skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.amazon.com/Data-Analysis-Bayesian-Tutorial-Public... is short and reputable on Bayesian statistics. On MCMC specifically, I don't know, but MCMC is really a kind of algorithm that lets you find the answer to a mathematical question (so I think understanding the math is the right thing to start with).

PS. There a second edition of that book, but I've heard that the first edition is better, because the second edition added a different author and expanded the book.
My issue is the phrase "sake of beauty." This ignores why this code was written. I'm fine with beautiful code. My issue is the use of the word beautiful in such a way as to imply that beauty was the intent. People don't try to write beautiful code, people try to write good code. That it happens to be "beautiful" is a bonus.

Hopefully my point is clear. I guess it's subtle, but I think a crucial difference.
> Would you be willing to buy a piece of furniture twice the normal price because the craftsman uses the most expensive tools available? And what would you think of a poor craftsman who, using poor equipment, manages to create great furniture? Who's the best craftsman of the two?

The author forgot to mention most likely alternative here: a poor craftsman uses poor equipment to create poor furniture that breaks easily.
Opleidingen laaggeschoolden via opleidings cheques
Building a Virtual Appliance – Repeatably
As far as I've understood it, the BBC isn't ignoring Android, the rollout of new features is simply delayed for a platform that's logistically significantly more complex to roll out multi-device supporting apps too.

Also, I'm not too sure about it being against the BBC's 'contract', could you let me know what you're referring to? As far as I'm aware the BBC has no legislative or regulatory duty to favour open platforms.
What you described is not true, however, for light or medium reservations where shutting down a machine means you have no cost.

The other key difference is that reservations apply to hours used, not specific instances, which means you can do things like buy heavy instances for your 100% utilization level and medium for the amount beyond that which you commonly but not always use.
I agree, his example makes a case for writing "beautiful" (maintainable?) code from the start.
That's true, but with some serious development things can be possible, after all you need a community to cover your back to compete with the big names, and our community is RaspberryPi, Linux, and the open Web...
Try telling that to Kim Jong-il.
We shouldn't write maintainable code because the idioms might not seem fashionable at some point in the future? Never mind that code is read way more than it's written and that maintenance costs way more than development. Building up massive technical debt is fine in the short term but eventually you'll have to address it and that's going to cripple development on the product. OOP principles aren't a fad, they're fundamental to structuring code in PHP.

The analogy with the furniture is particularly misleading. Would you pay half as much for a chair that occasionally falls over? That takes a long time to get repaired because each of the legs is tightly coupled to one another? I'd rather pay double for the reliable version.

I've worked with a lot of code bases in the past where the developers have had a resentment towards new methodologies and saw people who tried to use new ideas as just trying to show off. It's a disheartening experience to want to use such fashionable concepts as 'objects' only to be told that the way things are done is procedural programming with SQL queries nested in markup like it's 2000 again. In my experience it's been because they've not wanted to invest in learning new things. That's not a good ethos for a programmer. Let's not promote it.
In that case I would say you have architected an app for aws, then, and we should be careful not to do that for portability's sake. Http://www.12factor.net/backing-services
You wait ages for number theory results, then two come at once
Just buy a raspberry pi + case for that amount of money and install openelec/raspbmc.
I did that last week, it's a fantastic combination!
Is it really not obvious?

The site's FAQ admits that it'll engage in what is basically a man-in-the-middle attack against content that receives heavy traffic, for instance. See the "rawgithub.com will start serving evil.js and evil.css instead of requested JS and CSS files" part of one of the answers.

If the content being served will be modified in some cases, is there really anything preventing it from being modified in a different (perhaps more malicious) way in some other cases?

Like anything else, a service like this is itself susceptible to breach, of course. There's always the potential that it gets compromised, and starts acting in a malicious manner, initially undetected by its creators/operators/users.

Some may argue that this is acceptable risk for content served up for demonstration purposes. I'm not certain that's necessarily true. A demo being unexpectedly modified in a harmful way (racial slurs inserted into a web site's text, malicious JavaScript being injected, and so on) could seriously affect the demo giver's reputation, for example.

It's not difficult, nor expensive, to set up your own publically-facing web server. If already using GitHub, git makes it quite simple to fetch and update any content being served up. While there is still risk associated with such a setup, you are cutting out at least one other party by doing things yourself, avoiding the harm they could potentially cause. So services of this type seem quite unnecessary, and perhaps more of a risk than they're worth.
Maintainability and technical debt are very real metrics. It is just question of short-term versus long-term investment. This article prefers short-term investment (as many other startups do). I just wish buyers would include code maintenance costs when evaluating start-up.
I actually thought the article would be about indention, style, etc.
There's only one true brace...
I have used 99designs for two logos and used Logoworks back in 2007 for one logo. 99designs produces many more creative and professional designs than Logoworks. Logoworks owned by HP was more expensive and we were ultimately unsatisfied with the experience after being beaten down going back and forth on the little choices we had, even after they offered to throw in a few more "staff" designers.

Getting close to 100 designs with 99designs even though many were variations still gave us far more alternatives that we were happy with. In fact, it became difficult to choose a winning design.

You have to stay active during the process. Offering suggestions on what you want to see and what you do not like. The designers usually do exactly as you say. After their initial concept they usually just make minor changes. Comments like "like this but can you be more creative with this part" does not usually work.

As a startup, I believe it was both cost effective and the best use of our time. Instead of spending time finding a designer with a portfolio we liked and then going back and forth with revisions with them. Almost every revision we requested on 99designs was done within a few hours. I also feel the anonymous process of 99designs prevents wasting time by trying to be too nice with comments.

I have not worked with a designer, how many choices are you really going to get before it starts to be uncomfortable as you are wasting both the designers time and yours. Five designs? Ten designs? With 99designs you might get 20-40 unique designs. It just seems like better chances for success in a short time.
The only new thing in this post here is how to do this in IIS, but I guess nobody is using IIS here.
Why hate on light hearted fun? You sound a bit like a guy in his eighties yelling at kids to stop playing on the grass.
(This is not about the content of the article, this is about the site.)

Why oh why do they have a sign-up/sign-in? The content is clearly there in the background! So obtrusive!

This is how I was able to read the article:

(function(){var o,w,h,b,n,s,h,i,j;o=document.getElementById("TB_overlay");w=document.getElementById("TB_window");if(!!o){o.parentNode.removeChild(o);}if(!!w){w.parentNode.removeChild(w);}h=document.getElementById("art-mast");b=document.getElementById("art-body").getElementsByClassName("translateBody")[0];n=document.createElement("div");n.style["max-width"]="625px";n.style.padding="150px 0 0 150px";n.innerHTML=h.innerHTML+b.innerHTML;document.body.innerHTML="";document.body.appendChild(n);s=document.getElementById("share-box");s.parentNode.removeChild(s);h=document.head.getElementsByTagName("script");i=h.length;while(i--){j=h[i];if(!j)return;j.parentNode.removeChild(j);}})();
Not Google TV. Not even close.
Great work but what are the advantages over XBMC on the raspberry pi?
Despite the best efforts of airpower advocates, there's nothing like planting your boots on the soil of an enemy's capitol to demonstrate that you've defeated them.

"You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life – but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud."

T.R. Fehrenbach
This Kind of War, 1963
This is ridiculous. These synthetic news making to top of HN.
Let me wrap up the situation very shortly:
You know Ingress? That alternate reality game, yes. Scribbles like this are alternate reality too, so they have tie-ins with reality. But unlike Ingress, they are so far off from reality and so illogical; they are neither compelling nor fun!
BTW, I'm writing this from the peaceful Turkey :)
Along with this, does anyone know if Finland provides coffins for their recently deceased?
Napster's Sean Parker in $2.5m wedding venue settlement
No, most parents in Finland do opt to find out. I presume it's just easier to mass-produce a box of unisex clothing, and as the article says you can then easily reuse the clothes for siblings.
Looks 'shopped.
Social seems broken in almost all services. Can it be fixed?
if you think construction then a 20 day subtask could be a trade for a floor
Brakes generally aren't expensive (obviously, this is all relative... but lets ignore that), so instead of waiting a year, your more likely waiting a few days at most.

The cost of good quality code isn't expensive either, in the short term or even in the long term. However, for the un-or-misinformed, writing good code might seem higher. Indeed, I'll even go so far as to say that for less skilled individuals, good quality code might seem to increase the cost dramatically.

> if you're being chased by wild hungry bears, you don't care whether the car has brakes.

A little planning would mean I wouldn't be in that situation: bears and no brakes. Though, it's amusing coming up with ways I could find myself in that position. =)
If you are writing code for aesthetic purposes of course you are doing it wrong. If you are writing code and balancing delivering features with maintainability. A balance that constantly changes. Then I would argue you are doing it right. Sometimes that balance is just deliver for the deadline, nothing else matters. Sometimes it is this needs to be extensible and maintainable because it's a cornerstone of our product.
New York, NY

R&D Ventures, The New York Times - Software Engineer

http://jobs.nytco.com/job/New-York-Software-Engineer-Job-NY/...

The R&D Ventures team is seeking a Software Engineer. R&D Ventures (http://nyti.ms/10hrYe1) is an agile and entrepreneurial group tasked with commercializing ideas and technologies coming out of the R&D lab (http://nytlabs.com). We need a creative and talented engineer to work on one of our inaugural products Ricochet (https://ricochetmedia.net) as well as other projects coming down the pipeline.

As a Software Engineer on the R&D Ventures team, you will be working on solving complex and interesting problems. To handle some of the problems you will need to brainstorm on ideas that require knowledge of many aspects of Computer Science including but not limited to: information retrieval, data storage, distributed computing and processing, algorithms, security, etc.

Although you will be working on a team that typically uses Python and MongoDB for their day to day tasks, we strongly believe that a programming languages and technologies are merely tools that aid in accomplishing a goal. We also believe in using the right tool for the right job, so as a member of the team, you may be required to create prototypes with unfamiliar technologies on a fairly regular basis.

Minimum Qualifications:
- Bachelors degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline (in lieu of degree 4 years relevant work experience)
- 2 to 4 years of relevant work experience with large systems software design and development skills
- Extensive programming skills with strong Object Oriented programming skills (Java/C++/Python).
- Solid foundation in computer science with competencies in data structures and algorithms.
- Experience building software in a team based environment using a Source Code Management System (Subversion, Git, Mercurial etc.)

Preferred Qualifications:
- M.S or PhD in Computer Science or related field
- Understanding of Relational (MySQL, Oracle etc.) as well as Non Relational (NoSQL) Database systems (MongoDB, CouchDB, Redis, Hadoop, HBase etc).
- Prior experience building web based API's.
- Prior experience integrating with 3rd party API's (Preferably Facebook and Twitter API's).
- Experience developing for Unix/Linux based systems.
- Experience with asynchronous data processing using queuing systems (Beanstalkd, RabbitMQ etc.)
- Familiarity with software deployed in a Cloud based system such as AWS or Rackspace cloud.
- Familiarity with Agile development methodologies such as Scrum

If you would like to learn more about this, email peter [dot] ng [at] nytimes [dot] com.

Thanks!
Considering his examples, it's not. It's about architectural quality.

Indentation style is meaningless in this context.
"Of course he doesn't mean every single American"

Oh he was so close and yet so far. He means almost no Americans on a percentage basis of the total, not all of them. The linked article was an excellent study of the trees but missed the forest. The root of the problem is narrowcasting aka local maxima seeking.

Example. Lets say the country initially boots up with 10 million news consumers. Consumers, you know, like saprophytes, but I digress. Your individual media co. gets 10% of the consumers. Boss decides to boost his quarterly executive bonus by tabloid-ing it up a bit. So the "older" woman anchor gets fired and replaced by a perky college cheerleader, if it bleeds it leads, maybe some top ten lists (the equivalent of internet link bait). Hurray the exec got his bonus because your share increased to 20%. The bad news is the population, repelled by repulsive infotainment, shrunk to 5 million total.

Well, no problem, you've got 20% of the consumers, outta 5 million consumers. Well, gotta get a bonus somehow. We can blame the drop in total consumers on the internet or facebook or just guilt trip people or whatever... but we've gotta boost that 20% impact to a higher percentage. Maybe some B-list celebrity interviews, some lasagna recipes, some onsite "news" reporting about the state fair... Woooo Hoooo we're owning the market we went up to 25% of consumers hurray huge bonuses and backslapping for all... well, except for the repellant effect dropping total industry wide audience to only 2 million now.

Repeat this cycle a couple times and you end up with worthless American news media that almost no one watches. 95% of the population, literally, won't watch "the news" on TV for free, its such garbage.

The other "saw the trees, missed the forest" moment in the article is mass media is huge corporations owned by huge corporations. Total lack of diversity. Only five men in charge of five companies control about 99% of what Americans watch on TV. What a surprise that a big business propaganda conduit is boring and uninformative.
...in 1969, 10 years after the mentioned 1940-to-1960 gains.
As a foreigner, I've been lead to believe that Seattle is one of the top tech hubs after the Bay area and NY (don't have any specific source for this). I've noticed the lack of advertised jobs in Seattle while reading the Hiring threads, and this just confirms it.

Is the Seattle scene not as big as I think it is? Or are they just not hiring (through this channel)?
The article doesn't say it is attributable to the box, as pointed out by a bunch of HNers already (apparently, the ones who actually read it).
I stopped reading comments a long time ago. There's a slim chance they add something to an article, but it's not worth wading through all that garbage to find the one nugget of wisdom. Perhaps they contain some feedback useful to the original author, although personally I've turned them off on my blog long ago.

Edit: Of course HN is special :)
I know you were asking for effect, but of course they do and it's EC2. That's why they have a heavy reservation pricing tier, which only makes sense for 24/7/365 (you pay for hours even if you don't use them).

But, it's fun to point at "elastic" and tell people they're "doing it wrong" because they don't take a name chosen 7 years ago literally. As if somehow the service (called EC2 virtually everywhere -- not Elastic Cloud Compute) could never evolve beyond that initial use case. Incidentally, the "elastic" in EBS must have a different meaning because one of its primary selling points is that it's persistent storage.
There is absolutely no reason to post this yourself. It's posted every month on the first. June's was already done:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5803764

Edit: I was completely wrong. My apologies. I'll keep the original comment in place. The subject was a bit misleading, but still, mea culpa.
IOS light status bar notification/alert library.
Thank you! It's just an experiment, I totally agree with you it's no way near a Google TV that thousands of engineer strive to put into production...
I am certainly interested to see that my own country does appear in 'HN Who Is Hiring'. I didn't think it did.
This really could be the start of something great. FWIW, here is what I think a media center should do, which no current solution achieves:

Have a DVR-like interface, where all content is combined. This means downloaded torrents (by new and/or watched), with meta info. Also include new streams from HuluFlix based on when they were made available. New shows recorded from antenna and maybe QAM. New movies from Crackle, etc. The point is, I should be able to tell the application that I want all new episodes of "The Simpsons" and it will use all available configured sources to find what I want. It will present this to me in one comprehensive list. The source is irrelevant and I don't want to start various apps to find what I want. Google TV sort of tried to do this and failed. As cool as XBMC and their ilk are, they suffer from not passing the "wife test" and feature bloat. This thing, in my mind, should be dead simple to use.
To a certain extent I wish that the Paypal mafia had been more successful since I think if they had been able to launch a their own currency it would have shaken up the industry even further, and moved a lot more of it towards productive ventures (i.e. Tesla, SpaceX) than the cruft that fills the industry today. But anyways, they weren't the people for the job. Maybe someone else will do it soon.
The thing with good code is that it's cheaper than bad code.

For instance: it takes me 8 minutes to run the full test suite of an app and make reasonably certain nothing is wrong. It takes me 2 hours to get the same assurance manually. And I'll miss most of the problems.

Another example: I recently implemented a feature where the feature took ~5 days and fixing the whole codebase to make the feature implementable took 20 days. Had the codebase been using certain libraries correctly without ghetto-coding its own solution, the feature would take me ~5 days.
EU to Launch Net Neutrality Strategy
Thanks, "Technical debt" is the word here. "Beautiful" might not come close to "valuable" in terms of importance, but "Clean" should come close, because accumulating too much crap makes maintenance & feature addition painful. Uncle Bob's "Clean Code" does a great job at detailing that.
Disagree.

You deliberately call it beautiful code, whereas in reality it is clean code. Clean code is not more expensive to deliver than ugly code. It just requires a better calibre of developer i.e. a developer who can express features in a style which others can understand.

Once you have clean code you can take on features more easily and quickly. You can also change personnel more easily. Most importantly of all you can get better confidence that changes won't introduce side affects.

The problem is there are not many people who can do this.

No-one in their right mind (Fowler, Uncle Bob, included) say code should be beautiful as some kind of vain exercise in style over substance.
beautiful code does work in shipping products. This article is just designed to stoke a flamewar. :/
This is just a proof of concept, hacked it over the weekend :)
Same here. A thing that helped me a lot was to try to divide code parts into boxes, and understand one piece after the other.
Even after a year and a half, there are plenty of pieces I can't get. But it gets easier once you can find the main articulations.
Because some people basically go batshit crazy when they find out and start getting you super-strongly gendered stuff, and you want to put off having to deal with that crap for as long as possible is one reason. For example, if you have a baby shower _before_ the birth (yes, ok, you're having a baby shower to start with) and you haven't told people the gender, there's only so much bad they can do along those lines...
How to Get Rich Quicker: How Fast is your Plan?
Well there definitely is a real problem he is speaking to, in which people apply patterns out of reverence rather than understanding. They want to be able to say at their next interview or meetup that they've used all these patterns. Anyone who has worked in Big Corp has seen this first hand: a great shining tower of beautiful code which is 80% bullshit and ceremony.
I don't really like the casual acceptance of the total dichotomy between dirty and clean code here. I'll freely admit you don't always get to clean every bit of code and make it pristine, but on the other hand, with only a small amount of effort and perhaps 5ish years experience it becomes pretty easy to pump out clean-ish code at the same rate you can make an utter, total mess, and recover the value of your slightly higher effort in as little as a week or two, a time frame all but the craziest start ups should still be caring about.

Being in a hurry may be license to be "a bit sloppy", but I think it's a mistake to give yourself license to make a total mess, and use your speed as an excuse. For instance, once you're skilled at programming, and assuming you're using a decent language (another thing your startup should be doing), it's at most only slightly slower to refactor something into a function that copy and paste, and that probably still wins on every level the fourth time you reuse a function like that. Well-done unit testing can also have a payback time frame of under a week, in my opinion. You get bigger wins from listening to it guide you through the initial design that you will get from adding it later.
This is cool, but I've seen it in Home Depot a couple years ago. Why is it just now getting attention?
And what if he decides to keep going, to realize a few weeks later that you reused the very same source code to help building a company's friend?
I mean, everything goes both ways. Don't expect to be trusted if you can't trust
Thanks for sharing this awesome vision, I totally agree, the Open Web deserves an Open TV :)
His bog post is about stats based off that the link you've mentioned.
How does a pie chart help me email potential employers?