skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is he "biased against medicine", or is he "biased in favor of five-sigma+ results"?

Does medicine use 95% confidence intervals because it is actually sufficient to base a medical science off of, or do they use 95% confidence interval because it is all they can get? The problem is, the universe doesn't care if all you can get is a 95% result.

And he is right that at least some people in the softer sciences don't understand their confidence intervals in the slightest. That crack he made about standard deviations being computed for non-Gaussian distributions won't resonate with you unless you have a lot of statistical training, but it a damning criticism; doing that sort of thing is basically proof your entire analysis isn't worth the paper it's written on, in proportion to the deviation from Gaussianess. I've been witness to the training procedure on experimental stats for undergrad biologists, which consists mostly of endless hammering in of the p-value as mantra, with understanding neither asked for nor given (unsurprising, as given the math prereqs up to that point the true meaning of the p-value can't really be taught). At the time I wouldn't have realized how wrong it is to apply p-value analysis to a bi-valued distribution, but I bet they were asked to. I know there's a grad-level course on the topic for them, but I fear it may be the blind leading the blind there.

I'm less willing to write off medicine as a whole. It has had some undeniable success in some areas (but it should be observed that weight management with much less than stomach stapling hasn't really been one of them). I'm playing a bit of devil's advocate here, because I think you may not have given the article a fair reading after you flipped the idiot flag on the author.
It's high stakes (lower because of the economy) acquisition-bait.
When Flash gets there, I want a flash blocker to be ready.
Added later? It seems Dustin is monitoring this thread.
I agree. What with this, and the bit.ly funding, there's just further to fall when an adjustment back to reality is needed.
From my experience trying to get various Asian fonts working under it, I believe he invented Latex.
Wolfram Alpha Isn't Google, So Stop Comparing Them
Yeah well IRC lacks all those cool killer features like yellow background gradients, tag clouds and RoR.
I don't have enough industry experience to put any authority behind this statement, but investing in a company that has no profits and who's business model is based on using the API of another company with no profits seems like a bit of a dance at a dreamers ball. Isn't this exactly the stuff bubbles have been made of?

I'm going to go ahead and assume they know something I don't. (They do have the $800k to invest in the first place, after all.)
The worst thing about this is that he had to actively decide to use CipherMode.ECB. It's not like it's some kind of dumb default, hidden from view. A human being had to type that string of characters in there. Did he look at the doc and just pick one at random? Perhaps CipherMode.ECB the first hit IntelliSense gives you?
I thought Portland seemed like a nice area, too...

...but about 120 minutes of googling revealed what this article told me and in retrospect I am glad I didn't go. Although, it is a nice city.
Trump on Trump: Testimony Offers Glimpse of How He Values His Empire
Normally, I'm with you on the irc vs twitter thing, but twitter is centralized (meaning it's really easy to search all the data coming through) and its real time search thing is pretty good. Maybe it's something you could add to mibbit?
UserVoice Raises Funding, White-Labels User Feedback Facilitator
Technology Bill of Rights
How To Pitch VCs Remotely
Free calls
It was definitely there two hours ago when I first looked at it. (Which was a good hour before imajes posted about it.)
Heh. I wish there wasn't papers and computer crap and other junk in random piles, but that's because I like to be able to find things and don't want crap in the house that nobody is going to use.
I'll second the thanks - I've book marked this to add to our training regimes, some great tips.

Some thoughts to add though (based on ROG's condesing). Whilst I agree with "9 Write a comprehensive specification" in slide 14 he says "Development can be planned up front". By that I assume he means planning the process by which the specification is executed: or mapping how to build the spac. That's always a point I specifically avoid doing, at least till things are underway. One of the best things (possibly the only useful thing...) I was taught at school was that a specification is about what you want to achieve NOT how you plan to do it. Purely because if you plan out in too much detail how to execute a problem then you risk locking into an inelegant solution.

2 things I particularly like are the comments about "logged in logged out" (slide 32 onwards). One of the issues I often run into (and MUST learn to avoid) is beginning a design and framework in a logged out state and never consider the logged in state till I come to add it later. I often find this is much more of a problem with code than it is with visible design. Secondly "DONT reinvent the wheel" is the #1 bit of advice ever. Literally.

:)
That the singularity is a such an unimaginable thing, that all we can do is obsess over every detail in that tiny time and space when the singularity first happens?
So I tied an onion to my belt. Which was the style at the time.
“Steve, almost all my CEO’s came from very tough childhoods. It was one of the characteristics I specifically looked for. It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.”

I guess my company wouldn't receive funding from her, since both my co-founder and I come from functional families!

I wonder if she used any other highly scientific predictors, such as reading a founder's tea lees or checking to see whether they have the "entrepreneur" bump on their skull?
I feel that Obama and the Democratic Congress will swing way too far in the opposite direction of Bush and the Republicans. Yea I believe we still need stop anti-competitive behavior, especially AT&T and others. But am I the only one getting a feeling that they, the U.S., will use Intel as an example of an evil corporation taking excess profit (50%) and paying out HUGE bonuses ($6 million total to CEO)? Yet the results speak for themselves: lower prices and better performance (Moore's Law).
cough http://www.bugmenot.com/ cough

That one gets me past 90% of the "Register because we want you to" sites. I try to add a bugmenot entry for the other few, so I can at least save some time for the guy after me.
Interestingly here, it's not the authors complaining, it's the publishers. Much like the record labels, it is the publishers that are becoming less relevant in the slow move to electronic books. Without the barrier to entry of having huge printing presses, Amazon effectively cuts them out. Longer term though, with open formats, Amazon risks being disintermediated themselves, as authors can sell directly to readers.
two words:

"copy"
"paste"
Useful Cheat Sheets for Web Designers
1. The average HN reader/commenter is way nerdier than is normal and some late comers to the party that is social skills get aggressive about it. If I can overcome my (para) Asperger's so should you! But it sounds like you're one of those people who are of intersection partyer/social animal & nerd (one interested in knowledge for its own sake)

2. And they don't hang out with people of normal intelligence much. Otherwise they'd know they were smarter than average. [This is not a value judgement on someone's worth as a human being, just on whether they're interesting to talk to on an ongoing basis, or only a few times with interestingness decreasing]

3. I think your problem is not hanging around with smart people. That's it. Occasionally abrasive, intelligent, talkative, argumentative, smart people. Hanging out with people you have to watch yourself with, who you have to consciously tailor your behaviour to is a chore.

4. [asshole] Give me a break. Generalisations work statistically, that's why you've noticed them. If you develop an individual relationship with someone, sure, relate to them as a person, but stupidly huge amounts of human interaction and behaviour can be modelled and gamed if you want to put the time and effort in to learn and apply it. You're over correcting because the cant says that everyone is a special unique snowflake and your experience tells you that's not true but it's not socially acceptable to say that kind of thing. Be more confident in your own experiences [/asshole]

5. Yes, it is, just not with people who get all huffy about this stuff.

6. Hey, if you can get along with everybody at the party even when you've got vanishingly little in common with them, maybe you can go for something where that's useful professionally. Personally I recommend heading to the real big city and hanging out with intellectual peers with a similarly ridiculous range of interests. They might not know what you're talking about but they'll be able to ask intelligent questions, and they'll want to and you'll be able to do the same with them.
Ask HN: alternative for paypal
I live in a country not supported by Paypal, but I can use Moneybookers (Note that Alertpay are pure SCAM). Some freelance sites support Moneybookers, so I'm with them and to this point there's no problem.

In the side, I'm planing to work with some people and thus get paid for my work. The pay will be between $100 and $300. Paypal is not supported, but only few uses MB so what's the best option for me? Please give a payment system, advantages and drawbacks (also the fees) (I'll check them myself if it's supported in Tunisia)

Another thing, if my client have Paypal and a CreditCard, can he put his money in his creditcard (from paypal) and then transfer it to Moneybooker, will that be costing (very high fees??)
Why Linux is not (yet) Ready for the Desktop
Huh?

I went to the stocktwits site a few days ago after hearing about their acquisition of chart.ly. I could not figure out what they did. I get a cute live feed of people talking about stocks and... that's pretty much it. Who throws 800k at an app that is basically a much less aesthetically pleasing skin of search.twitter.com with the search fields essentially prepopulated? I told myself I wouldn't be so quick to judge too, but after spending about 10 minutes on the site, I left with nothing more than a stream of strangers' opinions and expletives regarding specific stocks , and my following of their twitter account without permission.

I'm looking for any and all enlightenment as to why this is worth 800k.
I am in IT but not involved with a startup at all (I work as an Oracle DBA) but I come to HN for the intelligent discussion and interesting topics.
You shouldn't be making your decision on how much money they are saving, but on how much value you are getting.
Some offshore guys I know use worldpay
link w/o the splash advert: http://www.fastcompany.com/node/1282717/print

Anyway, I think this has been well hammered home by now - excpet the media are still plugging at the theme (as I keep saying I'm convinced that is Google's doing and very clever of them too :))

One thing that has occured to me is that we were wrong to compare it to Wikipedia too (which I spent weeks doing... :( oops). WA is certainly not in any state to compete with WP either, yet; when you consider the wealth of information available on WP.

WA is really an academic and research tool: they have got some good hype from the "vs Google" and "vs Wikipedia" media coverage but I suspect that it will die off and wont last 6 months. It will have it's uses (if I were a student/academic/journalist etc. I imagine it would become as useful as Google and WP to me!) but.. well.. that's it...

And how do they monetize it?
300,000 hits per second make Indian election website crash
I'm sure everyone here is aware of Guy Kawasaki's "Alltop" site. I don't really see why it (or one of its sub-sites) deserves to be posted up here...
Good list.

Not sure about the comprehensive spec at page 9 though: BDUF - Big Design Up Front is often a naive approach. Requirements and constraints tend to change as you go along. Too much up front specification can be a waste if 30 percent of those features never see any use. I'm all for thinking each specific task, function and web page properly right through before coding it, though. :)

I also have trouble with "design for reusability" at page 39. Building one-off components is a waste IF you are going to build similar stuff in the future. However designing things for reuse also incurs overhead in itself that first time around. The specific project context should determine if building for reuse is cost-effective. Also, designing for reuse can be taken too far. We sometimes burn ourselves by thinking too generally - see some of the more complex J2EE frameworks out there...
Elastic Load Balancing isn't yet a replacement for HAProxy, for now it only seems to handle HTTP traffic, and not HTTPS: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/lates...
Upper Circuit for Sensex - Close Over 14000 Mark
Google Checkout pays internationally, but then there was this infamous episode: http://www.slash7.com/articles/2009/3/26/google-is-evil-wors...
Yup, good point. I was mainly meaning if you want volume of users/serious traders, they're more likely hanging out on IRC, than tweeting afaik.

Saying that, opt in, publicly logged channels are in the pipe line for Mib :)
In our case, we were using this Encrypt() method to experiment with storing some state data in web pages related to the login process. We thought it was secure, because the data was encrypted. Sure it's encrypted! It says Encrypt() right there in the method name, right?

!!!!!!!

There are two cases when you might want to send sensitive data to the end user: You may wish to send them something and have them send it back in an unmanipulated block, or you may wish to have them manipulate it in some way and send it back to you.

In the first case the best practice is to store the data on the server side and send a pointer (key) to the data. The key is inherently meaningless and sparse relative to its space, and is therefore difficult to attack in any meaningful way.

The second case would rely on the web server sending a piece of (javascript) code to the browser to manipulate the crypto data. If you can see the encrypted text and the plaintext javascript routine you're a trival hack away from rewriting the javascript to have it change the encrypted text. This moves the problem from a crypto problem to a javascript coding exercise. The proper solution in this case is to use a form of crypto that is outside the realm of the HTTP session (read: SSL).
Nor Wikipedia. If you need to compare Wolfram Alpha to something, compare it to Freebase.
Screenshots of Xmonad aren't that interesting. They don't show you how easy it is to do stuff without ever using the mouse.
I really want an interface designed with usability in mind. Things like:

* No common task should require more than 3-4 keypresses you can easily remember. Arrow keys count. Corollary: navigate the menus with the number keys; shortcuts, ...

* Incremental search to look up contacts with (like emacs C-s)

* Operate without looking. In particular, there should be a way to get to "home" from an arbitrary state, options have a "return to default" key, all important menus stay the same, anything common/important can also be done by keyboard.

* Typing speed. With slow input, calendar functions etc are nearly useless. Unfortunately, the fastest solution, qwertz keyboards, still sell at a premium. Perhaps there is a way to optionally emulate a chorded keyboard on standard 12-key hardware? It should have some form of visual feedback enabled by default, like Apple's keyboard overview.

* Reliable Sync. Even with 348 contacts, 1000s of appointments, international characters. The point is reliably correct - everything I have had so far has messed up eventually.

* Todo list and calendar 2 taps/clicks away, such as for a shopping list

Besides, I'd like some gimmicks:

* Adjust lighting / color hue / contrast on images, cut them down to an image section. Cut videos to save space and improve art.

* Easy file sync, regardless of file format

* Track location over time and tag photos. Even if there is no GPS hardware, cell towers broadcast their ID (or location), and modern phones have an acceleration sensor.

* A 3-touch way to keep track of my money / time.

* Office to go

* Flashlight mode. Display lighting is usually bright enough to find the key hole, stuff I have dropped,...

I admit you asked about computationally intense applications, but this is what bothers me most about my gadgets.
Badger's Top 1 programming font: Something monospace.

(Hmmm, I seem to have some time left over... should I review my choice of font, or just code something with my current choice?)
Is his salt even really a salt? I thought salts had to be different every time to actually meaningfully prevent precomputing a dictionary.
IndyBudget's Deficit
lastpass. more security addons here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=&cat=1...
Ask HN: Gut feeling on name change? bug.gd renaming to errorhelp.com
Hey guys, we've decided to rename our bug.gd error site to ErrorHelp.com. I wanted to get a gut feel from HN on the name change as a final sanity check.

Background:
We've invested a good bit in the bug.gd name over the past year and a half. We launched that way, with cheerful coverage on Digg, PCWorld, TC, Mashable, random news channels, etc. The press announcement pieces have settled down for now and the lion's share of our traffic is driven by Google and our Firefox extension.

We've begun selling services to corporations and IT groups where the "bug.gd" URL is more of a liability than an attention-getter. We're providing error search engines for help desks and corporate KBs so using a Grenada TLD raises more than a few eyebrows.

We currently use the sites as two different products: bug.gd is our community search engine and ErrorHelp.com focuses on companies. This dual approach makes things more difficult to describe to customers, too.

Questions:
What's your gut reaction to the name change? Good idea? What gotchas have you seen when renaming products or services?

From what I understand (and our experiences in the past), the 301 redirects will eventually carry over our decent pagerank, etc. Has anyone had problems with that? Or problems with sitemaps after redirections, etc?

Thanks in advance!
Communicating Values: Show, don't Tell
I'd love to write a tool to go from BMML (Balsamiq Markup Language) to NIB (XML XIB) and framework+skeleton Cocoa Objective-C files. However, at first glance, it appears to be quite complex.
A salt is different than a nonce. Either one hampers time-space tradeoff attacks significantly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce
You mean shareholders could not sue them (a la Cryptonomicon?)
You might want to also look at Escrow services - since it's pre-pay, some have lower fees.
That's a very good point, I'm probably in the same boat.

Yet on the other hand, if I thought his redesign was amazing, then I'd probably put up with an opinionated snot as a short-term contractor if it got our site something our customers loved.
Amen. Here's my question from the spin/marketing/PR perspective:

They got press because everyone loves talking about a Google killer. Freebase killer just doesn't get you the same type of hype.

Was the hype created due to:

a) Wolfram knew that people would talk more about a google killer and positioned it this way.
b) The press mis-interpreted what the product did and wanted it to be a Google killer, even though it's NOT.
c) A combination of both.
If your product is not viral by nature or solve a real problem people know they have, you had better market the heck out of it.
Errorhelp.com is better.
I agree with you. But after my experience with American Airlines, I felt personally insulted. This particular fight is personal.
You have to make decisions with incomplete and unscientific data all the time. If there was a scientific predictor to business success, VCs wouldn't pick lemons ~80% of the time. There's nothing wrong with making decisions based on features like that, as long as you're accurately measuring your results. Who knows, maybe his VC friend is "retired" for a reason?
Let's please be accurate here. People in other countries generally have lower rates of obesity not because they exercise, but because they actually have to do physical work and don't sit on their asses in an office all day.

People say exercise and everyone tends to think the gym. However this is total BS, you don't need to go to the gym to stay healthy, the only thing you need to do to stay healthy when eating lots of carbohydrates is to do an activity to burn them.

The other major misconception is people think thin=healthy when really all the 'healthy' (women especially) people on TV are definitely not healthy. In fact, unless you're very careful with a calorie restricted diet (lots of vitamins and enough protein to maintain your muscle tissue) you are doing significantly more damage to your body than if you were overweight.

It's been shown anorexia can shorten your life by 25 years. Being moderately obese (30-35 on the BMI) can take 2-4 years off your life and extremely obese (40-45) can take 8-10 years off your life expectancy. People who are in the overweight group don't see a reduction in life expectancy, unless they smoke.

Then it also depends on how healthy you are when you're obese. Many sportsmen and soldiers are obese to significantly obese, and I don't think you'll find a single one who's of normal weight. However, many of these men will live longer than the average normal weight person (assuming they don't use steroids), due simply to the fact that building muscle tissue usually helps build your heart tissue too, meaning you stand to live significantly longer.
Nonsense. Since when is being opinionated something to be avoided? A rant like this just shows you have passion, and maybe you're still young enough that you haven't learned to keep your head down and pretend otherwise.
This quote from Conrad Wolfram was probably something to do with it IMHO

“It does at first glance look like a normal search engine, but in fact we have 10,000 computer processors behind the scenes working out an exact answer. It will really change the way we get our knowledge, and we hope it will change the way people search online.”
except the media are still plugging at the theme

So much of our mainstream-facing tech media are infuriatingly bad! What can we do about this? Maybe David Pogue should set people straight.
Just use bugmenot.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6349
That's unfair, but we can't know the real situation.

I need an international credit Card for Google check out, something I can't have (I only have a bank account with our local currency)

Edit: Even if i had internation CC, Google Checkout is only for US and UK
The Latest Update for Xperia X1 Firmware
Steve Yegge wrote it.
CATE for English
You can already use publicly-available AMIs that contain a wide variety of application stacks.
Google Checkout pays internationally... for businesses with bank accounts in countries described by the the set {United States, UK}.

Not too much joy for a Tunisian there.
"Children's neural connections are more governed by proximity"