skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At CMU we had a mandatory stats class but it didn't have anything concerning sample size picking. Ironically, the stats class I had to take when I was in the humanities dept. was more comprehensive. When I walked into industry, I realized after two or three years that practically everyone I'd met knew jack shit about statistics. I myself learned most of what I know from humanities-major friends and books like NLP by Manning and Schutze.

Having been through what Zed's been through (on both the giving and receiving end to wit), I can empathize with why he'd get all sanctimonious about it, but I feel that it just makes the problem worse (at least in person). Programmers are already an egotistical lot, and I've learned that directly attacking their ego tends to make things worse.

What can be done then? I don't know. It feels like this is at the core a personality problem, in particular one in which people associate their ability to know with their sense of self, and personality problems are terribly hard to correct.
Yeah, no startups anywhere else in the world are monetizing their users.
Why aren't there statistics for CS classes that put stats primarily in the context of system profiling and metrics? Are there any out there?
I think that The Wire is the most overrated show on television. Many of my friends are very enthusiastic about it, but I watched at least six episodes and could not get hooked. The show felt "cheap" to me, and boring.
Socialism and the 'net
This is so very true. I often hear developer friends rejecting every proposition that goes against their current plan with excuses such as 'I don't know how to do that', 'I don't think that's possible', etc. etc. While I appreciate the clarity of mind that this can provide and the fact that it can deliver from 'analysis paralysis' and seemingly infinite development routes, there has got to be an alternative...
MIT visualization of cellphone data flow during Obama's inauguration
this can be accomplished with a simple blend. use negation to understand what is possible, which is quite large and still open ended, and drive your optimism/enthusiasm into there.

don't be silly and abandon negation. negation is the heart of why the sciences works, it is perhaps one of the most elegant and useful tools of mathematics, and I could add some interesting things about negation, Nietzsche and ontology, but decided to cut that out of this comment...

The most reliable way to the truth (essence, ontology) is by knowing what it is not. The most reliable way to understand the behavior of phenomena is by eliminating possibilities (theories) through contradiction against evidence (the sciences).

i like the author's enthusiasm, and it is well suited for within possibility, but if you take the good cheer of this posting to encourage yourself to have less 'you can't do thats' and more 'what can we do?' - you'll get a lot more hype than reality. negation is the way to the truth. within the truth, there are many possibilities.

if anything, negation helps make your creative explorations be more successful and more likely to lead into other true possibilities.
Do you scientifically analyze the results? Do you ever try and remove your internal bias? Confirmation bias is a very strong effect in search engine result evaluations.
You might be having problems with your software, not the hosting.
If you use a blog read about these security measures: http://www.mytestbox.com/news/secure-wordpress-blog-prevent-...
The parent post said "Book of Ecclesiastes, nuff said." in reference to an article about lifestyle. I made a tongue-in-cheek comment about how we should obviously start taking our values from the Bible. Bible = word of God = axioms to live by. That's why it's correct!
Large-scale nuclear power is not an option until the waste-disposal problem is solved safely and cost-effectively. Good luck with that.
The title of this pages says: "Confirmed: Twitter Gets Backing From Russian Investors."

Edit: no longer.
"Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova..."

I post to draw attention to the visualization technology, rather than the political aspect, by the way.
If jQuery is open source, and you look at the source, and you see room for improvement. ... improve it. ... or make a constructive criticism pointing out how it could be improved and someone else will do it.

Could the code be faster? Sure. People often analyze libraries, identify a critical path that is limiting performance, and then zero in on the offending the code ... and then improve it.

I think it's find the author goes on a bit of a rant. Perhaps he'll inspire a few coders (or Resig himself) to address some of the criticisms by revising the code, and then everyone benefits.
Larry Wall also changed it to given/when partly for linguistic reasons.

See here for his full explanation: http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/design/apo/A04.html (see RFC 022).
Superstition is an integral part of American society.
I don't like this article. Yes, he's right: an intuitive knowledge of the relationship between averages and standard deviations is essential. But to presume that the standard tools of statistics should be applied to every problem is to miss the point.

On a superficial level, if you are doing overnight processing of log files, then you probably care more about throughput than latency. In this case, averages are probably a fine metric. On a slightly deeper level, standard deviation is only a useful measure if the distribution is known, and in a lot of real world cases it is not. The right question isn't whether 100 or 1000 tests on the same data provides sufficient statistical power, but whether range of inputs is sufficient to trigger worst case perfomance.

Now, I presume that Zed knows these things and applies them appropriately, but the article strikes me as more snide than helpful. Perhaps as others say he's a great guy in person, but I prefer my stats with less attitude and more insight. Here, for example: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

[edit: changed my sloppy language from 'has no meaning unless to the distribution is normal' to 'is only a useful measure if the distribution is known']
It's caused by tilt/angle of Earth, correct?

Yes. My second-grade teacher made sure her class knew this. A year or two later I learned that the earth is closer to the sun (at perihelion) when the SOUTHERN Hemisphere is having its summer, and the Northern Hemisphere is having its winter.
Huh. For startup school applications that's actually a surprising result. I was under the impression that the admissions process on that was basically just to weed out the hackers from the business people, and with an application that brief I'm surprised that can't be accomplished with a keyword search.
Feed an Engineer
My friend had a good quote: "if you're trying to be happy, you've already lost." Happiness comes from satisfaction with the present moment.
I think they can make a ton of money there. First, allow devs to sell apps just like on Xbox Live and phone app stores. Secondly, require as policy that any program bound by the SDK license will only use Facebook's payment system to charge users for anything. Open this payment system up to people who need to collect small payments unrelated to Facebook; many of their customers will already have a Facebook account--it's like Facebook Connect but more useful.
On a slightly deeper level, standard deviation only has meaning if the distribution is presumed to be normal

Are you completely sure about that?

I suppose many readers of this thread are more knowledgeable about statistics than I am. I would appreciate hearing from the knowledgeable readers whether or not variance in the observed values makes a difference in the cases discussed in the submitted article.
I've been looking at new cars recently, and have to say that there's no way I would consider buying a BMW, or pretty much any car that isn't Japanese. The two- and three-year old used 3-series and Mercedes that I looked at seemed totally ragged, next to the condition of a used Lexus or even a Mazda.

I could spend $40k on a 3-series, or half of that on a used Lexus, or a quarter of that on a used Mazda 3.
Rooks reveal remarkable tool use
Giant empires are great!

Oops, it rotted from within. Small countries are great!

Giant empires are great!

Oops, it tore itself apart by war. Small countries are great!

Giant empires are great!

Oops, we decided it was too much work and gave the other countries back. Small countries are agile!

Ad nauseum...
I must obviously be in the minority opinion here, but I've been selling online for over 6 years using PayPal, many thousands and thousands of transactions, and really have had very few issues - no more then I have had with 2checkout or Moneybookers. Their procedures are fairly normal, I don't feel their customer service is any better (or worse) then other merchant providers I have worked with, and all in all they do what they say they will do.
PLT Scheme is clean, free, well documented, widely supported and beautiful. It has a decent numeric tower, and a good GUI toolkit for writing simple interfaces.

I taught most of it to my 15 year old nephew over two weeks, this last winter holiday.

There is zero configuration; you double click on the downloaded package, it self installs, and you have 5+ different programming languages and levels of Scheme in one package. You can get help right from within the IDE.
Instead of attacking them with "smug pricks" and "complete ass", read their reasoning. Look at the code.

Do you want your js to be creating functions all the time? Is it worth it?

My personal stance, is that you simply don't need a javascript library. The browser differences are very small, and not rocket science to work with.
Learning javascript > learning jquery | prototype | etc

I agree though, people build cool stuff with jquery. This thread is just people pointing out that if you care how fast your webapp runs, or how much memory it uses, then using a library is probably a bad idea.
More like people across the world knocking on their door to invest. The Russian investors simply gave them the best offer.
It's funny... To hear Ivan Krstic's story earlier this year, Porsche had made a brilliant financial coup:

http://radian.org/notebook/porsche
We already do this in Arizona.

Guys...1984 was a WARNING, not a set of instructions.
introducing her to C first might kill your friendship, once she learns of the other options. It's like finding out your parents played a prank on you and kept a remote controlled plastic monster in your closet throughout your childhood.
Who cares what country it comes from? DST is a fairly large ($1B) internet holdings company that practically -owns- the Russian-language web. This isn't exactly the KGB, these guys have been very successful and probably know their stuff when it comes to Russian speaking markets.
Top Ten Cars
All the information needed for Cars, Automobiles
Unfortunately, a lot of so called objective criteria are either entirely subjective or difficult to measure. Are variable names that begin with special characters like '$' easier for the brain to handle than those without? It'd be an interesting topic for a study (assuming one could be done), but lacking any clear empirical evidence, debates will rage on about this and other minutia.

Meanwhile, I'm going to keep using Python. ;)
> 70% outside the U.S? Yikes. So that means 70% of it's users cannot be monetized.

How did you come to this conclusion.
The ABCs of securing your wireless network
I've been able to get at gchat with XMPP for ages. Where's the news?
$10bn - Is Facebook overvalued?
> I think women are better programmers because they have less ego and are typically more interested in the gear rather than the pissing contest.

People need to stop writing shit like this. If it's not okay to say that men are better programmers simply because of their gender (it's not), then it's not okay to say it the other way around either.
I don't see much of it as "douchebag" on Twitter, obviously there's some who are just playing the numbers game etc, but Twitter is obviously also an effective marketing tool.

Using Twitter to make money isn't really the same as being a douchebag. Of course for users at the receiving end, it's irritating, but you can't blame people who have flocked to Twitter to promote and market.
Because when edu writes a blog post, he includes his entire life history, and, for that matter, the entire history of the universe in it.

I know you've already been smacked down but this is a big pet peeve of mine and worth pointing out. You can always complain that something should have had more information in it, and since that is always true no matter what, the complaint is information free. (A value that comes from a universe of one value contributes zero bits of information.)
That would have been cool. Stats wasn't required for us, but if it would have been Statistical Analysis of Computer Systems(or programs, or whatever), I would have signed up for it anyway.

I heard the stats class offered where I went to school was a joke so I didn't pursue it optionally. I'm sure it's different depending on your university.

Also, my school was not renowned for any sciences.
It's a no-brainer that games can change behavior -- they are disguised variable reward skinner boxes! I suspect that a part of being a great teacher involves implementing, as much as possible, an optimized variable-schedule of reward for each student.

I also suspect that a hobbyist or student who "gets into it" is often one who has stumbled into the right variable-reward situation.
Really? Which search engine works for you, then?
Except that the primary users of FB are twenty somethings who generally aren't that willing to spend money on stuff online.

Besides the biggest customer of any micro-payment system is going to be the newspapers (that may or may not work for them, but they will try it), but how many old people are on facebook?
> Women instinctively want to date and marry up.

On what basis do you make that claim? And doesn't the same hold true for men? (Maybe along a different axis, e.g. physical attractiveness - see "trophy wife")
That's a lot of text to say not much more than "Standard deviation can be as important as the mean; be careful about confounding variables; and if you're an engineer, spend more time learning statistics."

Oh, also, "You're all assholes and I rock."

Truly the Carl Sagan of software.
Something to consider, for those saying $10b is too much to pay: maybe these investors know something material that you don't? After all, those about to sign a humongous check probably get better access to the financials of a privately run company than, say, the media.
They had. Things change.
I do this: When Google fails me, I try the other search engines. So far, they fail me too.

Is this scientific? No. It is at least more objective, though. And I'm not trying for scientific rigor, just "does it do the task?" It's totally fair, too; that's how Google picked me up in the first place, and anyone else who meets that bar will get my business.
What do you propose people use for user to user payments? If you buy something from another person on the web, paypal is pretty much your only option. And if you are the seller, its pretty much the only way to get your payment right away.
Is the Singularity a Cult? A Nonviolent Debate
Given the existence of Bochs, Qemu, and VMWare, the use of anti-debugger traps is a comical anachronism.
Ask HN:  What would happen if public libraries only had ebooks?
Would such a thing be workable?

In particular, copyright issues would require limiting the number of copies of an ebook taken out over the net at any one time.

But the convenience of taking out an ebook over the net would probably mean that it would be very hard to find highly sought after ebooks since they will always be taken out.

In other words, most people who don't aggressively seek out highly sought out ebooks will never get to take one out.

It seems to me that the public library model really does depend on the inconvenience of going to the library and carrying physical books.

Update:

There's also the issue that many people today go to the library without a specific book in mind and just take out books that they find by chance. In an ebook library, I suspect that everyone would be searching or browsing hot/top lists, thus making it very hard to find a good ebook that is available without a long waiting list.

In other words, not only do public libraries depend on the inconvenience of going to the library and carrying physical books, but also on the inconvenience of finding books that you would like to read.
perfect example of .. jealousy. His points may be valid, but he needs to show some respect for what Resig has accomplished.
That's the poll itself, not the poll choices.
Thanks for taking the time to show what you had in mind. We're very quickly iterating over new homepage designs and will be sure to highlight the main interaction.
Try a small diverse set of languages? Here's an interesting anecdote for you. I have two friends from CMU, both who have a CS degree. The first person was an ace at C. Could handle everything with ease, but faltered a bit when it came to ML/Haskell. The second person managed to screw up the "easy" C class, but she scrubbed off ML/Haskell as if it were trivial, but hated all other programming classes she took. At the time of this writing, the second person is on equal or greater footing than the first person, and both are in industry.

Whether because of personality or because of the actual underlying mental thinking involved, people who tend to be good at C aren't good at Matlab or Haskell, and folks who are good at Matlab aren't necessarily good at either C or Haskell.

In light of this, I think it'd be really sad if your friend tried just one language, and wrote off programming forever because it was a bad experience.
The Most Expensive Coffee In The World Is Made From Animal Poop
I have developed license plate-reading technology which can use a modern digital camera. Just put the technology in the hands of the masses and we can track our own cars.
Skrenta talks about this, "Brand Perception Gap": http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_...
Correlation doesn't imply causation! This newspaper article seems to take this simple observation and twist it into "don't let the judges ask you questions". As far as I can tell, there's no evidence for this causal relationship.
I tried it out. There's a lot of work to be done before anyone can judge it properly, I think.

The biggest problem at the moment for me is the time it takes to load a file. brutal.
Here's another one.

http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/graphicsmagick-saved-the-...
good points, and thanks for taking some time to give us some suggestions with a mock =)
Video chat through their xmpp extension
Zuckerberg better not kill one of his Russian investor's guys in Vegas or he's going to get ventilated.
women were so "happy" 40 years ago they decided to march in the streets for the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment). women were so happy 40 years ago they were burning their bras for equality. women were so happy 40 years ago they made far less than their male counterparts and sex discrimination was open and readily accepted in business. yep, women sure were happy 40 years ago. the author is a nut!
This was one of the big motivations behind the design of StackOverflow. Joel and Jeff talked about it (a lot) in the podcast. Their badges were modeled very closely on the badge system of XBox Live.
There's the Cartoon Guide to Statistics ( http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Guide-Statistics-Larry-Gonick/... ), which, despite its name, is pretty solid and comprehensive book on basics. And definitely not boring!
She's presumably talking to people who know Marc.
Ask HN: C vs C++
As a fledgling programmer, I need some advice. I made a list of languages to learn by next year and on the top of the list is C/C++ (figured that's a good place to start). However, a buddy of mine, an experienced programmer, suggested I drop C++ and just move on to JAVA after C. When asked why, he said 'C++ is way too complicated and error-ridden to serve any real purpose. C is more than enough'

Is this true? Should I forget C++ and move on to another language after C?
What about the old adage: "Ask for the sale"?
Facebook has over 200 million users. It's more than just "twenty somethings".
I think the logic may have gone like this:

"If it ain't got no dead president on it then it ain't no damn money!"

I like to avoid giving credence to any negative stereotypes of Americans, but sometimes the internet makes that so very, very hard.
This happened in late 2005.
You mean the primary users of Facebook are the demographic buying content online through Xbox Live and phone app stores?

You don't need to be "on Facebook" to use their hypothetical micropayment system. Non-members can be shown a simplified sign-up page, like they would see if another company became the de-facto micropayment processor.
I wouldn't say this is a reddit link, naturally, but perhaps there needs to be an aggregator for random bits of nerd-rage with no significant value.
Why is he mixing computer science with programming? Computer science is just a branch of mathematics. It has not much to do with what he talks about afterwards.
The protocols powering the real-time web
Answer is yes.
I often run it on my phone charger which has a mini-usb plug.
All it needs is 5V.
Google Checkout is at least as bad as PayPal, though for other reasons. The API is a clunker. The buying process is not particularly nice or fast for users (and it doesn't have the benefit of being familiar, like PayPal).

There are a few things about Checkout to love. They take more responsibility for fraud than any other payments provider I know of. That has a lot of value, particularly for online retailers. The rates are better. They don't have the reputation for being shifty that PayPal has, though they'll probably earn one in time. When it comes to money, people get grouchy fast. Any mistakes, any perceived unfairness, any slight, will be trumpeted from the mountain tops (or sites like paypalsucks.com). It's just the nature of the business.

I've never had a problem with PayPal, and we have $10k+ in our account most of the time, and I've been using it since nearly the beginning of its existence.

I'm considering dropping merchant services payments altogether on our online shop and taking just PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon FPS. I haven't yet talked to enough customers to know whether this is a sane course of action, though.
That depends on whether Facebook can ever monetize their users to an extent great enough to generate the profits that would cover such a valuation. Right now it's not looking so good. There is only so much growth they're going to get in the west (which is where users are worth money) and growing elsewhere is more of a strain on resources than something that will generate revenue.

Search advertising seems to monetize so much better than pretty much anything else on the web and that's why Google is sitting pretty. Advertising just doesn't seem to monetize enough on Facebook and the like and the average value of their users keeps going down as the purchasing power of a lot of their growth is small.*

*That's not to say that poor people aren't wonderful, just less valuable to advertise to.
Libraries already have exclusive digital content, and they usually require you to sit at an on-premise workstation to work.
which is why the northern hemisphere has a slightly milder climate.
How can you write "Perl 6 will never ship"? Rakudo has monthly stable releases; last week they released their 17th stable release in a row.

(If you believe that a group of people who've demonstrated that they can make and meet commitments over a long period of time will suddenly stop, how can you believe that any group of people will ever release any software that takes longer than a week or two to write?)