skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stupid question: the reason he's questioning the equal probability of 1111111 being drawn is because it seems significant. It looks like it is less likely to be drawn. But we know it is equally likely.

But forgetting the actual fair drawing process and just focussing on randomly choosing a number from a set of numbers...if you divide a set of numbers into significant-looking and insignificant-looking, would it not be true to say that a random choice is more likely to look insignificant and random, than significant and ordered, purely because there are far more insignificant looking ones?

(I'm not saying that 11111111 isn't equally likely to be drawn in a lotto here)
Americans Giving Up Passports Jump Sixfold as Tougher Rules Loom
Yes I recognise having that option is an advantage, a major one for some cases (e.g. e-commerce). However I wouldn't be keen to put my credit card details in to a form on e.g. a blogger's website soliciting donations.
The repition that programmers hate XML for is ideal under many compression algorithms, including gzip.
The implicit synchronization happens at the point the child thread is started, regardless of when it was allocated. Perhaps it was already started prior to the initialization, in which case some form of explicit synchronization would be required to ensure visibility.

FYI, the relevant section of the JLS is 17.4.4: "An action that starts a thread synchronizes-with the first action in the thread it starts." [1].

[1] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se7/html/jls-17.html...
This is one thing that Alcoholics Anonymous gets right... when you're dependent enough on alcohol to get to the "alcoholic" label, drinking just one or two is really not gonna happen.
Max Mathews: The First Computer Musician
Oh man... I love that Stripe is finally coming to Europe.

BUT seriously (going on a disappointed rant here): Belgium & the Netherlands get into private beta and Germany gets nothing? I mean: Come on. BE + NL together have 27m people - Germany has some 80m AND a world-class economy. I don't want to bash on our neighbors (God knows we've done that one or two times in the past), I just want me some Stripe.

I know that the delay is probably because of some ridiculous red tape in Germany. :-(

tl;dr: Please absolve us from PayMill & the Samwer brother
How much would a good hardware RNG cost, and when can we have a phone with one that can run Cyanogenmod?
If you're eating at a deficit, high protein is good idea, actually. It helps preserve lean mass, which has important downstream health effects.
PerkStreet financial to shut down after funding dries up
Seems to me that the inherent problem here was that you could get the sender to send messages of your choosing, which is always going to be a vulnerability. Consider that this entire line of discussion is redundant if (a) the encryption key is public (as stated above) or (b) you know what the plaintext looks like for some encrypted examples.
What is now the difference between using Stripe and Paymill? Any objective benefit to using either?

asking this as an ex-Rocket guy with my own startup that needs payment integration soon. I've started the Paymill process but not sent the docs in yet.
Does anybody has used GoCardless or Braintree?
What advantages there are between Stripe and those other ones?
That just makes you more likely to be murdered.
You're still going to be "far more likely" to be murdered than to win the lottery.
Where do I learn about cryptography?
Well that sounds down right democratic.
They have been making and supplying them for many years, but they are not designed as a replacement for food, and do not contain 100% of known essential nutrients. Recommending something that we absolutely know for certain is not complete because you have an irrational hate-boner for soylent is absurd. Your claims about soylent are false by the way, which really doesn't help your case at all.
It really all depends on the use case and your target end-points. JSON is great when the data is transmitted to and from web browsers because of JavaScript. Nearly every major framework has a really good XML library. Readability of the payload is usually not a concern, at least my experience, because only the software has to deal with it and not a human. Also in my experience the size difference between a JSON payload and an XML payload is not a big deal (except perhaps across slow network links where every byte counts, but there are more succinct and faster binary serialization formats available).
Uh....

Actually the risk and potential damage of nuclear is very easy to calculate. "Extremely low." And that's counting Fukushima, because the alternatives are all much, much more dangerous.

We're talking about a technology which, in terms of deaths per TWh of installed capacity, is ten times safer than rooftop solar. Yes, it's safe, yes, it's clean, and our best estimates of the entire costs, including subsidies, say it's significantly cheaper than other clean options.

What's beyond comprehension to me is why people refuse to look at what's truly happening in Japan, and somehow think that it does something other than prove nuclears potential. And it's trivial to show that more people will die in Japan due to their switch from nuclear power than will ever die from Fukushima. That's the real horrendous "desaster".

In the real world, nuclear is quite clean, extremely safe, and moderately cheap. That's cold, objective fact.
No more compiling Phusion Passenger
A pilot still uses eyes, gyroscopes and has an understanding of terrain and how to manipulate a flight controls to make the aircraft go a certain way. Presumably all those things can be done by technology, terrain following, and autopilot systems are not new. If jamming detected it can return back to destination. I am sure it can be done for less than $1TN
Another way to achieve this is to try different foods.

You might also be interested in reading about "Mindfulness-Based Eating". It seems a bit woo-y to me but psych friends of my acquaintance say it shows promise.
>Commandeering is a practice we're used to in wartime, where commercial ships are taken for military use, or production lines are converted to military production. But now it's happening in peacetime.

No it's not. We are technically in "wartime." Congress passed a law in late September 2001 that declared war with "those nations, organizations, or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons" [1]. The mass-surveillance of the internet is being touted as one of the weapons in the fight against those entities [2]. As long as the AUMF is still law, the fight against terrorists, and all actions taken to prevent "any future acts of international terrorism against the United States," are governed by the rules of war.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milita...

[2] http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/31/nsa-director-keith-ale...
And yet that's still useless.
I believe this is the point in the discussion where people willing to do some digging indicated that the problem was most likely not in the apps:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195707

It wasn't days, but I can't say for sure that it was minutes... my vote would be for hours! :)
I was in your camp until the weight of the discussion convinced me otherwise. I learned regression as an advanced statistics topic, and it wasn't touched on in my (beyond awful) AI class.

However... If linear regression is being used to predict the next value in a dataset, and the caliber of the regression improves as more data is gathered, then it counts as machine learning. For all I know, Netflix could be improving their picks of my movies with a grand regression.
Soylent is made by people who know what they're doing, in clean factories, with quality ingredients. You seem to have a really deep emotional investment in strawmanning soylent, why is that?
For those who are not familiar with Phusion Passenger: it is a Phusion Passenger is a fast and robust web server and application server for Ruby, Python and Node.js. It works by integrating into Apache and Nginx and turning them into a fully-featured application server.
You can compare it to (G)Unicorn, Puma and uWSGI. The difference is that Phusion Passenger integrates better with Nginx, is a lot easier to setup, and provides useful deployment, stability and security features such as process supervision, I/O concurrency protection, good admin tools for providing lots of insight, multitenancy, etc.
We'd love to move to Stripe; the one issue is that you can't send us $USD to our UK based $USD account via a wire transfer (like Amex does for example). Instead, it seems the only option is for you to send us £GBP after charging another 2% on top. This is both expensive currency conversion; but we also spend $USD so have to pay to turn our £GBP back into $USD!

Fix this, and we'd move in a heartbeat.
Of course, 1111111 has as good a chance of winning as any other number, but since most lotteries are parimutuel (i.e. the prize is divided evenly among all winners), it makes sense to try and pick a number that no one else is going to pick.

The Quebec lottery published their most popular numbers a few years ago [1]. They were:

7-14-21-28-35-42
1-2-3-4-5-6
4-8-15-16-23-42 (the numbers from the tv show Lost)

Also, from personal experience, it seems that more people play "birthday" numbers (numbers 1-31) than higher numbers.

And, while I haven't confirmed it, I suspect that in games like Powerball, where winning tickets are determined by two independent sets of balls, people stick with their habit of choosing numbers in numerical order and not repeating numbers, so 4-12-17-24-36 (42) would be a more common pick than 4-12-17-24-36 (24).

[1] http://lotoquebec.com/loteries/nav/en/useful-information/pop...
How do I get a job with this company? I hear nothing but great things about their product and the working culture there. I want to be a part of it.

People from Stripe. If you're reading this, I'd like to work for you.

Can we talk?
Show HN: pdoc – A documentation generator for Python code (replaces epydoc)
Is this not an insanely high cost for a months worth of food?

Depends on what you like. When I was a student I spent a lot less than that, now I send a lot more. $260 is a reasonably nice dinner for two at a restaurant here in Sweden.
My chief misgiving with the title policy is partly of my own making. Not being a graphic designer, I created a style for my personal blog that uses a large font for titles. I think the design looks best when the title is short and only a single line. So I recently titled a blog entry "Unfair comparisons" and when I submitted it to HN, I added parenthetical clarification to the title that this was about comparing across disparate attributes when benchmarking web development frameworks. That clarification was later edited out of the HN submission, leaving just "Unfair comparisons."

Fine. It's just my blog, so be it. Like I said, it's my own fault for making a design that limits my title length, and I should correct that if I had a serious problem with the policy. But since I was asked at submission time to provide a title, I preferred giving the potential reader here at HN some added clarity about the subject matter before they clicked. I know as an HN reader, I don't like vague, short submission titles. I probably would have never clicked "Unfair comparisons" myself because I'd quickly think, "about what?" and move on.
I don't think the DEA is at nearly as much risk of being captured by those they're meant to regulate compared to the SEC. Power and money are extremely concentrated on wall street, and there is a well-documented revolving door between wall street and the SEC that I don't think exists between drug dealers and DEA officials. [0]

Totally agree with the rest of your posts.

[0] http://www.pogo.org/our-work/reports/sec-revolving-door.html
You don't understand correctly. Socialism is simply worker control of the means of production, states, taxation, etc are entirely orthogonal. "Libertarian socialism" does not refer to social democracy, it refers to socialism. Furthermore, before the 1950s, "libertarian" meant socialist.
Landing Pages -- Show don't Tell
800K license plate scans from ALPR cameras
My eyes flicked across the word "Steam." I assumed it referred to Valve's Steam, and my interest was piqued.

Then my eyes settled on the word "Blender," and my interest grew stronger as I thought about 3D modeling.

Then my brain ingested the complete phrase, "Steam-powered Blender," I figured it was steam-punk related, and I moved on, slightly disappointed.

Awful title.
People in this thread seem to be arguing past each other. Patrick is specifically disputing the claim (a few posts up) that you can always tell if the hardware is adding incorrectly. His argument is that if it's deliberately manufactured to add almost correctly, except in certain carefully tailored cicrumstances, the chance of that being detectable by a third party are pretty slim. The Ruby stuff is just a metaphor.

(Google for "Illinois Malicious Processors" for what an attacker might actually do. A few extra transistors here and there can lay you wide open.)
Yes you've correctly identified a problem. It's sad that I have to "know a guy" to sometimes get stuff done.

Unfortunately, no one with purchasing power cares.

You can try promoting "social" and "collaboration", and you might get some sales out of that since those buzzwords are hot. However, you won't fundamentally change anything because ultimately someone bought your software to fluff up their annual review, and then it gets dropped like a hot rock after the coast is clear.

You're probably better off with IT self-service, it's a hot enterprise area right now.
Baidu Eyes Group Buying With Nuomi
This snippet from that thread is particularly enlightening if true.

When I told him months ago that his product was incredibly stupid and he didn't have enough stuff in there to be a healthy alternative to eating, he pretty much ignored me.

A couple of weeks later, he found out the underlying cause of his arrhythmia was iron deficiency (in addition to hypermagnesia and hyperkalemia), he decided to put iron in it. This was of course after I had already told him to do it, and he ignored my advice.

I also told him his weight loss was likely a large degree of lean mass when he was only taking 50g/day of protein because that's what the RDA was. He essentially ignored me, continued to shed lean mass while exercising and not getting enough calories. But a little while later he added more protein in.

The lack of boron was also something I told him about, and then he added it (fairly quickly, actually).

I also mentioned lack of semi-essential/conditionally essential nutrients (GLA). The formulation still doesn't have Carnitine or Taurine in it. Because "they're not essential", even though a decent amount of the population lacks the ability to synthesize carnitine.

What kind of folate is he using? Because about 5-10% of the population doesn't have the gene to convert the commonly used (and cheaper) form of synthetic folate to it's physiologically active form tetrahydrofolate.

I said he needed fiber, he added a tiny bit of fiber and believes "the body doesn't really need that much fiber and it might be bad for your gut" (lolno).

Edit: ...there are companies that have been doing for a lot longer than he has, with smarter people, more resources, and are better in every way. They still haven't quite figured it out yet, but this guy has been living off his formula and accidentally almost killing himself at nearly every turn.
No, you have to defend trademarks, or else eventually lose them.

Was "It's the real thing" trademarked? And furthermore, trademarks are only usually enforced among competitors. Apple Computer can't sue Apple Dry Cleaning for trademark infringement. Well they can, and occasionally do, but it isn't a given that they will win. Usually you have to show damages, and Apple Computer isn't damaged in any way by having a dry cleaner use the name of a popular fruit. Similarly, I don't think Coca-Cola lost anything by having the phrase "it's the real thing" associated with a literary work.

My question for the lawyers: Does a letter like this count as "defending a trademark"? Or would Coca-Cola have had to actually take these publishers to court over it?
I read the first couple of chapters of that book and it simply wasn't believable. Too many serial-killer cliches, too strong an odor of creative writing classes. Pretty clearly a work of fiction
I looked it up. The Soylent guys are no longer going to make it themselves, they've outsourced the actual manufacturing to this company: http://www.rfiingredients.com/

So that much at least is being done by professionals.
Representing vectors, matrices or general arrays as anything other than a single contiguous chunk of inline values is a complete non-starter for numerical work since you can't call BLAS, LAPACK, FFTW or any other high quality numerical library on e.g. Clojure's vectors. Without those libraries, you lose many orders of magnitude performance on crucial operations like matrix multiplication.
Also forgot "Social Media Maven"
Good list!

Do we put ____ guru in the same bin as the ninjas?

It would be worth adding data analyst or data scientist, as this is a growing aspect of managing a platform.
JS Bin's 5th birthday competition
Well, those rules are really for the petty sociopath. If you do it, do it big.

1. Disregard unspoken rules, but not the small ones like not donating at the museum, think more rules like "you just can't enter this industry", "you can't just schedule a meeting with that CEO". Those can have an immense ROI, while the petty ones may get you a punch to the face.

2. You should also live in the best place possible for your budget - negotiate down to the last dollar, but not for some shi%%y apartment in some shi%%y ghetto.

3. Rule 3 seems accurate - if you can't do it on your own, take some drugs :-).

4. A few prepared anecdotes is short sighted - you should learn human psychology and the art of social manipulation for the best results.

5. Or get them from the inside - blend in, build up support, then announce your true intentions (aka the dictator way).
> but they are not designed as a replacement for food, and do not contain 100% of known essential nutrients.

This is wrong. I'm not sure what products you're talking about. But there are products that are designed to be used as a sole source of nutrition.

> Recommending something that we absolutely know for certain is not complete because you have an irrational hate-boner for soylent is absurd.

> Your claims about soylent are false by the way, which really doesn't help your case at all.

Feel free to rebut anything I've said with links.

Soylent have no dieticians on staff, or anyone with any nutrition qualifications. So far all product has been produced in their kitchen. Several mistakes in formulation have been made. Errors in mixing (not taking fineness of powers into account, for example) have been shown.
In case someone does not recognize the reference, this is a parody of the Spam Solutions Checklist that used to be circulated when e-mail spam was a new issue: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Actually this is a really interesting point...
Well the SCIFI-future scenario is valid though. Imagine a world in which people use such devices regularly. It's not that hard to envision some social media application or game that can extract some information without you being aware of it.
New third layer approach to virus detection
"Initial tests [of the new approach that employs a data mining algorithm] show an almost 100% detection rate and a false positive rate of just 2.5% for spotting embedded malicious code that is in "stealth mode" prior to being activated for particular malicious purposes."
A lot of people may know already that PHP is purple, Python is blue and JavaScript is orange. Or at least GitHub has chosen those colors to represent languages on their site.

So I would like that my avatar is more blue'ish because I focus on Python. :)
Hmm. That's unfortunate. Their content is generally interesting - it's too bad they're willing to discredit it with manipulative social engineering.
I've speculated before that it's algorithmically updated in most cases.

If 5 people submit a link to the same url and 3 of them use the title "ABC" but the first submitted used "XYZ" then at some point the algo changes it from "XYZ" to "ABC".

Other than that, active moderation because of excessive editorializing by submitter.
The cynic would say that AirBnB is a YC company and HN doesn't want to draw attention to negative news, which makes sense (if you were the operator of this or any site, you wouldn't want bad news to surface)
Why Aren't More Designers Starting Companies?
Great. Now I have no excuses not to launch a side project
You're wrong about each(). I do use it in the demo twice. Writing each() was the main challenge and goal in my development process; the most enjoyable part of it. Look at the code itself and how much of core.js is devoted to giving each() it's power and flexibility. each() also powers the alter.js (as it should all extensions). Calling it a cop out is flat out ignorant. What you also don't know is that i've writing javascript since it's beginning. I am no stranger to the DOM nor its history. I've been building apps with web technology full time for 12 years. Your "you don't know what your doing" posturing is again, founded in ignorance of me and my code. There is no choice in this library that i made in ignorance of the tradeoffs nor of the conventions i am challenging. Accept that, please.

And i am most certainly NOT making things hard on myself. I forked Voyeur and rewrote it because the concept was so close to what i needed to make things much easier for working with the DOM. I needed a tight library that let me avoid branching code (unwieldy if/else) into either querySelector (node returned) and querySelectorAll (list returned). I wanted something that made it easy to traverse the short and usually quite static structures of my shadow DOMs or web components. The gains are numerous for me (and many others). It baffles me that you think using HTML.js is harder than straight DOM.

Now my lecture... You need to stop seeing the DOM as a large, dynamic structure of myriad, loosely defined nodes. The future of the web (what i'm aiming for) is components: groups of encapsulated structures whose internal relationships are well-defined and whose external relationships are nearly irrelevant. You probably won't understand the value of working close to the DOM with tiny libraries that don't abstract everything away for you until you pull your head out of 2010 design patterns and into 2015 ones.
Quickly browsing the github page of the OS-library it seems like you can extract the raw data from the EPOC which would turn the 300$ one into a decent enough device.

Granted you'd have to write the unfolding algorithm and infrastructure stuff yourself (eventhough I'd guess someone probably has done this already)

Seems like a neat enough toy to add it to my xmas-wishlist. Time to build a light version of the "Ready Player One" cyberworld :P

I used to play poker semiprofessionally and could see this as a very useful device to identify tilt (and shutdown the pokerclient or at least give you an alarm of sorts) or generally wear it while grinding and see what helpful info you can extract when comparing to your hands database.
(I work at Stripe.)

Yep, we have the same fees for American Express transactions: 2.4% + 20p + VAT per successful charge.
When you're just starting out the cloud is significantly cheaper. When you're growing, it's good to have that support network. When you get large enough, it's more cost effective to actually own hardware.

My question is, how large is large enough to warrant owning your own hardware? What's the breaking point?