skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is unfortunately a perfect situation where anecdotes are not very valuable, as can be seen by the fact that the same pattern can be observed with obvious nonsense like hologram patches and magnetic bracelets. We see a typically less gullible set of subjects for these anecdotes, but that can unfortunately be explained entirely by the more plausible sounding hypothesis.

I'll dispense with the full Bayesian treatment here, but what we have here is a case of the base rate fallacy (although not the form that is usually discussed): failing to account for the prior probability of the evidence. That is, we have some evidence, which is that the anecdotes we see are largely in favor of standing desks being helpful, and we need to account for how likely that evidence is regardless of whether standing desks are helpful.

Unfortunately, as our friends with the magnetic bracelets demonstrate, that probability turns out to be very high. If something works, we see overwhelmingly positive anecdotes. If it doesn't work, we see overwhelmingly positive anecdotes.

Why might this be? Well, for one thing, there is sensitivity to placebo effects, because have purely qualitative phenomena that are being reported only subjectively.

But even stronger is a selection bias that has to do with people's behavior in reporting and reading. Someone is unlikely to write about their experiences publicly who tries a standing desk for a while, finds no significant benefit, and goes back to a sitting desk. She won't find it interesting to talk about, and she may also be self-conscious that she didn't do it right, and would be inviting criticism. After all "I tried X and it didn't work" is, on some level, an admission of personal failure, and people aren't particularly prone to those. And if she does write it up, her write-up isn't likely to get all that much attention because "X didn't work for me" isn't a particularly interesting story.

But one who finds the standing desk to be a miracle cure for all of her problems is relatively likely to write about it, and people will take notice, because "making a simple lifestyle change improved my quality of life" is an attention getter.
1 puma worker vs 4 unicorn workers isn't a fair test on a multi core machine under MRI.
The quote you picked doesn't fully support your view - if you read the full quote, Darwin suggests that such inherited effects start to appear at one point in one's life and disappear afterwards. If instincts were truly passed on as memories, then they should be present throughout life and not appear when such evolutionary adaption is needed. This conflicts with evolutionary developmental psychological theory, which suggests that people face different survival adaptive problems at various points of their lifetime. For example, problems of survival as an infant must occur before problems of mating. Mating must predictably occur before parenting, and likewise before grand-parenting. From this, we expect certain "instincts" to appear and disappear as adaptive problems change. This is known to be true in infants: two examples are an infant's ability to swim (which disappears after 6 months) and also the Moro reflex, a potentially lifesaving reflex that occurs while falling. If these were "memories" and not instincts, then they would not appear so rapidly nor so consistently. There's quite a few examples of similar instincts listed on Wikipedia [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_reflexes
My point is that this is a bullshit quote that people use to shore up their opinion without actually having to think.

If it didn't sound apocryphal to you, would it really change the fact that Hanlon's/Heinlein's razor is nothing more than a non-scientific personal philosophical statement?

In any case look at Wikipedia - other smart people are quoted saying the same thing that was attributed to Einstein:

"...misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent." — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

Malice does exist. It's just good old common sense to never rule it out.
The plan is for it to be my favorite, and I'm designing it, so I hope so!

I'm trying to design the system I've needed for years, because the problems I've had building robots generalize to nearly all the problems that Arduino users have.

We are aiming to nail this.
In my opinion, all hacker spaces, co-working spaces, etc. need somebody to be the "bad cop". Building any size community requires members to participate. Tech people in particular are generally less likely to want to cause confrontation, but for the betterment of the community some policing is always needed. It really goes back to respect. Respect the community, and it will respect you back.
Hans Blix: The US Is Not the World Police
Their previous full name was "10gen: the MongoDB Company"; they've been trying to dispel confusion over the company name vs. product for a long time (probably since they pivoted towards making Mongo the main business product - 10gen started as a PaaS company).

source: worked there

Edit: the title of this submission should really be "10gen: the MongoDB Company shortens their name to MongoDB, Inc." Less attention-grabby, more truthy.
My college German instructors told us to imitate Arnold Schwarzenegger's deep Austrian accent when we were speaking German in class. The idea worked for us too.
I'm not sure it matters, actually. Most of the highest value work is going to get done by the best folks, so as long as the "trust and empower" regime doesn't cause a complete erosion in the productivity of the mediocre programmers then it might end up being a net positive.

Even so, you are correct that there's no one size fits all management strategy for every individual and every situation. Holding such a view is a sure fire route to failure, typically. If managing were as easy as consulting a lookup table for the correct policy to apply then we wouldn't need human beings with lots of experience to do it would we?
We think Dropbox is great because it's so easy to use and "just works". We designed Cloak with that thought in mind.
If you look at "market depth" plots, you'll see that a small desire to buy or sell BTC has a disproportionate impact on the market relative to market capitalization. Lots of people are sitting on bitcoin, so the few who make trades on any given day have an amplified effect on price.

Right now, ~1 million USD can shift the price of BTC by ~$5. That $5 shift changes the effective market capitalization by ~$57 million. You'll know things are stable when a million dollar purchase of BTC shifts the market cap by ~$1 million.
Thanks for the reply, Taylor. Perhaps you can explain this to me:

What niche are you guys trying to fill with this? I guess I'm just not seeing it yet. You talk about "piping TCP/IP" over the data link but how is this superior that using any of of the dozens of other powerful, low-cost, mesh solutions purposely designed for TCP/IP routing?

Maybe you're trying to fill the "talk to my kegerator" niche. OK, but how is this superior to the Xbee shield [0]? That shield interfaces with a number of different Xbee products that offer a wide variety of power outputs and ranges. These Xbees do mesh networking out of the box. How does Flutter do it better? Help me understand. :)

[0] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10854
Why should it be made of wood? Any composite material will do. We just need to build one which is affordable. It looks like a niche product right now, and a whole lot of average americans cannot afford to purchase one. It looks like one of those things we have to pay a premium to own. You get sturdy and durable hydraulic barber chairs between $100-$150. A table with the same kind of lift mechanism should cost you ~$750 to own?
They don't even have to leave Windows to use Mercurial, since there's a GUI Mercurial client for Windows, TortoiseHg.
Well the host machine is my laptop in this case so it doesn't matter.
I'm pretty sure hellbanning is not primarily an evaluation of whether the user is writing about "real" topics or not.

HN is a discussion website for hackers and topics that interest them. If you're dropping wall-of-text posts in the middle of unrelated discussions, it's completely irrelevant whether you're talking about something "real" or not.

Here already you're complaining about (re)posting into the void, and copy/pasting things you've apparently already posted elsewhere. This is a discussion site -- that is not discussion. You have more comments on this post than anyone else, half of them complaining about being hell-banned; that's also not discussion.

Finally, I read what you wrote and still have little clue of what you're talking about. It's probably worth finding a single solid source for what you're talking about, post it, and then discuss it (not just flood the comment thread...). I.e., see what people are wondering about, or what other people know... that's how discussion works. Good luck.
This is about as meaningful as ranking the US healthcare system in terms of the average height of doctors.
Syrian Electronic Army has also changed nameservers on Twitter.co.uk
I tried it for a little over a month. Just doesn't work for me. Very bad knee pain, shoulders pain, felt not tired but kind of awkward. Felt like punishment. My fat ass prefers sitting. Period.
Hey Taylor, Greetings from Belfast, Northern Ireland (Well, not currently, I travel a bit... anyway).

Disappointed that this appears to be US only. would love to use a few of these for monitoring our Hackerspace!

Actually I'm also involved in mobile ad hoc security research so might try and 'acquire' a few of these for testing out some collaborative network theories on our quadcopters... but can't do that as current delivery status stands!

Good luck with certification.
Fantastic! I've been wanting to learn FRP for quite some time. The fact that this is a follow-up to the awesome Scala course is a bonus.

I can't wait for this to begin. =)

EDIT: The syllabus doesn't mention any FRP libs. I'm surprised, especially as one of the professors is the author of RX. Maybe because there isn't a canonical one in Scala?
It would be extremely easy to for anyone who wanted to, to write such a script using procmail, or maildrop.
Datomic lets you write a function and send it to the transactor. This is a pure function which runs against the database value (specified) and returns a new database value which becomes the result of the transaction (assuming it succeeds). Because Datomic is also a library in your application, you can run this function on the client side as a dry run (against a value of the database) before sending it to the transactor.
I was searching for evidence, and it appears I may be wrong. Cornell (http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/ahtutorials/typingposture.html) is one example that seems to think your set up is better than normal.
Honestly I completely didn't expect the outpouring of support from international backers. We're two hackers in silicon valley building a product out of my apartment, and honestly canada, mexico, europe - I'm not surprised you guys want it (that's the point!) but I was completely blown away at how serious the international support is! I'm thrilled, excited, and happy to figure it out though!

I think we probably can sell in all of North America without changes, I'm checking on it. Europe is also pretty easy design wise, I just need to consult with our radio expert about certification, it was something I just did not look into, with all the things it takes to make this happen! But I should update the FAQ to say "we're" looking into it, since we absolutely now are!
Show HN: HN Birthday Countdown
Will NoSQL eventually replace SQL?
I have a simple(minded) idea here. Connect a damn horizontal rod between the two pistons/moving-legs on each side
http://blog.planetargon.com/entries/2012/8/14/rails-hosting-...
Definitely. Maybe Noisebridge is a cool place to be, but I hear stories like this often enough and it really makes me never want to go there.

I've been to plenty of other spaces and it can be a cool scene, but Noisebridge's reputation isn't good.
The >300lbs on a GeekDesk Max isn't how much it can support, it's how much it can lift. Your office chair can't lift 300lbs. It can't lift much at all. I also don't believe in the ability of a pair of $300 hydraulic lifts to consistently reproduce my presets.

As someone who weighs close to 300lbs, I can also tell you you won't find a good office chair rated for 300lbs for under $100. Go look at the specs on office chairs closely. Most of them will be rated for less than 250lbs with no more than a few hours/day of use.

If you want your own crappy top (planks? really?), the actual cost of a GeekDesk Max is $725-745. The non-max (275lbs lifting capacity) is $525-549. You want a vastly inferior product to save $225?
"Syrian Electronic Army claims to have taken control of Twitter.com domain registration"

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100988772

Tweet with some info regarding Twitter & NYT:

https://twitter.com/jaesonschultz/status/372456943312330753
Meet Saudi Arabia's Bandar bin Sultan: The Puppetmaster Behind The Syrian War
Its W. Edwards Deming.
Anyone have options for people who can't stand for prolonged periods of time?
Watch out for IPv6 on Windows. I have a PPTP VPN through StrongVPN and the IPv6 interface is unaffected. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to programmatically disable it.
Hmm, it seems though you're right, it seemed odd to me that the difference between puma would be so large at high concurrency, but when I look at it now the I see how the test does correctly mimic I/O for the purpose of the benchmark.

My apologies if I came out too strong.
Will it be possible to change the radio firmware without losing FCC certification?

Does the message go straight from one end of the mesh network to the other, or can it store things for later forwarding?

Can it really support a mesh network with thousands of clients? In a mesh network with thousands of clients, how much bandwidth does each client get?

How do you divide time between different clients - is it contended like wifi so you have to keep the network uncongested?

How does roaming work? What triggers provoke roaming events?

If I want to communicate with one device 10cm away and another 10km away at the same time, is that possible? How do you avoid near-far problems?
Good question. Hopefully you have not been put off by that comment. It comes off kind of harsh.

She wasn't right about lack of concurrency. Go, Scala, Python, hell all of them I guess can do "concurrency". They all have facilities to launch concurrent requests/actors/callback threads/other processes.

Now maybe what she was going to say (and her "how much pain and when" kind of hints in that direction) is that once you start handling large scale concurrency, things get very complicated. Anything that lets you share memory will eventually bite you back in terms of debugging and downtime.

Erlang's concurrency is unique because its concurrency units are isolated. They are as isolated as possible. Each has its own memory. Garbage collection can happen concurrently. One such what they are called process will not damage or interfere with other processes. That is invaluable.

Erlang's concurrency just like (Go's and Rust's I think) is also a mix of both CPU and IO. So behind the scenes Erlang spawns an operating system thread for each CPU core and then it dynamically scales your concurrency units over them. You need to run better, just add more cores.

Another (and this should be the main differentiation) is fault tolerance. This was and is the raison-d-etre for Erlang. Nothing practical out there matches it. Processes can and will crash and Erlang has standard ways to supervise and restart. Even crazier it provides built in facilities to reload the code while the system is running. That is of course possible in other frameworks and languages but in Erlang is baked in and battle tested over many years.

That sort of makes Erlang a unique tool. It doesn't come without trade-offs. It doesn't for example has terribly fast sequential speed. So if your task is to multiply matrices for example, or computer lots of numbers. Erlang won't be the fastest in that regard. It is also a functional language. It is beautiful I think, especially if you like pattern matching, but some people don't like that.

But if you don't like the syntax, there is way out, the same Erlang virtual machine called BEAM can run other languages. For example a nice new one is Elixir http://elixir-lang.org/ check it out, it is rather similar to Ruby in syntax but includes all the concurrency features from Erlang.

As for resources I would recommend the wonderful and funny online book called:

Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good http://learnyousomeerlang.com/
I like my Aeron for when I do have to sit.

It surprises me that guys will easily drop a thousand dollars every six to eight months on the latest phone, yet cheap out on their workspace. In fact I would be hard pressed to think of anything more worthy of my money than my desk and chair that I spend most of my day using.

Another thing is that most standing desks, including the one in the OP, seem to have a very small work area, which would be unacceptable to me (I like to draw stuff on paper).
What about the "Basic HTML" view?
For any very simple arbitrary program, perhaps. But certainly not in general. That's sort of the point of the Halting Problem: you can't know because it is undecidable.

Of course, there are simple and trivial programs that can be specifically analyzed, but we're definitely not to that level on any of the stuff under discussion here. The analogy really is pretty apt.
Semantic technology to improve education
And I diagnose you with a severe case of confirmation bias.

Start here: http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3801081.htm

Shift over here for some overview:
http://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/04/if-this-is-evidence-base...

Then jump into the hard science at SBM:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/chiropractic-a-brief-ove...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/chiropractic-a-brief-ove...

It's not acusing someone from a position of superiority if a profession has continually shown itself incapable of eliminating the pseudoscience in its practice, which is most of it. A claim could be made that Chiropractory is largely fraud based on their incredibly weak evidence base and the fact they are charging money for treatment that is no better than placebo.

Have a nice day!
NYTimes hacked by Syrian Electronic Army
Paul Vixie to step down from ARIN board
I created Product Design Guild to help with this problem: http://www.productdesignguild.com/

Designers learn best by working with other designers but this is becoming increasingly rare. The PDG holds events where designers come together, everyone brings work and you work collaboratively with other designers in a studio style environment.

We're current 500+ members strong across Bay Area, New York & London. It's one of the only places in the world where you regularly get to see work-in-progress from companies that you don't work for.
Long distance is tempting, but it isn't necessarily a good idea. All kinds of wireless interference/collision will make available bandwidth really low.

For example, on 2.4 GHz 802.11 protocols, there are 11 channels from 1 to 11. All wireless routers operating in US have to be on one of the 11 channels. When there are other wireless APs within the range, you and others share the channel. There's a limitation on how much bandwidth a channel can give in total. That's the hard limitation, given that CSMA/CA works well. That's why channel 3 and channel 8 often work great (most wireless routers have default channel choice 1, 6, or 11) - they are far away from defaults that others are using.

Same thing applies to 5 GHz 802.11 networks.

Now back to this project. 1 km is really long distance. You get communication range as large as a circle with radius being 1 km. There are a lot of wireless devices that fall in this range. You might not get affected by them since they don't have that powerful antennas, but your signals will effectively lower the bandwidth of all routers in the area.
This is not new by any mean...
One concern of mine is there are so many comments about "I'm sick of comments about 'why are there so many negative comments?'" In my view, we should be very careful not to criticize people who criticize people for leaving negative comments, as non-negative comments about leaving negative comments are crucial, as are negative comments about not leaving non-negative comments.
I would think, similar to Netflix or Spotify, that they would use machine learning algorithms (ensemble technique) to perform collaborative filtering.
I can't speak for the creators of Flutter, but I can definitely attest to that TCP/IP with full mesh routing should be doable with the Flutter hardware. We (Thingsquare) have the CC1101 as one of our supported hardware platforms and use it to run full TCP/IPv6 networking over a self-forming mesh. The system is used in a number of commercial products and systems. The chip-level firmware is open source so I guess the creators or backers of the Flutter system might even be able use it pretty much out of the box: http://thingsquare.com/tech/

One of the things needed to get full IP routing working is to do channel switching over the sub-GHz connection. Both the FCC and ETSI regulations let you transmit at a higher power and with longer bursts if you switch channels with a regular interval and if you back off if you find other transmissions in your channel.

That said, TCP/IP routing over a sub-GHz CC1101 link isn't going to be very fast. It is suitable for automated devices but not a general purpose replacement for WiFi connectivity. For IEEE 802.15.4g-compliance, the raw bit rate is 50 kbit/s which isn't a lot. The CC1101 can be run in faster, non-802.15.4g compliant, modes though.
interesting. does he mean frequency hopping ? if yes then i would not immediately agree however...

edit: i'm not a radio engineer just saying based on practical experience.

edit2: just googled . congrats on having this guy on your team.
Which will cause the desk to jam at a (potentially disastrous) angle when the motors get out of sync.

Are you a programmer? Do you like it when a non-programmer tells you "just do X", because it must obviously be so simple?

Why, then, are you so sure that you can come up with a better design than mechanical engineers without even studying the problem?
Can you expand on this? I use Ghostery all the time. What exactly is being sold to businesses?
I was aware of this, but was genuinely confused for a few moments, since I would have hoped that a reference to Seymour Cray was more likely on this forum than such, as you put it, “vernacular” forms of expression.
There have been times I've wanted to read in the library at noisebridge, but all the couches are just covered in people sleeping, it's pretty frustrating. I feel for homeless people, but I don't think it should be noisebridge's problem. I know I'm more tolerant than most and it discourages me from coming, I'm sure there are many more who are driven away by it.
My first thought too, being an Intellij IDEA user (and mostly java developer) I was annoyed with that affirmation. I had the need to use Visual Studio recently and I can say it is still light years behind Intellij.
"That's a circular argument"

If it sounds like a circular argument to you then that's because economics involve systems of feedback. It's not as simple as A causes B. A has an effect on B which has effect on A. This isn't a very difficult concept that you needed to waste 4 paragraphs on.