skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am currently reading a book called "The Housekeeper and the Professor" of Yoko Ogawa.

I haven't finished it, but I find it quite interesting. It's the story of a housekeeper and a professor of mathematics who can remember new memories only for 80 minutes.

Here is a link to the relevant wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Housekeeper_and_the_Profess...
Smarter Parentski. ;)
Indeed. Pretty quick work with RCurl & RJSONIO… https://gist.github.com/hrbrmstr/6566865
The `netmap` stuff (high-performance networking stack) is really neat. The author's site has a lot more information about it if you're interested:

http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/

I'm curious to see what kind of performance is possible with FreeBSD 10 (using `netmap`) and the new I/O manager which will be included in the upcoming GHC 7.8 release. The combination seems like it would be epic in terms of web server performance, and it might be a nice choice for web hosting companies / CDNs who have a vested interest in reducing latency as much as possible.
I'm very surprised that he actually decided to meet with you. In my experience, troglodytes like Pax Dickinson are usually too cowardly to show up after saying things like "oh yeah? you wanna say that to my face?!"
Approach 1:
There is in fact new information when you look into the envelope it's also very valuable because it allows you make judgement taking into account your knowledge about the world and specific situation (who puts money in the envelopes, what are general preferences of people in such situations etc.).

Approach 2:
You made the same mistake.
Seeing the money is actually valuable and very real information. The problem is that original reasoning makes wrong use of it. It doesn't mean there is no information or that we can/should ignore it.
You don't even need to hedge that much.

Quite a few non-PhD granting colleges offer superior education (not even arguably superior, just superior) than all but the highest tier research universities, public or private.

I won't pick too many examples lest this gets bogged down haggling over details, but basically, Swarthmore.
Consider 'T. S. Eliot'. I guess 'T S Eliot' could give an alternative, but it hasn't gained traction. I'm sure there are more cases.
I don't think that's right. Why is the probability of winning after switching the product of the initial probability times the one after the switch (which I think is also wrong)?

You pick one door, the probability of winning is 1/N. The probability of losing is (N-1)/N, which stays fixed no matter how many doors the host opens. If you switch, the probability of winning is (1/(N-2))-(1/(1/N)).

If he opens all doors except two, and you switch, the probability of either of the two having the car is 50% minus the original 10^-6/2. Each door decreases the probability by one in a million, not one in a trillion. If that were the case, it would be highly unlikely that you won even if you switched after all but one of the doors were opened.
I'm not assuming that that is the distribution. I'm saying that the problem as presented is underspecified, but even if you give this specific distribution in the problem you can still cause confusion. Assuming stuff is bad but the original 'paradox' still doesn't go away if you nail everything down. It's a useful problem for education people about the subtleties of infinite sums.
Sorry but right after you finish the basic probability coverage it stops making sense.

-> In the case of the two envelopes the problem comes from the fact that there are an infinite number of possible amounts in the envelope.

Right there.
Census data isn't accurate? If you want to make ridiculous claims, you're going to get called out. Cite a source.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069159
Memcache is a pretty good solution.
Leadership without Management: Scaling Organizations by Scaling Engineers
> How about instead of SAMPLING, and without performing any sort of "moving average", you just SHOW the homicide rate ...

The answer is simple -- it serves no purpose. If the point is to establish historical trends, and in particular if it's desirable to create a future trend line, the first thing to do is avoid the classic mistake of examining the raw data. (This is true in climate studies also, for the same reasons.)

In this case, a moving average meant to confirm or refute the thesis that crime rates are higher now than in the past, is best conducted with a long interval. Such an interval shows that crime per capita is much, much higher now than it was in the past, along with population (which also fluctuates over time).

The 1930s were a historical anomaly -- the Great Depression (an increased level of social upheaval and desperation), and prohibition coming to an end (which meant that gangsters had to think of a new way to make a living), arriving at once, make it unrepresentative. Any statistician hoping to establish social trends would treat that period as an obstacle to producing a meaningful trend line.

> I don't see much point in applying "a reasonable moving average"

Yes, I got that. And I won't be likely to successfully explain to you why it's needed.
Wow, bummer. I'm sure the others will understand though - it's really not your fault.

Some years ago the company I was at had a policy of sending an email on every error - to every developer, so nobody actually checked them. One day the 3 main servers went down, all at the same time. Transpired that a) someone had introduced a bug into the code that completely 500'd a site b) it got through QA on to live and c) there was a relay chain for the email servers (I have no idea why). By the time we'd worked out what was going on the hard drives on all the machines had reached capacity and all the live systems were down. Of course the timeouts that started happening as the load came on just cascaded the issue. Gotta watch those automated emails :)
Yes, that first disney image left me confused and slightly uncomfortable! Hovering over it give an indication though, the tooltip says "so random!".

Of course the other images mostly make sense, but it would have been informative to have captions on some of them, such as the the second image, which has alt-text of "the three".
Square will be a $10 B+ outcome. Juniper already is. Lookout, Jawbone and ZocDoc (all Series A leads) are $1 Billion companies. Ring Central is on the precipice of its IPO, etc.
Isaac Asimov's robot series (start with "I, Robot" and "The Caves of Steel") is good, as is his Foundation series. Ender's Game is also good; I've heard other people complain about the other novels in that universe (Speaker for the Dead and sequels, Ender's Shadow and sequels), but I liked them fine. Cryptonomicon is rich, fascinating, and entertaining. Dune is rich and pretty fascinating. Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "Time Enough for Love" are somewhat scandalous, but I thoroughly enjoyed them.

Outside science fiction: P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster novels, as well as what of his other books I've read, are hilarious and brilliant; I would suggest "Right Ho, Jeeves" as a starting point.
KV offered substantially less of a valuation than other firms to lead the Series A.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but here's my analysis.

There are two envelopes. One contains a value x, and the other has 2x. You pick an envelope at random. Let's call the envelope you choose z. The variable z is a random variable that has an equal chance of being x or 2x, so the expected value of z is 1.5x.

If you switch, there are two possibilities. In one case, you picked x, so switching gains you .5x over the expected value of 1.5x.

In the other case, you picked 2x, so switching loses you .5x from the expected value of 1.5x. So, the expected gain from switching should be zero.
Try Git in your browser
How To Pack Like An Engineer [video]
You should always assume many people will operate according to the defaults.
The Apache License (v2) has a dangerous interpretation
The assumptions made around Bitcoin being "programmable cash" are debatable. It is not moving in that direction - some thoughts on what is going wrong with the Bitcoin economy:

http://statspotting.com/bitcoin-economy-one-big-issue-with-t...
Many explanations here contain the same mistake:
Some reasoning -->> seeing the money doesn't change anything and/or doesn't count as information.

If you arrive at this point you've made a mistake. Seeing the money is valuable information. The trick is not in ignoring it but making good use of it like this:

-use your best knowledge about person who puts money in the envelope, general human tendencies and how the world is to approximate distribution of money in the envelopes

-pick according to your personal utility of money assuming the distribution

What the the wrong reasoning in original puzzle suggests is to assume uniform distribution which is impossible but more importantly baseless. As other poster shows there are baseless distributions you could assume which leads you nowhere as well.

Just don't let it detract from the main point: there is new information but making use of it is not that easy.
Ehh? Is this spam or what?

note: the site is down so I don't know if this is a reference to the original article
I think the'generational gap' here is fascinating. I'm 18 years old and I browse the net like this, as do most of my male friends from conversations we've had. The only difference for me is that I don't have porn up while talking to friends.
This is actually an old idea, perhaps a hundred years old. It was patented in 1972 (3,647,970 Flanagan) and called the "neurophone", but I recall an article about something like it from the 1920s.
This thread will mysteriously disappear soon enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6381482.
Right but if you are downloading an ISO you still have to manually verify it correct?
Gizmodo beat me to it, with photographs and construction details, even. Nice job!

http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/how-to-build-the-miraculous-t...
Not so much that it leads to nonsense as that naively applying expectations doesn't always work. This is a contrived example, but it's not uncommon in eg random walk theory to hit upon cases like this where the expectation does not exist at all.

People commonly think of mathematics as being purely about formal proof but the reality is an interplay between proof and intuition. Usually when a mathematician encounters a problem in a familiar area they immediately know the answer by intuition which then guides the production of a correct proof. When you first enter a new area of mathematics your intuitions are all completely wrong and you have no idea where to start with a proof. Good teachers will introduce edge cases like this problem to refine your intuition until it is useful enough to be a guide.

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s-...
Rovio Ownership Structure
KV recently led the Series A in Quartzy and a Series A in another deeply technical YC company (soon to be announced), which had offers from other highly prestigious firms.

Most YC companies are addressing markets and challenges that are ideal fits for KV. There are probably 10 companies or so that would (even with the benefits of hindsight) been quintessential Series A candidates for us.

Footnote: I write this as someone who loves YC and has personally invested in over a dozen YC companies.
The .ssh folder and the files inside it should be given the lowest permissions possible.
I did this with my a company repo, when I wrote a script to migrate issues from a spreadsheet into GitHub. I only sent 50 issues * 15 people though.
> But one thing doesn't change -- the shocking number of people who are starving at any given time.

But that one thing DOES change! It improves! In what sense is the vast improvement since the 1990s not change?

> we aren't feeding the hungry.

We ARE. Hunger is becoming less prevalent, worldwide. Again, here's a gapminder chart (are you looking at these?). This one shows calories consumed per person, all countries, plotted against GDP, over time. Notice how at the start most of the mass of the chart is BELOW 2000 calories/day; at the end of it all but a few countries are ABOVE that line. Progress is occurring, even in very populous countries. Even in countries with a high rate of population growth. How do you explain that fact?

http://www.bit.ly/15h0Wp4

> When it comes to hunger, there's no point in arguing that that we can feed the hungry

If you meant to claim we don't feed the hungry, you should have said that. But you said can't. While giving a link to support it that said we can, and what's more, that showed that we were.
In FreeBSD (and the other BSDs), packages and ports are two separate things. Packages are binary distributions; a port is just a set of patches (if necessary) and a special makefile telling the build system where to download the sources for the software you want to build and any special instructions necessary to build/install it.

It makes sense to sign packages, but not ports. Ports do contain checksum files though, to make sure the source tarball/zip you download hasn't been changed -- this is what 'gaadd33' was referring to.
This is cool and all, but you messed up back flip. The angle is completely wrong. Pretty good overall, but doesn't have the same feel. Would not play.
The value add on this doesn't seem very high... it can be useful in limited circumstances.
Perhaps HN commenters should have regular 9 to 5 jobs.

Are you suggesting that most HN readers have easy jobs financed by government largesse?

That strikes me as an absurd suggestion.
Xamian also ported Android to C# a year ago. http://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/
However, it says in the problem that you are offered the switch before you open the envelope. So, you can't know if your original choice was $20 or $80,000.
Tech’s Rising Stars Push Into the Online-to-Offline Era
Just to avoid confusion, I would have said "most restrictive", not "lowest". At first glance, "lowest" might be taken to mean most permissive.
Someone should start a consumer protection type business which offers certification with varying degrees of statistical significance to slap on your products to prove it isn't bullshit. Then we legally mandate you either get the seal or have to put "THIS PRODUCT MAY BE LYING ABOUT ITS CLAIMS" on the packaging. Then it'll be interesting to see how long until the process is corrupted and the certification becomes meaningless.
Well, there are distributions which don't have well defined expected value and I agree that it's valuable lesson.
I would argue though that this is not the best example to show it. The point of two envelope problem comes much earlier and specifically giving distribution defined by you would make it completely different problem and assuming it in original form would already be a mistake.

I think there are better examples to show how infinite sums and relying on expected value based on those might leads to problems. Like this one for example:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-stpetersburg/
That's a good compromise.

I just thought of enabling 2 factor authentication instead of plain password auth, which I think is probably reasonable too
I've always liked Robot Odyssey (or modern clone http://www.droidquest.com/) as an early introduction to concepts of programming and digital logic
Given that the author of this article is "Schering-Plough Professor in Health Care Regulation and Enforcement", it should be obvious why disruption rhetoric may appear threatening to him.
I recently read one of Victor Hugo's shorter books, The Toilers of the Sea, and quite enjoyed it. I like Hugo's writing in general: has a rich feeling of time and place, with the style of the sentences he crafts sort of feeding into it. He's not exactly underrated in general, but I don't meet many people in my circles who read his novels.

I also recently read Kafka's The Trial, which I've long known about but never read, and it was good but not at all what I expected. For some reason I expected Kafka to be an intimidating, serious writer, based on how his name has come to be used metaphorically. But The Trial is a very easy read, engaging and plot-driven, moving along at a fast pace. You can read it in a few hours, and it feels like light reading, despite having some serious content.
A potential map of high-speed rail in the US
I don't believe that site is even using census data or at least not in the correct way. Ratio should be separated by age groups. Counting > 60 yr olds is a mistake because at that point women outnumber men 3:1 at least.

San Jose has been forever in the headlines as one of the worst cities for men to date, how is this news to you just now?
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/weird/San-Jose-Looking-More-L...

San Jose

>> The U.S. Department of the Obvious finds that there are 117 men for every 100 women in the age range of 20 to 44 years old.

>> Mountain View has a ratio of 125 to 100.
I think the point he is getting at is that expected value (or even expected utility) is not actually a good measure of human preferences.

Additionally, in this problem there are certain distributions over the amounts in the envelope for which the expected value is not defined, making it an interesting problem to study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow is a good book exploring mathematical models for decision making.
I don't get it - if the best places are available only for minutes, shouldn't the landlords adjust (raise) the prices? The demand is obviously there.
It's usually also worth checking whether you need to generate new SSH host keys - a lot of VPS providers use the same host keys on all their deployed instances, which isn't secure, and the longer you leave it the more of a pain it'll be to change. If "ls -lh /etc/ssh/" shows that the host keys predate when your system was provisioned, change them:

rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_*
dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server

Also, on some VPS solutions I've come across you can't use passwd to change the root password permanently; management software outside of the VM changes it back on the next restart.
VPN bonding is the key for branch office connectivity
I definitely should have been more clear. I meant that in terms of formal philosophy, she isn't usually ranked up there with Plato, Nietzsche or Kant, and that as far as literature goes, I haven't seen too many highschools advocating Atlas Shrugged. Universities might (I'm not really sure), but even then, I'm not sure it's really regarded as a "classic."

I don't think everything she has to say is bad, wrong or unimportant, even if I think she was nutty, verbose and a poor writer, but I was pointing out that she isn't nearly as important, from my perspective, as the OP claimed.
Wow. I am the author of a popular app-that-runs-as-a-daemon and I just went through a HUGE debate with some folks about whether or not my package should auto-start on boot by default.

I eventually settled on this: If you're using Upstart you get auto-start by default. For everything else you'll have to turn on auto-start at boot via whatever mechanism is normal for your distribution.

That means for Ubuntu you get auto-start on boot the moment you install the package. For Debian you'll use update-rc.d and for RHEL-based distros you'll use chkconfig.

I have no idea if I made the right decision though since there's no standard. Sometimes it annoys the hell out of me that a package configures itself to start at boot and other times I wish it did auto-configure itself to start at boot. It all depends on the package and what I want the server to do (primarily).
The expected value in the St Petersburg game is actually well-defined - it converges to positive infinity. That is a subtly different result than not converging at all. Both problems are useful.
My point is that you would be quite right to reject writing in which someone employed double commas as an affectation

Personally, I think writing should be judged mostly on content, not presentation. Sometimes the line can be hard to determine on which is which, but to me that we reject things based on presentation (which we all do), is an unfortunate circumstance of our human nature.
VIM Mode Transition Diagram
We've seen this gameplay tried many, many times before. It NEVER works.

You need to lock developers to your platform whichever way you can if you want to survive.
ie: the majority of computer users?
Anyone have a mirror or cached copy of this page? This site hit the front page of hn/proggit twice this week, and it was down both times.
>> But one thing doesn't change -- the shocking number of people who are starving at any given time.

> But that one thing DOES change! It improves!

Learn statistics -- learn how to avoid cherry-picking intervals to prove anything you care to. That is all.
Google’s Boss and a Princeton Professor Agree: College Is a Dinosaur
>herd/pack/social animals
I can already tell you have no idea about what you are talking about because you cant figure out the word to use here.

Stupid pop-sci reading pinkerian evo psych pseudo-wisdom lesswrong.com idiot.

Who's "we"? I bet that just pissed you off, keep projecting how much of a inferior you are.

>generalizing everything as a "tribe"

You do know those evo psych idiots use the term "genetics" and not "DNA" right? Now you really don't know what you are talking about.

>highly evolved to fit in

I swear schools should just stick to bible class instead of evolution class if they cant even teach it properly.
The tech industry: one or many?
"without qualification of their exact experience "how often" it is really hard to tell the bias in that statement wouldn't you agree?"

No, because many people have experience which contradicts theirs, and they don't provide any support for their claim: no information on what the stability issues or troubles they encountered were, no information on the causes and how they were specific to the OS in question as opposed to e.g. user error, no information about how CentOS would do better on that issue, etc.

All the indications are that they're making a very typical sort of claim that people make when trying to defend a decision that they're not qualified to defend. They provide no reasons to take it seriously. As I said, it's content-free.
Most of these, especially without colorful, professional photography adorning them (which is unlikely to be the case in real use), just look like wireframes to me.
Very few Linux distributions have the equivalent of FreeBSD's ports. I know of the Arch Linux AUR and they also use checksums in their PKGBUILD files.
Oh that's too bad; I didn't realize that. It looks like Apple's Enterprise Partner Relational Feed serves up JPEGs as well. I guess the last place to check would be by monitoring network traffic coming out of the iOS App Store app or iTunes Mac app, but that'd be a bit of a pain (not even sure those use PNG).
One of the nice things about upstart is that it helps this situation out a lot. Disabling a service before you install the package is as simple as creating a /etc/init/servicename.override file with "manual" in it. Unlike some other solutions (like placing a full configuration file before install) this doesn't trigger a conflict with the package installation.

The thing is that for a desktop user, starting the service is fine. A lot of the time it's what you want. And that's Ubuntu's main raison d'etre.

Also note that autostarting when installing is different from autostarting when booting. It's the former that I find frustrating, not so much the latter. Generally speaking, I have plenty of opportunity to tweak the boot behaviour between installing and rebooting (assuming the server ever reboots at all).
My use of "impossible" was only with respect to measures that modify the behavior of individuals by force. That's impossible without abandoning civilized standards.

Ok, yes, I agree with this.
Are you suggesting that would weaken his argument?
Exercise key to long, happy life