skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me this seems ridiculous. A real programmer would not answer stupid time-wasters like that, as should have a sense of pragmatism. Want to show how good programmer you are? Show me what you did just for fun of the problem. Show me a problem others have not recognized yet and tell me how you can solve it.

Programmer is not meant to be a problem-solving machine, unless a narrow one that loves a life in a cubicle, as a mad scientist. Those days are over.

Don't give me ridiculous puzzles that do no good to anyone - I use my time to do greater things. A challenge to me is not an algorithm, but turning something difficult in something easy. An idea, not algorithm is what should be taken in consideration. An engineer doesn't know everything about everything, but knows enough to recognize and quickly learn more on the topic. Solving a problem like this is just a time waster, and the one who created on the other side just thinks he is so cool because he is creating puzzles. Solve a real problem, not made up to show how good you are. But I guess those puzzles comply with Facebook values...none..

These puzzles seem to me just as if they want to hire people who are desperate to work for them. It seems it's the new trend in recruiting.
I don't get why you are modded down. Mathematically, the article is a piece of junk (which doesn't mean the elections were fair -- I don't think there's anyone in the democratic parts of Earth who thinks they were fair).

You are of course right, why choose exactly those two metrics? Also, the two metrics are probably not independent, so taking their product is bogus.

The article was written by a 'PhD candidate' in political sciences. I think he should get his degree. He learned how to convincingly misuse statistics.
I agree. Closing firefox through file->quit takes at least 30 seconds for me, during which I can hear the laptop's fan spinning up.

Usually I just kill -9 it because I don't have the patience to wait.

Firefox 3.0.11, on a dual-core low-voltage laptop with 1 gig of ram. It's fast enough to run everything I care about but firefox.
You put the word disproving in quotes, but the parent post did not use that word or claim to be disproving the entire discipline of economics. Your knee-jerk reaction here typifies why so many avoid studying the subject at all.

Also, that "psuedo-intellectual observation" won Herbert Simon a Nobel Prize (in Economics) in 1978. I don't see how it's far-fetched or "ignorant" to suggest that healthcare decisions are made by boundedly rational satisficers rather than perfectly rational optimizers.
Negative. It is intuitive (and wrong). It is not mathematically sound. He does understand statistics. The point he's making is that the author of the article chose the metrics after the act. There are tons of such metrics to use; if you are not honest, you can search for the ones that prove your point.
You can go straight to their website, but here is an alternate analysis. My apologies for not having time to do both their analyses, I'll try when I get home, but I have to run.

Grab their data: Iran_2009.csv
Then: (apparently I can't embed preformatted text. Sorry.)
Try this: http://img.skitch.com/20090621-xrmw8yrxaec15jku414ffb2cjq.pn... -or- http://earlh.com/HN/iran.R , and http://earlh.com/HN/Iran_2009.csv

Here's a histogram: http://img.skitch.com/20090621-ewdbtr9q2cw5hyemn64fg3kbqd.pn...

The p-value I get is p-value = 0.07685

NB: there is something weird going on with their data: it doesn't sum properly. http://img.skitch.com/20090621-dx6nqws4u9rc5p3nghsnuy24j3.pn...

---------
So, the way this works is that I look at the last digit in each of the totals, then ask what is the probability that we should observe such a distribution of final digits if the final digit were distributed as discrete uniform U[0,9]. I use a chi2 goodness of fit test, then calculate the p-value with H0 = the final digits are distributed uniformly. We would reject H0 and say the election was rigged at an alpha level of 0.9, but not at 0.95. Take of this what you will, but I'd hope to have a higher significance level for elections. : shrug :
The problem is that the memory is used by other programs when I want to start them up.

Don't get me wrong, caches are great. However, it's one thing for the OS to cache stuff, because it can easily drop caches when memory pressure rises. Userspace software in current systems have no good way of knowing the memory pressure, and no good way of responding to it by dropping caches to free up memory. (yes, an API for "this memory is a droppable-at-any-time cache" would be nice in OSes, but it doesn't exist at the moment, and getting one that's easy to use would be hard).

More or less, that means that software that uses more memory in userspace causes swapping and lame performance. And honestly, there is no good reason for a browser to easily be the most resource intensive program on my system. Even games tend to be far lighter than browsers.
Some initial Googling finds one article putting malpractice claims at about half a percent of the total cost of health care in the U.S. ("The cost of defending U.S. malpractice claims is estimated at $6.5 billion in 2001, only 0.46 percent of total health spending." [1]). On the face of it, that doesn't sound like a place to look for serious improvements. Is there something non-obvious that makes it more significant than it sounds?

[1] http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/24/4/903
After the recent Mechanical Turk meetup, I tried being a Mechanical Turk worker to understand the process better.

One of the work units I got was classifying the 'sentiments' of individual Tweets as 'positive', 'negative', 'both', 'none', or 'hard to tell'.

It seemed that many of the tweets from several work units had to do with companies in the Web2.0-finance space, and others were about people traveling by air (missing flights, waiting in airports, etc.).

I presumed I was helping to do one or more of: (1) help monitor certain direct brand/product mentions quantitatively on Twitter; (2) help do the same, indirectly, for people whose surrounding unseen tweets had linked them with specific airlines/airports; (3) help train a automated classifier to do the sentiment classifications, in general or for specific brand/experience domains.

And perhaps, the classifying fed into this Twitter offering.
OXO brings great design to syringes
Does that line of thought inevitably lead to nihilism? I mean, isn't life just as arbitrary?
Go read up on Benford's law. (See http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/1999/May/nigrini.... for an example of how it was used)

I'm not familiar with the digit-distribution law the article mentioned, but on its face it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. I'd prefer to see some study applying this same analysis to thousands of other elections, of course.

But, prima facie, using digit distributions to detect fraud is not at all unreasonable.
Twitter lessons from Iranian coverage
Search image by visual similarity features for your website - Quick survey
> Besides, why should we be so scared of death?

Avoiding death is the one goal that's clearly built in. Why should we want to change it?
Did any of Parakey ever get released? screenshots? code? or just firebug?
Some friends and I played a game of Riskopoly. It lasted many hours, but was quite fun and interesting. Here is one variation of rules: http://www.gilwood.org/riskopoly.htm

The deals we did quickly spiraled out of control and we needed post it notes to keep track of all of them. Cease fires, profit sharing, time sharing, army loaning, all sorts of craziness.
Don't let browser market share keep you from doing something you think might be cool. "Not everyone uses firefox" is the inverse logic of "IE6 is still used, so we have to cater to the lowest common denominator". Let the capabilities of your tools be part of your inspiration! Some things are too cool not to do, and some things get done even if there is no capability to do them.
Actually my degree is in economics. When I got it, the arguments were in terms of "utiles" instead of dollars. A utile would encompass quality, but was such a nebulous concept that it was of very little practical use. So when I said "rationally economic" I was speaking in terms of dollars, which you can measure and not utiles or feelies which you cannot. I dont think that giving everyone an HSA is going to give Friedman's desired result of lowering health care costs, because it depends on people making dollar based decisions. I think improvements in the cost structure will be made the monopolistic components of health care, including drug pricing, and reactions to insurance optimizations like factory medicine.

I made the decision to switch from economics to programming a long time ago, pretty much for the reasons I gave above. I WAS expecting a scientific approach and pretty much got mumbo jumbo like Friedman's essay. And if you think things are very much better, how come Greenspan and the quants and politicians lead us into this economic disaster we have now. I will admit that my attention to theories economic since then have been superficial, and great strides in understanding may have been made, but I dont see it yet.
Google Voice captures 1 million Phone Numbers
A reply:

http://curi.us/blog/post/1423-ftc-and-reason
Get a Life, Holden Caulfield
That is obvious. What is less obvious is how much memory you can waste for the internal representation. I would expect that the memory footprint of a well-designed browser should be dominated roughly by the download size (w/out taking into account the javascript code, which could keep a lot of state around).
I always had that problem with Firefox prior to Firefox 2 and continued to have it with the first several releases of Firefox 2. After some update to Firefox 2 I never saw it again. I would call you crazy or a liar for reporting it with FF3 except that I remember being called (essentially) crazy or a liar when I complained about that problem with early releases of Firefox 2. Plus ça change, I guess.
Almost all of life is arbitrary and meaningless. Denying this is not particularly enlightened, and ultimately tends to get rejected by the intellectually curious. On the other hand, seeing absolutely no meaning results in wasted time. The least bad answer seems to be leading a balanced life, with a few elements that are very important, from which meaning is created.
I wish they did a comparison to iPhone OS 1.x vs. 2.x vs. 3.x. I've noticed a big decrease in "snappy responsiveness" when the 2.0 upgrade came into play. I have a sneaking suspision it's apple adding all the "restrictive crap & checks" slowing the entire iPhone down. Like code sigining, sandboxing, and probably other things.
Hmm yes... fairly quickly, one runs out of large rich countries at the beginnings of twenty-first centuries to draw parallels from.

I liked A Mind Forever Voyaging, though, which is about an attempt to do c) properly.
You just have to pay 100$ to see it (legally?) run on your hardware. How is the Pre handling the SDK stuff? Or are they?
Are you saying my definition of 'good' isn't?
This sounds remarkably like what Twitter gets used for during major conferences. I know its what I used it for during WWDC, at least.
I watched this video and an idea immediately came to mind. Bastards!!

Very cool demo, especially with the addition of the map on the tabletop. There is definitely possibilities here for cool stuff to be created.

EDIT - One example I'm thinking of is AR overlays for pre-existing boardgames.

For example, imagine playing settlers of catan with an AR 3D overlay, or oldschool randomised adventure games like Warhammer Quest using cardboard markers instead of miniatures and letting AR fill in the blanks.
an API for "this memory is a droppable-at-any-time cache" would be nice in OSes, but it doesn't exist at the moment

Naive question: would this be any better than letting applications provide swapping hints to the OS? And is that any better than just letting the OS swap based on usage?
For anyone who wants to play with augmented reality, there's an API:

http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/
If like me you're suddnely curious about immigration rules in Norway, there is a good website here: http://www.udi.no/templates/Tema.aspx?id=9352

I see that you can get "Work Permit" (the analogue to H1B) if you have an employment offer from within the country.

Then you can get "Settlment Permit" (~ greencard) if you were on "work permit" for 3 years.

To get citizenship you have to be inside the country for 7 years. The downside is that you have to give up all your other citizenships (which is pretty much a deal-breaker).

Few things are not clear:

1. How much time does it take to process these documents? In US this is typically months or years, actually stretching the timeline quite a bit.

2. Does one have to remain in Norway to keep "Settlment permit", or does it "automatically" expire after 6 months of absence like the green card?
Risk preference? Individual doctors are exposed to a risk of many times their annual salary if something goes wrong and a patient gets a lawyer. If they have the choice between an operation costing $X with a 10% chance of failure, and one costing 50*$X with a 1% chance of failure, they may choose the latter so they don't need to worry so much about getting sued.
> should be dominated roughly by the download size

Well, judging by the graphs in the linked article this is clearly something that every browser vendor experiences. I imagine that the trade off in speedy page rendering is having a lot of memory intensive data structures.

It's prolly more complicated than we give them credit for.

I've never liked the griping about memory use - if you're not swapping out to disk then you're perfectly fine. I'm much more concerned with having firefox occupying a whole core if I leave it unattended with too many js intensive tabs open.
To enable it, after installing the config on your iPhone, go to: Settings > General > Network > Internet Tethering

Maybe I missed it, but I had to find this out on my own. This came in very handy the other day when I found myself in a hotel with spotty wifi.
"It was about grinding it out. It was a story of will. It was a story of perseverance. It was a story of doing tasks that, from the outside looking in, would seem boring, dry, and monotonous."

Sounds sexy to me.
German Member of Parliament Joins Pirate Party
Active Learning Tutorial (ICML 2009)
A Deeper Look at The Iranian Firewall
Norwegian really isn't that bad. At least it's kinda similar to other Germanic languages.

Their neighbors' Finnish though. Man. That's about as uncrackable as it gets.
I see two issues here:

* the policy of the appstore obviously sucks for both developers and end-users

* developers miscalculate the risk that their application will be rejected and therefore engage mindlessly into the implementation phase

There is not much to do about the first (except of course give Apple the bad PR it deserves by e.g. posting this stuff to HN). But developers can/should calculate their profit expectations more thoroughly.
Results: Okay, it's been about three days now, and it was hardly a conclusive study, but yep, Daniel was right. It didn't market itself, and I only got 8 people emailing me (in the first day, none afterwards). So I get to keep my $20. :-)
I always love when something Georgia Tech contributed to gets posted on HN.
On the 3.2kbytes in Influenza A
Learning is cheap, replacing all the code, however, is not.
so, to summarize, Yes but there's no point getting all upset about it.
I didn't even know that 'designed' syringes could exist. I think those could help me with my fear of needles.
I made three attempts at replying, but they all boil down to the same thing: just wing it.

If it's bad, you'll learn from your mistakes. If you study up beforehand I can guarantee that the knowledge will do you no good. You'll forget the good parts because you can't relate them to real world scenarios, and you'll remember things you'll never need. Common sense and divide & conquer will get you to the point where you need an expert.
Its definitely more ergonomic for the inexperienced user, but if you regularly inject yourself you don't find the existing design lacking whatsoever. I take a shot a week and its a thoughtless, effortless act at this point.

It is a great design, and maybe it would offer a lot of value for older people with less agile hands?

Cost is the other issue - I bought 200 single-use disposables for like $20 shipped. That will last me almost 4 years.
If you're using a Mac and enable the Developer menu on Safari, you can set the user-agent string to Safari for iPhone.

Using BitTorrent clients might be inadvisable ...
Repetition cures that in no time.
6233 Camera Operation Failed Problem | repairmobiles.saaqi
I don't get it. Friedman points out that while the U.S. government spends less on health care than almost any other OECD country, the country as a whole spends much more. And yet his solution is less government spending on health care? He points out a number of factors which allow a single-payer system to control costs, and yet argues against it. The conclusions don't follow from the facts.
Chicken, meet Egg. Egg, this is Chicken.
If you're 25, sure, but 80? When the choice is between spending down a lifetime's accumulation of resources, or handing said resources off to the next generation? I think evolution would have favored the latter.
"Too many entrepreneurs stop after they build the product. They think that building products is what makes them an entrepreneur"

The most true statement I've heard about entrepreneurship in a while.

Actually I think there's a good business in making deals with all the people out there that have a finished, or almost finished product they've abandoned when they found out that the product is not the end of the trip but the beginning, and getting together a bunch of business and marketing guys to sell and market the stuff.
So, how much would these be to produce versus the traditional? It's a pretty big single-use product.
I wonder if you could claim ignorance. As in you were reading about it in anticipation of them offering it and you acidentally installed the file and later you plugged your phone into your pc to sync with iTunes and you thought you were using starbucks wifi the whole time...
How about the FTC forgoes doing this and tax payers can just save the money? I'm not sure we need a nanny to tell us some emo blogger kid is getting a fat check from Sony to review their latest gadget.
20 best examples of City life Photography
If it is a web app, use Google App Enigne. You don't have to know dbs for that (in fact it would hurt because you would have to unlearn stuff) and it is much easier to change than a traditional db schema.

It will also save you from doing lots of admin stuff that you probably have no experience with. And it will scale out of the box.
You can learn as you go. Schema are rarely static anyway. Get a book, learn some SQL, and network aggressively to find help in this area. Join user groups. Get some momentum behind your business, promote it aggressively, and you'll find someone to fill this gap if you need to.

You don't need to build for scale now anyway. You need to get something working in front of someone that tells you they will pay for it.

Reach out, contact customers, get coding. Nobody's initial database makes it into a successful product unchanged anyway. Thats a fantasy.
Life boils down to aesthetic choices, best as I can tell.
Health insurance is a difficult thing to price. Do you know the probabilities that you will need treatment for any particular condition? Can judge how much more you should pay for a policy with a million dollar limit on total reimbursement than one with a $500,000 limit? Unlike most goods, we don't get lots of chances to evaluate the quality of the product and then switch providers if we're not satisfied. Once you realize your health insurance isn't good enough, you're probably already in trouble. There are a lot of factors required to ensure the proper performance of a free market, and health insurance fails to satisfy many of them.
If you're injecting for fun, maybe.

I don't have a choice. Medical necessity, meet Chicken ;)
If you're talking about a database in terms of a web application or something similar, it's very simple. I remember I learned my way around MySQL in a matter of days. Check out w3schools.com and go over the quick MySQL tutorial.
Not necessarily: time cost.
We used to play this game at philosophy group meetings as an undergraduate. Very fun. My favorite laws involved spelling words backward.
I'm not attacking the suits, just managers who lack intellectual honesty and the appreciation for the difference between causation and correlation.
You don't know any of these things for car insurance either. That's what Consumer Reports and their ilk are for.
Monopoly and Risk are my two favorite games. This variant combining the two sounds incredible. Ingenious!
Rails deployment that just works... sure
Yes, to a certain degree. The problem is that it would be cheaper to, say, drop a decoded version of a JPEG and re-decode it, instead of having it get swapped out. In fact, I suspect that for large images, it would be cheaper to re-read the compressed jpeg and decompress it than to read back a larger swapped out decompressed version, just because hitting the disk is slow, and swap tends to get fragmented because it's usually written a few pages at a time.

Swap hints probably aren't really worth the effort, although I haven't benchmarked it.

The idea behind caches is to avoid doing expensive operations repeatedly, and hitting swap is about as expensive as an operation can get.
The worst can opener I've ever used was made by OXO. And their current can opener designs look like they have the same inexplicably unergonomic handle shape on the part you turn that mine did. Terrible.
This is overdue, actually. U.S. consumer law already governs paid word-of-mouth marketing, as it is a form of advertising. (It is commercial speech and not fully protected by the First Amendment.) It is a reasonable standard to say that paid bloggers can't make false commercial claims about a product, and that they disclose situations where they are compensated.
At least for prototyping & early development, I'd say you want the schema flexibility & rapid development that a relational database can give you.

SQL lets you issue very complex queries incredibly easily (both for production & for measuring your own metrics). With alternative systems you'll have to do a lot more work to get the same results; I'd say SQL is invaluable for getting something working.

Once you've locked down your schema & have a good idea of the queries that run, then you're in a much better position to evaluate the various technologies. If you choose an 'alternative' DB, it'll be fairly easy to get your data out of MySQL, whereas the converse often doesn't hold.

Finally, it seems to be the fashion to underestimate how much data a relational database can handle, while taking it on faith that alternative databases can handle a lot more. Once you have real data, you can do your own comparison, rather than just buying into the hype.
My back hurts just watching that guy play bent over the table like that... :)

Other than that it was a a very cool demo.