skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>They can predict real markets very well in most scenarios.

Amazing that we are in the longest recession in years, and back in 2006 most economists were saying the only way is up.
Amazon's standard affiliate rates range from 4% (less than 7 sales/month) to as high as 8.5% (3131+ sales/month). According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system)#Insta...) Ubuntu had ~20MM users as of 2011. Good estimates of conversion rate and average sale price would be tricky to come up with, but let's just pretend they're 0.1% and $50 respectively. That would see Canonical bringing in about $1MM annually from this feature.
Surely the question should be, "Can you apply the scientific method to economics?".
Here is exactly how you deal with some guy writing in to tell you you're too fat: delete the email and get on with your life.

It's simple, it's easy, it solves the problem.

Of course it's not the modern solution of publicly bullying your correspondent into a retraction while claiming the moral high ground but it works and it's less unpleasant.
Any more insight in to your case?
a "goat rodeo"?! I think I'm missing the analogy, can you explain?
> I can't really trust Canonical - even though they've given us all so much

What did they give us exactly? Unity? Upstart? I'm laughing.

It's really interesting how Canonical managed to promote Ubuntu. In the beginning, Ubuntu had nothing Debian didn't have. Nothing at all. It was just Debian with a brown theme. They claimed it was the most user friendly Linux distribution, and a lot of novices believed them not knowing better. Fake it 'till you make it.

Ubuntu's success comes from the free CDs. That was Mark's single good decision, but what a decision that was.
This seems to be a use-case for `etcd`.
It seems like there are two separate things needed -- overall increase in wealth creation, and better survivability of structures (or at least shelters) at the current price points (or maybe in the price points somewhat above the current point.)

(I was looking at being in Cebu or Leyte for diving last week, but my ear was slightly sore so I went to Bangkok first instead. Pretty happy about that.)
Sbire : Control your OS with the voice
Your edit is much clearer than "you know it when you see it" (Justice Stewart), which pretty much represents giving up on any formal definition.

I like your suggestion of detecting trolls by whether they actually transmitted/helped anyone with the invention. There's a problem in patent law, that you're infringing even if independently invented it. (Copyright is different, you only infringe if you actually copied - though see "unconscious copying"). Your suggestion could be implemented, I think, just by getting rid of that. Which might be a good thing, though difficult. It's a big change (though copyright case law and legislation would provide some guidance.)

Of course, inventors need to be able sue people that they didn't help produce it, so the copying part is important.

Alternatively, make it a requirement that you have to make prototypes and put it into production. This is also a big change (though, in the past, a prototype was a requirement). But I think it would be easily gamed, with shell production companies. From the other side, for real inventors, what if production requires substantial capital investment? The producer just refuses, and the patent fails. Maybe other requirements could avoid this, but seems tricky.
Firstly you can't throw claims like that around without a source, secondly I don't think now is the time to make FUD about which charity to donate to, thirdly that's tangential to what I was quoting (that cash is better than goods), and fourthly http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/10/typhoon-haiyan-...

edit: fifthly: http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...
So what if you know your balance sheet, income statement, FCF, capex, when you are analysing Enron or Lehman Brothers?

If you are so sure Facebook is overvalued, how big is your short position? Guaranteed win right?

Can you guarantee Microsoft won't swoop in to buy Facebook at 5x over "fair value"?

I think we have reached the point where is conventional wisdom that "professional" fund managers struggle to outperform index funds, so you can mock the financially illiterate, but I hope your investment returns regularly outdo monkeys throwing a dart.
> And I don't necessarily want to send the context of searches for content on my own computer over the wire to Canonical's servers (especially these days).

So why are you typing them in the global search tab of the dash? Use the applications tab if you want to search for local applications, or the files tab if you want to search for local file. Super+A and Super+F pulls them up quickly.
>maybe TSLA just needs a V-hull to dissipate the force (by deflection, rather than absorbtion).

Vhulls are only useful for upwards blasts...short of IEDs showing up in California the concept is useless for a sportcar. Also...humvee doesn't have a vhull - prototypes aside. You're likely thinking of either the MRAP or some buffalo derivative.
There are lots of non-experimental subjects at any university -- history, archeology, etc.

The ideologists wanting to demote economics never seem to want to also throw geology out of the university.

(In the future, some gigantic geo engineering might make geology experimental, the same goes for "perfect" computer models of society and economic experiments. Don't hold your breath, unless we argue inside such a model now; wonder what the hypothesis is? :-) )
NYT: Con Men Prey on Confusion Over Health Care Act
"If you claim an undeserved subsidy, then that means you earn too much for the subsidy. Which means you earn enough to pay for healthcare. You may want to spend it on something else, like your mortgage."

Your last sentence indicates you know the truth about the statement your penultimate sentence makes. Which might be better stated as "Which means you earn enough to pay for healthcare according to this dog's breakfast known as the Affordable Care Act", which following our version of Newspeak for the naming of political bills tells us it's unlikely to be always, or maybe generally affordable.

"The Social Security Number prevents subsidies from being claimed for nonexistent people."

Good point. Change "nonexistent" to "real people under 65 not in the system" (the SSA knows the age). Like illegal aliens using other's SSN numbers, a scammer "insurance" company could just harvest numbers and other ID information for people who aren't buying insurance through Obamacare (hard to say, but a selection of young ones should be fairly safe) and those covered by employer plans, unless and until those people are reported to HHS.

"[Insurance companies will be] around to be accountable."

I'm postulating the creation of new, entirely or partly fraudulent ones (e.g. Obamacare subsidizes the creation of co-ops), or the subversion of existing ones. If there's "free money" to be had, it's likely stupid people will try to grab some, no matter how likely or certain it is they'll get caught.
I think it's 42874/1864=23. (256 and 2048 is presumably the key strength).
Companies that always appear on "best places to work" lists include:

http://www.gore.com/ - Gore Industries, a truly astonishing workplace in almost every write-up I've ever read.

http://www.semco.com.br/en/ - The book "Maverick" by CEO Ricardo Semler shows how he set the culture. It's grown a lot since then, but still an amazing firm

http://www.sas.com/ - employees love it

http://www.netapp.com/ - ditto, and the hardware is everywhere interesting.

http://www.qualcomm.com/ - Qualcomm is best known to sys admins of a certain age for producing qpopper and for some of their staff being killed in Iraq. The company is apparently great to work for

http://www.dreamworksanimation.com/ - more code than you might think

http://www.amazon.com/ - I know a guy who works in operations who loves it. For developers it has downside (you own your code in deployment), but he really rates it highly. YMMV.

http://www.salesforce.com/ - Rated highly by staff

https://www2.wwt.com/ - I'd never heard of them, but they appear on about half a dozen lists

http://www.rackspace.com/ - Biggest cloud provider outside Amazon, I think

http://www.autodesk.com/ - Personally I'd rather eat my own head than work there, but well regarded by employees

http://www.hds.com/ - Everybody forgets about HDS, but they do some really amazing work and do staff love it

EDIT: added more companies
Because technical criticism is welcome, and the tea party remark never applied to technical critics.
I liked the idea. it's information travel.
I wonder why authors are still working with those publishers and not switching to print on demand or even giving digital copies away for free in order to reach a larger audience. I never published a book, but to me it looks like the publishers are selling the books for pretty high prices, while giving the authors only ridiculous shares of that. Is the editing, printing and marketing job they do really worth it?
"A pyramid scheme is an unsustainable business model that involves promising participants payment or services, primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, rather than supplying any real investment"

"By selling some of its holdings, she said the firm is able to return cash to its investors."

welp
Obama’s Portable Zone of Secrecy (Some Assembly Required)
Investors: A User's Guide
>Tesla made a choice to arrange packs like this for swap purposes.

That might have contributed, but I think lowering the center of gravity was the main consideration.
Epigenetics might augment theories of heredity, but the causal role of incompletely penetrant alleles in expressing a particular phenotype is falsified in the absence of any auxiliary hypotheses to explain their level of penetrance (especially if that phenotype may also be expressed without that allele). If naive falsificationism is the distinguishing characteristic of science, then an awful lot of biology, including some very useful statistical associations between allele X and phenotype Y (supported by statistical hypothesis testing that looks remarkably like that in social sciences...) gets discarded. If you had to throw away every theory whose counterexamples couldn't be adequately explained there wouldn't be much biology left. The AIDs denialists would have the right idea. Koch's postulates would, if anything, be too low a standard. Popper even had his doubts about the scientific validity of natural selection...
Yes indeed.

Weird that DNS is mentioned though because I thought this would be about Tom Limoncelli's hostdb, which is a DNS management database!

https://code.google.com/p/hostdb/
http://grammarly.com
Africa's great "white spaces": tech's new frontier
Exactly. To remain competitive, Ubuntu needs a global search feature much like iOS, Android, Windows, and OS X have. It's what non-technical users are expecting of a modern operating system. Sending the search result to a central server is required to implement this properly by adding voice recognition for mobile devices, and using data correlation and analysis on the server side to return appropriate and relevant results.

With users storing more and more data in the cloud, having a global search box that searches for a particular picture not only locally, but also in my Facebook account, my Ubuntu One, my Flickr, my Dropbox, and my Google+ just makes sense.
A New Home for the F# Community Project Templates
Ack, I didn't realize that screw case.

And we've got less time; realistically, the insurance companies need finite time to process enrollments. The official deadline is December 15th, which I've been modifying to "mid-December" assuming they do a Maximum Effort if the exchanges are working well enough to give them a lot of valid enrollments.

And of course a lot of people who don't realize this, got to a subsidy calculator like the Kaiser Foundation's and satisfy their gut feeling they aren't due one, will bypass the dysfunctional exchanges and just buy on their own ... then some subset who hit hard times will get screwed.

Blah. Thanks for the good discussion and bringing up yet another screw case.
Psychology Behind Conversion Optimization
If your boat is only aluminium you don't really need the anode. it is only when in contact with other metals that aluminium has serious problems in sea water, as it becomes the sacrificial anode to your steel or brass, so you need zinc then as it has an even lower potential.
Take all the fast food workers that strikes to raise their minimum wage from ~$7 to $15/hour because they need to work more than 8h or are dependent on food stamps.

Many (most?) economists think that that will have disastrous consequences for the US economy. Iff economy is a science, then their view should be taken into account because it is based on solid scientifically-backed evidence. Exactly like how you would take the view of climate scientists very seriously if you knew climate science was a real science.

But if economy is not a science, that means there is no evidence either or. Then you have no one else results to rely on and have to use your own common sense to analyze questions like the above one.
Τι είναι το Google Dance; - ParaMarketing Blog
The JS is the largest delayer in here. Marked me 10s. But the page was loaded in 703ms. Sometimes, more. This can be even speed it up a lot by taking out the extra HTML/CSS used. By the quantity of CSS this site uses, better to include it in header than having it linked.
UPS CONNECT: shipping for small businesses
My wife is in Vietnam and I've been worried for days about where the typhoon would go (South or North). Its silly but I'm relieved it's avoiding the South.

When I was telling her about the storm, I realized that people are that more exposed to natural disasters since they don't usually store food. At least in her surrounding, people buy food off the market everyday and don't have reserves, leaving them completely exposed to any disaster affecting food supplies.
There's no way to make a global search box on par with iOS, Android, OS X and Windows without sending the search string to a central server. The box is marked "search your computer and online sources", there are other search boxes in the dash to search locally, and there is a simple toggle switch to turn off the online portion in the privacy applet in the system settings.

The commands on the fixubuntu site are unnecessary, the simple toggle switch in the privacy applet solves the problem for people who want to disable online access in the global search box.
Or in other words, word to the wise would be to avoid saying something if you don't want to take the consequences for it.
The amount that you misunderstand what you're talking about is staggering.
Your anecdotes are not data.

Once I had a rock the size of a golf ball smack into my windshield on the highway. It hit with such force that it made a noise that almost sounded like a gunshot, it was quite startling. It didn't leave even the smallest mark on the windshield though. Another time a tiny pebble the size of a pea hit my windshield and made a very sizeable chip in it.

Anecodtes involve luck (good and bad), the purpose of statistical analysis is to gather enough data so that the luck, which should be random, is filtered out from the "signal".
Track the GOCE satellite
First thing I thought was that it should include DNS.

We have a Chef plugin that maps all our machines to IPs. We then delegate a short subdomain to that DNS server and bam, access any server at hostname.sub.domain.com

Set it to your search domain and you can access any of your servers with just the hostname.
Possibly. OO theory and Java (I don't really distinguish the two) actively encourage creating lots of classes to do simple things. I think a lot of people would look at that style and nod approvingly at the use of design patterns and correct use of OO idioms. They wouldn't see much wrong with it. OO theory also promotes good, commonsense ideas, like limiting the number of classes and the limiting the complexity of the interactions among them. But they contradict themselves, because lots of classes and complex designs are the inevitable consequence of the style they preach.

Objects can be considered a bad idea on their face, because they are made up of code wrapped tightly around state variables that are supposed to be secret and hidden. The functional style preaches the exact opposite: functions should not have side effects; all their state is either passed-in or returned. The more state your program keeps, and the greater the number of types of transitions that are possible, the greater the number of ways that the overall state can become inconsistent and cause an error. The way to keep the problem in check is to try to make state and state transitions simple and clear. I'm not a functional absolutist -- I don't use functional languages very often, and I see nothing wrong with doing simple things in the most natural style and language -- but I think the point is valid about how to deal with state.
By selling holdings and not returning cash from new members this scenario is clearly not a pyramid scheme.

The quote from the article makes a comparison to a pyramid scheme impossible.

Are you trolling?
Very useful, hopefully I remember this when I need it next time (that being the bane of all bash cleverness). The >(foo) would benefit from some extra explanation though, currently it is not very clear how it differs from regular |foo.
A detailed analysis of "the accident" is precisely how we don't find out how Tesla "ranks in safety".

Once the numbers of cars become large enough we can simply look at the outcome numbers, to determine how likely that outcome is. It doesn't matter if a car is "designed to handle such an accident". What matters is if it does handle a given kind of accident.

A Tesla car is unlikely to ever be involved in a fire at a gasoline station. We probably shouldn't give combustion vehicles a free pass there.

As more and more Tesla cars hit the road, confidence level increases in the stats that are derived. Early data is not meaningless; it can be indicative of later results.
Nice to see people I know in this thread, Joel.
We should meet in person at some point! ;)
From my limited experience this summer with Amazon: owning code in production is great. It's a truly awesome and unique learning experience. You get to see big systems fail in so many ways and solve problems trying to find root cause.

Actually, I'd put that as a plus.
I hire some people in the Philippines via oDesk. They are friendly, honest, hard working, trustworthy (I bought them a laptop and Kindle), speak English pretty well, and cost less than people in the US who do similar jobs, even if I believe I am paying them pretty well by local standards.

Luckily for them, they are far away from where the typhoon hit, but in terms of moving some money there, providing some work for people has funneled several orders of magnitude more cash into the country than what I could provide as charity.
my settings for php 5.5.5 on debian wheezy with the dotdeb.org apt-repository:

error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED & ~E_STRICT & ~E_NOTICE
expose_php = Off
log_errors = On
display_errors = On
display_startup_errors = On
date.timezone = 'Europe/Somecity'
magic_quotes_gpc = Off
max_file_uploads = 256
max_input_vars = 10000
post_max_size = 296M
upload_max_filesize = 256M
session.cache_limiter = ''

opcache.enable=1
opcache.memory_consumption=128
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=8
opcache.max_accelerated_files=4000
opcache.revalidate_freq=30
opcache.fast_shutdown=1
opcache.enable_cli=0
What about javascript?
It is interesting that the site is hosted at University of Pittsburgh. I wonder if how their policies would look upon provocation.
First of all James Roper is one of the main engineers working on the Play Framework. You're quick to jump to conclusions.

The "Promise pattern" is extremely awful for Java. Yes, Play does allow Java developers to do Async I/O by means of Futures/Promises. That doesn't make it any less awful and a quick search on Play's mailing list should highlight it. The reason for it is because working with Future/Promise instances involves a lot of calls to map() and flatMap(). In comparison to java.util.concurrent.Future (which sucks), these Futures are non-blocking and can be processed and transformed without doing a .get() ... We aren't talking about one or two calls, but rather about chains of calls. Scala is a language designed for this, it even has monad comprehensions and an upcoming library that should bring C#'s async [1]

Iteratees are also one of the coolest notions for dealing with streams of data that ever came out of the FP world. And if in Java you can sort of limp around when it comes to simple Future/Promise objects, well Iteratees are in a different league [2] [3]

The Play developers did an extremely awesome job by exposing a clean Java API. But some things are sorely missing, as there's no way to expose them in Java cleanly, which is why the internals of Play's server are written in Scala.

Also, it does make sense to compare frameworks in language comparisons. For example you can't compare C# versus Java for web development, without comparing the frameworks themselves. If Play also allows you to use Java, that's only testament to the awesomeness of Scala, of the JVM and of Play's developers.

[1] https://github.com/scala/async

[2] http://mandubian.com/2012/08/27/understanding-play2-iteratee...

[3] http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.2.x/Iteratees
And Lua http://parrot.github.io/parrot-docs0/0.4.5/html/languages/lu...
It was much clearer when it was more appropriately called "Political Economy".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_economy
Apropos of the link, there is a famous paperback book literally named "Steal This Book" written by 1960's counterculture activist Abbie Hoffman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_this_book

Booksellers (who dared sell it) typically kept it behind the counter since the intended audience did steal it.

The antics of Abbie Hoffman were legendary: He once brought the New York Stock Exchange to a halt for several minutes when he threw hundreds of $1 bills from the visitors gallery onto the NYSE trading floor, and all the brokers scurried around grabbing the money. The gallery was separated from the trading floor by bullet-proof glass shortly after his visit.

The book is chock full of hacking techniques, by which I mean using systems (subways, payphones, shelter, society, politics) in unexpected ways. Contrary to popular belief, the content of the book is mostly legal things one can do to live for free.

Reflecting the times, Hoffman's politics are very socialist, not libertarian. However, the book would be well appreciated by HN readers. I'm sure there are free copies easily found on the web.
Not our decision! Tell the WPI folks about it and why (if) they should consider using it.
It sounds like it's a lightweight version of the Foreman [1] with less integrations for virtual servers and configuration management? In any case I starred it to keep track of future updates...

Just as a curiosity, CERN uses something similar to this (LANDB) as its source of truth for the physical infrastructure. [2]

[1] http://theforeman.org/

[2] http://landb.sourceforge.net/
And they forbade GvR from working on porting Python to Android.

It was mentioned in the Pycon 2012 keynote I think, a source:
http://jjinux.blogspot.com/2012/03/pycon-keynote-guido-van-r...
Just the other day I read this: http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism

I'm starting to think that forking wikipedia might be a worthwhile endeavor
chef or puppet has very similar functionality, where is the target audience of this tool?
Vagrant + Puppet = AWESOME
Yes, I spoke too loosely. What I meant to say is that you'll have hard time making Ruby fast. I assumed implicitly that the point of writing a compiler was to optimize performance, though maybe not.