skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> I find it disturbing that everyone in the demo has a shortage on sleep

Looks like it's a family with a baby in the household?
I, for one, appreciate the Remo The Destroyer reference a whole lot more. Boy that brings back memories.
Thank you for posting a link to that story. It reminds me a bit of Boethius:

"It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,' says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of time, like the best, are always passing away."
Percona XtraBackup 2.1.6 is now available
Literally, my mom is the one who got me to send off my spit to 23andMe. She thinks it's fun and interesting but at no point has she indicated that she's thinking of it as a medical service - especially not one that replaces seeing a doctor.
Neat idea, but there doesn't seem to be any way to explicitly accept a completion candidate (tab, space, return all behave as default instead of accepting), and trying to type as in a normal textarea results in random completion candidates being accepted mid-word. Also, C-a (Control-a, i.e. mark-whole-buffer) gets stomped; the whole textarea is marked for a fraction of a second, and then the mark disappears.

Not ready for prime time.
I love Seth Godin, he seems to have universally good advice. Sometimes his blog is hard to follow but it's usually a pretty good read.

I love the quote "if I fail more times than you I win."
Typing crazy slow:

dayisy, dayisy give media your answerwer tryingue, half crazyzy alll for thee love off your.

Typing full speed:

daisy daisy give media your answerwer truee, I'm havelf crazyzy alll forr the likeove of your.

Very strange how typing slowly wouldn't allow me to type "I'm". Kept auto correcting to "more", and then deleting itself. (Come to think of it, deletion is caused by the space, because "more" is still selected)
"Oppenheimer most definitely quoted Pulp Fiction."

- Quentin Tarantino
I think it's fair to start with, "No industries or geographies are pure meritocracies." Then it's worth asking, "Where does Silicon Valley fit in the spectrum?"

Is it more or less meritocratic than teaching? Being an actuary? A politician? A banker? A lawyer? Advertising? Writing?

I don't know all of the answers, but my impression is the market forces on startups (Can you get funding? Can you get customers?) at least pushes them towards being meritocratic. Software also is more binary than fields like writing. The program does have to compile and work.

But is it a pure meritocracy? I doubt it.
Ask HN: Learn dotsies or something else?
I've had that[1] bookmarked from a year ago from HN and I never really went through it. I loved the idea but I'm wondering if it's really that useful to read faster, or if there are other better alternatives?

[1]http://dotsies.org/
You don't have the right to boss me around. You are advocating putting up roadblocks between me, and my pursuit of values, and you should feel bad.

(I do mean this with a hint of jocularity.)
I've been reading lately that the East Texas "Rocket Docket" now has so much experience with patent lawsuits that it's no longer easy for undeserving plaintiffs to win.
It's all about education and results reporting. Where you or I might see a result as a predisposition to a phenotype with a statistical probability, someone else might see a death sentence.

That could be one area that the FDA might be trying to address.
>If one wants to make the claim that the net effect _d_=0.09 (IIRC) was purely the work of the art/tutoring and nothing else, that would only be partially supported by the results, yeah.

To put that another way: If one wants to make the claim that the effect was actually casually related to the art/tutoring at all - as opposed to the effect of just going on a field trip, expectancy effects, etc. - then this experiment isn't useful.

Its interesting that you phrase it, though, as 'partially support by the results'.

Would you therefore say that the results of a non-randomised trial also 'partially support' the hypothesis under test?

Lets say that we didn't have a randomised assignment; that instead we simply identified existing populations whose parents had brought them on one outing last semester, and contrasted those who had visited an art museum, vs. those who had visited a science museum, and administered our tests to these two groups.

We could probably do some research with our data, but we'd always be worried that we couldn't account for selection-like biases, (e.g. maybe the kind of children who have parents that choose art vs. science museums are already smarter).

I understand that in the strictest bayesian sense, any data that doesn't could directly reject a hypothesis, but doesn't, 'partially supports' the hypothesis.

But, I'm not sure that, in practice, its meaningful to differentiate between which of the two methodological problems is the generally bigger or smaller issue.

That's where my comment is coming from.

If the hypothesis is as described in the news headline (which may not have being how the original study was motivated, which may be what you are more interested in, hence our disconnect), then isn't one problem as big as the other? Isn't [potential selection bias etc.] just as bad as [potential expectancy effects etc.]

Wouldn't it hence be a little misleading to say "well, yeah, they didnt control properly, but savour the fact they had random assignment"?
While I applaud the time the author took to write this, isn't the message a bit misguided? Wouldn't it be more useful to encourage people to "Learn JavaScript and how to read an API"?
Not sure when it became ok to call something a myth without emperical evidence.
I am not sure there is as big a black-and-white distinction between 'providng' and 'interpreting' as you suggest.

23andme is a 'device' that takes a bodily fluid sample as input, and provides genetic information as output.

A an automated blood pressure cuff is a device that, well, I don't know how it works, but wikipedia says it "They do not measure systolic and diastolic pressures directly, per se, but calculate them from the mean pressure and empirical statistical oscillometric parameters", whatever that means, and produces some blood pressure numbers as output.

23andme is obviously a much more complex 'device'. Both both take some sort of measurement of your person, and then provide medical information.

Even if you could somehow draw a line at some point in this process of translation from physical measurements to medical information, some point at which the 'interpretation' begins, I'm not sure why one would suggest that either side of that line would be exempt from FDA regulation!
You're one of those people who sees "needless friction" in the previous sentence and tries to make an out-of-context argument against a position that I obviously don't hold.
The Apple App Store has a search function, and the Slovenian iHelp doesn't come up in the search. That means either it is not available on your device or is not available in your country.
You've been meaning to: but you have other things to do.

It's all about the economics and tradeoffs of different choices, in the end. Sometimes a framework is a good tradeoff, sometimes it isn't, and it depends entirely on the particular set of details involved in any given situation.
Actually, the "aka" is: "I fully realize that most people have been indoctrinated to ignore the obvious, but here's the obvious."
Except for a few traps, the opening is largely irrelevant to beginners.

Study endgames first, you learn how the pieces move.

Then study middlegame tactics to see how they work together.

Lastly you study openings to get to your preferred middlegame.
It's not random in the sense that "anybody who tries has an equal chance at success." The prior you're missing is a person's ability, current mind, and biological mental capacity. Some people are just waaaaaaaaay smarter than other people. "All people are created equal" is a fantasy when you reach extremes (sport abilities, mental abilities, creative abilities).

Now, once you have a baseline genius startup mind, no success is guaranteed anyway. Twitter would be nothing without an Internet-famous founder and techcrunch hyping it up constantly its first few years of existence.

That's not saying you can't be rich. Anybody can always get dumb success (especially these days) with things like advertising or affiliates or ebooks.

The money doesn't enable your happiness — the freedom money provides enables your happiness. You can substitute being rich with having a job/life you don't hate plus a good salary.
One of the reports mentioned their dead bodies being found left on railroad tracks. That... doesn't sound like radiation poisoning to me.
Of course it does. Most sales organizations know this.

There are still reasons to hunt new customers though:

- You don't want your business to fail at the loss of one customer.

- New customers can help you push the product.

- It's possible to simultaneously invest in new and existing customers if both are profitable activities.

- In a SaaS model, your existing customers keep revenue flat. New customers grow the top line.
The bio on the guy who sent the letter you linked is interesting; not the "career civil servant maybe with a JD" you'd expect from an enforcement action:

http://oba.od.nih.gov/oba/sacghs/roster/bio/2010/Alberto%20G...
Pythonic solutions to the Facebook Hacker Cup 2014 Qualification Round
My impression is that Chess is making a comeback in schools. At least in NYC, many schools have competitive programs.

Here are two programs: http://www.nychesskids.com and http://www.chessintheschools.org.
Entirely fair. In hindsight, I regret not including citations and expounding more on how I came to that conclusion. I try to contribute to the discourse of this forum in a meaningful and positive way, and reflexive, emotional posts don't forward that agenda. Your downvote was warranted.
It's worth noting that the term "meritocracy" was defined to be something quite different, and rather more interesting, than it's current usage:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
Ask HN: Google search quality
Now a days google is not returning quality results( from last 2 months). almost 70 -60 % results are useless and mostly either big brands or have very good backlinks. Howmany of you experienced same like me.
Please share your thoughts.
Hi hodgesmr, author here. Could you expand a bit more on your comment, would love to hear your suggestions.
The fact that I have not taken out the wordpress framework yet (because I've been busy with other "more important" things to do) doesn't mean that NOT doing so is somehow justifiable.
I do have access to glass, but I'm not going to hack on it at the office and the price tag is just too steep for me to justify taking a pair home to hack on in my free time (especially with their lack of prescription support). That seems to be where they're falling flat, it's too early to base a business or startup after and it's too expensive to get the enthusiast/hacker support they seem to be expecting.

Also, I really wish they weren't so strict with their facial recognition ban. I'm useless in social situations because I'm terrible with faces (if I see someone out of the context I met them I will not recognize them). For someone like me, even if it was restricted to my own personal database and required approval of the person I was interacting with (NFC or BLE touch for instance), it would heavily level the social playing field.
China Announces That It Is Going To Stop Stockpiling U.S. Dollars
I certainly think the proper purpose of government is to prevent citizens from threatening and coercing other citizens.

A system of free-market capitalism is precisely that.

As you go beyond that, you have a system where citizens are coercing each other, with the government's sanction and backing (e.g. the FDA).
Just because people don't have an M.D. doesn't make them automatically wrong. The patients that complain about gluten have access to information you do not have. Namely, they are able to experiment with their own diet. When they eat gluten, they feel bad. When they stop, they feel better. Who cares if it's placebo effect? If they feel better not eating gluten, tell them to stop eating gluten and support them in their decision instead of writing them off as part of a dietary fad.

And I certainly hope you have at least done some research on fructose metabolism before writing that woman off as a kook. Even if it is all in her head, you can make her at least happier, if not healthier by suggesting that she also avoid foods with sucrose or monomeric fructose, and substitute them with alternatives such as xylitol, glycerol, maltose, or ordinary glucose corn syrup.

If the patient is ignorant, that is a condition the doctor should be expected to cure. If the patient is stupid, they should find a less arrogant personal physician.
Right outta the article

3) Inside job

"[Whistleblowers] are getting scared of being involved in the nuclear industry in India,"
> But if the tech scene is really a meritocracy, why are so many of its key players, from Mark Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, white men?

a jewish guy and a half arab guy aren't exactly the best examples of the point this guy's trying to make.

there's also no shortage of asian and indian "key players" so ... i think this guy is trying to make one point, but accidentally making another point altogether, and then failing at it.
Paper-Based Secret Santa Protocol
One important function of unions (which is often overlooked) is training their members to be future proof, so that when their job is taken over by the machines they can go do something else, straight away. YC does this sort of duty pretty well.

Of course, the economic role you talk about is also important, and YC probably aren't doing that part - but then, they don't actually bill themselves as a union :)
Clever Self-Promotion Mailer
Related material: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html
They make explicit claims about the accuracy of their reports.

Whether there is the appropriate support to make those claims about a product marketed to consumers as a diagnostic tool is the question here.
Well, I certainly hope nobody tries to build a system off the back of that blogpost!

But I think there is a lot to be said for helping people build useful mental models. My experience is that people either have no mental model for how money moves or have models that are just wrong.

So anything we can do to impart some insight has to be a good thing.... but you're right: a little knowledge can be very dangerous :-)
I'm actually an Objectivist---I agree with the philosopher who had 5% of her system ripped out of context and stolen by the libertarians (i.e. Ron Paul people).
> and a human operator could simply confirm them few times a day by signing the transaction with his password protected private key.

It's a payment system. This would be unacceptable.
In Bitcoin’s Orbit: Rival Virtual Currencies Vie for Acceptance
Jefferson and Einstein, never trust a quote attributed to them!
The only startups that are "lucky" are those that never validate before development and still find traction.

I define validating as getting 3 paying customers before building a viable app.

You could have built an abridged or simpler version of your game and asked people to pay you to play it. If that posed problems, you could have pivoted to a different premise for the game.
>weren't most of the questions that the TQP lawyer asked ad hominem?

Attacking the credentials of a supposed expert witness is a perfectly legitimate strategy in court. He wouldn't really be representing his client well if he didn't try to discredit Diffie.
That's like saying "does anyone know a case where trespassing laws were used for the good of humankind"; lawsuits are necessarily the bad outcome, we can't be sure how many times the law caused a good thing. There are certainly valuable things for the good of humankind that were patented, and that were produced by corporate (or even university) labs where obtaining patents was certainly a factor in the company's decision to fund that lab (taking computer industry examples I think of the nokia 3G tech, or RSA or LZW).
"Don't grease my palms with your filthy cash
Multinationals spreading like a rash
I might stick around or I might be a fad
But I won't sell my songs for no TV ad"

RIP MCA
I haven't heard of anything that made it sound defense-friendly to me, what were your sources on that? The closest I can come were some win rate statistics where the settlement rate was not factored in, making the figures potentially misleading.
New social network for sharing short five-sentence stories
Ask HN: How much do you spend on WordPress plugins?
Why did you click on it?

Just ignore or downvote next time.

Bitcoin is a hot topic these days, tons of people are interested in what's going on.
Five Sources of Start-up Ideas ... from HBR
US banks warn Fed interest cut could force them to charge depositors
I think the tutorial is nice and does a good job demonstrating the power that jQuery offers over plain old JS. But if a newcomer to web dev came across this, it seems to not relay the point of what jQuery is: a JavaScript library. IMO, "learning jQuery" is a rather abstract concept and in the grand scheme, developers would be better off spending time with plain old JavaScript and making themselves familiar with how to read the jQuery API. I know this sounds rather "RTFM" of me, but that's not quite what I'm going for.

Good job on the tutorial. But I hope new-comers will look for JavaScript references for future education.
Try discussing that with the family of the murder victim Sally Geeson. She wrongly believed an emergency 999 (911 to North Americans) cost money so she did not call when she knew her life was in imminent danger as she had no credit left on her phone:

From http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/oct/19/guardianwe...

"...tragic consequences last year when Sally Geeson, a student, was abducted and murdered in Cambridge. Sally, whose phone had run out of call credit, sent a series of texts asking for help to friends, apparently not realising that she could have made a 999 call for free."
New technology could alter airport security rules on liquids
What's the best place to play online, for an absolute beginner?
Multiple unneeded follow-up tests across the population, not per person.
Dropbox? Unless you're pushing gigabytes per day it should make a perfect static host with urls no more ugly than previously mentioned services.
> look at how pandas handles categorial data

Could you expand on this point?
Scummier was the attack on his credibility:

That's not what Fenster did. He went on the attack.

"You never completed a master's degree, correct?" he asked Diffie.

"That's correct," said Diffie.

"Other than the honorary degree, you don't have an earned doctorate or Ph.D. correct?"

"That is correct," said Diffie.

And even though he taught a few courses, "you never had a real professorship, correct?" asked Fenster.

"I never had a full-time academic job, no."
Not as exciting as watching the brown trouts swim but close enough.
In what ways a jewish white man is not a white man ?

It's a serious question, are people of jewish faith not considered "white" in the US ?
The thing the author is challenging here is not whether Silicon Valley is a meritocracy, but whether it is as much of a meritocracy as its participants believe. It doesn't matter much how it compares to other industries.

In my (limited) experience, among successful founders and investors -- the "trend setters" of startup culture -- there is a widely held notion that anyone with a computer, a good brain, a decent idea, a little bit of luck and the gumption to do some hard work can build a billion dollar company. The author is suggesting that this is not true.
So far I haven't seen the need to spend anything on WordPress plugins.
> If you’re next to someone and they have their headphones on, messaging them in chat is a more respectful (and productive) way to ask them a question.

This is one thing I didn't like when working in an office. At my last office role we had team chat, but nobody used it, they just walked over and interrupted you if they wanted anything. Happy and free now :)
The definition of a myth is that there's no evidence!
It takes both. luck is a constant that can range between 0 -> inf, and work is the multiplier 0 -> 1.
I'm not able to scroll down the page on my iPad - it doesn't seem to hang, I just can't scroll. Any idea why?

Will definitely check it out when I'm on my laptop, seems cool!
Is it just me? Do you find that working remotely you can get more work done than being in the office with coworkers? The days that I'm in the office working I don't seem to get as much actual work done, because I'm spending most of the day in meetings.
yes, basically. i don't like paying the cost at runtime for a lot of things... NSArray is very useful for instance, but I can't use it for any serious amount of data I want to process in a frame. this comes down to the design of the language implementation not caring about performance. its not so much a tradeoff as 'for performance reasons I can not use Objective-C'

i also don't like the ref counting. when given a choice i would rather do my own allocations.
I'm speechless. I'm going to read the publications in the about page to see what went into this because, at first glance, it appears to be very poor information design:

- The use of a circular arrangement is questionable. Judging the distance of items from the center along radial axes is not something humans are good at. And drawing lines between the points adds uninformative visual noise. Better to just have a little bar chart with consistent axes.

- All the 'data' is presented without scales, numeric values, or trends over time. The one overall numeric value is presented without any context. We need a scale, a min and max, and a population average for this to be remotely meaningful. My first assumption is that this is like school grades in the US, where 85 is perhaps normal and 60 is abysmal. Is that right? Will that make sense to those from countries without grade inflation?

- The directionality is all messed up. Sleep is bad when it's low, that makes sense. Nutrition is bad when it's too high? But 'nutrition' is good, right? It's not clear what 'conditions' and 'environment' are, or how they could be too low.

- I would guess that the relative importance of these pieces of information differs by individual, gender, race, etc. Someone with diagnosed cancer should be marked as such rather than just being high on 'conditions.' And individuals with specific diagnosed ailments or family histories should have specific measures listed more prominently as important predictors.

- Some information that isn't good or bad but just descriptive belongs on here, like age, occupation, and, for women, period/pregnancy/menopause status.
How To Make An Infinitely Scalable RDBMS
My mistake. I was under the impression the whitelist was quite restrictive, but maybe not.
Yahoo confirms hire of Katie Couric as new global news anchor
I'm ashamed to say that I said "in some sense" to be deliberately vague about what I meant by consistency - I didn't want to overstate the strength of Cox's theorem or end up arguing about Godel.
The invisible island where New York buries its poor and unidentified
Chance favors the prepared mind.

--Louis Pasteur
Well, whether it's overkill depends on how weak your passphrase is.
I think it's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy
Tricky, isn't it. If unsure, the answer is usually both, or something else entirely. To clarify, I know it is pulpy, but that quote still keeps the more classical references, while also including a secret government assassin, which seemed apt.
It seems to choose the word too early and too quickly. For example, if I type: "in" (without the quotes), it shows "into". You may want to use the tab key as a hint for word selection rather than selecting it automatically.