skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've encountered this sort of logic before. It is certainly one way of defining "long term stable" but a more useful definition is that packages go through more extensive interoperability testing prior to being made available, so they are 3 - 6 months perhaps behind the current stuff but not years behind.

It is perhaps one of the biggest challenges for me on a Linux desktop, constantly having to choose between 'everything works' or 'has current features'. Which is not a choice I need to make with commercial desktops.
It would be nice if something like the Efficient Global Optimization Algorithm were implemented. In my opinion this would be the "automagical" way of optimizing hyper parameters.

[1] http://www.ressources-actuarielles.net/EXT/ISFA/1226.nsf/0/f...
I never would have noticed that the Dropbox icon was the only colorful icon up there if I hadn't read this article. Oh well.
I'm the author of the gist. The submitter is a good friend of mine that felt like posting it, and I don't mind.

It was a reply I made to another friend and previous co-worker on twitter a while back that was talking about software estimation. It wasn't a comment on any other blog post or hackernews story.

I was thinking I should edit and elaborate on it into a full blog post at some point, but that would also require setting up a blog ;P I didn't take the time to write this up to the standards of an adversarial blog aggregation audience. And I don't care to defend it as such or in detail. It's meant to outline a broad point I think is true, but not to be ironclad in it's argument.

Anyhow, no cherry picking or anything unethical going on here.
If our entire society is so pervasively misogynist that you can basically do it all the time just by going through your daily routine, then why is misogyny even notable at all? Misogyny is supposed to be an abnormal thing.

How do you define misogyny?

Yeah, the word "overreaction" can be applied to many contexts. Who would have known?

Wanting people to check for consent before buying them drinks

I wish someone bought me free stuff.

or walking them home

That one I can agree with, but how exactly does someone walk you home without your consent? I mean, if they don't have it, then by definition it's following or stalking.

coming into their house

As in, they knock and come in uninvited? Politely send them away. If they come in forcefully, that's a different issue entirely.
The first part sounds like they created a user management system: normally a single table with fields like username, password-hash, real name, address, etc, and sometimes a couple of other tables for groups/roles and cross-ref tables for relationships. In this case the user table would also probably have ids/references to the various government backend systems that the site used to verify your identity, income, etc as you signed up.

The rest of it sounds like they botched making this system scalable, to handle both the number of possible users (every adult in the US) and the rate at which they'd be signing up. "Endless technological loops" might refer to either a circular reference in an overly-complex schema, or to normal dependency checking in the schema which takes too long to evaluate within the database when the database is under enormous load.
I trust the reports, and I trust the data, but the trend has been pretty obvious, I'd wager, and predictable for some time now.

People in the suburbs increasingly migrate to cul-de-sac communities, which isolate them from the rest of the world, to make them feel safer, depriving their children of the much-needed contact with a diverse population that builds trust.

Beyond that, the news is more and more pervasive, and more and more sensationalist than it's ever been. Every tragedy is made public, and the more grave and more egregious, the more media coverage it gets. People grow up believing that child abductions are the norm, and even likely, when the reality is that stranger abductions are less likely than they've ever been -- but the Amber Alert system (at least in the DC area here) broadcasts on highways, making it impossible to believe that a kid isn't abducted every two seconds.

Humans are built to be paranoid. Historically, the person who heard a strange noise outside their shelter and didn't react was mauled by a bear, or lion, or what have you, while the more alert human that took to defensive measures was more likely to survive. Having established our positions as apex predators, in cities this is far less likely to be needed, but our brains still seek danger patterns, cling to them, and those instincts aren't able to be quashed by rationality or statistics. We see something like the Newtown shooting and instinctively feel that all our children are in immediate danger, despite its actual unlikeliness. The media catches another school shooting and reinforces it even more in our brains that there is a very real danger, and breeds distrust and paranoia, triggering an instinct to be even more isolationist, and more paranoid, breeding more and more distrust, which further fuels the cycle for the next news article we see reinforcing our beliefs.

This isn't meant to blame the news, or humans, or any particular person at all, but the idea is that we should all at least attempt to be more data-driven, more pragmatic, and to try and find data that doesn't agree with our assumptions. It's harder than it sounds. In most humans, the brain simply rejects data that doesn't agree with its pre-formed hypotheses, but scientists are better equipped here than the average human, as we revel in data, enjoy being proven wrong, and strive towards better results, not just a reinforcement of the bad data we already believe.
I'm not saying you were. Just saying that not only is that a fire-able offense to Joylet, their post heavily implies that to be the motivation for the revert.
I don't think you get to complain about these sort of things when you make the choice to use OSX.
It was mentioned in this talk:
http://vimeo.com/9270320
and in the corresponding book "making software"
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596808303.do

have fun.
> If the OP of the patch had gone through and consistently changed all He|She -> Them|They

If they missed any gendered pronouns in the now-landed PR, surely they would be discoverable in the current source:

- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=him&type=Code
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=he&type=Code
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=his&type=Code
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=she&type=Code
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=her&type=Code
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=hers&type=Code

To a reasonable approximation, it turns out the author of PR did consistently change gendered language in the project, there just wasn't very much of it to begin with. That wasn't my assumption either (I thought there'd be more such language somewhere), and the biases that created that assumption are surely an interesting "this is how these problems happen" sort of side topic.

Anyway, definitely a lesson in where we choose to direct the benefit of the doubt. In this case, the author of the PR was the one who deserved it, but wasn't the one who received it.

(edit - link formatting)
Practical Bayesian Optimisation of Machine Learning Hyperparameters [1] was a great recent paper on this topic that looked to have very nice results in practice across a range of models. Is there any interest in implementing that algorithm in hyperopt?

[1]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.2944.pdf
The Race is on in Silicon Valley to Escape Real America
Images of the spacecraft and facilities here: http://www.isro.gov.in/pslv-c25/Imagegallery/satellite.aspx.
>to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense. ... the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered.

So what. The request was rejected on the principle of it being trivial:

> Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that. [1]

I can find no mention in the discussion of anyone arguing against the change on the grounds that gendered pronouns are preferable.

We can still argue over wheather this is a good reason to reject a pull request. Personally, I think that trivial requests should be accepted if for no other reason than to be welcoming to newcomers who are testing the waters before becoming active. However, accepting pull requests takes time, and one might not want to encourage a community to spam oneself with minor corrections. Furthermore, in this particular example, the proposed changes were grammatically incorrect, as the object itself is the singular "user", while the new pronoun is the plural "they/them". This could easily be resolved by making user plural, or avoiding the pronoun altogether, but this still takes more of the maintainers time.

Notwithstanding that, it seems completely dishonest to frame the original dispute as Ben Noodhuis objecting to removing gendered pronouns on principle.

[1] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...
You can change it to be monochrome in your Dropbox preferences.
Perhaps it would be most clear to say they "insinuate" that was his motivation?
The background one that bugs the heck out of me that keeps returning is the "iTunes Helper". I still don't get why that even exists on OS X. It's so un-Apple-like to have something like this exist as a Login Item in system preferences.
Introducing Cloud Explorer, an S3 client written in Java
This is a simple S3 client that I made. It is under heavy development. This program has a text editor, image viewer, and music player for your S3 storage.

Github: http://github.com/rusher81572/s3
If you use as weak and binary a definition of "capitalism" as you expressly state that you are, then the idea of nations inevitably trending toward capitalism is even more ludicrous than it is if you use it in a meaningful way -- as it is, even currently socialist nations are "capitalist" (not trending toward it -- which is impossible, there is no way to have a variable distance from it -- but actually capitalist.)
I think it depends where you draw the line. These comparisons can be hard to make due to different accounting of what counts as "reuse." In this reply to a friend I was taking a very broad economic like view. For example: no one is rewriting the linux kernel from the ground up to launch an ecommerce app. Likewise people generally aren't rewriting the functionality provided by their langauges' standard libraries for each app. So in the broadest sense of all labor involved, there's a lot more reuse going on than a more narrow experiment may consider.
I'm on the verge of setting up my MBP to double boot to Arch or Debian and slowly moving as much as possible to Linux.

Unfortunately, neither Illustrator or Photoshop are available on Linux. Are their open-source equivalents anywhere near the quality of their Adobe counterparts yet? I've yet to try InkScape, but I know that the last time I used Gimp, it was excruciating. I would rather work via ImageMagick, RMagick or node-canvas than subject myself to gimp.
Recently I wanted to find if Apple hardware ships with a TPM chip. This article from 2006 suggests it doesn't:

http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/tpmdrmmyth/

BTW This site is fascinating, for example here's on Apple encryption of binaries:

http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/binaryprotection/
Time > Money

I can always make more of one of those.
That's nonsense. All of the previous ways to sign up for health insurance are still around, and the policies that were cancelled basically didn't give any coverage anyway (that is, they didn't cover medication or hospital visits and allowed insurance companies to drop the owners of those policies at any time).
Yes, it seems weirdly PC to leave the changing demographic situation out of the picture.

The Extraordinary 30-Year Growth of the U.S. Hispanic Population
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/08/extra...

US ethnic minorities make up 49.9 per cent of under-fives
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...
Might as well go whole hog with Emacs' SQL-mode and/or pg.el
Not everything that puts crap in the menubar is crap. The Google Chrome Notification is an egregious offender - it appeared without warning, ugly and unretinafied, and can only be (temporarily) removed by (1) doing everything it asks, (2) then quitting and relaunching Chrome. It's highly-visible systemwide placement for minor system-oriented tasks, and unnecessary given how much interface Chrome already has to work with. It sucks, but saying "you just shouldn't use Chrome" is a pretty weak solution for the small but conspicuous blemish.

That said, the menubar is a legitimate place for lots of things. It's great for services (eg dropbox), status (eg battery), and shortcuts (eg wifi).

It's a useful distinction from app icons in the Dock, which generally use more traditional desktop windows. I always like it when an app in the grey area (eg Twitterific) lets users choose where the icon lives. Like the author, I resort to Bartender to manage them all.

I wonder if menubar apps will eventually be moved into OSX's Notifications sidebar. I don't want them there, but I'd guess Apple prefers shoving into a drawer rather than sherlocking Bartender.

[edited a li'l so it made more sense]
Starup Development Made Simple. Really
And so, as Microsoft Windows continues its precipitous decline, that bastard abomination known as the Windows systray icon finds a way to ride the mass exodus to Mac OS, much like small pox found its way to The New World across the ocean.
And most likely nutrition. It appears that your weight is determined by your gut bacteria: https://www.google.com/search?q=gut+bacteria+obesity
So it's basically a month or so after the prototype phase, what's the progress? I see some nice photoshop mock-ups, but where's the tech demo. I can say from personal experience, the heart-rate monitoring from the wrist is very difficult - bloodflow noise (generally a low SNR), bad data (constant movement or loose connection), and beefy processing (for a wristwatch at least) to get anything better than guessing.
This argument is not a fair question. It is a straw man. The debate has never been about the validity of seizing the metadata on one phone with reasonable suspicion. It is about warrantless wholesale surveillance of hundreds of millions of innocent people, who are being forced to give up essential freedoms on the remote, off-hand chance that, if the stars align a certain way, "the authorities" may stop a hypothetical criminal act. It is about a trade-off where the costs to everyone are exceedingly high and the benefits to anyone are exceedingly low.
I'm curious what reality he considers missing from K&R.
Photoshop CS5 works perfectly on Wine. I had it running on Mint 15 for a while.
depends on how big your project is. I've been working for hours on this thing :/
Yes, good distinction. I should have linked the Byzantine Fault Tolerance page [1] since it describes that distinction better. Not sure why I went with Two Generals since I looked at both.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Generals%27_Problem
This does have the, ah, interesting consequence that essentially any policy you could have about when you use gender-neutral pronouns will either offend or involuntarily out at least some trans or genderqueer people. (Even if most of the gender-binary cis populace won't notice.) Using gender neutral pronouns for everyone unless they object seems especially likely to do so though.
I wonder if "the EIdM" is one or more off-the-shelf enterprise identity management products from Oracle? For example:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/id-mgmt/overvie...
This stuff is less about being unable to "handle getting offended" than it is about being unwilling to tolerate people who behave offensively.

I don't think it's okay to use the word "gay" pejoratively, even when there aren't any queers in the room. I don't think it's okay to make rape jokes, even when there aren't any women around. I don't think it's okay to behave or speak in a way that is deliberately and hurtfully exclusive of anyone, for any reason, at any time.

To me, being deliberate and mindful about Othering is less about being "accommodating", and more of a useful means to help keep me from being "That Guy" in any of the countless, subtle ways that I might be — because we all do it, even the people you think of as the typically Othered, no matter how hard we try not to.

If you want to call that pampering, that's on you. I call it courtesy and decency, personally.
Chrome is becoming worse and worse, just to push Google's interests further. I don't get why there are still hackers who don't use just Chromium by now.
Excessive brushing has always been detrimental to the enamel.
Laptops and tablets with two operating systems on arrival
Do you mean literally or metaphorically? As in page load times are getting longer because browsers have to download a lot of js files? Or that Javascript is a deep seated technology and therefore prevents any other alternative from emerging?
The scenario sucks, and I really do like apps that give you the option (display in the Dock or display in the menu bar).

There is Bartender (http://www.macbartender.com/), which lets you shove all your non-critical menu bar items into a second menu bar like thing that you can hide away. So, while I have 18?? some odd status item apps running right now, by default I only really see the 6 or 7 most critical ones.

Bartender doesn't work with all status menu items, notably Chrome's notification status menu (maybe it's changed in the month or so since I last checked)... but Bartender "solves" the "GTFO out of menu bar" problem.
To anyone who hasn't followed the link to the reversal, this seems to be a case of a normal power struggle:

"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided."
What exactly do you mean? Because your question could be asking - 1) does using JS slow average page loading times? or 2) is JS actively slowing THE INTERNET down?

If 1 - it could be; it is hard to pinpoint the cause exactly. The average page loading time is increasing (http://marketingland.com/retail-website-load-times-continue-...).

If 2 - I don't think so; Bandwidth is increasing, and average internet speed is also increasing (http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/q2_2013_soti_infographic.pdf)
neat snowing background, loved the fall direction controlled by the mouse motion.
Agreed.

The cult of buffoonery should have long stopped using gendered pronouns decades ago.

Let’s also hope the world-changing-software manages to avoid treating every person as a customer.
Another gaping hole is how to recover the key when the user manages to delete it or lose it (new browser, new computer, etc).

This is all just dismissed as "not the subject of this post"
Considering that anyone trying to sell that much bitcoin at once would pretty much crash the currency, how much is it really worth?

Perhaps some kind of revolutionary mathematical fact could be worth even more? This is a very interesting question.

EDIT: A lot of people responding to me seem to be trying to contradict my argument by pointing out that if it was true, it would be true for almost everything. I don't get how that works, because it is true of everything! Flooding the market will always reduce the value of what you are selling.
Mpelembe Network highlighting World's AIDS Day news from around the Globe
I consider schemes such as this as a subtle attempt to kill the freedom and open nature of the web. It appears I'm not alone.
You get the irony though that this was the original purpose of SGML (which admittedly HTML 1.0 thoroughly screwed up). It seems perfectly reasonable to render the page using HTML and have the render logic for browsers or what have you be in the form of style sheets and Javascript.
Obligatory mention of Betteridge's law of headlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
You should implement at least Sender Policy Framework to endorse only email from your own servers. Better yet implement DomainKeys Identified Mail.
The Tactical Adventure Medical Preparedness Outdoors Necessity
I think Justin.TV used a setup like this in the early days to stream 24/7 live video -- several mobile hotspots from different carriers all working on sending data to the remote server, ensuring that the data got there somehow. The difference was that they controlled the server side.
Slightly irrelevant but I have always had terrible experiences with PostgreSQL on the CLI. To start off, it has extremely generic names for its binaries that are installed on Linux -- `createuser` for example gives no indication that it handles user creation for PostgreSQL. This also means that I cannot do something like `pg-TAB-TAB` to find out all PostgreSQL relevant binaries that I can then invoke.
Apart form this, the OS X PostgreSQL installer I noticed had changed the ownership of the `/usr/local/bin` directory to itself, which was plain rude.

I'm largely new to PostgreSQL and it is quite possible that I'm using it all wrong, sorry for ranting.
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=37.890736,+-85.963174&hl=en&l...
I don't think it's okay to use the word "gay" pejoratively, even when there aren't any queers in the room.

That's the whole point of an insult.

I don't think it's okay to make rape jokes, even when there aren't any women around.

I don't think you understand how comedy works. In many ways, it's a coping mechanism. The jokes we laugh at are often quite depressing or disturbing if you try to elucidate their underlying subject matter, but they're presented in such a manner that we can be humored by and cope with the dark side of life.

Not making jokes of X type is just censorship and idiocy. Comedy has no boundaries.

I don't think it's okay to behave or speak in a way that is deliberately and hurtfully exclusive of anyone, for any reason, at any time.

I can agree with that, but the way you put it is excessively vague.
What a well-written and researched article. An absolutely fascinating read!
Bruce Schneier once equated the security of a 256 bit private key by comparing the energy needed to brute force all possible combinations of 256 bits to the amount of energy harnessed for one year by a Dyson Sphere built around the sun.

So maybe there's a correlation, in the sense of knowing the GPS coordinates of Fort Knox, and targeting it with an ICBM?
It costs one to make the other.
I admit I don't follow the grammar rules (and am not insane enough to think I can force my variations on others). My plan: I try to write a/an based on graphical clues (is the next written letter a vowel or not) and speak using sound clues (is the next phoneme (or whatever you are allowed to call it) vowel like or not). My twinge-worthy moment is the way-over the top British "an 'ospital."
> When we call a country "she" we are making a female description of what a country is: nurturing her citizens.

This is an example of gender stereotyping.