skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the thing, though. The problems the 'critical thinkers' point out are usually so obvious as to be completely uninteresting.

Strangely these 'critical thinkers' rarely apply their massive brainpower to then thinking of potential solutions for the problems that everyone else has also seen.

In other words, no one is impressed by your ability to see problems. Everyone else here can see them too. We've all got brains, thanks. The trick is to use them to solve problems, that's the valuable skill.
That does sound confusing, yes. Perhaps what Thunderbird does, then: shows such information bar as soon as one of the "attachment-related" words is found in the message or subject.
An Amazing 360-Degree Simulation Of The Big Bang
From careful research (watching Friends and How I Met Your Mother) I've learned that all New Yorkers have access to a romantic roof-space. That would be a rather superior alternative to porches.
Then again, he's proposing a short summary as well, so you won't have to make a choice purely on whether the link looks extremely interesting.
In the long term yes. In the short term (the rest of an adult worker's life) there is widespread, chronic unemployment and reduction of quality of life.
>In the real world, you can't "fly to this GPS point". If this were possible, we would have automated airplanes and pilots would be out of their jobs.

These things don't follow. We actually do have automated airplanes and pilots jobs are really just there for passenger comfort, but that is because Autoland and autopilot utilize ILS' and other sensor data besides GPS to make it precise enough.

So while your point about GPS alone being insufficient for precision delivery is correct, the overall thought that we can't do precision delivery is misguided.
shame there is no mention of how you can convert from infix to postfix by also using a stack... this completes the link to familiar everyday programming languages. :)

http://scriptasylum.com/tutorials/infix_postfix/algorithms/i...
This is not true. Because there is a liquid market for equities, it is possible for companies to IPO into that market, incentivizing entrepreneurs to start companies and for VCs to fund them. High liquidity in the market also leads to higher-resolution pricing, which gives the economy information on where, and where not, to invest.
Javascript template engine in just 20 lines
The idea of "beating the market" which refers to beating the S & P index returns is quite flawed. If anyone tries to impose capital protection measures, like a stop loss, then there's a good chance they would underperform the S & P by getting stopped out at inflection points. Thats why I feel looking at risk adjusted returns is critical. How much risk does a buy-and-hold investor accept to see those returns? If the stock market tanks 50% next year, what is your exit strategy?
Battle of Hastings was not fought at the traditional site at Battle Abbey
Fortunately for Thor, being a man, has more to do on screen than just be there for the female gaze.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test
Probability matching is hardly what I would call a deterministic algorithm. What the authors likely means is that we should use a probabilistic algorithm rather than a random one.

Nitpicking aside, I disagree with the usage of the original quote:

> “It appears to be a quite general principle that, whenever there is a randomized way of doing something, then there is a nonrandomized way that delivers better performance but requires more thought.” E.T. Jaynes

What randomized methods are good at is reducing bias. In our case, there are several sources of bias:
- The population that upvotes links on the 'new' page is different than the one that upvotes links on the frontpage
- The probability of upvotes (which I assume are either ratios of upvotes to impressions or the ratio of upvotes to clicks) itself is determined by several factors other than article quality: article type and headline quality (and there is another interesting debate about quality vs. popularity, since sensationalized headlines are likely to get more clicks) to cite the main culprits, but there are many others.

I have three problems with this article:

1. The proposed strategy answers the question of variance but not bias, which is where the problem differs from a simple multi-armed bandit problem. Now we could build sophisticated models that try to take all these into account and get an unbiased estimator of quality, but it's likely be a pursuit that's not worth the payoff.

2. Adding random noise to the rankings is likely to be much more efficient. The author here suggests computing the posterior probability of an article being better than another for each pair of articles, which seems rather impractical.

3. Most importantly: is overall quality of the frontpage really the ultimate optimization objective? This solution doesn't solve the problem of the N+1th article receiving much fewer votes than the Nth, where N is the number of articles shown on the frontpage, while being arguably equally deserving. I would argue that the problem of minimizing the probability of a good article getting few pageviews is actually the more important one, because we have more good articles than slots on the frontpage. A randomized algorithm would be much better equipped for this purpose.

Of course, the other thing is that for bragging purposes "We made the frontpage of HN" sounds much better than "We made the frontpage of HN for 60% of the users". But that's a different problem altogether...

Edit: writing this comment made me think of alternative solutions. An easy-to-implement one would be to add 5 or so slots at the bottom of the frontpage that would contain random picks from the 2nd or 3rd page in a rotating manner. That would give good articles which weren't fortunate enough to get good visibility a chance at floating up to the top, without all the implications of changing the ranking algorithm itself. In other words, add fuzziness to the threshold instead of the ranking.
The 9/11 attacks were in the President's daily briefing, meaning Bin Laden's gang was known as a more severe threat than some Irish rebel or whoever who might have wanted to cause trouble. It may have been improbable to find the specific attacking individuals before the attacks, but I have seen no evidence that they were known but buried in a haystack of extra noise.
kind of similar to my CV: http://stbr.me/blog/files/cv.pdf (edit: which I did in latex)
I lol'd at the title. Just having a Gruntfile is the first smell I notice when looking at a project. Seriously, why take two simple tools and layer a unnecessary "task runner" on top of them?
Don't use Actors for concurrency
thank you !
I'm not English native speaker and yes I'll try to use standard punctuation.
Little off-topic now, is IRC safe passage to chat and talk to people with common interest ??
From the guidelines - and I think a much better way of adding commentary & changing headlines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add
commentary to links. The text field is for starting
discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url
field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link,
write a blog post about it and submit that instead.
Corrected, with apologies.
> it is just as insidious.

As a woman I completely agree with this - which is why it's hard to see issues like this on HN. The argument suddenly turns to "but men have it hard too!" instead of "wow, we're messed up, let's all acknowledge this together".
A QR code is a nice idea. Another solution could be to take a picture or a short video of the place you want the drone to leave the package. Machine vision technology is easily sophisticated enough to translate this into an accurate 3D model which could be correlated with known GPS information.

This kind of process will probably happening anyway for hazard avoidance.
That's really interesting for me. I did a CS and EE dual degree and we have a required ethics course as part of the engineering program (it's a requirement from Engineers Canada for an engineering accreditation). In the CS program, things like this were only discussed in context (e.g. privacy and security were discussed in the elective security class I took).

Comparing the two, I did find the formal discussion in the Ethics class to be really interesting. It was a simple pass/fail course, we weren't really graded on things, other than being required to show up and talk about the kinds of issues we might encounter in the field. Some as mundane as a manager pushing you to shrink estimates and cut corners (ahem, software), some as serious as failing to do proper load analysis and having a shopping mall roof collapse after a heavy snowfall.
Maybe you could do something with tags.
SEEKING FREELANCER:
The project is a health care related built on Ruby and Rails and Postgresql for database.
HTML, CSS and Javascript experience required.
REMOTE FREELANCER FINE.
Email: subrat2040<at>gmail(dot)com
Please don't do that. Sarcasm is a cancer on written discourse, making it harder to extract meaning.
It shouldn't be hard to add for pg if HNers asks for it I guess. I agree with OP's that webpage titles can't be used as-is and a text submission adding context is better than auto-titled entries.
Are you a good enough journalist/editor/writer to make the evaluation that the article's title is not appropriate for the content of said article?
[...] useful [to prevent terrorist attacks]
[...] useful [to prevent terrorist attacks etc.], because that is the implied reason for having spys.
Btc-e.com: Site is under maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience.
scam or maintenance?
wow. you too might think of allocating unnecessary memory, wasting people's bandwidth and occupying cognitive resources of others for nothing. TIA.
>Have you actually discussed this with all of them?

Also a woman here, with many friends in STEM: none of us like it. All power to those who do - but give us some space to work, and when we want to blur those boundaries we'll do it outside of the office or in our private relationships (office or not).
Having falsified data doesn't prove outright that he's not qualified for the degree, but in my opinion it does prove that he doesn't deserve it. Unless there is absolutely no code or expectation of ethics in his chosen field, I don't see how this result makes sense.

Rewarding such a lack of integrity is a terrible precedent to set. We know this is not the only time people have done something like this, and now people who do this, have done it, or may do it can all see that they may not have as much to worry about since we're now in the practice of shrugging and looking away rather than enforcing any reasonable code of conduct... even the ones that already exist.
Why not every one should trade stocks, but some of us should
Looks wonderful but the horizontal navigation goes out of control. I would take Path's approach –if I have to mention something publicly known– to display the important events of your life.
I would base it on Javascript just to give certain people something else to whine about.
Just Try It: Quantity Trumps Quality
This is really naive. Cherrypicking things like Pearl Harbor where the ball was dropped is really the exception proving the rule.

The spying that organizations like the NSA against foreign countries, even allies give key insight into what the leadership there is thinking. If you think that there haven't been big wins in diplomatic and other areas from this data, I find that hard to believe.

In warfare, there are all sorts of examples that come to mind where spying saved the day. How about the utter destruction of the WW2 U-Boat campaign via interception of communications? Or Patton's "ghost army" of inflatable tanks that combined with double agents misdirected the German defense of Europe?
Any chance of a readme? I've thought about working on a torrent client in Ruby before but never gotten around to it so I'm interested in seeing where this goes.
Most of the trouble I've had with spreadsheets boils down to not knowing the (albeit small) language. Writing =B3/B$1*$A$1 is generally useful, don't get rid of that. Emphasize the formatting as a separate concept from the data (formatting needs its own language). Add type hinting/checking to cells & functions, but don't 'enforce'. Make plots first-class, embeddable in single cells (and mergable into larger areas). Make functions first-class, so a cell can contain a formula. Allow simple access to not just other sheets' cells/fns, but other files' cells. If you're crazy, allow access to remote files' cells/fn over HTTP. If you can define a sane JS FFI, you could import js libraries remotely. It blurs into web development, but what doesn't?
If you want to add initial commentary on the link,
write a blog post about it and submit that instead.

This will immediately get flagged as blogspam though.
Amazon Tests Drone Delivery System
Wait, hold the phone, there are legal and logistical problems to consider?? Thank god somebody wrote this article to cut through the insanity!
Hmm… I would think history suggests spies were pretty successful bootstrapping the Soviet nuclear program towards the end of WW II. I also recall reading how various rocket data/details were obtained from foreign countries post-WW II and there's been a lively, two-sided game of spies for things like submarine operations and control. And unless we're only talking about spies working for a government, industrial espionage has been successful in the tech period. As others have already posted, I assume the original author ignores SIGINT (as there's a long, colorful history of its success) and other "collection" based methods.
Is blockchain.info set up as an effective store of consensus around tracking "evil" addresses? If not, is anyone else doing that (publicly)? I am sure the NSA and cousins are studying the blockchain carefully.
Beyond Bin Laden: but figuring out the viability of attacking the Nuclear Arsenal of Iran, determining who is Friend / Foe in Syria vs Friend/Foe in Lybia (notice how we have decided that all parties in Syria are enemies: saving us considerable amounts of money. Also, that prevented the US from entering another war. Our only concern is the Chemical weapons that we have known about)

Speaking of Syria: spies and so forth were who determined whether or not Syria even _used_ chemical weapons.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/26/idf-intercept-shows-sy...

It was a SIGINT Intercept. Spies are extrodinarily useful for figuring out the truth when international incidents occur. And knowing who is lying, why they're lying, what their motivations are, etc. etc. These are all important foreign-intelligence missions that Spies do their best to figure out for their country.

--------------

Now of course, spies get it wrong sometimes. The famous Iraq situation was brought about because the CIA focused on one bit of evidence that turned out to be falsified. But nonetheless, the general "intelligence successes" strongly outweigh the "intelligence failures" in the past decades.
Site operators retire to Cayman Islands.

Bitcoin has been mostly good for promoting the Ponzi scheme style of business operation. Bitcoin businesses are divided into exactly two types:

- those that have absconded with all customer funds

- those that are planning to abscond with all customer funds
Again, I don't know what HN uses slowbans for, but my guess would be it's for technical reasons rather than content. It's an interesting issue that got me googling. There doesn't seem to be a real point of contact where people can appeal account moderations on HN. It seems to me that emailing pg doesn't scale very well, which might be the reason why you didn't get an answer.

And I found this, somewhat self-absorbed, blog entry by Michael O. Church about pretty much the same thing you're describing:

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/heres-why-pau...

I think it's weird that people think HN admins, or specifically pg, owe them an apology - but it does show how serious people are taking their accounts. On the flip side it's not at all clear how seriously HN takes its more seasoned users. All things being equal, I trust the admins to statistically do the right thing because there are probably a lot of hidden variables we're not aware of.

However, there seem to be a lot of young and/or low-karma accounts who do just fine while being hostile, personal, and all-around detrimental. Maybe there is an algorithmic problem that causes more seasoned accounts to accrue "flag debt" or whatever without a sufficient method of decaying those flags.
> If I assume that a "skilled craftsman" in the US earns $20 / hour (less than I made as a summer intern at amazon before graduating college), that puts the price of the bulb at at least $400,000. For the price listed in that catalog, you could also have bought 25,000 pounds of cheese. It also notes that while flowers in general averaged 40% annual price depreciation at the time, tulips averaged a more impressive 99.999% annual depreciation.

I don't think you understood my point: these were scarce, expiring, novel luxuries. High initial prices often followed by vast depreciation is normal, and we see it all the time in the most comparable market, fashion and art, where artists who once commanded stratospheric prices tumble into obscurity and their works get junked. Pointing out the claimed performance (and remember the extenuating factors here like a lot of the sources being polemical lies) betrays a lack of appreciation for the volatility and time factor involved.
Fixing Fsync
Don't try to overthink it. The sad truth is that password management is a total boondoggle, especially for banks. This is due to a huge body of superstition and cargo-cult policies on how to do it, how everyone else is doing it, and how the mess of regulations concerning password/credit card info tell you to do it.

There are of course best practices concerning how to correctly, securely, and safely manage passwords, but these pale in comparison to all the "common knowledge" about proper "password rules" and "encryption methods" out there.

Many banks will limit password length, limit your character set, forbid non-alphanumerics, auto-lowercase, choose an obvious login for you, limit you to easily-google-able "secret" questions, and prevent you from pasting in a password from a password manager app, and do other things that limit your ability to choose secure credentials. These days you are lucky if your bank lets you actually choose a password instead of just assigning you an unchangeable 4-digit numeric PIN!
When Customers Make You Smarter [Steve Blank]
I wonder if the NIH grant turns this into an FCA problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Claims_Act; http://sstroudtrainingsresearch.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/res... (essentially, the False Claims Act makes it illegal to receive a payment from the government fraudulently or based on fraudulent statements).
Marketing Lesson from Noah Kagan
Give back with the first-ever donatable Hangout-a-thon on Google+
Amazon has also affected independent shops for second-hand books on the high street. As has eBay. But independents also have competitors on their own turf: charity shops -- particularly specific charity bookshops.

Charity shops receive tax concessions and get business rate relief.

They also don't have to pay for stock. People are willing to donate their books to a charity shop. If they took them to an independent bookseller they would probably want something in return, either in cash or a trade-in value.

Some charity bookshops get more stock than they can handle. I've heard stories of them taking boxloads to the local tip.
Sixteen that we know of...
Well if you consider the effect progress has on birthrates (they drop - below replacement rate in fact) then it seems likely that we have effectively unlimited time to delay having children, it's likely birth rates would get even lower.

However, clinical immortality isn't absolute - an on average we would survive about 250 years between fatal accidents.

One of the conclusions I've always thought we can draw from this is that it's a decent explanation of the apparent paucity of life zipping around the galaxy: civilizations discover immortality before they get warp travel or whatever, their birthrate drops to near zero and the population stabilizes so you get no exponential growth across the stars, and so relatively few of them are actually out exploring.
I think his dishonestly will end up helping him. Companies these days are looking for employees that will go the extra mile especially if they can produce fraudulent results and keep them covered up.
Looks great, I wanted to something similar, glad its here now :) But as most are saying, the horizontal view is not very user friendly!
And just for posterity's sake, this article ended up being flagged into total invisibility within about 10 minutes of hitting the front page, despite having 50+ upvotes in about 20 minutes.
Most of these books are not PDF, but if you own PDF books, here is something you can try to organize/search them: https://register.blib.us (and access them from anywhere)
Yes, acknowledging is good. I wonder whether we'll ever be able to "fix" it.

Objectification is a cognitive function. We all do it to some degree. When our attention turns to a person, it isn't always at their core. For instance an employer might see her employees in a utilitarian way at one moment and appreciate their humanity and feelings the next. The big issue is whether it's hurtful or the dominant mode in a person.
Very many bad articles make it to the front page (sensationalist title and/or link bait about Bitcoin), however, the flag option is so much more powerful than the up vote that it counteracts false positives immediately.
It has to work with all subtypes of stdClass, since in order for the interface to hold its word, I need to be able to get an object thats implements I, and pass it any stdClass, regardless of what they do with it.
"We use commas to divide large integers into groups of 3 digits. Grouping is done from the right end of the number, for example: 17,000,120".

Those two rules are, to my knowledge, the entirety of the US number-commaing system. How did you spend an hour on it? It might be difficult for people to understand it before having it explained, but I wouldn't call it complex.
>These are just a few examples from an obsessive, and often baffling list of more than 1,400 English words that Google has quietly deemed inappropriate for Android users.

What a fatuous line of reasoning. A simpler explanation would be that those are words that one would be less likely to want to type accidentally in, say, a text message, because of their potential for causing misunderstanding or embarrassment. The idea that they would want to bowdlerize a user's text input to advance a vague political agenda is absurd and resembles the worst kind of paranoid conspiracy theory.
It's true though, stack overflow gets you more programmer eyeballs
It's often pretty clear that the original articles headline is link bait to begin with, or may not convey the topic properly to a community such as HN.