skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've only read the first two chapters of Jaynes' book, and bits and pieces of various other books. (One of the late chapters in http://uncertainty.stat.cmu.edu/ is a great reference for outlining the problems with significance and hypothesis testing.) Anyway, to me the problem described above sounds like it can generally be phrased as the common problem of ranking user-rated products on an e-commerce page. (A good Bayesian write-up is here, with simple code at the end: http://masanjin.net/blog/how-to-rank-products-based-on-user-...) At least if one assumes that treatments are applied more-or-less the same, and sets of objects amongst a treatment are more-or-less the same. There's also the question of how rankings change when both treatments are presented to a volunteer instead of just one. I interpreted the problem as just showing the OLD sets or just showing the NEW sets, never showing the original sets pre-treatment.

How does sanskritabelt solve the problem, I wonder? Set an arbitrary number of volunteers for each group to say "this is the point we can stop collecting data", assume normalcy of ratings, take the means and use some test to see if the difference is significant or not?

Really the problem of the problem is defining what is meant by 'better'. Is 'better' a higher score? (Which scoring function do you use -- mean, median, most 5-stars, least 1-stars, something else that takes into account the number of ratings per rating bucket?) Does it have to be higher by a certain amount (how meaningful are deltas in your scoring function)? Once it's defined what is meant by "A is better than B", then you can go about the business of computing the likelihood of your data given "A is better than B" to fulfill the RHS of Bayes' theorem.
US Congress to vote on explicitly creating a police state
Guideline on how not to write commit messages.
I am a PhD statistician and I can't understand your comment.

What statistic is being calculated for the N=1 Trillion dataset? And what is the way of calculating that would be off by 10%?
Yep, working with natural languages is scary. :-)
This was on Hacker News a while back, maybe give him a try? http://jeffhuang.com/rethinking_the_phd_application.html
People do it all the time, just with the help of a boat across this obstacle. Given the scale of the journey, its often not "footnoted" in many casual references. For scale, the Pan-American-Highway, which basically navigates from Alaska to Patagonia is about 48,000 kilometres (30,000 mi) in total length.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-American_Highway
Google Compute Engine Guide
Using Facebook after Losing a Job: Differential Benefits of Strong and Weak Ties
As a historical anecdote, this was also the site of the Darien Disaster in the late 1690s: the plan was to build a Scottish colony, but it didn't go well. It went so poorly, in fact, that Scotland went broke and had to get a bailout from England, leading to the Acts of Union in 1707.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme
Four steps to put an end to all-male panels at conferences
[Notes] Sam Lessin(FB) Keynote- Future of Social Data & Travel
Yeah, just various errors make it crash pretty hard. I've attempted to wrap an error handler into it but had no luck, I might try again and send a PR if I can get it to work.

Phake, that's the one. I was curious about it, as I think a nice LISP styled build system that can be bootstrapped with only PHP and the Pharen runtime-lib would be really awesome as a build system for PHP in general. With Composer and a lot of other projects, tooling in PHP is moving forward at a rapid pace, but we're all hacking together shitty build systems from scratch (or using Phing, which is painful in my experience). Phake could be a nice alternative. For now, I'm using Make and calling into Pharen directly :)
I always remember them as the ads with John Hodgman.
While it's unclear what the line is, it's clear that it has been crossed. When you start needing lawyers to split hairs, it's time to re-examine what you've hatched and ask if it even passes a giggle test.

"Secret court" and "All this stuff we've collected? We haven't actually collected it until we look at it" and oversight by people who are clearly invested in keeping things cozy. This is all madness. How did we get here?

I might not know enough to know where to draw the line, but I know enough to know that it's gone wrong, and that erring on the side of severely restricting this kind of behavior and shedding light on what has happened is probably the best course of action.
He was right about Flash--Adobe never did get it running well on mobile devices, despite trying very hard to do so on Android.
My 2 cents would be to just focus on what services you can offer rightaway with your skill set and grab whatever leads you could.

#1 follow what zedshaw is offering to you and
#2 if you think craigslist could help you bring some leads let me know what you can do and I will try to post ads for your service offering for you.
#3 if you want to try earning (passive or something) online via some website, I can buy you domain + hosting + any script
#4 [removed the text where I offered you monetary help, you must proof you are not a troll]
What are the risks? That you might be killed or injured? Just like on any other day of the year? One guy died of a heart condition, could have happened anytime. Another injured in a burglary attempt (apparently burglaries only happen on Black Friday?)
Community Structure and Market Outcomes [pdf]
10 File Explorer Tips You May Not Know You Can Do in Windows 8.1
Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits To Discredit 'Radicalizers'
> Almost universally one of the reasons to hire remotely is to hire people in lower cost-of-living areas and pay them accordingly.

I currently work for a decent sized Drupal shop. I was told upfront that the company went with remote employees because there simply weren't enough within commuting distance. Based on how the knowledge Drupal people in another state have been snapped up, I completely believe it.
I think Yev put it well, but I just want to add that customer support has two distinct jobs (Tedivm's issue fell under #2):

1) Answering basic general questions like "how much does it cost"?

2) Debugging live customer issues. For example, if crappy anti-virus quarantines one of the Backblaze executables, what the heck is happening and why? Of if a customer's client cannot contact Backblaze's datacenter, which firewall is blocking it (maybe it is the software firewall on the computer, or maybe it is the router not allowing HTTPS through)? Etc....

In the process of debugging problems, the customer service reps are dealing with a truly insane array of possible issues and symptoms and they go back and forth with the customer asking for log files, ask if specific symptoms are happening, and in general COLLABORATE with the customer to get to the true bottom of the issue. Nobody lied. These are good, honest people that are really looking out for our customers and take their responsibilities seriously.
tl;dr author compares bitcoin to tulips, argues it's all mass emotion or something.
And as Adi Shamir could have found out with a little more Googling, the address belonged to Trammell, not Satoshi.

It takes a bad Googler to know a bad Googler.

I guess we're all just bad Googlers.

We should really brush up on our Googling.
Al Roth's Game Theory, Experimental Economics and Market Design
To the OP: Thank you for sharing this. I'm sure it wasn't easy. I hope that some of the many folks offering help can give you a leg up.

To everyone else: I like HN, but I often wish that it really was Hacker News instead of Startup News, and this is one reason why. I worked for a startup for a while, until it folded; now I'm maintaining servers at a university library, making mid-five digits a year, and I'm as happy as I've ever been. I've got stability, I've got low stress levels, I work 40 hours a week and then relax at home or with my friends; and I've got enough money to live comfortably, save for retirement, and have a few luxuries besides.

We need to stop telling aspiring coders that they're not worth shit unless they're taking risks, burning with ambition, dreaming of being billionaires. Some people really enjoy that road, and that's okay, but sometimes taking the safe and easy path is a perfectly fine and noble thing to do.
Twitter is probably the best technology company that has ever helped this community. They built bootstrap to help start of all your companies, and open sourced Mesos for when you get big. If rvm was saveable they would have not rewrote that mono app into services. A tuned JVM is a great compromise of performance and development flexibility.
That sounds like an impressive way to create an echo chamber of opinions. "Looks like what you said isn't what other people believe so you shall be punished!"
> (and malware)

Has this really been a problem since XP SP2? Maybe I haven't been using my windows machine enough, but I honestly can't remember having any malware issues in quite a few years.
So how does this compare to the rest of the year? How does it compare on a per shopper basis over the rest of the year? Less than one death per day, and about 10 injuries per day. What are the statistics for other events that draw large crowds?
I thought this was pretty cool until I encountered this douche-like tone in the article:

Yes, this Jewish white kid wants to be a rapper and calls himself “Lil Dicky.” Get over it.

Anyone that throws race, religion or sexual preference into the mix and assumes the reader has a problem with it is not a very good writer.
I ended up writing a wrapper around youtube-dl and ffmpeg to download the MPEG-DASH video and audio streams and mux it because of this. It was a spur-of-the-moment hack, so don't expect error handling.

https://github.com/rahulg/dotfiles/blob/master/tools/dashtub...
developer/ designers don't pay for web services anyway :) It's only the rest of the population that pay for things. Said developer/ designers find open source alternatives.

Who cares what tech stack a web app is written with. It's like saying you wont pay for services that use rails, prototype instead or jquery, or a color palette you don't like.
Airline pilots are also woefully underpaid, particularly in the regional lines. After spending a lot of time and money on an ATP license and probably a degree (the cookie cutter "career airline pilot" programs run $50-70k), pilots can expect to make under $20,000 annually at a regional. During Congressional hearings after an accident, it was revealed that the copilot made $16k. Career pilots a few decades in barely break $60-70k. And many fly 14+ hours a day.

Given the race to the bottom in the airlines I would consider ALPA and the airline unions necessary and I am all for treating pilots better. Since pilots, you know, keep aircraft from decorating the sides of buildings.

It's pretty sad when a Wendy's manager can do better than a regional captain.
If only this were the singular problem with higher education.

I have a problem with the phrase the problem, as if there were a single, uniquely identifiable problem. Example sentence: The problem with 'the problem' is that there is no canonical, singular, uniquely identifiable problem.
Mobile Chameleons: Apps that Adapt to Users
Update HTC One Google Play Edition to Official Android 4.4 KitKat [How to]
thanks! Searching through small startups in NYC on AngelList now and it seems that there are not so many of them.
I don't see anyone who's mentioned Portland, OR yet. If you're around there, I'd be happy to talk: pj@illuminatedcomputing.com. My startup failed two years ago, with a homemaker wife, two kids 2 & 0, no health insurance, and almost no savings. Pretty scary. I've been freelancing since then and it's a huge relief to be out of that place. You have more support than you know!
Note that Ask HNs have their own tab. They often get comments way after they disappeared from the front page.
I'm not sure "intrinsically superior" is the right way to think about this. If you were asked for a mechanism to get web clients to execute stuff "fast" that was generated from a traditional C-like compiler front end, you surely wouldn't have designed asm.js. You'd probably have ended up with something more like the JVM or PNaCL.

It's true that asm.js wins for compatibility, for obvious reasons. And that's a powerful advantage. And it works in the same runtime that existing web apps do, which likewise a win; Java and especially NaCl have complicated interoperability paradigms. They are not just "a faster web page", which is what 90% of developers really wanted to begin with.

That said, the remaining 10% really do want something more. They want to write targetted architecture-specific assembly, perhaps. They want access to syscall-level abstractions like threads and true sockets (buffer sizes, Nagle settings, timeouts, etc...). And asm.js has nothing for these people.

And despite its simlicity, asm.js is still mostly just a toy. It's got one working compiler backend that isn't packaged sanely anywhere. I've three times now decided to get serious and build emscripten from source, and three times given up -- it lags LLVM releases, it has glitchy behavior. Compare to clang and especially gcc which build robustly and cleanly everywhere and come with elaborate test suites. This isn't a toolchain I'm about to start betting a company on, for sure.

Give it time. I like asm.js too. But it's never going to be The Answer to remotely deployable "native like" code any more than Java was.
Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits In Plan To Discredit 'Radicalizers'
"I Am Not Satoshi" is also an anagram of "I, Homo Satanist".
The rise of context-aware computing
I have no idea if he is a bullying cock or not, but his personal website is a spectacular artifact of narcissistic douchebaggery. I am not sure I have ever seen someone tell you he doesn't care what you think of him so many times in such a short span. It reads like a high school journal.

One day, when he is an adult, he will look back on that and really cringe.
OpenXML is a proprietary format?

That seems like a stretch to me.
Dont want to hurt OP but seems like he is a troll, he just joined 7 days ago and made 500+ karma.

Would happy if he prove me wrong by writing in detail what he did and how did he failed, sympathetic people will be ready to rush money to him including myself, but dont want to be a victim of emotional blackmailing.
>Many people could derive huge benefits (in the case of patented medicines, life!) if we hadn't artificially made the copies and drugs scarce.

That's a very short term analysis. Again, drugs don't just drop from the sky. Unless there's an alternative funding model, people copying drugs for free means the firm that did the R&D to make the drug goes bust, and won't invent future drugs that would save even more lives. Until the number of untreatable diseases tends to zero, making sure drug firms survive is a much higher long term priority than saving a few lives now.

>Authorship is scarce, but copyrights only indirectly relate to authorship. They are an attempt to encourage authorship by restricting society.

All laws are restrictions on society.

> However, by banning derivative works, they also reduce authorship.

No, it only bans unlicensed derivative work. See all the recent "Tom Clancy's XYZ" novels, or the new Bourne novels, or the entire plethora of Star Wars novels and animation. If you profit by building on the foundation laid by somebody else, don't they deserve a cut?

And heck, if someone really wants to author unlicensed derivative work, they can post to a fanfic site. If you've ever read fanfic, or heck, any amount of amateur work, you'd realize why any talent that we find worthwhile is so precious and should be nurtured.

> Empirically, many works of authorship got quite well funded without the support of copyrights.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but historically works got funded was through the means of patronship or commissions from rich people. Not a terribly scalable process.

Yes, we apply artificial scarcity to copies because authorship is scarce. But that's the best way we know how -- that's how economics has always worked. But until we've figured out a better way we should not just abandon a model that's worked pretty well so far.
> Is my logic incorrect? Does merit not correlate with the ability to make money? Is merit not heritable?

You're using the word "merit" in an impossibly vague and poorly-defined way. You might as well say that having a sweet tattoo is a merit when picking up dudes/ladies, and merit is heritable, therefore sweet tattoos are heritable.

And, again, you're the one making extraordinary claims, so you're the one who needs to provide extraordinary evidence. I would genuinely love to see it.
It's gold ratio fell from 16:1 in 19th century to 100:1 in 1930s.

Getting only 15% of your savings is not a good result :)
Personally, I make certain assumptions of a site using Bootstrap, all of which revolve around product maturity: if a site has identifiable Bootstrap design, then I assume they haven't been old enough/profitable enough to afford a new coat of paint.

That being said, unless you're creating a service specifically for picky designers/developers, it doesn't matter. 99.8% of the Internet has no idea what Bootstrap is.

(ps: the folks who first made Bootstrap worked at Twitter, but Twitter let them take the ownership of the product with them as they left.)
wow, that's insecure! A co-worker mistakes your desktop for a mac and you take the time and trouble to switch operating systems!! haha.

if you only tried it for a week it's hard to make any judgement about stability. Even Windows can stay up for a week.
How to introduce a new tool in the workplace (part 2)
Good lord yes. Before the drive crisis we were smug and confident and everything was operating smoothly and according to plan, we just couldn't even imagine what could possibly go wrong. Yep, and we bought our drives JUST in time, the longer you delay the purchase the lower the cost the higher the profit.

What did Andy Grove say? "Only the paranoid survive." Now we run a larger buffer of drives.
Add some value, advise him specifically what he and people in similar condition could do, if you know someone ask him to get contact details. If you can help him getting some leads loud your voice.
Agreed. The first rule of computing is that anything can do everything -- it's just a matter of how challenging it is to implement.

The notion of transactions were invented not for performance, but because they are easier to reason about. So much easier that it often means the difference between a project that never finishes and a project that finishes so early that you have time to spend on optimization and caching.
Never too late to try. I'm beginning to figure this out now.
See also http://sharklet.com/
...said the 23-hour-old account.
Please do reach out to Zed Shaw. His offer is genuine and I can't think of a better person to offer you some help.
We really wanted to focus on the scale of operations for this article so we used a full http request / response. The payload of the response was 1 byte.

Anthony F. Voellm
Google Cloud Performance Engineering Manager
@p3rfguy
I'm from Phusion.

There will be no Ruby Enterprise Edition 2.0. REE has been discontinued.

The original goal of REE was to incorporate our copy-on-write friendliness patches into Ruby, and to distribute it in a user-friendly form. Since then, its goal has been extended to include other useful patches as well. We've discontinued Ruby Enterprise Edition for the following reasons:

1. Ruby 2.0 incorporates (or obsoletes) all these improvements.

2. Ruby 1.8 is no longer supported even by its upstream authors.

3. We have limited resources and wanted to focus on Phusion Passenger. Since the discontinuation of REE we've made tremendous improvements in Passenger.

The plan was to hand over maintainership to another interested party. Unfortunately nobody volunteered. http://blog.phusion.nl/2012/02/21/ruby-enterprise-edition-1-...
> those mistakes are basically ensuring that I can never get into a top-tier master's program

Take courses at a local community college or state university to bring up your GPA and demonstrate that you now do take things seriously. It works.
Unfortunately, this is the shared reality of many in the Valley. And that's not to say you should feel any less or more guilty than others faced with this dilemma.

The challenges that exist with developing products for "everyone else" are nothing short of daunting. For one, anything that comes with high cost and high functionality will most likely intimidate the average consumer.

Much easier to develop for those who are more savvy than your average Joe blow who doesn't wish invest the time nor money while adopting a new product. Even with all that being said, I do believe there needs to be more of push to cater to those who aren't as sophisticated.
Thats about right. In hindsight a tcpdump or other trace might have been useful to include.

Anthony F. Voellm
Google Cloud Performance Engineering Manager
@p3rfguy
the problem with higher education is that with all it's great rhetoric it was made for the greatest common denominator. it's not made to surface ones capabilities and talents, it's rather designed to network and create as many mediocre worker bees as possible.

on an unrelated sidenote, i'm looking for professions or studies where the biggest gap exists between what is taught and is actually used or needed during actual work or practice. if anyone has suggestions, please comment or email me.
It sounds more like an issue with the customs agent, and not TSA. Was the note notarized? In America 16 is a minor and needs parent or guardian approval, a friend is not a guardian. I would say your experience was probably about par for the course for an unescorted minor entering the country (your friend doesn't really count) If the note wasn't notarized I'm surprised you actually made it into the country!
We explain how to setup a dev and build environment here: http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/contributing/devenvironment/

I guess we could reference that it the install docs.
Indonesian Hackers are Hit back to Australian Police Websites
>> He definitely needs to be called out on this.

Maybe it's just because I'm old and jaded, but I think the ad is doing people a favor. Clearly it's an "overwork, underpaid" position, which should raise red flags for most people to say "Next!"

It's a lot less insidious than being dragged through an interview cycle where they don't tell you what they consider market value for the position you're interviewing for until the later stages, or where they won't tell you that everyone in the company is a workaholic doing 80 hours a week unless you know to ask.

Sure, it's a sucky position, and you can call him out. In my experience, people like that can't be educated. They'll feign some remorse, but all they'll do is use softened, misleading wording and end up wasting the time of prospective candidates who will be misled into thinking that this is a better job than it really is.
On internet its easy to dumb people emotionally. You are a nice person, but instead of feeding fish it would be wise to have him learn how to fish.

People enjoy emotional blackmailing others.
Knot DNS Server
For anyone that hasn't experienced it first hand: "programmer" + "IT/computer guy" is a recipe for professional failure. The demands are so different and balancing them is impossible. You can be an IT person or software developer but never both at the same time. It is also a sign that whomever job description doesn't understand the difference.
There is a difference between wanting to do it, and being forced to do it.