skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Programming "puzzles" in interviews are not made with the intention of tricking you. They aren't designed to make you find some metaphorical needle in a haystack, either. They're designed to be easy problems with clear avenues or multiple avenues of attack to solve. And people asking them are well aware that applicants sometimes get stuck, which is why they ask multiple questions (unless applicants get stuck on the easy warm-up question).
I have little dispute with everything you've written.

However, one place I'd argue with you strongly is that handling beliefs about the world should be part of your model. For example, you mention different upvote probabilities on the new and front page - I'd simply model that with a new parameter beta (possibly related to alpha in some way).

It's far from clear to me how randomization such as what Dan Luu proposed actually addresses this at all.

I'll also discuss one other point: The author here suggests computing the posterior probability of an article being better than another for each pair of articles, which seems rather impractical.

It probably is. However, suppose we went through the effort of computing posteriors, only to discover that we get stuck at the stage of computing pairwise probabilities. There is still a very good chance we can draw samples from the posteriors.

Even though our deterministic algorithm has failed, we still get a much better random algorithm out of the exercise. Given the posteriors on P(good article), we can draw samples from them and employ Thompson Sampling to sort the articles. (I.e., draw a sample from each posterior and then order the articles by increasing sampled posterior.)
Confessions of a Prolific Moonlighter (with a Chronic Writing Disorder) [video]
How William Shockley's Robot Dream Helped Launch Silicon Valley
This kit lets you grow your own edible INSECTS to help cut down on meat eating
Facts about this particular incident are irrelevant to a generalized discussion about police power and how we as people should respond to an irrational and/or overzealous police force. It is entirely uninteresting to discuss particular facts of an isolated incident; the real discussion comes from a generalization of the issues involved. For the purpose of initiating discussion, all that matters is that the scenario described is plausible. Of course its more than plausible, similar scenarios have played out before where well intentioned reports ended up getting investigated themselves. Discussing the pros vs cons of such a scenario do not require that the initial jumping off point be provably true.
I think there is a difference between syntactically valid and semantically valid.

UB always puts you in the semantically invalid category.
More detailed response:

> By "easily" do you mean it happens for some measurable number of small-money participants (of which there are many, of course)?

I mean a relatively sophisticated trader, one who actually understands markets and understands where he can take advantage of markets, can achieve very high returns if he takes advantage of his, you could call it 'agile' position.

For instance, it's quite common for a stock to gain 1-2 percent per day, and to go on a 10% rally within a week or two. Let's say I'm bullish on a stock. I'll wait for a 5% or so pullback, then watch it on a down day. I see a dip, I'll buy in. I could be up half a percent by day's end. Then, if I'm right, it'll rally up to 10% within 2 weeks.

If I'm investing an 'optimized' amount (ie. one that's small enough to unload quickly, but big enough to make commissions a no-factor), then I can make money on a half-percent move. I can be happy with 2%, and very happy with 5-10%. If you repeat this enough, and have a batting average of 60% or higher (ie. consistently just over half with a very disciplined strategy), the interest compounds when you sell one stock to buy another.

Let's add up numbers in 2 percent moves, times 10 trades. You wind up at ~122 dollars, or 22% percent up from your original amount. 50 trades, you're at 269 dollars. Over double. 50 trades isn't very much for a dedicated trader, and that's not even what you'd call 'day trading'. Compounding interest and math is fun, eh?

> Or do you possibly mean that you invest in 10 different stocks and one doubles?

That would be stupid. Investing isn't about shooting in the dark and hoping you hit something. It's about optimizing your return through solid principles, and not giving a shit about any single stock.

> There is no basis for returns to "go down as numbers go up", except if you are forgetting to average in the losses when the numbers were small. (Maybe because they are small they don't feel like they "count"?)

Volume is everything when trading. If your position in a single stock is too big, you'll have a hard time loading or unloading a position. When you get into managing large amounts of money, it gets more difficult to get in and out of positions, which affects how much of a return you can make.
Those are good arguments for the automation existing to begin with, but don't address why manual controls shouldn't be available.

Which to me is the crux of the issue - in the scenario without an available override, when something goes wrong, there isn't anything you can do about it except hope that it doesn't kill you, because at that point it's no longer about the AI and all about collision physics.
The Investment Vehicle Consultancy
E.U. basic income petition
The fundamental takeaway is that a tech book is a startup (if you want it to be). Thinking of it as a product (not a project) fundamentally changes the dynamics of how to go about writing and supporting it.
Sorry I have no idea, it's all an opaque blackbox. This is just idle speculation, take it with a bucket of salt. Maybe your account crossed some automated threshold for spam, voting rings, etc. Readers of the site cannot say for sure.

Related thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6596038

Edit: Some posters keep posting for months after not realizing that they're banned for posting a single comment in ugly threads. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=donalmacc
Thanks for sharing this, I find building new habits and skills is an exercise of building discipline, the realizations you've shared can apply to many things.
From ColinWright's comment [1] upthread, it doesn't seem like it was manufactured. But even if it was, the point of the article did not seem to be that, look, horrors, boys were acting out. That's utterly unremarkable. It was that they (or the audience as a whole) responded well to his lecture at the end. He seems to think this is a new phenomenon.

1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6833804
Is there a solution for automated sprites with Sass when you can't use Compass?
Edan Yago - The World's First Cryptocurrency-based Political Zone (video)
SEEKING WORK - SF Bay Area

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All television news networks and programs exist to sell advertising, and compete for viewers by picking sensational stories, dramatizing the reporting, and reacting to ratings.
Analyzing test coverage with go test -cover
http://www.ironzebra.com/code/109/hands-on-with-test-coverage-in-go-1-2
MongoDB the leading NoSQL database is seeking top notch talent! We are looking to hire engineers at multiple locations. Austin, New York, Palo Alto, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, DC, and Toronto to name a few...

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I don't know why you need to explicitly state "Skeptical", it's kind of implied being that I haven't seen an optimistic response yet.
I generally prefer Make as well and I even made the case for Make when Grunt.js was first announced [1]. That said, I did use Grunt on a recent project and it worked out reasonably well. For myself, I'd prefer to keep using Make, but for many teams, Grunt is a reasonable choice.

I chose Grunt because Make generally requires a lot more background knowledge and ongoing discipline. Most Grunt tasks are configured by relatively constrained JSON data, so it's pretty hard for non-experts to muck it up unless they need to write a custom task. A Makefile would have created much greater education burden for me. That's particularly a concern when the team's Make/shell expert has time-limited involvement with the project.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3777393
Thanks for posting this!

I'm the author if anyone has any questions. If you have some feedback, I'm looking forward to seeing bug reports on GitHub: https://github.com/rpicard/explore-flask
I'm not sure it's that simple.

People hear opposing views all the time -- they just ignore/hate them. Democrats listened to George Bush talking for eight years. The Republicans are going to be listening to Obama's pronouncements for an equal length of time. None of this is changing any of their minds.

The real issue is integrating opposing views -- the Hegelian dialectic where people take a thesis, antithesis, and turn it into a synthesis -- that's where actual understanding takes place.

But this is very difficult, and while news organizations often pride themselves on presenting "both sides", they generally neglect the synthesis step, because that moves from the realm of supposed impartiality to opinion.

The only exception I can think of is The Economist, whose articles often follow exactly the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model, which of course is why they're known (correctly) for being a heavily opinionated publication. But to their credit, they do generally present "both sides" in most articles, which distinguishes them from traditional opinion writers like columnists, editorial boards, and explicitly partisan media outlets.
The article's philosophical wankery was way too pragmatic.

Random vs deterministic is a spectrum, anyway. Given enough information about the state of the machine doing the random picking/number generation all computer algorithms are deterministic anyway.

Heck, given enough information about the state of the universe everything is theoretically predictable, some predictions are just really hard.

Hopefully this achieves the needed philosophical wankery quota.
Just curious, do you have some links on handling non-stationary rewards?

I've cooked up a method of my own which I believe is theoretically sound, but I imagine there must be methods out there that don't involve solving PDEs. (Or at least simpler closed form approximations to the PDEs.)

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/time_varying_conversi...
It's a blessing and a curse. I'm sure at least 50% of people wouldn't even notice, and 90% wouldn't find it distracting. Alas, I do.
a bias towards people who use MacBooks.

and iPhones and iPads and android phones and kindle tablets and ....

Web traffic for some (most?) sites is already tipping over the half-mobile-usage direction (where "mobile" means "doesn't have a built in full-sized keyboard").
I'm puzzled, what's the use case for threads in the node asynchronous model ? Isn't the major use of threads is to prevent long running task from blocking the app in synchronous programming ?
I have no idea what GrabCAD has to do with this, or what the GrabCAD challenge even is.

I don't see why Elbonia would necessarily represent Estonia. It's a fictional country, that represents all of the small, relatively poor, Soviet Bloc states that people in the US don't know much about; Estonia, or Latvia, or Albania, or Moldova, or Slovenia.

This just seems like some false outrage to garner hits for his site.
Wear the cloak of invisibility with OpenVPN and Perl
That's exactly what I'm hoping for. If you don't find it useful it would be amazing of you to contribute some feedback, even if it's just letting me know how you felt.
+1 for compass, but one problem with it is that (AFAIK) you can only do png sprites, so you can't do them for animated gif (for spinners and the likes).
So I wonder which will first reach practicallity the flying car, as touted by the guardian http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jan/30/flying-car... or Jeff Bezos?

Oh, and here is a 2007 guardian article about flying cars:http://www.theguardian.com/science/2007/aug/31/3

And here is an older one poo-pooing the idea: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jun/16/1

Now I ask, which is hype and which is journalism?
The original question asked about C++, but in the old days of assembly language, accessing "out of scope" data from the stack was fairly useful.

For example, Apple II computers had a series of slots into which expansion cards could be inserted to add new features to the computer. These cards, as you might expect, often needed controller software, and this was supplied via on-card ROM. The code in this ROM, by convention, was mapped into memory at address $Cx00, where x was the slot number the user happened to choose for the card. As a result, when this code was called, it had no idea where it resided in memory and, consequently, which slot its card was in. To figure these things out, the controller code used the following trick:

JSR IORTS
TSX
LDA $100,X

The JSR instruction makes a subroutine call, which causes the address of the next instruction to be pushed onto the system stack and then transfers control to the subroutine, in this case a well-known subroutine in system ROM called IORTS. This routine, as its name implies, is just an RTS instruction, so it returns immediately back to its caller. Control thus returns to the second instruction of our code, which copies the stack pointer into the X register. The third instruction then uses this pointer to read above the top of the system stack to obtain the value that was there during the call to IORTS. This value, of course, was the most-significant byte of the return address pushed onto the stack by the JSR instruction. Now the code knows where it resides.

If you want to see a prime example of this technique in some famous code hand-assembled by Steve Wozniak 35 years ago, take a look at page 22 of the following PDF file. It contains the boot code for the Apple Disk II controller card:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3data.computerhistory.org/atchm/do...
I would argue that percentage of population that uses one versus the other is not the best metric here to determine worldwide use, but rather geographic dispersion or likelihood of use in a random international communication. The parent comments were discussing the appropriateness of the comma/period as decimal on HN, as a forum of generally international interest. As such, sheer percentage of users is not as relevant as the accepted usage in an international or intercultural context. We end up being in agreement over the outcome, but disagree on the standard for measurement.

Example of why percentage population doesn't work: 14% of the world speaks Chinese natively by one estimate, the most of any language. [1] Does that mean that Chinese punctuation or syntactic standards are more likely to be used worldwide?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_...
i see what you're saying but if they have profit margins they could opt to keep some BTC. i think the issue at this point is that if one decides to hold onto BTC they are put more in the position of an "investor" rather than a bank-account owner.

business owners can't all be expected to drink the kool-aid, so they don't really seem to be assisting Bitcoin adoption outside of making it a choice in their payment processor
Interview with Entrepreneur Thursday Bram
OS X Mavericks passes all predecessors after just one full month of availability
This is clearly a Cyber Monday promotional stunt. It amazes me that people are taking it so seriously.
I don't think so. They seem to have an agreement where Waterstones sells kindles & e-books but that's about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterstones
get over it weakling
If any githubbers are reading, it would be great to be able to filter my organization's timeline events out of my personal timeline events. It's been bugging me for years. Thanks.
- Okay PaulHoule. Thank you for letting me know.
Not so much people have heard of Matternet, a general delivery drones system. The TED talk worth a watch: http://www.ted.com/talks/andreas_raptopoulos_no_roads_there_...
It's not hard to add, it is omitted on purpose
This explains LSAT and AMD in context of a virtual or swipe keyboard. In both of those cases, the more common word (last/and) has two keyboard-adjacent letters swapped.

Edit: Whoops, AMD doesnt have N and M swapped within the word, it'd be M replacing N. My point still stands with LSAT, and I still argue they're in the same class of problem.
Sometimes I hear animal right activists argue that there is a direct link between animal oppression and minority oppression. I think they might not be far off. If you have the heart to oppress non-human animals, what's stopping you from oppressing the homeless, and if you have the hart to oppress the homeless, why do immigrants deserve your respect? why do the gays, why do women?

I hadn't heard about intersectionality before, but knowing how dynamic the societal hierarchy is, and knowing that individuals are often times worse oppressors then governments, it makes sense that people would cast their oppression in various ways down the hierarchy.
The "failed" life of 210 IQ whiz
Ask HN: Best eBooks to buy on Cyber Monday?
I like to buy a few eBooks every Cyber Monday. This year I'm looking for advanced iOS topics (threading, OpenGL, etc). However, it's probably more appropriate if I make this a general request for any great ebook.

The book business is a bit saturated these days and good books are hard to find.
> Multicopters carrying payloads use powerful electronic motors; You do not want to put a finger near a spinning prop

I wonder if something like SawStop (http://www.sawstop.com/why-sawstop/the-technology) could be adapted to help with this. Probably not worth the weight I guess.
Exploit Prevention as a Service for Rails
Do people really find extended analogies like this helpful? If you have even a vague understanding of how computers work, it just seems confusing to me.
COMPLETE VIDEO: Ron Burgundy Real Newscast In Bismarck, ND
That's sort of what I was talking about. Sorry if that wasn't clear. Anyway, I'm with you on that. :)
1 - Maybe

2 - Not really. Consoles' lifetime is getting bigger. But five years from now you'll get the first games in second-hand or at a discount.

3 - If your friends think like you, they won't.

4 - Yeah but... piracy is wrong. And if you like videogames, you should buy games.

5 - It will probably be cheaper, but see no. 3.

6 - Yeah, probably. But new features will arrive and, with them, new bugs.

7 - See no. 6

8 - See no. 3

9 - Probably not but, by that train of thought, you'll never buy anything because "a new and better product will arrive soon".

10 - Yeah, I guess.

11 - Debatable. Many games don't have a PC release (but I believe that is changing).

12 - Everybody wants you to buy their product. You are free to do what you want.
Don't forget about Washington's spy ring in Boston and New York. The success of pigeon holing the British into New York and keeping them out of New England was partially due to the success of spying in New York City.
Thank you for this. I turned this into a nice life lesson for my 7 and 10 year old this morning about the possibilities that you can get by taking the long view.
There's a "Block offensive words" option that is checked on by default.

Problem solved.
For professional news sites and (some) larger blogs, headlines are usually written by editors, not the author of the article.
"Aerial maps usually aren't updated frequently enough to show obstacles"

I wonder where a company that constantly had a fleet of drones in the air could get up to date aerial maps...
People write modules for node to an audience rather than to scratch their own itch?
When compiled with -O3 using g++ it returns 0 8. Compiler will use undefined behavior to optimize.
Sometimes you need to do a lot of CPU work which the async I/O model will never help with.
Microsoft codename 'Threshold': The next major Windows wave takes shape
“Viral” Isn’t A Choice For Content Creators Anymore
Obviously they're not 'offensive' words, just words they want to autocorrect guesser to reject when it comes up with them as candidate corrections. LSAT is the giveaway - it's there to prevent autocorrect from guessing you meant to type LSAT when you meant to type 'last'. A and S are commonly substituted, and this serves as a way to resolve the tiebreaker when someone types laat or lsst in favor of the more likely word.
This is pretty cool!

What do you use for a stack?
(I don't know a lot about bitcoin)

That's what the thief done. But a user on reddit seemed to track it all the way through the tumbler[1]

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/SheepMarketplace/comments/1rvlft/i_j...
Compiler has the freedom to use assumption that the code will never hit undefined behavior. To actually access the variable you have to hit undefined behavior.
Inertial navigation systems[1] have been used for more years than GPS has existed. Even now almost all military drones / rockets / ICBMs use very precise inertial systems.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system
C# has various options (see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/671231/linq-nhibernate-al...)

The Scala equivalent is called Slick, and it's the only SQL DSL that approaching anything near widespread use. I fail to see how incomplete projects on GitHub which happen to be written in Scala are relevent to this discussion.
Keep ASP.NET MVC projects organized with partial classes
From what I understand, v8 does allow multithreading, but each thread still needs its own isolate scope. That's roughly the equivalent of forking off another node process per thread, which is what cluster does.