skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Timeline — Working for Free Software since 2001
JavaScript or a language that improves upon it like CoffeeScript, TypeScript, or Dart.
The first really strong argument for some randomization that I remember learning went like this:

1. Suppose you have a game which is a perfect indicator of skill. Whenever two people play, the one with more skill wins.

2. We can now give everyone an ordinal number representing their skill in the game. But ordinal numbers are a little unsatisfying. What we really want are cardinal numbers (the answer to the question "how good am I at this, anyway?").

3. We can get much closer to that goal by adding noise to the game. Now, instead of the better player winning 100% of the time, the better player will win with some probability (> 50%) related to his skill. Instead of being doomed to label three people as first, second, and third, we can say "A wins against C 75% of the time, and B wins against C 72% of the time; A is better than B, but the gap is not so large".
>though, unlike Scala, it is not a superset of Haskell, Lisp, Javascript and Java

If you think scala is a superset of those, then you either really don't know scala at all, or you have an incredibly low opinion of all the languages you listed.
I see this as, perhaps, the most important thing I've seen on HN this year.

People come to a conclusion, sometimes by informed means, sometimes not, but however we come to it, we generally stick to that conclusion, for better or worse. Once we've reached that conclusion though, we become very bad scientists. We discard data that doesn't fit with our conclusion, or if we can't discard it, attempt to minimize its significance and promote things that do fit our conclusions as more important.

The media panders to their audience, constantly surveying their audience and reactions, and serving up more and more of the news that we're already predisposed to the news we want to hear. Once a certain capture rate has occurred, the news that people choose begins shaping opinions.

Newsroom parodies this somewhat (disclaimer, I love the show, even though its politics disagree with my own), proclaiming that the Fairness Doctrine was unnecessary, and you can deliver hard-hitting news fairly and accurately without it (which may be a true assumption, maybe not), but then they proceed to deliver extremely biased news coverage that is extremely colored by their own politics and beliefs, presented as intellectualism because we're supposed to get the idea that Will McAvoy is the smartest man in whatever room he's in, so all his opinions are informed by sheer fact and wisdom, so we should believe that whatever he says is true because of that.

Despite that coloring, we see in every off-air scene that he's well informed, but terrible at drawing pragmatic conclusions from a given set of facts, belying that the central theme of the show is even possible with the cast of characters as presented.

Back on topic, because I'm rambling terribly, but the brain rewards itself when it finds facts that agree with its pre-existing beliefs. A chemical 'high five' to reaffirm how right it already was, and to reinforce that it made the right decision before, and now the rest of the world is catching up. I don't know that this can be fixed, but I think that the surest way to mitigate it is to disallow it from becoming too set in its ways, to keep it slightly off-guard, and in a constant state of discomfort.

This might kill us in some other way, and it's possible that the brain will just refuse to allow this, or that we'll all become blathering idiots as a result, but i's at least a step in the right direction of preventing a vicious cycle of arbitrary self-affirmation.
I would do away with the opaque, error-prone cell references altogether and work exclusively with named columns, cells, etc. Yes, named cells and ranges are supported in most spreadsheet programs, but people don't seem to use them much since it's easy to get started with the cell references. Operating on named column ranges seems safer than "fill-down" etc. which it's easy to go wrong with.

I think this change would be more beneficial than changes to the formula language, though I think the one-liner style the formula languages encourage is quite problematic too.
Cool! Now the only thing missing is to integrate this[1] to natively support syntax highlight on diffs ;)

[1] https://github.com/danielribeiro/github-diff-highlight-exten...
Fire your PR firm that is astroturfing HN?
My own thoughts on Scala (scala-debate)
>> So far I've heard these drones won't work because existing aircraft can't do this, or because military drones can't do that.

That's not the reason why I think this Amazon drone thing is just a way to generate some media hype, I can think of many other reasons why the idea is silly and won't work. You can find most if not all of them in other peoples posts in the various Amazon drone articles, I don't have to list them here.

My main point was not that delivery drones are impossible because planes or military drones still need pilots, I just wanted to point out that 'self-flying planes' are so often used as proof for other types of autonomous vehicles, which is based on the false premise that planes are autonomous.
He's fast-tracked for management no doubt.
The EMH does not assert that people are rational. The EMH can be true even if every single person is irrational.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis

How it implies there is a strategy to beat the market? Simple. Suppose you have knowledge (e.g., the next iPhone causes cancer) that the market has not incorporated. You can use that knowledge to trade since the people not using that information will give you favorable prices (in this case by shorting AAPL).

Ultimately the problem with the EMH is the name. It's a fairly technical result that most people don't understand. People hear "Efficient Markets Hypothesis", they think it means "markets are magic fluffy bunnies that protect puppies from twisted stomachs and cure inequality", and argue against that.
If PDAs were inexpensive and everyone had a need for one then they would have seen the same massive growth that mobile phones did, and would likely have had call capabilities added a long time ago.

But PDAs are niche, and expensive. Mobile phones offered utility to everyone, we all loved the concept of being able to make calls form everywhere. And it could be done inexpensively, the device was simple once the infrastructure was built. Then because of this phones entered a features war, and PDA technology and features got absorbed. Nobody manipulated anybody, nobody said we should market phones as PDAs. It was just the natural progression of a highly competitive market.

If anything the driving force was the demands of the consumer, manipulating the industry into a startling pace of technological adaptation to remain competitive. Modern civilisation has it good, real good. Not because of a shrewd marketing move, but because when enough people like something that something has to evolve to keep up with our demands. PDAs never saw that attention.
Wow, never heard of datanitro, thanks for the tip. Something like this but in ruby?
iOS Library List - A useful collection for iOS developers
Hey guys,
I realized that sometimes someone need a powerful library list to refer or make a decision for their iOS applications, especially non-experience iOS developers. Thus, I created this repository for all passionate and honest developers contribute to . I think it may help many people! Let's bring precious open source to our developers!
http://www.opposingviews.com/ does a good job here. It lets you see the best arguments from either side at least.

Edit: I dunno what came over me. I had the address transposed in my head. I meant to post a link to debate.org.
Everything I have seen about the Salesforce Hackathon screams foul play. I also agree that it looks like companies are abusing hackathons for project ideas and code.

At this point I don't trust any hackathon that is created by a company that wants you to use their technology specifically.
Catching Fire/Hell
I think the key insight is if enough people provide misinformation, the real information is useless since it's hard to tell what is true. One could say that this over-feeding of information contributed to why folks didn't see 9/11 coming. Yes there were drops of clues, but they were lost in the firehose.

I also believe that information needs to be acted on to be relevant. This is why corporate espionage isn't very helpful. You can throw a monkey wrench into a competitor's market trials, but IP is very hard to copy. Having a copy of somoene else's source code only gets you so far - you need people who actually understand it. Having blueprints to someone's plant only gives you clues - you actually need someone who understands it enough and can overcome Not Invented Here syndrome to make value judgments.

I recall an anecdote from the 80s where an American car company was taking apart a Lexus. They concluded that their cars were superior in every way, and that all the design decisions were a result of poor Japanese design. Whoops!
Hey guys,
I realized that sometimes someone need a powerful library list to refer or make a decision for their iOS applications, especially non-experience iOS developers. Thus, I created this repository for all passionate and honest developers contribute to . I think it may help many people! Let's bring precious open source to our developers!
It's an open source language - surely critical security fixes are easily patched in?
I can't handle the day/month/year syntax
There isn't anything in that account's immediate history that looks like grounds for bannination, on the contrary. Are you sure it's a slowban, not some technical problem? I'd try to email the admins to find out more.
You've described the opposite of what he does. It is widely known that Buffett does not interfere with a newly acquired company's strategy, management, or overall market. His bets are sure bets currently -- as they are.
"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation

http://old.easyco.com/easydocs/d3/pickref/page1517.htm

(50 year old methods that worked well on the technology of the day would fly today.)
>So Haskell doesn't do it justice because Haskells insistence on purity makes it impractical for me in getting stuff done

I know this will sound snarky, but I have to ask: have you tried haskell before? I only ever hear that line of reasoning from people who have never used it (and I was once one of them, using that very same reasoning to choose a multi-paradigm language). We bailed on scala for haskell precisely because it is pure and has a better type system.
Karma (Spike Lee's having a rough weekend)
Seems like office coffee delivery is pretty common. Ronnoco in St. Louis, they hook up restaurants, offices, convenience stores, auto mechanics. Places where people work and where customers waiting rooms need coffee. Getting a bag of coffee in the mail is great, but Ronnoco will stock you with everything you need including make sure your equipment is in working order. I kind of like the all or nothing approach. What's the alternative, having an office manager or admin assistant go to costco every couple weeks, probably the productivity gains are there over the cost. It helps that Ronnoco coffee doesn't give me any kind of stomach problems (at least what we brew here, so they have a special place in my heart).
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=300bps
Just because you are subject to confirmation bias doesn't mean you're wrong. I'm not a cyclist, but I can't stand all the cars clogging up my city. So dirty and noisy and dangerous. I'm not convinced cycling is the answer though. Mass transit is best. At least until we all have electric self-driving cars.
> I believe there is also "latency creep":

Very good point. I'll have to steal that phrase. Latency is additive in the system but also over time usually. Prototypes look good from then on it is usually just API layers, paths and more code on top. Those usually add latency to the stack.
Epic fail. If you are going to create sockpuppets to game HN, at least do a convincing job. I've seen more subtlety in erectile dysfunction spam emails.
I never understood why Java didn't go to proper sum types when it introduced enums. They all have to have the same shape, just distinguished by their method implementations, same as always in OO. What kind mechanism for describing alternatives is that?
I disagree. CompSci is mainly userland.

Most EE courses these days have the majority of a comp sci course built in. MIT actually blur the line between both. Pure comp sci will not help you understand why your RS485 bus drops have noise, why your serial wont sync and how to get stuff off an SPI bus by bit banging. It's all analogue at the bottom of the stack as well which is why embedded systems people still have scopes on their benches.

Comp sci only people shit a brick when you lug the scope onto the bench and crack out the probes.

The Arduino teaches you to do so many things wrong that its almost dangerous and requires a lot of unlearning. Build an AVR programmer and use gcc fine but lose all the arduino crap over the top and gain JTAG debugging, single step, more memory (!), full IRQ control, timers etc that aren't under a layer of crud. Oh an ISR that runs in under an hour as well, CMT. I could go on for a week.

For ref, you won't find a job writing software for or using an Arduino or a Pi either. FPGA yes, ARM SoC yes, AVR maybe, PIC maybe, x86/PC104 yes.
Everything is just a pull request away :)
>There is an optimal tradeoff somehow.

You are basically talking about Bandit Algorithms, which are a family of techniques to solve the problem of trading of exploration ('discovering new good content') and exploitation ('just promoting what has already proven itself').

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit

There are several bayesian approaches to bandit problems, which calculate the the uncertainty in a bayesian way, and then use this uncertainty to make the tradeoff between explore and exploit (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_sampling).

So that's a well understood problem.

For my money, the 'correct' way to solve the HN problem is as a bandit arm for each article, which you use to decide how much to display low vote articles.

I think this bandit process should be run on top of a bayesian model that features not just the estimated quality of the article from its votes, but also a prior which it gets from the submitter's 'quality' (which is updated depending on how their articles do - this would also serve as a brake on spammers).

Then you just need a heuristic to age out articles over time.

I'm sure PG knows enough ML/stats people to do this sort of thing properly; the fact that its not done means admins are probably happy enough with the status quo.

It's also worth looking at this article by the author of XKCD on voting on reddit, for an easy discussion of simple bayesian voting:
http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...
I'm planning on getting it for free, and if it's useful, probably drop like 5-10 dollars on it. Looking forward to reading!
This is a question that would be better suited to asking on stackoverflow.com
> Oh, I bow before the philosophical might of a Telegraph article :/

I'd love to read a randomized survey, but in principle, a single counterexample invalidates a general claim.

> I don't know a single one that appreciates being wolf-whistled in a professional context.

Have you actually discussed this with all of them?

> It usually generates a certain unease about physical safety

Why? Because of the stereotypes that go with it? Would a stranger walking up to you and telling you that you're sexy be more acceptable or less? What if they said beautiful instead? Or is it that you (your friends? all women?) generally don't want men to show their interest in you unless you first have given your premission in some subtle way?

It seems to me that all of this is stuff is way too individually different to make such broad, sweeping statements. Heck, it probably is different for the same person depending on what mood they're in.
Amazon just announced it will be launching a new drone delivery service called PrimeAir as early as 2015, but safety concerns will be key — no one wants an Amazon delivery falling out of the sky. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says, "Look, this thing can’t land on somebody’s head while they’re walking around their neighborhood." Check out this new video by Mark Mueller out of Raffaello D'Andrea's Flying Machine Arena at ETH Zurich (note: D'Andrea is the tech wizard behind Amazon's robotic warehouse) — it shows a new failsafe algorithm that allows an unmanned aerial vehicle to recover and land safely following propeller loss. According to the researchers, the algorithm allows the vehicle to remain in flight despite the loss of one, two, or possibly even three propellers.
That wasn't what I said. All I said is that complaints like this irrelevant to the guy's article. What's wrong with merely asking people to stay on-topic?
Thanks. For anyone in the same position - Anvil is a good option for that.

http://anvilformac.com/
PowerUp 3.0: World's First Smartphone-Controlled Paper Airplane
Replace fans with users. The point of this article doesn't change.
See now this is one of those viewpoints I don't see very often.
For the longest time, this is pretty much what I believed, and so I never touched the stock market, preferring to invest in other assets. And, depending on how your investing mindset, it's still true.

I was recently introduced to the dividend investing strategy. Basically, you pick big, stable companies with a strong history of paying dividends and increasing them every year, and which are very unlikely to go out of business any time soon. You invest in those stocks over the course of years (using a dollar-cost-averaging strategy or something similar) and set up a dividend reinvestment plan on each. After a few years the dividends should be pretty high and once you decide to end the reinvestment plan and keep the dividends, you have a cashflowing asset.

The problem with investing for appreciation is that it's speculation (i.e. gambling). If you're looking for appreciation then index funds are probably your best bet. The strategy above would probably produce a portfolio where the stocks themselves probably won't appreciate more than the market as a whole, but everything I've read about it says that, between a bit of overall appreciation and lots of dividends, you should end up with a pretty massive return on your investment over time.

Of course, I haven't actually begun investing in this strategy yet, so my input may not actually be useful -- this is just what I've found in my research lately.
There as some people that we call gullible. You might want a few of them in your organization for entertainment purposes...

(trying to practice your style of fancy ad-hominem debating)
Ask HN: Do you use Google Now?
I kind of wanted to get a general feeling on how people feel about Google Now. I'm severely tempted to install it on my Nexus, but am balking at Google knowing my location history over time.

Do you use Now anyway? If not or if you have concerns, what are they?
actually, at the beginning, he does say that you should invest in low-cost index funds
Very well put. It is VERY hard to beat the market unless you have inside information. The cost of buying enough stocks to have a broad portfolio is more than a few basis points to a cheap index fund.

Even most active mutual funds fail to beat the market. Many hedge funds fail to beat the broad market. Since the market is a self correcting average, even the top professionals are just that - average.
I should have put some "irony" markers around that... Mathmatical humor is difficult...
Maybe I'm just slightly retarded, but I can't see what peacocks have to do with anything in the article. The word itself occurs only once, in the title.

About the article itself: this "Jamie" person seems to enjoy lecturing others about how to be politically correct. Yeah, because being told what to do and how to act isn't exactly the same thing the women in his lecture were forced to endure, eh?

Hypocrite, just like all others that reckon they've figured out a better way of being human and must now convert the rest of mankind to the New Wave of Behavin'.
The Hospital Is No Place for the Elderly
Don't use heuristics. Age out articles by penalizing them in your objective function. It's far cleaner.
Hey I made something like this a while back too! Except I'm not so sure mine is "Reverse" PN, it might just be standard PN...

https://github.com/codeandiron/calculator
Healthcare.gov: Better, but not good enough
> It'll spook smaller companies trying to get into this game (how's the nook doing?).

Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm thinking that Bezos isn't investing in drones to deliver ebooks.
Rails and Django also switching documentation to gender neutral pronouns
Had the exact same thoughts running through my mind as I was reading this - "you are missing the point of why you should strive to give kids the opportunity to learn this!".

Learning to "think like programmers" is essentially teaching kids to think like engineers, in other words, recognize complex systemic interdependencies and understand that things usually form a system that has it's own rules, constraints, etc. When you start to understand these relationships, it helps you immensely even outside the realm of tech. For example, the Monarch butterflies are not having such a good decade. Why? Well, the system that enabled their migration (the prevalence of milkweed) has been modified extensively by humans, and now is at the breaking point where there may not be clear avenues for the butterflies to continue their migration patterns. This is a gross oversimplification of course, but the point is that now we can look at the other "nodes" in the system that will be impacted by lack of migration. Birds could be impacted, which in turn impacts whatever feeds of those birds, etc., etc.

Computers offer some of the more understandable and finite systems that we can learn, yet offer incredible flexibility, illustrating how complex things can get. Learning to speak in these languages helps with that understanding.

Also, I don't think anyone is advocating learning assembly or what not. When most people talk about "learning to code", it's picking up a higher-order language that does a lot of the complex things for you. It's not the same as teaching real computer science. It's basic comprehension and knowing how these systems form.
How about writing a real post in the real blog, referring to the article you agree to but where you feel the idea is not expressed clearly or appropriately enough?