skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We expect straight and to-the-point prose, piddly word counts and a literal/predictable assortment of ideas.

Personally, I disagree with all three items. This isn't the first time I've seen a text delay its thesis until the end. Yet none of them imparted the sense of utter bewilderment that this article has. I doubt word count is an issue since I read plenty of books. It's not as if all I read is buzzfeed, cracked, and HN. As for ideas, I don't know how this is relevant. HN's primary criticism is directed towards the presentation, not the underlying ideas. I do think Curtis has an interesting idea, but I still think the presentation was trash.

> writing is still a creative art. (...) surely we can allow a few artists to tell their stories the way they want to?

"Creating noise" is surely appropriate for sports stadiums, but probably not for journalism. This text is clearly explanatory. It's not a novel, it's not a poem, it's an article. Its purpose is to inform.

This goal is accomplished effectively most often by building a hierarchy of abstraction. The thesis is often a single abstract opinion/judgement supported by tangibles such as examples, anecdotes, statistics, etc. Paragraphs organize text so that tangibles support a minithesis, which often supports a main thesis, which sometimes supports a chapter in a book.

The author didn't take the normal route, but did he accomplish his goal of "informing the reader" effectively? I think his paragraphs were too short to organize his ideas meaningfully. And even if his paragraphs were longer, I would have preferred that Curtis group the paragraphs into "chapters" so I could mentally index each segment for the conclusion. In short, I think he failed his goal spectacularly.
Interesting project!

I have some questions that I couldn't immediately answer from skimming either the BayesDB documentation or the paper linked from http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/crosscat/

* The CrossCut paper seems to focus on binary features and categorical learning. How does BayesDB generalize that? Does it quantize continuous features first to make it all categorical, or does it generalize CrossCut somehow?

* How are we to think about what BayesDB doing? Is the underlying model most similar to a graphical model? A Bayesian network? A Markov field?

* On an informal level, how is the factorization structure learned?

* What's the time and memory complexity in terms of number of features and examples for different operations? Is insertion constant time? Is it storing sparse contingency tables of some kind?
A skeptical review of this article and the paper it uses as a source:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/12/getting-in-a-tangl...

Significant portion: "... [O]ther experts have crunched the numbers and they state that although the differences are statistically significant, they are actually not substantive. And remember, these are average differences with a lot of overlap. It’s possible that my male brain is wired more like an average female brain than yours, even if you’re a woman."
While I'm sure this is merely the WSJ's attempt to generate some controversy by coming back to this issue again, many don't seem to realize that a lot of the reasons against a US-Canada merger are not economic or financial, they are political/social.

A lot of Canadians have a very contradictory love-hate relationship with the US. In fact a great deal of vitriol spewed at our current PM revolves around how his conduct and policies are too American in nature: pro-attack ads, anti-gun control, anti-abortion, naively pro-Israel, etc etc etc.

There would be huge public opposition to such a merger in Canada.
Is this future of content sharing and consumption?
Additionally, you only have access to negotiated rates for Medicare whereas an insurance company providing this information is going to provide as much information as they can for all of their members by displaying their negotiated rates specific to your plan.

This is important. Contracted network discounts may not align with Medicare reimbursement rates for providers so if you have insurance through a network you should look for a tool that can compare in-network rates for your plan as MJR suggests.
Seriously, thank you for this. I have a huge amount of anxiety over heart disease. All of my grandparents' brothers and sisters on bot sides died of stroke or heart attack in their mid-30s.

I am 27.

I keep a good eye on all of my cholesterol stats and my blood pressure. I can see myself using this tool a lot.
Basically pulling content from various sources and gathering them into one place - for sharing, lead gen and marketing purpose.
Facebook offshores $1,75B to Caymans - via Ireland - to avoid Tax
Don't worry. It will be well-regulated and never abused.
I'm having a hard time imagining how this would occur.

Stock splits are done to increase liquidity of trading. Because GOOG is ~$1000, and I can only purchase a whole share, I cannot purchase any Google stock if I have less than ~$1000 available.

With Bitcoin, it's simple to purchase $10 worth of Bitcoin (in most places), by just purchasing the equivalent fraction's worth. At the moment, the Coinbase spot price for $10USD equates to .0136BTC.

A 'split' for a US Dollar is a conversion to a smaller denomination, which does make it more liquid in a physical sense, but only for physical purchases. In the case of Bitcoin, i can already send fractional bitcoins wherever, and however.
Final part of Eben Moglen's "Snowden and the Future"
> I can't see how this fits with the process of switching from open mind to closed mind, as Cleese describes it.

Granted, you will need to be proficient enough in the act before you can be creative with it. However, I would think that musicians have their open time, where they explore themes and ideas, just fiddling with chords and seeing where it goes, i.e. improv, versus their closed time, when they find an interesting theme and want to flesh it out even more, i.e. composing.

> The work gets done in sessions that are better described by the concept of "flow", where if you still want to use Cleese's concepts of "open mind" and "closed mind" then it is best said that you drift frequently perhaps imperceptibly between the two.

My personal experience with drifting frequently between the two is that you hardly get things done. An example I can think of is of programming a particular algorithm. With the "open mind" you'd explore how to express it in interesting ways, but with the "closed mind" you'd have to implement it and move on. If you were to drift between the two frequently, it occurs to me that I would possibly be:

1. spending time exploring (while the deadline is looming)

2. implementing a bad solution (if I did not explore enough)

3. doing no.2 halfway, getting a flash of brilliance, do no.1 to see if it works, then rinse and repeat

By setting aside time to play with the ideas, and then get down to actually fleshing the concepts out, I know how much time I have before making a decision, and once that time is up, I make the best decision I can within that time-frame and stick with it. Second-guessing after this point would be counter-productive, as Cleese mentions.
Kasparov versus the World (2007)
But isn't the point of Bitcoin that it's unregulated and akin to digital cash? If you start regulating it, what makes it any different or better than using cash? What's the point, then?
I just met with Castlight this week. They have a really slick tool. Other companies like Change Healthcare and Healthcare Blue Book are trying to solve the problem too (with their own B2B solutions).
It'd make lunch pretty fun, though
Or how good they are at receiving exploit infos from FBI/NSA, who create them.
No it not. History is written by historians, who are constantly reevaluating primary documentation and the conclusions that were drawn from them by previous generations of historians.
And if you want to get really fancy, let a user search in layman's terms too (e.g. "sore throat", "mammogram", "MRI", etc.).
Think Distributed: Live from RICON|West 2013
Sure. Like I said, maybe it's a crime, but not one hugely worth prosecuting.
The VASIMR Plasma Rocket: Bridging the Gap in Space Travel
Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket
Andor ICCD camera images "spooky action at a distance"
LSU researcher shows possibility of cloning quantum information from the past
Researchers show possibility of cloning quantum information from the past
Why Bitcoin is Volatile aka I Told You So
If an article asks a question the answer is always "NO". This one more than some.
He wrote the foreword to The Joy of Clojure:

"... It’s an astoundingly high-quality language, sure—in fact, I’m beginning to think it’s the best I’ve ever seen..."

Not sure what he thinks now.
KarmaSnap: Do Good, Click, Share
Get points for doing good and pushing others to do good.
Submerged Navy Submarine Launches Drone
Your second paragraph is by far the most vitriolic thing I've read in a long time.
Hacker Typer: How To Look Insanely Busy In A Coffee Shop (2011)
Wow HN: Such Bloge. Bloges for Doges.
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
Wow I lucked out. I bought about $70 in Bitcoin earlier this year. Cashed out on Monday fir $800, I needed the money for some car repairs. Looks like I might be able to repair my car and spend the leftover to get just as much BTC as I had last week.
Testing babies for "theory of mind" is my favorite. http://www.livescience.com/10924-7-month-babies-show-awarene...
Show HN: A better interface for Rotten Tomatoes
I think this is great. For the sole reason that it implies the data being transferred fits on a floppy, or a series of floppies. And that in turn implies that it's free from the senseless bloat and inefficiency that often makes "modern" computing so annoying. Software and web programming follows a sort of "inverse Moore's Law", it just keeps getting larger, with speeds remaining constant. Like a gas, it expands to fill space.
Side note, the Norden bombsight was pretty useless in actual combat. The German solutions weren't much better.

But precision bombing was the fundamental engineering challenge of WWII. And the US did solve it, twice. Sort of.

BF Skinner's pigeon guided missiles were the first way, they were crazy effective. They were just too weird for everyone.

Giant irradiating bombs that don't need any precision struck everyone as a much more sensible approach, so we went with that instead.

I think the last 70 years or so would have been better if we'd gone the pigeon route.
Bah :( Just read this and got out of bed to fix this. Thanks!

EDIT: Should be fixed now :) Thanks again for pointing that out. I really need to adopt a TDD approach.
Apple Wants Samsung To Pay $22M For Legal Bills
This is how i remembered it too. I thought he said something along the lines of lisp and smalltalk are the only two languages i am aware you can do OOP in. I tried to find this and couldn't.

And OOP here means these two things from Kay:
(i)'In computer terms, Smalltalk is a recursion on the notion of computer itself. Instead of dividing "computer stuff" into things each less strong than the whole--like data structures, procedures, and functions which are the usual paraphernalia of programming languages--each Smalltalk object is a recursion on the entire possibilities of the computer.'

(ii) "Four techniques used together--persistent state, polymorphism, instantiation, and methods-as-goals for the object--account for much of the power."

i, ii are from http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltal...
Higgs isn't alone in remarking that he would not have had the time today to conduct the kind of work he did in the 1960s. Brian Greene has remarked that today’s grant-driven academia would not have allowed Einstein the luxury of a decade in which to develop his General Theory of Relativity.

Eric Weinstein wrote that, "We have spent the last decades inhibiting such socially marginal individuals or chasing them to drop out of our research enterprise and into startups and hedge funds. As a result our universities are increasingly populated by the over-vetted specialist to become the dreaded centers of excellence that infantilize and uniformize the promising minds of greatest agency." [1]

Weinstein's "deviants and delinquents" include "von Neumann [skirt chasing], Gamow [hard drinking], Shockley [bigoted], Watson [misogynistic], Einstein [childish], Curie [slutty], Smale [lazy], Oppenheimer [politically treacherous], Crick [incompetent], Ehrenfest [murderous], Lang [meddlesome], Teller [monstrous] and Grothendieck [mentally unstable]."

Higgs's observation suggests that the systematic stamping out of non-conscientious non-conformists is a byproduct of over-scheduling them. (Scheduling has to be considered independently of effort, ability and experience. [2]) Weinstein's deviants benefited from a historical period during which they had sufficient time and freedom to pursue their greatest work (von Neumann, who didn't need any time, is an exception).

But I imagine that time is a luxury even for the deviants and delinquents who find themselves displaced from academia into startups. So what is really needed is a startup culture that provides for years of uninterrupted development and focus. (Not to mention a hiring process that actively selects for displaced deviants, but that's another post.)

[1] http://www.edge.org/responses/q2013 Edge 2013 : WHAT SHOULD WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?

[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w16502 Don't Spread Yourself Too Thin: The Impact of Task Juggling on Workers' Speed of Job Completion. Decio Coviello, Andrea Ichino, Nicola Persico. NBER Working Paper No. 16502
Did Knuth read it on a 7-inch screen, or is the font going to be uncomfortably tiny without a lot of zooming and panning?
Omaha Code School
>As long as bitcoin is seeing these huge crashes for no real reason, it's not a mature investment vehicle.

It's not supposed to be.
Moreover -- ER visits with fake names. I have no moral issues, completely nothing, 0, lying and stealing from the bastards that sell $300 for a bag of saline or $40 for a pill of aspirin. I don't care that nobody pays it, I don't care what complicated laws or accounting tricks are, if that is put on a bill and sent to a person who was just sick or injured, that is wrong. It is criminal. So if you are conscious and can get way with it (don't need prescription written out just want to get "stabilized"), give them a fake SSN, name, address and fuck them.
I remember when hacker news had a culture that was embarrassed about making contentless unproductive comments like this.

The article is about Peter Higgs and the current academic environment. The Hacker News thread contains a prolonged debate about the merits of some TV show.

and then this comment.
The main thing I don't like about BBT is that it's generally not funny. Look how the show holds without its laugh track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKS3MGriZcs
I've seen many people say that, but none who proved it scientifically. After all, it simply uses generally accepted equations to make its point. As the author suggests, I've plugged the equations into Excel to get the same charts.

My favorite part is this:

- The Relativistic Rocket site reports that a rocket accelerating / decelerating at 1 Earth gravity can travel from Earth to the Andromeda galaxy, 2 million light years away and arriving at low speed, in 28 years on the crew’s clock. Then the rocket’s crew would observe a beacon floating at the midpoint between the galaxies recede 1 million light years in the 14 years after they pass it.

That's an unassailable conclusion, and it follows that the beacon would accelerate away from the crew as they observe, since the beacon moved away from them at an average rate greater than that the rate at which they passed it. That's the explanation for dark energy in a nutshell.
Its fine you think its fine.
There's no need for a center. Take the infinite universe as it is, and steadily decrease all the distances between the galaxies. There you have it: all galaxies moving towards each other with no cosmic center. It's definitely possible in principle.
This computational cognitive science paper about CrossCat (http://shaftolab.com/lab_papers/repository/shaftoetal06_cros...) provides a different perspective that may be more approachable.
This is hilarious! Great work
Dispute all of it and the bill will likely be way less than 20k. I had mallet finger once and I got a bill of thousands of dollars and charge for a broken finger, then a set, and multiple check up visits.

In reality I went to the doctor once, got an xray, he gave me a splint and said don't take it off for 8 weeks. I never went back for a second visit because it wasn't needed assuming I followed the treatment of did not bend my finger for 8 weeks. I called billing and asked for an explanation and the bill went from a couple thousand to a couple hundred.
Russian hackers/coders are good and there is no doubt about it. Former USSR mathematicians and scientists were always good so it so no surprise that Russians have strong cyber security and cyber crime minds. People like to downplay it but the trend is there. I recall carderplanet, one of the biggest credit card fraud community in the world, and some recent nasty malware that were developed there. Gotta give them credit.
How about we make a trade: we give most of Canada, but keep back Alberta and BC - - and also keep Washington and Oregon. We can call the country 'Cascadia with Alberta'. Maybe this will be Quebec's out too.

All jokes aside, I hope that Canada never decides to merge with the US in anything that would make us 'one'.
Yes but you don't necessarily lose tenure if you don't publish, no? So realistically the promise isn't that important if you don't really suffer from failing to keep it.
Bitcoin Meets Tesla With Lamborghini Dealership’s Model S Sale
> And it eschews static type annotations and strong type modeling

I don't know that this is true. core.typed is really solid.

> Clojure's community came pre-populated with highly conservative programmers from the pure-functional world"

What does he have against Haskell? ;) Haskell is ahead of its time. I agree with Ikrubner here, that his definition of conservative is quite desirable. Additionally, people with experience in Ruby/Javascript/CL/Python make up the majority of the community.
Exactly.
And I really want to hear his/her opinion, because it interests me. My goal isn't to attack in a passive-aggressive manner.
If you look through his other blog articles, it's something of a theme with him.

That said: I've encountered a number of otherwise good journos who can't write a headline to save their life. And many more who can't write a decent lede.
Yes, in France its about 100 to 200 euros.
Question: I assume it uses various zero-days and known exploits to work. But what if I'm doing all of this through a Linux VM? The guy in question is "savvy" enough to use a proper proxy, and his OPSEC is good enough to get away with things thus far...
Don't feel too bad, you're not alone. I got burned in the first big crash last spring: http://peterdowns.com/posts/my-adventure-with-bitcoin.html
original was jpg, can be found here: http://static1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130930064922/uncover...
Actually, I only just bought A coin. And mostly because it will be more fun to watch with skin in the game.
How to change the ringer mode of android device using code
> I've read books on algorithm analysis and I just excitedly purchased a book on discrete mathematics through haskell

I think you love what you do
This and super for constructor chaining in Java
And all from the comfort of your own home in your spare time!
Well, first you need a sorting hat.
Then you have different houses that cater to particular styles of learning.
If all goes well, one of the students will figure out how to vanquish evil.
Cleese says to switch back and forth and specifically drills into the aspect of getting into open mode. I didn't take that to mean you should not switch back and forth within a state of single flow if you can.

Also, I think the characterization of "open" as "brainstorming" is a bit more limited than Cleese intended. I understood "open" to mean in consideration of observed feedback. One example he gave of this was "playing" with other people, and thats brainstorming, but thats just one case where the feedback is from other people.

I do think there is something incomplete in the talk, which is the notion of deliberate practice - I'm not sure the distinction between general experience and deliberate practice was as well understood a the time of this presentation. Yea, the more you practice, the faster you can work, and compress the "open"/"closed" cycle - in this sense mastery of work and play increases potential creativity.
No need to do it manually: use promethease, for instance. Still, it's quite inconvenient.
For some reason I keep thinking "Google" when I read about this. It seems very Google like somehow... didn't they do something similar to this before (albeit at a smaller scale)?

That said, this does seem like it's a bit, erm, big, to be a simple recruiting initiative, even if it is recruiting for the NSA or something. I'm leaning towards some movie / game promotion angle. There was at least one TRON reference in there, so maybe all of this is leading up to a TR3N announcement?
I'm probably out of my depth here, but isn't everything math? Pretty much all science boils down to math. All physics and chemistry can be explained (and predicted) in mathematical terms. But I would think some new substance or process would be the "good" kind of patents that most of us want, even if they were ultimately derived from a working knowledge of math. If that isn't all just math, then neither is an instance of a program running on my computer.
My experience in ads is that most digital display ads for technical people are a waste of money. You will have zero conversions, period. Our demographic does not click and convert. My data include million-impression campaigns for other salesforce products on channels like Reddit, AOL, Yahoo, and Google...

For perspective, 100 views is extremely small in advertising. Hobby-small. You'll need a sample size of a few thousand views before you'll get even 100 interactions to compare. The sample sizes of conversion for this experiment are too small to make any conclusions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4685928

I suspect you will see better conversions from this content ad (i.e. blog post) posted to HN. Which, coincidentally, I fear blog ads are a large percentage of the content posted to HN today.... still nice to see others' findings, so thank you for posting.

Anyway, good luck with the product, but I can't emphasize enough that you should be skeptical with any of the results you have. You simply have too few data points to deduce any trends.
Does 23andme claim to treat diseases? Not that I know of.
The issue is Volume versus Quality. The conservatives (not political but professional) administering our research infrastructure find it much easier to greenlight an incremental (or inconsequential) project versus anything truly revolutionary. We need more Higgs and less incremental academic researchers - industry can do that better.
More like "Apple markets on website by appealing to public figure".

I don't see how this is relevant? Can we link to the public figure rather than apple? :/