skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So first about the article:

>>The notion of standard deviation has confused hordes of scientists

What an assertion! It also proved to be very useful for hordes of scientists... what about some examples of confused scientists ?

>>There is no scientific reason to use it in statistical investigations in the age of the computer

As someone who uses it daily I am eagerly awaiting his argument.

>>Say someone just asked you to measure the "average daily variations" for the temperature of your town (or for the stock price of a company, or the blood pressure of your uncle) over the past five days. The five changes are: (-23, 7, -3, 20, -1). How do you do it?

Ok... if I am to calculate the average I am calculating the average if I need to know standard deviation I calculate standard deviation...

>> It corresponds to "real life" much better than the first—and to reality.

What the flying fuck. What "real life" ? Standard deviation tells you how volatile measurements are not what mean deviation is. Those are both very real life things just not the same thing.

>>It is all due to a historical accident: in 1893, the great Karl Pearson introduced the term "standard deviation" for what had been known as "root mean square error". The confusion started then: people thought it meant mean deviation.

I don't know how one can read it and not think: "is this guy high or just stupid?".

>>. The confusion started then: people thought it meant mean deviation.

I am yet to see anybody who thinks that standard deviation is mean deviation. It's Taleb though. Baseless assertions insulting groups of people are his craft.

>>What is worse, Goldstein and I found that a high number of data scientists (many with PhDs) also get confused in real life.

One example please ?
I can give hundreds when std dev is useful and mean deviation isn't. Anything when you decide what % of yoru bankroll to bet on perceived edge for example.

Ok so he asserted that people should just use mean deviation instead of mean of squares. Guess what though, taking the squares have a purpose: it penalizes big deviations so two situations which have the same mean deviation but one is more stable have different standard deviations. THis information is useful for many things: risk estimation or calculating sample size needed for required confidence (if you need more experiments, how careful should you be with conclusions and predictions etc).
He didn't mention how are we going to achieve those with his proposal. Meanwhile he managed to throw insults towards various groups without giving one single example of misuse he describes.

This is not the first time he writes something this way. His whole recent book is like that. It's anti-intellectual bullshit with many words and zero points. He doesn't give any arguments, he throws a lot of insults, he misues words and makes up redundant terms which he then struggles to define.
The guy is a vile idiot of the worst kind: ignorant and aggressive. Him gaining so much following by spewing nonsense like this article is for sure fascinating but there is no place for him in any serious debate.
This works well for X-sandboxing* e.g. a browser. Completely seamless, in contrast to Xephyr.

* Each window can sniff keyboard input etc. of every other window on the same server.
Silent Circle is for business use to avoid industrial espionage. If you are an activist or suspected criminal I would imagine they would cooperate with any court order to feed you a malicious update that allows federal access just like Hushmail does. They swear up and down this is impossible but it's a for profit business they arent going to risk it protecting whistleblowers, wanted hackers or enviro activists. Redphone at least you can build it yourself and prevent targeted updates
I've turned off subpixel anti aliasing on my macbook pro retina.

Net step would indeed be disabling anti aliasing
I don’t know - you come across as fairly victimized in this post.

I somehow doubt your failures with more attractive girls are down to “being cockblocked by gays and fatties” - my initial feeling is that it may have something to do with your stellar perception of other people.

Seriously, “I complain about fat girls hitting on me.” “I complain about gays hitting on me.”
I think what he is saying is if you think technology is a viable replacement for democracy your going to be in for a rude awakening. if you making stuff to get rich you can do more than you could but so can mage corporations.
So when are we expected to be able to write FirefoxOS Apps in Rust?
I agree with your interpretation, but bitcoin eliminates that kind of fraud, while requiring you to protect against theft.
My thoughts exactly. Listening to John, he somehow manages to refer to how sucky HFS+ is literally in every other episode of whatever podcast he happens to be on.
That's useful, and user-hostile. On iOS you can just tap "Skip this step" if you don't want to use an Apple account with it.
I was just wondering about a very related problem. I do 5 measurenments of some random variable (let's say execution time) and average them. How should I report the variability of that average?

State the sample size and standard deviation?
Sometimes nations lie to one another--even allies--in order to further their own self-interest. A diplomatic program that does not take that into account will find itself surprised in negative ways. Spying is one of several tools for managing that problem.
By the way, this is exactly why the NSA will not catch many terrorists. You can always hide data and you can always hide communication (which is just data written and read by two different endpoints).
I think it's a map of countries that lost a 125 million dollars Mars probe after failing to properly convert between imperial and metric units.
It is a plain fact that people rarely distinguish between philosophy, religion, and culture. As a former mormon who served a mission in a foreign country, I witnessed this first hand: American missionaries (mostly from Utah) trying to superimpose their culture on foreigners and calling it religion, while foreign members pushed back (appropriately IMO) when they felt that the religion didn't really clash with their culture which was being stripped from them.

Now I am seeing this from an outside perspective; I'm not a programmer or software engineer but I work directly with them in a weird sort of non-supervisory product manager role. In my opinion, this is no different...in fact, "Agile", which as far as I can tell is nothing more than a hand-wavy underspecified form of Extreme Programming, has so much ambiguity in its definition that you can't ask any two advocates and get the same response as to what it is. And as such, whenever there is a problem with the outcomes of the process, the only apt response is the No-True-Scotsman fallacy...which makes development descend into the phenomenal failure of productivity that all holy wars are.

This isn't unique to Agile. Lean and Six Sigma are also mixed bags of philosophy and process, and they have been mixed bags of occasional success and phenomenal failure.
> No, asm.js on browsers that do not use AOT compilation is already faster than non-asm.js for the workloads of interest (compiled from C/C++, etc.).

That would be a bytecode-to-asm.js compiler. Hence, no difference besides distribution.

I was not aware so many features are getting added to JS for the sake of asm.js. Other than structure/array abstractions (like LLVM's), which largely only improve debugging, I can't think of important missing features that can't be fixed with compilers or extra APIs.

The only major objection remains lack of elegance (which is indeed largely a syntax/decoding argument). I guess browsers environments are doomed to be ugly and quirky.
It's different, it means there is no Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL) in Node.js.
What influences users' decisions to take mobile apps into use?
How people assessed the influential factors before actually using the applications? Please share if there are any academic research done under this question.
Social Problems to consider with Drones
The average age of HN (in 2012) is lower than the average age of Reddit
Full article with more demographics

http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/21/report-social-network-demographics-in-2012/
If you want to reach everyone who has a modern web browser or equivalent (modern web engines are in many devices now), then the rolling web standards party is the only "alternative tech" outside of native stacks.

Businesses that can afford to port or rewrite for every platform out there are rare. The web replaced Visual C++ / RogueWave windows apps for a reason.

Mobile pulls back toward per-OS apps, but only really to low degree: iOS for "elite consumers" (I didn't make that up), Android in several ways: native for games, some Java apps, and a long tail of PhoneGap-wrapped web apps.

Common among the mobile app approaches are web(view)-based apps and native apps. Emscripten/asm.js handles the latter by cross-compilation. The plugins escape valve for "alternative tech" is gone on mobile, so this is likely to be "it" for a while, IMHO.

The web+mobile composite is an ecosystem. Energy is never free, so apart from enthalpy beating entropy locally, tech that flows downhill usually wins with developers and publishers. Game devs/pubs porting their C++ catalogs to JS via Emscripten is an example of "flowing downhill".

What about opening files? The Web has lots of APIs, more all the time. Firefox OS has local storage, and it has only the web as its platform.

/be
I tend to listen to 80s goth/metal/industrial music, on the basis that that's what I used to listen to, go clubbing with, and enjoy the most.

There are times when I'll listen to random things, such as Jeff Wayne's war of the worlds, opera, or piano works, but generally I'm an 80s metal-head at heart!
4 major broadband providers would be a lot better than 2. In the US, the two are the cable TV company, and the telephone company. Recently, a telephone companies came to a marketing agreement with the cable companies; the telco would control the wireless connections, and stop seriously competing on the wired broadband side. So, we might be moving to de facto monopolies for fixed line.

How does France have 4 providers? Wherever we tried line-sharing here, the ILEC would stop repairing the lines used by competitors until the customers switched to the incumbent.
Don’t have any recommendations here, just thought I’d mention that for the stated purpose—​preventing the tracking of the cellphone location (i.e. where you go)—​running your own VoIP to PSTN/​ISDN/​GSM bridge at home would be sufficient.

Completely anonymous hosted PSTN bridge would be very open to abuse, so I imagine not many of them are/will remain accessible via Tor. But for completely secure and/or anonymous communication you don’t need or want PSTN, all you need is (encrypted) VoIP–VoIP that you control, and can optionally expose via Tor (as a hidden service).

Bonus points: GSM bridge at home raises less flags. You could even “take it for a walk” from time to time to make it appear even less suspicious.
The central limit theorem shows us that unimodal data with lots of independent sources of error tends towards a normal distribution. That description is a good first-pass, descriptive model for lots and lots of contexts, and standard deviation speaks well to normally distributed data.

Squaring error isn't just a convenient way to remove sign, it's driven by a lot of data-sets' conformance to the central limit theorem.
Full article with more demographics

http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/21/report-social-network-de...
No. There are absolutely no citations or specific examples. There is the claim that "every time a newspaper has attempted to clarify the concept of market 'volatility', it defined it verbally as mean deviation yet produced the numerical measure of the (higher) standard deviation," which is not an example, it's a fact claim without a shred of evidence behind it (and as it is an absolute claim, you only need to find one example of a journalistic article on the stock market that properly defines standard deviation to prove it wrong).
Risk. I have family and because I can't just out my job (with very good salary) and work 150% time on my project/product without get money for this.
While invoking 9/11 isn't exactly the best way to illustrate the point I agree with Isaac that this doesn't have anything to do with npm, and is just an attempt at digging up old drama.

And yes, the sitation with regards to that commit is unfortunate, but I'm not sure what any of us can do about it beyond wait for someone to get over themselves and start contributing again.
Thanks for the ori link! :)
Because the author does seem to care about defining what COW means, because "atomic cow" doesn't readily google to its proper meaning, and because it doesn't seem to be otherwise mentioned here:

COW: Copy-On-Write

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy-on-write
I've been tasked with raising freshly hatched human beings. My task is to do my best to make sure that these tiny humans turn out to be worthwhile, contributing adult humans. I supervised them during their baths as infants/toddlers because an infant/toddler doesn't know yet that you can drown in very shallow water or that hot water can burn. I supervised them when we first took the training wheels off the bike because balance is hard, crashes happen and need attending to. I supervise them when we're at the playground because not every human in the world is a worthwhile, contributing human and some of them like to do bad things. I supervised them while learning to use a knife because knives can hurt if used incorrectly. I don't understand why people are so confused about a parent supervising a child's computer use. I'm not some fucking idiot that is going to interrogate my kid about why she Googled "Mark Twain". But if I noticed that my 6 year old had been reading up on how to cook Meth, I might want to have a few words with him. It is my job as a parent to make sure he understands that cooking Meth is illegal and dangerous. That doesn't mean he can't have a science kit for his birthday. Raising children is more than keeping a roof over them and feeding them. It is about letting them experience things on their own but stepping in when guidance is needed. But everyone is free to raise their children the best they see fit.
> Interestingly, in order to keep atomic time in agreement with astronomical time, leap seconds occasionally must be added to UTC. Thus, not all minutes contain 60 seconds. A few rare minutes, occurring at a rate of about eight per decade, actually contain 61.

And thus, the programmer's nightmare begins...
Yes, we are considering a variety of corporate and legal structures to make sure that the open source projects and community are taken care of in a sustainable way. There are many trade-offs involved, and we've just started.

I don't feel strongly (as some do) that non-profits guarantee benevolence. There are many evil non-profits (and many more incompetent ones!) which do harm to the world, and many capital-G Good for-profit companies. In many cases, a non-profit can easily become an empty hand-wavey thing. (And in that case, what's the real difference, except $800/year to the state of California?)

Of course, it has worked out well in some cases. Mozilla and WordPress are great examples of this sort of thing functioning really well to facilitate the interaction between a company and an open source community. But it is very early to even be worrying about such things.

In any event, even if we do create a non-profit, the first step is to create a Delaware C as a for-profit company to generate the money that can allow us to create new products, spin up new infrastructure when necessary, and employ people to run the thing. So that's what I'm up to these days. npm has gotten too big to be just some dude's hobby project :)
I'm starting to think everyone involved with node.js should probably start speaking through a PR person. I can't even remotely imagine the logic behind this comment.
This comment was great fun to read, and I suspect that I share some of your opinions about Taleb (although mine are decaying with each day that passes since I last finished reading any of his books), but it would have been stronger as an argument if you had left off the part about him being a "vile idiot".
To be honest, I don't know if you should. But it seems that to raise money you have to put yourself out there and get contacts. I think PG mentioned referrals are a good thing.

Here's Steve Blank's (tongue-in-cheek) flowchart on how to get a VC meeting:

http://steveblank.com/2012/10/17/how-to-get-a-vc-meeting-the...

I've never been in your place so I don't know if my advice is applicable and I live outside the U.S.

The other advice posted seems good.

Edit: other links, from Fred Wilson on how to pitch them

http://www.inc.com/eric-markowitz/fred-wilson-on-pitching-un...

From Wired, how to get a meeting with a VC:

www.wired.com/business/2007/07/how-to-get-a-me/

Another interesting link (european-centric):

http://venturevillage.eu/12-things-you-need-to-know-to-get-v...

hope they help :) and good luck !!! Do tell us if you succeed! (or not, but let's think you will :) ).
> Standard deviation tells you how volatile measurements are not what mean deviation is.

Why would you use sd to convey the amount of volatility? Isn't the mean deviation much more easily understood?
Context I think

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=970480

And I think you should pay more attention to this:

"...as it does more harm than good—particularly with the growing class of people in social science mechanistically applying statistical tools to scientific problems..."

if you want to understand where he is coming from.
Everything you need to know about Japan's population crisis
Their trailer seems a little too "inspired" by this First ELSE promo video from 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHghZnOH8dA
To me this was the key insight. There was this idea of a slowly, ever-increasing display density that we'd have to handle by making everything be vector based, since bitmaps don't scale -- which has a grain of truth, and a certain aesthetic beauty.

But in practice, the human eye has limits so density is not going to increase forever, and we only have a known, finite set of displays to support. So just provide bitmaps for the display densities that matter. Boom. Problem solved.

(Probably forever, depending on how much you believe the "retina" marketing claim -- the difference between the type on e.g. a retina display mac and a magazine seems small enough to me that I could easily imagine a push to "super-retina" not happening in my lifetime.)
> That would be a bytecode-to-asm.js compiler. Hence, no difference besides distribution.

Your "That" referred to something in my sentence "No, asm.js on browsers that do not use AOT compilation is already faster than non-asm.js for the workloads of interest (compiled from C/C++, etc.)" -- but I have no idea what. Please use a noun. What "That" did you mean?

I was not talking about a bytecode-to-asm.js compiler. I said asm.js code (output of Emscripten, hand-coded -- whatever typechecks) runs faster in other browsers such as Chrome than non-asm functionally equivalent code, even without AOT compilation. But as the blog post shows, AOT in Firefox is even faster at startup (and see the link on "throughput" for other wins).

Missing features are not being added to JS for the sake of asm.js. I clearly wrote we are adding SIMD, int64, etc. for hand-coded JS users. Ecma TC39 is not only concerned with "compile to JS" use-cases, we look at apps, libraries, and compilers.

For some reason, at least twice now, when I've written X, you've read Y or !X. Not sure why, but I hope this message is clear, at least!

/be
Agreed. Why can't it be the other way around? The robot being at the office and the father being at home.
The example looks very clean.

Reminds me a bit of treesaverjs.com, which created automatic magazine-like page layouts for any size screen, but unfortunately seems to have run out of steam.

Do you plan on offering a complete solution for publishers including CMS integrations?
Google Launches Publisher Plugin for Wordpress, Lets You Monetize With AdSense
Another recommendation that I learned from an old boss is the following.

1. Store password in a function and return the password.
2. Whenever the password is needed call the function.

Example in JS.

function getPassword(){
return 'I am a password';
}

if(req.data.password == getPassword()){
passwordIsCorrect();
}else{
passwordIsNotCorrect();
}

This is not for sure. Core dump and debug dump usually dumps variables, but not the source code of program.
Dutch government recommends taping off webcam
Thanks! Always nice to read the full research.
Microwave on high for 20-30 minutes. Season to taste.
Congrats, and a great pursuit that may not be SnapChat famous, but may have an easier and much needed value proposition. Modern farm machinery is pretty-well wired, but it's also believable that the systems to organize and make use of such data could be improved. Modern combines are fun to ride around in...like a truck, except relatively safe to watch movies while driving given the speeds involved.
Botulinum Toxin type-H Discovered (Deadliest Known Toxin With no Known Antidote)
I prefer BDFW: "Benevolent Dictator For a While"

A good leader makes themselves obsolete by taking the community somewhere new. A bad leader gets themselves into a problem they can't fix. Either way, occasional change is good and healthy :)
Clara.io looks great, nice work on that! Would you mind elaborating on how it was created?
Yeah. Eliminating stdev so social scientists don't get confused is the tail wagging the dog.
You do it with entropy calculations. Crypographic material (encrypted data and/or keys) has higher entropy than unencrypted data (even if the data is binary). You scan the memory looking for high-entropy regions.

Note that this doesn't work if the entire memory is encrypted, but I can't imagine how a computer could function with the whole RAM encrypted.
What is the technical definition of net neutrality? I look at a lot of these articles and they seem to imply people are using the same term for multiple things.
Secret State of North Korea
In Latin seventeen is septendecim, and sixteen is sedecim (fifteen is quindecim). Language drift has shortened most French words from their Latin ancestors, and the same goes for the numbers for 10-20. I presume that the early French chose to use dix-sept when their words for septendecim and sedecim started to sound the same.

As for dix-huit and dix-neuf, the Romans counted down from twenty; duodeviginti (two-down-from-twenty) is eighteen and undeviginti (one-down-from-twenty).

So it probably made more sense to the early French to say dis-huit and dix-neuf instead.

But one interesting thing about French numbers that you have missed is that it possess a vestigial remnant of the vigesimal (base-20) number system of the Celtics, where 80 is quatre-vignts (four-twentys) to the French, and 90 is quatre-vignts-dix.
Has anything ever actually gone to jail for refusing to decrypt data that wasn't actually real data?

This is why we have judges. In order for a warrant to be issued and enforced there has to be evidence that there is something there to search for.
Facebook is dead and buried :) #FB>40
Also thinking along devil's advocacy lines -- it seems that without a universal basic income, people naturally resort to theft and copyright infringement to pull themselves back up to the baseline quality of life. With the economy naturally balancing itself out either way (The rich either pay taxes or get stolen from; the poor either spend their money or don't have any), it seems to make sense to go for whichever option has the lowest overhead.