skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no snark in my post: I am outright calling Taleb a false prophet who is guilty of exactly the things he criticizes in Fooled by Randomness.

And yes, I've seen a lot of claims of various other successes of Taleb, with a lack of any actual citations or proof at all: His own fund folded after yielding mediocre returns, and then he started consulting for a fund that seems to demonstrate a tremendous amount of bluster, with some curious and cringe-inducing ways of reporting returns, the narrative reading like the story of a gambler, telling you with great pride about the 35:1 payout on their roulette bets, skipping over the 0:37 payout on all their other bets.

I've worked with a large number of hedge funds, many of whom made a lot of money in 2008. You haven't heard a word from them because they have no need to do PR or to pitch the one bet they made right. I become suspicious of any who does.

And the danger of Taleb's lucky bet was that he is listened to as an expert, at least by some. Virtually everything he had to say about government intervention after the financial crash has been proven fundamentally wrong -- actual reality demonstrated that. Thankfully a lot of people didn't listen to him.
Without their qualifying where the 5% figure comes from it is useless conjecture.

If you're talking farms with over a million dollars in sales per year (around 40,000) then having 2000 farms using FarmLogs is highly significant.

Either way very proud of this Michigan startup's success to date.
Quartz2D, but the same idea.
Huh? I... I don't know that. AAHAHAHAHHAHAHAhahaahahahhhhhhhhh.....
Upvoting for awareness, but I have to say, I hate having to upvote this.
I worked remotely previously and figured that the best way to stay in the loop was just have the line open all the time and listen to the office chatter like a radio. I had small screen in the corner of office that showed when I was sitting by the computer to remind others that I was there as well. Most of the time my mic was on mute, but I had hotkey to chime in if I wanted to say something.

I also got access to ethernet connected security cams to take a look around the office.

People adjusted to it quite fast I think. At least everyone said it felt normal after week or so. Having blurry wall projections or even bigger integration between the two spaces would be even better, but haven't been able to try that out yet.
Exactly. For me, a lot of the pseudo-Agile failure turns on not having actual teams. Teams are groups of people that win and lose together. But so often, companies are structured so that individuals win and lose separately. Or the design "team" can win while the programming "team" loses. It seems like such a simple thing, but I have a very hard time getting people to notice it.
Saying that it's silly to think that food carts have $5,000 in change is unproductive because I was illustrating how the calculation works, not how the economics of food carts works, and the numbers I used for illustrative purposes were not intended to reflect reality. (1,000 customers in a day? Not likely, my guess is 200 for the busiest food carts.)

But it's good to have bad estimates, at least, it's better to have bad estimates than it is to have no estimates at all. I'm not saying that standard deviation is a substitute for more thorough analysis, just that standard deviation is an improvement over just talking about the mean.

Another example: We'd like to hire you, the mean number of hours per week you'd work is 40.

Versus:

We'd like to hire you, the mean number of hours per week you'd work is 40, and the standard deviation is 15. So your bad estimate is that you'd have two 70-hour weeks each year. But it's better than no estimate.
It works differently for different people. For me it helps drown out background noise in the office and helps relax me so I can get in the zone. Its important to note that I play my music very low with headphone and with rather no lyrics or lyrics in a different language so that it doesn't distract me.

With all that said though, there is nothing worse than being subjected to a coworker's music choice. Having experienced this at different jobs, I can totally understand why other people avoid music at work like the plague.
Neo900 Progress Update - January
Finally, a convincing argument for the metric system! It will shorten our commutes!
After reading your two above comments, I'm not sure what your point is. You've listed a bunch of facts about Taleb that he talks about. Just because people mis-attribute his success or butcher his ideas when applying them to him is not his fault.
Anything that can run Samba server can be a target for Time Machine backup, google DIY Time Machine. I considered FreeNAS but figured it would be too much time to ste up and went with the Synology Intel box instead, could not be happier with it. Synology has step-by-step instructions for setting it up as a Time Machine backup target.
An advantage you gain right off the bat is that patterns
in AES keys can be distinguished from other seemingly
random blocks of data. This is how tools like aeskeyfind
and bulk_extractor locate the keys in memory dumps, packet
captures, etc. In most cases, extracting the keys from RAM
is as easy as this:

$ ./aeskeyfind Win8SP0x86.raw

Shouldn't it be possible to store an AES key in a way that's indistinguishable from random data?
I do pair programming with my brother and we used Skype for face video and VNC for remote screen. Skype has audio problems (noise cancelling is bad) and VNC requires an external routable IP to let anyone connect and that is not possible in all situations. I found other tools, such as TeamViewer but they slow down my desktop considerably.

What tools are best for remote screen + cam video on an IP behind DHCP?
LearnStreet Launches Java For Dummies Online Course
Insufficient data to provide a meaningful answer.
Giveaway: 3 winners get a Template each from TemplateMonster.com
Love it, and laughed when I got to the reference to SO.
My sincere apologies for posting same link again.
I will take your word for it that some systems make this "optimization" but any such systems is fundamentally broken at the design level. Disk drives can, and do, return corrupted sectors without any indication of failure, the RAID system you describe would not catch those failures and would thus 'fail' in terms of providing any sort of data reliabilty.
So it sounds like this comes down to vendors competing [...] I guess this is similar to Nvidia vs AMD (vs Intel I suppose) [...]

Yes, exactly. Sometimes just seeing how something is organized, or the API can give significant clues to how it is done. It is much harder to start from scratch.

Do we have any alternatives? Are there any completely open radio chips in development?

See my parent post. First you need a few billion dollars to buy some spectrum.
> If nothing else, Mozilla does not have nearly as much money as Google, and really cannot afford a "tear down everything and rebuild it" approach like PNaCl

The rest of your post is spot-on, but this part isn't really true. The barriers to "tear down everything and rebuild it" are much more systemic and less monetary (just look at the small JS engine teams that got us where we are today).

Meanwhile, Mozilla Research certainly continues to grow, and Rust is a perfect example of a "tear down everything and rebuild it" project now run by them, albeit in a different domain than JS.
Very exciting. But I expect it will take some a bit of time to appreciate Skej.
They have to do that work anyway due to Firefox OS.
Pay your taxes with BTC
Is Your Product A Vitamin Or A Painkiller?
You should try walking a mile in someone else's shoes before telling them what they should and should not think or how they should act.
Scientists Solve Mystery of Birds' Flying V
Indeed ... Hipchat has proven to be a great way for our teams to communicate. Also, it creates a nice log of conversations for historical reference.

Secondly, Hipchat is a great central posting ground for all your apps, both internal and external services. The same apps that we have created to increase internal transparency on work being done are set to be relatively spammy in Hipchat, which allows the team to receive passive updates on activity with no extra work from individual team members.

Works nicely.
See also: http://zenphoton.com/

(use shift+click to move the light source)

https://github.com/scanlime/zenphoton
It would not help. Volatility is not doing any searching, instead it is reading TC's data structures in memory to find the key. Basically replicating TC's algos offline.
CrossFit athlete severs spine during snatch event
Secret surveillance court judges oppose reform ideas
For reference see the Amazon reviews of the $10,000 Denon Cat-5 cable [1].

[1]amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Cable-Version/product-reviews/B000I1X6PM
Because it improves the quality of delivery of their service (e.g. video-on-demand). The Internet user won't notice the improvement - their Internet speed would remain the same, by metering - but the actual pipe improves so they can deliver more/better video (and reap the profits from it).
Back before I was married, in 1999 or so, I fell for the "premium" cable ruse. I spent $150+ on some component video cables for my Sony XBR high-end, CRT TV (this was pre-HDTV). I didn't believe in the audiophile stuff (they were crazy), but video quality could certainly be distinguished by an "amateur."

One month ago, my Comcast DVR's HDMI port failed, and I had to dig out my old component video cables for my 7-year-old plasma TV. They worked perfectly, after 15 years. But the quality is no different than the $2 Amazon-branded HDMI cables. My lesson: 1) premium audio cables are bullshit; 2) premium video cables are bullshit too.
There are plenty of places for outrage junkies to get their fix. Let's keep them away from HN.
Hangouts are pretty good at this. We use them in groups, at least.
Yeah, I was absolutely asking seriously :)

It's easy enough to see how someone who doesn't understand the basic science could be taken in by some of the claims made for these cables - what I can't make my mind up on is whether the people selling them know and understand that they're lying.

(edit: to be clear, I'm as sure as I can be that the people producing the things must know that they're liars)
Retail in the age of Amazon: Scenes from an industry running scared
I almost said "states or territories", but DC is technically not a territory. And covering all the bases threw off the sentence. This being Hacker News, I knew I couldn't win. ;-)
Digital interconnects generally do not have error correction. Signal degradation with digital interconnects generally shows a cliff effect, but it's a myth that you get either a perfect picture or no picture. At some point the receiver loses lock, but before that you get a gradual escalation in bit errors that may or may not be obvious: http://www.audioquest.com/resource_tools/downloads/whitepape... (see page 6).

And with audio, errors caused by digital transmission, mainly clock jitter, can be quite subtle: introducing low-amplitude unwanted signals into the analog reconstruction.
I usually listen to whatever is on the top of the list for anime radio stations (http://www.shoutcast.com/radio/Anime) while at work (since its easier to just stream some music).

At home I have a large collection of random music (some music from video games, anime, metal/electronic bands, parody/comedy songs, meme themed songs, etc)
New Smartphone To Put Privacy And Control First
NTFS supports it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_NTFS
I am Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Edward Snowden is my hero. AMA
Have you ever tried Screen Hero? We use that from time to time here and it works nicely.
Blackphone: A smartphone designed to stop spying eyes
Nostalgic Capital: Money, Memories, & Miller Lite
From Star Wars to Miller Lite - how the past impacts new product design, development, and marketing.
Seconding you and jasonmccay. Not even two hours ago, I used it to, with ease, scare up some IM'd example data that I neglected to save elsewhere.
Exactly! I thought this whole black thing was some kind of spoof.
I hear this analogy used all the time, with the implication being that you must sell a "painkiller" to be successful. But the more I think about it, the less convinced I am. I mean, ok, analogies are only analogies, but "in real life" guess what... a TON of money is made selling "vitamins" and "nutritional supplements". I got bored once and looked up some data on this point, and the numbers were pretty staggering.

The other issue I have with it is this: Talking about "pain" is talking about something that exists NOW and is, presumably, rooted in something that happened BEFORE. That is, "I stubbed my toe THEN, so NOW my foot hurts, give me ibuprofen". This means that selling painkillers is inherently backwards looking, rather than looking forward and looking to opportunities.

"Here kid, use this protein shake and you'll get buff and then you can pick up all the hot girls at the beach this summer". That's forward looking, that's selling a "vitamin" as opposed to a "painkiller", and for a lot of kids, it's a pretty compelling message.

Is it really necessary to focus on selling painkillers? I don't think the answer is as clear-cut as some people want to make it out to be.
That's kind of sad. Dragging windows seamlessly across monitors has been one of those cool Mac tricks since approximately 1987.
Oh my god that is a premium $275 15A wall plug. There's just too much wrong with this. I don't know where to start. Electrical engineer brain. Is. Exploding.
This is where the "async" bit comes in. Remoteness is a good excuse to work asynchronously, but people still have to think it's important to leave breadcrumbs.
This post doesn't contemplate one of the biggest problems on Odesk. The best of the "team" will perform the test. Then they put one of their low level team members on after the team leader passes the test.

The only way I have learned to work around the problem is to require use of the odesk time tracker with WEBCAM. Can't hide who is doing the work with the WEBCAM taking shots of the person. :)
Looking up the numbers it's still a tiny, tiny minority of roads in the US. Cintra's worldwide holdings are ~1% of the total length of major highways in the US. Significant, but not all in the US. And many toll roads are publicly owned. Or under private contract for X years so the taxpayers didn't have to take out a bond or front $Y million for the project.
I'd love to see Nest integrated with Google+.

"OMG LOL your house is burning down."
> If I could, would I be able to see the number of downvotes?

The only person who can see number of upvotes/downvotes is the person who made the comment. I am pretty sure this is to prevent making leaderboards out of trolling, but I could be wrong.
Personally, I now consider that too long. I have built entire products using index cards with nothing more than 3-8 words on them, plus occasional temporary artifacts (whiteboard sketches, mocks, etc).

In my view, stories are tokens for conversation. Now when I deal with teams who are writing down more than a few words, I look for barriers to conversation. E.g., not all the right people sitting together, or too much work in process.
Tamper evident holograms above each and every screw?
I think Paul Stamatiou is working on something.

http://paulstamatiou.com/storage-for-photographers/
Chat can be laborious, but it has the advantage of being recorded and searchable.

Our product (Sococo) has group and P2P chat, but its also a voice/video tool so you have to remember to chat/paste examples etc for posterity.
Thousand Dollar Genome - HiSeq X Sequencer = Lots more genomic data
How about trying chasing some data scientists jobs and fixing your knowledge/experience gaps as you go?
Thank you for showing the list, which is part of the marketing campaign I'm running on both Kickstarter and Hacker News. Since those posts are not on the first page, they disappeared quickly, and I'm afraid that not many people have visited.

Is there anything wrong with it? Do you mean I cannot or should not post the series of blog posts here for people to visit?

Instead, I'd like to hear from you how you like it or why you hate it.

You may check out if I only commented on my own project from all my comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dclara
To clarify slightly, the proposal wasn't to switch from defining the kilogram as the mass of one particular lump of platinum to one particular lump of silicon. Instead, the idea was to define the kilogram as the mass of a certain number of Silicon 28 atoms and use the silicon sphere to get that number as close as possible to our old kilogram.

This would then allow independent scientists to make their own spheres, calculate the number of silicon atoms in the sphere, and have their own reference benchmarks for the kilo without needing to check in with Paris.
Philly Ladies in Tech, Let’s Step It Up
And a lot more people will contribute nothing of note to science. Why should we cater to the lowest common denominator again?
It seems a bit like you're doing to farming what PetroFeed is doing to Oil & Gas. Great work!
Can't Truecrypt secure erase sensitive data they keep in the RAM, say by overwriting the variables with random noise, when a volume is dismounted?

If so, I'd say anyone who participates in Truecrypt's development is also intended audience.
Our tool Sococo (I work there) works audio/video P2P so it all can stay inside the firewall.

But chat is generally aggregated/federated so ends up on an encrypted server in the cloud. That can be an issue to fix; either its saved on everyone's own machine (and not your pad at home when you want it later), or its on a server and theoretically 'at risk'.
Write a plugin that downloads arbitrary x86 or arm code from the internet and jumps into it, install it on half the world's browsers, and wait a few months. You could say that that new plugin has only one security issue: it downloads code and executes it, but in practice, its security issues will dwarf those of the Java plugin. It's just very hard to build something that can do arbitrary useful stuff at good speed, yet protects you from those attempting to misuse it. Could that be done better? Nowadays, it probably could, as we can afford to run have in a separate process, and add extra layers of code between the JVM and, for example, the DOM, the filesystem, etc.
Any ol' wiki should be workable. Hackpad sure is low friction, though, and handles multiple simultaneous edits really well.
This is insane. By this logic, public goods don't exist. Tax-funded fire departments are great if your house catches fire, not so great if it doesn't, etc.
Convirture announces easy-to-use Hyper-V management platform
Counterexample:

| ..
| . .
| waste | . . | stuff
| of | . . | I
| my | . . | don't
| time | . stuff I'll . | grok
| | . read . |
|(Nassim Taleb) | | .
| . | | .
|______________________________________________________
-3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3
standard deviations
Very valid point about unconscious bias. Even at Phillips Academy, probably as diverse of a high school as you can get, most of my AP Computer Science classmates were males--many of them Asian.
The late-90s project I'm thinking of was called picoJava. Apparently it lives on in some form.

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

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-237302.html

http://www.javaworld.com/article/2077295/sun-s-picojava-i-co...
I once was told to help interview some potential developers to work with me, but I was then told I wasn't allowed to "ask any very technical questions." (and their threshold for "very technical" was very, very low)

Of 3 people who were hired (one, then another a two years later, then another a month after that) the 3rd one turned out well.

It was quite frustrating.
NX has a "rootless" mode, and a "desktop" mode. xpra has only the "rootless" mode.
Official website of TBBT comic store
It is the non-metric units for volume that really turn into a shitfest.

I grew up in America, went to public schools, learned to cook from American cookbooks, and still can't keep all of them straight.

Pints in a gallon? Quarts in a gallon? Quarts in a pint? Teaspoons in a cup? Cups in a pint? Who fucking knows? The best I can do is a pint is roughly how much beer you get at a bar (but that changes from region to region!) and milk comes in a gallon while other beverages do not.
I particularly like Noah Smith's take on him[0]:

"Nassim Taleb is a vulgar bombastic windbag, and I like him a lot. His books do a good job of explaining some deep, important finance ideas for a general audience. He has helped popularize the notion of "skin in the game". His trolling of economists is also good for some lulz (I particularly enjoyed his coinage of the term "macrobullshitters")."

[0]http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/of-brains-and-bal...
Thunderbolt doesn't provide raw access to DMA (and thus the ability to directly access any process's memory) the way Firewire did.
Absolutely impressive. I'm an investor in an agricultural (non-software) startup and what people may not appreciate is the sales process required to make in-roads in this industry. Farmers can be very skeptical (rightly so) about anything that may disrupt their ability to yield crop. It can also be a very high-touch industry in which you need to give face time to your end users. The corollary to this is that once you've proven yourself -- your competition has a deep moat to overcome to take you out.
I get where you're coming from, but what you don't understand is that phobias are not rational. They can't be reasoned away. If you've ever had one, you'd know.

Scared of heights? Man up and go bungee jumping. Agoraphobic? Just spend an hour locked in a box. Depressed? Man up and feel better...

During the few years in which I was stuck in a stage-fright mindset, I learned that phobias work in the unconscious mind. You can know your content well, you can tell yourself there is nothing to worry about, you can prepare perfectly... and you can still be overcome with adrenaline that can cause you to freeze up, shake, and get sweaty.

In a sense, you are right, the way to get over it is by facing it and doing it. However, you have to face it in a controlled, safe, incremental way, otherwise you run the risk of making the phobia worse.
One could argue RC4 could have gotten more insecure. 2013 saw a theoretical attack that would yield the RC4 key within real connection time frames.
any chance for a new programmer to take part?
I found my favourite

http://www.avguide.com/forums/blind-listening-tests-are-flaw...
I'd love to see an alternative to npm that:

* Puts security as a high priority

* That is operated as a federated system (think bitcoin block chain)

* Puts uptime as a high priority

Many companies and individuals could run deployments of it, removing the need for a new NPM Inc to pay for service costs.
Powerful video.
SOrry to be a broken record, but Sococo's product does all of this. IT uses P2P when it works; else it routes through a 'media node' when necessary, all automatically and on the fly. You can be walking around with your wireless laptop on VPN talking and video-chatting; stop at your desk and plug in, and all the streams switch almost-seamlessly.

Caveat: I work at Sococo (I architected the audio/networking system).
Dear e-reader designers and producers…
3D-Printed Music Boxes Let You Compose Your Own Tune
It doesn't calculate all beams that originate from one point. It calculates only the beams which originate from one of the points and eventually reach the other point. It only looks random because the walls are placed at odd angles.