skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't you usually end up paying more in court costs + penalties if you fight a ticket in court and lose?
>Ummm, are we both discussing the same article?

Yes.
He doesn't mention the fact that MAD loses information about volatility. He ignores the fact because that would make his whole article look silly.

>But please argue to the merit of his arguments.

It's kinda difficult when he is not saying anything specific. When he says: "look, those scientists don't grok basic math but fail for catchy names instead" without any facts, examples etc. all I can do is call him out on this nonsense. When he argues for abandoning SD I can give situations where it's not gonna work and I did.

>1) MAD is more accurate in sample measurements, and less volatile than STD since it is a natural weight whereas standard deviation uses the observation itself as its own weight, imparting large weights to large observations, thus overweighing tail events.

But this is nonsense. It's like saying measuring temperature is better than measuring mass. Those are just different things to measure and saying one is less volatile isn't really meaningful. SD contains information about volatility, MAD doesn't. That the reason SD is used for many things. When you want to substitute one with the other you gotta address how you handle that lost information.

>Also he alludes to his paper with Goldstein. It is clear form Goldstein and Taleb's manuscript that that Taleb is not just throwing these arguments to talk trash about practitioners of statistics. They

This paper wouldn't pass peer review. What was the methodology ? How much time they have ? Did they have access to a computer ?
Even if it was really serious experiment it's just toy example of people getting question asked in tricky way wrong. What about actual mistakes they make in real world because of using SD instead of MAD ? This is what he claims is a problem.
He claims SD should be abandoned in favor of MAD, what is one situation which people would get better if they do it ?
I am mocking him because is a master of using many words without making a point and somehow is good at seducing readers to like him.
I think dojomouse is referring to the idea of "exponential" being something quantifiably provable and it being used in this instance without anything actually being "exponential".
Google Hangouts is a Contender to Solving Remote Team Members
Faulty frame. Try it with other basic infrastructure: "The more money I think I can make by owning ROAD infrastructure, the more I will invest to build it now."

See the flaw?
Wow. Such viral. Many hype.
If I wanted to launch a startup in 2014 ...
> The standard deviation maps to processes where the "importance" of changes is proportional to their square.

Sure, but the point of the article is that STD is used very commonly, in places where that does not make sense. For example, it is common to see things like "the weight of the test subjects was 170cm (STD 5cm)".
I'm curious what you'd like to see in a travel router. Is it mainly the software or hardware you think needs work, or both?

On the software front, I have an OpenWRT image which I think works pretty well for travel which I've been meaning to publish (routes all traffic over an OpenVPN tunnel and can act simultaneously as a WIFI client to the hotel network and as an access point for your own network). The hardware is nothing special (WRT54GL) and it would definitely be nice if it were more portable. I'd love to hear your thoughts and will be looking forward to that kickstarter.
>Reality always provides some bound

But... it doesn't. You ever hear about the hypothetical possibility of your atoms lining up and falling through the floor?

It's hypothetical in the sense that it's really ridiculously unlikely, but there is no bound preventing it.

Now the central point about different probability curves stands, but that's not what Taleb was talking about--he seems to think that it's the tool's fault if people are using it wrong--and it's also not what Homunculiheaded argued.
Haha I just remembered that you're the primary maintainer of Bedrock. Very cool idea for a distro, much respect.
No, and neither are cryptographic keys derived from passwords, and neither are cipher tables derived from cryptographic keys.

A simple defense would be to access all such material through a permutation table. (Which need not be explicitly stored in memory, but could be computed by means of multiplication modulo a prime.)
I think it is more about doing same science with same results in different places. The infinite long wires part is not exactly reproducible.
Ah, ok, I see what you mean by not claiming I'm dense but just what I'm saying. My bad.

Also, again my bad, I'm attributing the whole discussion onto you instead of specifically your statement. I tend to lump everything together when multiple people respond throughout a single thread as though they are in agreement with the thread as a whole. I'll have to work on that.

I fully recognize the opposing position in this debate, I understand the thought behind it, I use to agree with it. But at this point, exactly as you point out, I highly disagree with it today. For the most part, I see people wanting to alter the definition of ownership for their own benefit to the detriment of the original creator. That the simple idea that a song can be perfectly copied countless times without damaging the original copy is somehow license to demand that the original creator hand over all their ownership rights without compensation is just wrong. It is as simple as the "black and white" example of stealing bread or any other physical object. I would give more credit to discussions about stealing bread because it's possible a human being stole it to survive, no one needs the latest hit song or movie to survive. If time and resources were spent in the creation of the product then I fail to understand why it's wrong for the creator to expect compensation, if they desire it.

Rational basis? What exactly is that in this case? Because I've never seen it. If anyone can give me a rational example of why the "I want it, it's easy to copy, therefore it should be mine" way of thinking is justified, then I'll reconsider my position.
A great looking tool! Can't wait to try it out on a few hundred projects :)
Pretty cool idea. I think it could really take off and go nationwide.

Helping people to deal with government labyrinths is always a good angle, especially when money is on the line. Here in Chicagoland there are dozens or hundreds of law firms that only exist to help residents appeal their property taxes. They do the research to find arguments for lower taxes, and do the legwork of appealing.

I would imagine that local government may have a hissy fit if this started to happen in other arenas, like for parking tickets, but there is clearly already an appeal process for tickets, and so they are really just using the existing system.
This was much more important in the early days of CD players, when there was no buffering between the signal and the D/A converter. The timing of the signal could definitely influence the timing of the conversion, which would change the waveform in a subtle way that could be audible.
Oh, definitely. I'm just saying listing the steps in the diagnosis isn't, in and of itself, convincing, since most of them aren't actually that hard (and like carbocation says, you end up doing most of them in a college bio class), so at least figuring out that you have a staph infection isn't completely implausible (though like I said, the "MR" part of MRSA is probably harder).

It's still unlikely, though, firstly because PCR is hard, and secondly, because what person willing to go to that much effort wouldn't just go to the doctor?
See also: http://www.laservex.com
Yeah, the parent seems to be advocating that the ISPs should have a right to double-dip, else it would be unfair to them.
It's not about whether UX is important or not - and I agree it is. It's about what 'exponentially better' means. Which is to say, nothing technical, and hence something buzzwordy without a solid foundation.

It doesn't detract from the product I'm sure. But he could just as easily have said 'vastly superior', and so doing not made me go 'Danger, danger, casual disregard for meaning ahead'. Especially since disregard for meaning is a bad thing in UI design.
this is great! Takes web development to a whole new level
The Productivity Cycle
Use ZFS. Create a filesystem in your pool with copies=n to get n copies on the same disc.

But still use mirrors or raidz to protect against failure of a drive.
I doubt most people understand or think of "Point" as a measure of length. It is just some completely arbitrary scalar that exists only due to poor UI design and so that teachers can mark off points for it not being set to "12". In many other cases, such as modern web browsers, it is being replaced with the concept of "zoom" which just uses natural numbers with "100" being arbitrarily defined as some loose concept of "default".

They would certainly never dream of using it for anything other than choosing how large they wanted their font, or possibly line.
Optus is one of several major mobile telcos in Australia. Telstra also offers free Facebook, IIRC.

I'm not sure whether FB is paying Optus/Telstra, but I would think so.
I don't know about California, but here parking tickets (as opposed to speeding tickets) are civil matters. They don't go to court, they're handled at City Hall like any other type of fee or fine.

There is an existing appeal process, and it's likely that they either say, "Okay, ticket dismissed" or "Sorry, ticket stands, send payment in."
In over 100 audiophile bashing posts, at last someone who actually understands the issues. USB cables have an 'eye pattern' which affects the timing of the signal presented to the DAC.

If USB cables make a difference, then there is probably an argument for doing something else (not ignoring the problem because USB cables must be 'perfect'). Like putting the DAC and computer driving the DAC in the same box and connected by I2S with the DAC as the master.

There are some good articles on the Audiostream site about why 'bit perfect' doesn't cut it in the context of audio:

http://www.audiostream.com/category/industry-voice
Beautiful.

This is probably one of the better legal start ups.
Also, Docker vs Zones. Linux still has a way to go. :-)
Awesome!! I hate testing..
lgpl - http://cudafy.codeplex.com/

commercial - http://www.hybriddsp.com/Downloads.aspx
The Surprising Musical Origins of Star Trek's Theme Song
Yes. For a side-project of mine (perfectlearn.com), I am developing both a web application and for mobile (both iOS and Android). It's very time-consuming to say the least :-)
AOL sells patch to private equity firm
I agree with you except that you left out the only really important (in my opinion) part of his pretty trivial message: "Sometimes unexpected things happen, and people are bad at expecting the unexpected, and then they FAIL TO NOTICE that they are bad at expecting the unexpected"

It can be difficult for folks (myself included!) to separate their message from their irascible personalities.. ;-)
> The buyer is led to believe they are spending $695 on a device which will improve their audio quality.

The problem is, there's probably no good way to legally argue that it doesn't improve their audio quality, since audio quality is obviously incredibly subjective, especially when most of the buyers are probably very satisfied.
The last time I brought this up when we were expanding our pool to include remote, the response I got was: "Yeah, but then we lose all the face-to-face benefits."

I wonder if I should challenge what these perceived benefits are.
>If Fixed gets your ticket dismissed, you pay it 25 percent of what the ticket would have cost. If it loses, you pay the ticket like normal but pay Fixed nothing.

I assumed this meant that Fixed would be picking up the legal fees (likely with the revenue from winning cases). If not, then there's really no advantage to using it except you don't have to show up to the court date.
But what are future YC applicants going to use as examples of non-computer systems they've hacked?
You don't think that's covered by:

> They are tough and calm. Founders of great companies are always tough and unflappable.
Changing your DPI settings on Windows can cause all kinds of strange issues. I had a problem a few years back where my Windows 7 gaming theatre PC thing I had set up and connected to my 1080p TV wouldn't work quite right; specifically Star Wars: The Old Republic wouldn't launch, and would crash on loading.

I couldn't figure out what the problem was, and googling was no help until I stumbled across the dumbest advice I'd ever seen: change the text scaling. Once I set it back to 100%, the game loaded fine. Frustrating, because at 100% I couldn't read any of the other text, which meant that if I wanted to play the game I basically had to navigate by icon and give up on reading dialogue boxes unless I wanted to sit on my coffee table instead of my couch.
Flipped bits will be detected and corrected if you're running at least a mirror, which you should be. This is one of the main reasons you should use ZFS for data you want to keep, and one of the reasons why it's so much better than traditional RAID.

You can create snapshots of FS to keep old versions, but how many, and therefore how much space is used, is up to you.
Agreed, regulations can address this.
There's a fun activity that makes the remote work day feel like a game. I call it "platforming," as in jumping from platform to platform.

Travel to an uncharted area of your city and bring your laptop. Set about 10-20 concrete objectives for the day. Each time you complete 5 objectives, you get to transition to a new place such as a coffee shop (or anywhere with WiFi).

This segments the day and makes it feel a little more structured, not to mention fun.
I guess it might be that simple eh? Thanks for the advice. I will definitely look into resuming with Grails.
Among other things, Lance Armstrong is kind of a legendary asshole. (See http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112031/lance-armstrong-do..., http://sports.yahoo.com/news/lance-armstrong--arrogant-and-u..., http://www.etonline.com/news/129267_Anderson_Cooper_Calls_La..., etc etc etc)
Ruthless can be an outlook you adopt in order to understand the field of competition. Whether or not you actually start throwing elbows sometimes doesn't matter as much as knowing which elbows you could throw if it came to it.
Well, I agree on the performance (speed) side, VM out, subset In. but feel abandoned on the memory footprint side.

Objects are just huge! Asm.js promises something more like structs, I think. Now making THAT available to JS programmers would be a great help.

I really don't want to go back to C just for faster JS. Lets use the knowledge of the last year to put some of the asm.js goodness into JS hands. LLJS is likely not the answer from a recent jlongster post. Rather than a new language, simply parts of asm.js would be better received by the JS community.

-- Owen
Luck is a function of hard work and preparedness.
Can you calculate a force applied to something that's infinite? I mean, if the wire is infinite, what's it's mass? Doesn't seem plausible to me, but I'm not a physicist, so I could be talking crap here.
This isn't the same thing it seems but I recall a documentary/movie about the dotcom craze in the late 90s called startup.com. My recollection is that the company portrayed in that documentary (GovWorks?) got the lucrative contract of handling NYC parking ticket payments online. Ah ... memories.
Facebook was selling ads almost immediately in reality. The movie made a big deal about Zuckerberg wanting to avoid running ads on FB, but from launch, FB had a nifty native ad system in place and even gave equity in the company to an ad agency in return for guaranteed spend over time.
I hate parking tickets so much that I follow posted signs and obey traffic laws.
CEO isn't overly important until you've got a board. It's nice to avoid the job for as long as possible :)
ZFS is also wonderfully usable. It's a delight to admin. See http://rudd-o.com/linux-and-free-software/ways-in-which-zfs-...
Interesting! Just read up a little on that, and from here http://www.edn.com/design/consumer/4376143/2/Fundamentals-of... it appears that is only one of several options (and acknowledged as a bad choice)
startup dot com

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
Telemetry Protocols, or Why HTTP Won't Work for IoT
Out of all the things to focus on in the article it's that?
>"The realization that the normal distribution is not the only way to model data".

Realization by who? If you understand the normal distribution you had damn well better know that there are other probability distributions.

>The problem of course is that the Cauchy distribution is pathological in that it doesn't have a mean or variance, you can calculate similar properties for it (location and scale), but it doesn't obey the central limit theorem so in practice it can be very strange to work with.

In other words, we're using the normal distribution as the workhorse because considering other distributions is, well, inefficient/unproductive.

> However a great amount of future progress is going to come from wrestling with more challenging distributions, and paying more attention to when assumptions of normality need to be questioned

What exactly is it that you think physicists have been doing for the past half century? The error accounting for CERN's experiments requires actual millions of PhD-hours.

This topic's conversation is at some bizarre intersection of good intentions, concrete knowledge, and woeful ignorance. I guess I tar myself with that brush.
Why is the valley crowd treating distributed systems engineering like it's a new fad? And why are they only using tech made in the past 5 years? The field has been around for four decades, yet they focus on only a couple algorithms and models?
When will we stop crying wolf for every tech company's demise when there's no enough data to support any kind of underlying trend?

3 million is a drop in the ocean for Facebook and I don't even know how much valuable the teen demographic might be. Teen for the most part don't have jobs (heck, these days even older men have trouble finding jobs) and have to beg parents to buy them things. If you advertise a certain product on Facebook they don't go to, say, Amazon and translate the intention into action, so conversion rates must be abysmally low.

Trust me, Facebook can take it.
Using a surrogate mother puts you at the mercy of her whim. She may decide to keep the baby, thus forcing you to pay massive child support. For wealthy men this is extraordinarily risky.
Ask A Tech Event Organizer (AATEO)
Hardware. USB powered. Dual radio, ideally dual dual band (so 4 radios which can be 1-4 in use). Ethernet port. Probably a USB port for 4g. Ideally a good form factor. Probably no battery, use a USB battery or laptop.

My goal would be to never ever connect my devices to wifi, and run everything through the device.

There are lots of attempts to make current hw work for this, but while you can get close, nothing is good enough IMO. I have the tplink, the belkin, etc with different firmware.

Enough flash and ram to run sane openwrt, and maybe options for a VPN client, and a stretch of Tor. Fitting that within the power budget would be the issue.
Exactly!

And someone who says "Exponentially better" rather than "much better" is the kind of person who might have a button marked "proactively validate" rather than "confirm".

At the same time, it's hard to get enthusiasm across in emails. I'm no poet. I just get put off when I'm reading a pitch and mentally trip on some out of place phrase.
Like you said it's unnecessary spending. Firing a slacker can be both ruthless and nice (towards employees that put in real work). There is no obligation to pay people and no right to be paid. Cutting wages is not some horrible or cruel act if it's done for good reasons.
Yup. The problem is trying to explain to a client: "Ok, so we've got the 4 best back-end developers, 2 best UX/UI guys, and a scrummaster. Now they'll cost you $100k/month, and we think that'll create 3 apps for you, but ummmm we're not sure. But these guys are the best, so on average you'll get more production out of them if you don't do agile" My conclusion is that agile only works with talented people; most of the enterprise clients I've work with (non-SaaS stuff) don't care whether they are Linus Torvalds or Joe Shmoe, they just want to spend their budget and get their "app" within the budget.
The Problem with Time & Timezones - Computerphile
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY&feature=share
Looks really promising if it can work on complex dynamic sites!

The sample script provided is totally incorrect though:

<script src="//cdn.tryhoudini.com/houdini.js"></script>
Houdini.init("xxxx")
Houdini.startListening();

Missing a script tag around `Houduni.init ... Houdini.startListening()`
It's definitely a lot more work, and since I hate tracking time, it's hard to quantify.

The book is the majority of the work. I would guess that adding multiple packages increases the amount of work by 50-75%.
In arlington VA, I once got a parking ticket issued outside of the 9-5 parking restriction hours; in the same place i got a ticket with an address that was nowhere near where i was parking; and another that had a totally fictional address altogether.

In retrospect, I should have contested these tickets by going to court, grilling the parking attendant (under oath) on the details, getting them very specifically, and then catching them in an act of perjury with evidence. Would Fixed go the extra step to do this? Someone needs to hold these attendants accountable.
Would it matter? We'd probably build a renewable energy farm to run Bitcoin mining gear, and have a field with vegetables and a grass area to kick a soccer ball around.. :-)
That's good to know. It seems the issue is actually motherboard support. Newegg shows a single intel motherboard with ECC and no AMD ones. I suppose the low-end server hardware (e.g., HP Microservers) just tend to be AMD so it's easiest to get a cheap AMD server with ECC than an Intel one. I had assumed it was an intel issue but apparently not.

It would be nice if the intel ultrabook standard started including ECC as well. One can dream...
Zapier is one of these things that totally blew away my expectations.

It works really well and is easy to use even for non-technical users. Doubly impressive given that the problem they are solving is really messy underneath it all.
Agreed - major cognitive disconnect there. Preferred identity providers, if any, should be ('GitHub', 'Stack', 'Twitter') followed by None (i.e. independent / paranoid). FB tends to have vibe ranging from "Meh" to worse among most developers I know (who don't actually work for FB).

Definitely not a place I'd think to go looking for available talent, in any case.
Ask HN: Does Olark's support suck?
I basically submitted a bug with the feature that is most important to me. I've tested it pretty redundantly over the past week on different browsers and computers, yet the issue is always happening.

I contacted Olark to see if they can fix it, before I pay them any money, and their response was basically: "tough luck we can't replicate it" (even though I've been replicating it consistently everyday for the past week on different environments).

Is Olark's support known to be terrible? I'm afraid to commit money to a company with such horrible support.

If so, what do you recommend to use instead? I'd love to use Customer.io, but I do not have user data yet. It's just a page with anonymous users with no account/login that I need to be able to reach and chat with.

Suggestions appreciated. Thanks!
There are also software features missing on current devices, especially in stock firmware. A really good firewall, VPN client, and other security tools would be nice. Central enterprise management and/or managed service as an option would also be wonderful. My main goal is execs who travel to China regularly.