skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The difference is Wikimedia doesn't pay for this benefit,

In some markets Facebook, Twitter or YouTube don't pay for this benefit either - the free data deal runs as a free trial for limited time with the hope of converting you into a paid data customer.

> the telcos are doing it because they support Wikimedia's mission.

Maybe. Or in markets where data packages are still not widespread (even in smartphone era), using Wikipedia, Twitter or Facebook allows the telco to showcase the benefits of buying a data plan.
I think we'd be better off if we recognized that there are statistical distributions in the world besides the plain old Gaussian. For example, wealth does not follow a Gaussian, so why the heck do we throw around ideas like "above average wealth"?

Is MAD any better? Definitely. But I'd like to see a visual demonstration of how well it models exponential-based distributions. How well does it describe their "shape", the skew of the tail?
And if pay to play had been in place when Google debuted against Lycos/Altavista? If we were stuck with that old search tech today, we'd be suffering.
At least for finding developers, referrals from employees and trusted friends tend to be one of the most consistently accurate signals of a quality candidate.

It looks like YesGraph is solving a serious pain point in what should be a lucrative market. Hiring can be one of the toughest parts of growing a successful company—it's pretty surprising there aren't more products like this out there in widespread use yet.
$695 USB cable wins TAS's editors' choice award
Because you have inaccurate cones[1], son

[1] http://physicsfaq.co.uk/General/BlueSky/blue_sky.html Section: Why not violet?
> which Goldstein?

From ClementM above, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=970480
2 hours of battery life seems pretty short. The tablet portion should probably have a separate battery and can then have a 7-10 hour battery life, like most tablets these days.

Maybe they should add a wireless charger to the package. When the batteries get down to 10%, the unit automatically wheels back to the charging station.

Now, if there's a sleeping dog in the way, or a box or something, then the robot's out of luck, but otherwise it just takes care of itself, like a person going to the toilet once in a while.

The other obvious thing the product needs is a robotic arm. So useful. Obviously, bringing the medicine to a bedbound patient springs to mind, but the uses are really unlimited.
maybe it was intended? lol
How did it manage to be off by 32 (!) for freezing, but fairly close for body temperature? I would expect a constant (or at least same ballpark) error.

I imagine it had something to do with the medium used for the thermometer?
Do people go through this much to hire from oDesk?

A while back I would just hire 3 people for the same project. One would always stand out pretty early and I would stick with them after the first week. After a few projects I had a list of great people which I still use today.
Most people call it a framework, rather than a process. You could call it an empirical control process, which means it adjust based on previous history.
Depending on exactly what you're doing, ZFS (and probably btrfs?) provide at least the Consistency & Durability of ACID, and maybe Isolation as well.
But yes, it seems like it would be relatively straightforward to build Atomicity guarantees on top of a COW-based filesystem. I guess it's unlikely that Oracle would add that to ZFS now though - they don't tend to like discouraging the use of relational databases!
> I am starting a company, npm, Inc., to deliver new products and services related to npm.

I don't know whether I should be concerned a core part of Node.js is becoming "businessy". Is this common amongst other big software projects?

Providing "premium" services is a slippery slope. What happens when someone wants to add a feature to npm that the premium services already provide, for example?

Python and Django have non-profits which help sustain their ecosystems, but AFAIK Node.js doesn't. Perhaps it would be a good step.
If it's going to be a train wreck either way, I'm not sure which I would prefer. Maybe jump and find another train?
A comment like this makes me question node/npm's future...
> concentrating on making the other parts of the browser rendering engine a lot faster.

The fallacy of the excluded middle, yawn.

We're working on perf all over, so are Chrome folks. But unlike Google, we're not building three VMs requiring their own toolchains. We can't afford to, nor can others building browser engines, and developers are not buying it from what I can tell.

> All this games stuff is a huge distraction.

True in deep ways (have to keep my kids away from it or their brains turn to mush).

We agree that hand-coded JS needs pause-free GC and JITting. Pause-free GC is doable, I've advocated it. Top engines' GCs are still optimized for throughput.

Pause-free JITting is harder, and less theoretically tractable. Whack-a-mole is unwinnable, AOT is beating JIT here.

We follow our nose on this one. If AOT == JIT in some utopian future, great. Otherwise, misspeculations and phase changes happen, and using background threads on other cores to recompile can help, but without precog JITting there will be jank and startup pain.

/be
i think is a great thing! communities flourish when they are support by companies with effective ( preferably transparent) revenue models. exciting times . npm inc , best of luck !
Copied for posterity from the other answer:

The money you gave to Nodejitsu to continue supporting npm was a huge part of getting us in front of the exponential growth curve. I'll continue to be closely involved with Nodejitsu.

But a service of npm's scale and importance can't survive on handouts forever. At some point, we need much more continued investment and a focused team, and the way to get that is to develop additional features that people are willing to pay for.

> There's simply too much money going around Node at the moment and while it might eventually be a good thing (as involved companies will push node adoption among devs), it's also scaring and quite weird.

Yes, there is the hazard of extrinsic motivation messing up intrinsic motivations. That's why pursuing revenue around npm must be done carefully.
No windows? No, thank you.

It'd be cool to visit, but I wouldn't want to work there.
Exactly! This is why it's dangerous and irresponsible to allow the metric system into your space program.
I think because it's called "standard deviation" that it sounds like the thing to use or look for. It sounds more correct because of the word standard.

I feel like it is the same kind of failing due to human perception of language that programmers have with the idea of exceptions and errors, especially the phrase "exceptions should only be used for exceptional behaviors". That's a cool phrase, but people latch on to it because of the word exception sounding like something extremely rare and out of the ordinary whereas we see errors as common, but they are in fact the same thing. Broke is broke, it doesn't matter what you call it, but thousands of programmers think differently because of the name we gave it.

We are human and language absolutely plays a role in our perception of things.
> Honestly I've never heard of a Turing-complete language whose type system can provide such a guarantee.

SPARK (a dialect of Ada) can, I believe. But it does so by forbidding allocation :)
They shot the messenger. That's the main point.
Who's to say you will need it?
I had a bit of back-and-forth with Marc on this topic and I think he's underestimating the difficulty of regulating a non-neutral 'net such that competition (and, therefore, innovation) isn't stifled.

I can't help thinking that if, 20 years ago, Microsoft had struck a deal with the major ISPs to prioritise packets being downloaded to Internet Explorer over those being downloaded to Netscape browsers, Marc would have had a very different take on net neutraliy.
With classic ISPs, not just anybody can start digging trenches and lay fiber.

With wireless, pretty much anybody can start renting the space from cell towers and resell their wireless capacity.
Hi, dkoch, thanks!

Compared to other platforms we're more about the user using a editor to create the content himself, rather than doing that automatically (like—for instance—Paperly). There is an import tool, but normally you'd want to use Papermine as a content creation tool, rather than an aggregator.

As for CMS integrations, right now we're focusing on getting the basics right. However, we do want to make it easy to create great publications: if integrating with any CMSes people use will help with that, we will certainly do it :-)
I just can't pass it. I gave my best at reading his book. The guy is unable to write one paragraph which doesn't contain some nonsense or serious misuse of established terms. He is insulting whole groups of people and institutions without giving any examples or research.
I am pretty sure that if his stuff were posted without his name the conclusion would be obvious: it's just nonsense and very offensive at that.

I realize calling people idiots are frown upon here but I am ready to defend it. There isn't one other author which infuriates me with his ignorance and inability to make specific point without throwing condescending remarks.
If there is anybody who deserve the term it's him. I mean "we should retire standard deviation because everybody misues it and it's not useful for real life" without any examples ? He just called out thousands of scientist, risk managers and statisticians without giving one single argument. His suggestion to just use mean deviation is laughable and obviously doesn't work for many purposes which he didn't address while being condescending in the process.

It's worse than saying: "we should retire Java and just use Python because it has dynamic typing and seemingly developers at even serious companies fail to see this!". Remark of this kind would gain me "idiot" badge pretty quickly.
This article is on this level (well, actually lower as remark about Python actually contains an argument) and his book is worse. If that doesn't qualify him as an idiot I don't know what else could.
Can you name any software that relies on security through obscurity -- and I assume you mean obscurity from the user of the software, since nothing else seems relevant here -- that is not just a specific kind of DRM?
I could imagine small children developing attachment to the robot(or the father projected through the robot) instead of the father.
I remember reading a couple years ago that the Touchpad (their tablet that went on a firesale after a lackluster launch) was actually one of the most serviceable tablets out there, built very much like a PC, for better or for worse.

Can't speak for the software side though.
Yes, but copyright abuse doesn't equate to stealing bread. I realise you already know this, but it's kind of a fundamental distinction here.
I guess I have to report you for your DCMA violation by breaking my novelty encryption scheme.
Is that better or worse than an acquihire?
Programmer privilege
Ohms law will not be denied and if the volt from a Josephson junction apparatus combined with the ohm from a quantum Hall effect apparatus don't match up with the new amp, it'll be interesting to see who gets adjusted to match.

The scientific soap opera of metrology (not meteorology) is interesting to read about. Computer science is hardly the only discipline to suffer from multiple standards.

One standard defined an amp as a certain mass of plated silver in a certain amount of time, so if that was still "cool" then you'd have mass defined indirectly solely from the quantum hall effect and Josephson junction effect and time aka cesium vibrations or whatever it is, which wanders into the whole "a kilo is a lump of metal in Paris" situation.
I really wish I had bought one of them when it went on a firesale in 2011. Was it $99 or $79? Either way, it was pretty spectacular!
Georgia Tech Launches World's First Massive Online Degree Program
It'd work fine for headphones + mic. Plus in the car it plays through the audio system as well. I just wouldn't want to lug around an iPad Mini or other ~ 7" tablet everywhere I go.
Isn't that how all businesses work these days, anyway? You can't start a business and expect to be able to support yourself until your business starts making money. This is only feasible if you are able to get into huge amounts of debt or if you already have plenty of resources (i.e, rich).
I'm pretty sure that this wouldn't be safe. By simply disassembling the software you would see the strings stored in the application itself, so you could easily find any password stored that way.
That's been the major downside of having an Android phone.
The problem is that business conditions do change that fast.

However for a lot of small companies it is better than what they had before, regarding consistent direction. Lots of startups change scope or features daily and are in a constant state of panic.

Having a fixed two/one week sprint provides same restspite for developers. But still allowing feature and priorities to be changed after each sprint.
One thing I've seen before, but never quite understood, is how a company like this can exist, but have a position for "Lead Engineer" open on their jobs page. Is it usually the case that their previous lead engineer moved onto something else, or that they bootstrapped a functional version until this point, and now they need someone with more experience leading a team?
I think his point is that Black-Scholes et al are holed beneath the waterline precisely because they involve standard deviations. In his world, you're better off being unable to price an option than you would be with Black-Scholes. Your example of "That put option is currently selling at 30% vol" is actually an example of why the system is so completely broken: if volatility as standard deviation was valid, all options against the same underlying instrument would have the same implied volatility. The volatility smile shouldn't exist.

This wouldn't matter if the down-side wasn't so crippling.

I don't think Taleb has to be the one to propose a replacement for portfolio theory, and I think criticism of him for not doing so is pointless. You don't need to have a spare tire handy to point out that your neighbour's car has a flat, and you don't have to run an airline to tell people not to get on a plane with the engines visibly on fire.
Thank you. I don't think it is intellectually honest for Taleb to omit this fact.
Welcome to the Internet of the Stupid
Congrats to the Kan brothers!
In Iraq alone >10x that number have been killed since the invasion.
You seem to have missed the convenience of secondary definitions using SI.

Using SI, 1 J = 1 N * 1 m = 1 W * 1 s.

You can't do the same with calories, miles, horsepower, and other Imperial units.
Knight News Challenge Awards $2.2 Million to Health Data Innovators
Everyone is an idiot some of the time.
>> You mean interactions like paying a consenting adult $7.24/hour to clean your bedroom? Selling a consenting knowledgeable adult a substance which has not passed FDA review? Paying a person without a medallion to drive you to a different location?

When I said the article proposes no particular structural reforms, and ought to take on protectionism, &c. I meant that these are exactly the sort of issues I would like to have seen addressed.

It seems like we have in common more than you think :)
What do people think of the OP's test repo?

https://github.com/donnfelker/example-rails-challenge

This is a sensible test, I guess, but the OP is just satisfied that the devs know basic syntax and conventions? Would it be more productive to ask more open-ended questions...such as, instead of telling exactly what tests they should write, ask them to write tests that verify the system is working.

Hell even if they did it in Minitest, that ability to conceptually prove how systems in Rails work would seem more valuable than knowing RSpec convention
Congrats Ivan!
That's beyond distasteful. Node.js seems to be the new Rails/Ruby community, from a couple of years ago, drama-wise.

And, ironically, this is on his profile: "I don't look at this site much, because it turns people into jerks."
I'm not talking about piracy or passive consumption as "participation". I mean people who are making art, movies, music etc. can't create anything new with Mickey Mouse or Snow White or Bambi because they are owned by Disney. You can't even sell a ringtone of Alice saying "You’re mad, bonkers, off your head! But I’ll tell you a secret: all the best people are", even if you make your own version in your own voice. Because Disney decided they're not done wringing money out of a movie made before my father was born. I don't just mean wholesale copying, but using any of it as raw materials for something creative is prohibited.
yes a slippery slop indeed. The bigger problem is the current economic system/context that we are all operating in. I for one would prefer a NPM non-profit (maybe with a for-profit branch for consulting).

How does the Python and Django non-profits work right now?
Not crazy. A Bluetooth headset for around the house or out and about, and a hands-free bluetooth system in the car, and you have a perfectly usable phone. Less portable versus better screen - that's the only tradeoff.
Why not ask him directly instead of bringing up old pointless news.
targeting a wedding because some attendant guest may have terrorist links sounds pretty similar to me.
four-day returns of stock x: (-.3, .3, -.3, .3) -> MAD = 0; four-day returns of stock y: (-.5, .5, -.5, .5) -> MAD = 0.
I honestly couldn't tell if this was a real product or some sort of parody at first. I half expected it to be produced by Aperture Science. I don't blame you.

I don't think the issue is the data collection. I think most of us here would admit that slicing and dicing data about yourself is fun (e.g. see [1]) and that an unobtrusive tool to help collect that data is a good idea. The problem is their deliberate overt anthropomorphism. I'm perfectly comfortable with a system for recording data points about my life in some database on my computer, I'm significantly less comfortable with someone monitoring me and telling me about my life.

[1] http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytic...

I don't think it is a coincidence that at least three different franchises have used "Mother Brain" as the name for their malevolent AI.
The relevant sense of "common carrier" in this context is as a classification in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It's a detailed set of regulations applicable to telephone companies. Classifying ISPs as "common carriers" would not just implicate all of those regulations, but implicate one of the animating principles of phone service under the Telecom Act of 1996, which is universal service.

"Common carrier" is also a classification for various services under common law, but that's not what the recent D.C. Circuit opinion was about. Those involve not formal regulations, but certain rights and liabilities under common law, which differ depending on the particular kind of service.
"The obvious method"

Using a cesium time standard and an atomic force microscope figure out the half life of individual atoms of 14C (or something more fun/shorter) then define a kilo of 14C as a pile of 14C generating X decay events per whatever interval calibrated by our cesium time standard.

(edited to add the point is you can watch individual atoms with the AFM and see which ones disintegrated in the past since the last scan, and its no great trick for a century or so to detect individual decays using a geiger counter. Also 14C is no fun for this task. Try a shorter halflife)
Interesting article. Cheers for sharing! A brain reset (power nap) should today be accepted / common knowledge as eating healthy food to stay healthy.

For power naps stay within your REM sleep. The duration varies from person to person tho. You don't need any sophisticated monitoring device whatsoever. When the down slope hits, do a Caffeine Nap - a cup of tea/coffee right before your powernap and in 20 or so mins when the caffeine hits you will be wide awake.
Check this out http://vimeo.com/21216091
Deep Nets Really Need to be Deep
Thank you.

From that paper:

"We first posed this question to 97 portfolio managers,
assistant portfolio managers, and analysts employed by investment management companies who were taking part in a professional seminar. The second group of participants comprised 13 Ivy League graduate students preparing for a career in financial engineering. The third group consisted of 16 investment professionals working for a major bank."

From the article:

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

I get that "data scientist" is a really broad term at this point, but I don't think it's a very good description of the people quizzed in this paper, if this is the paper he was indeed referring to.
I live on a small farm and know quite a few farmers socially. The 5% number seems hard to believe.

According to Wikipedia[1], there were 2.2 million farms in 2007. Since the number of farms is decreasing (land development, consolidation, etc), let's say today there are only 2 million. At 5%, that's 100k farms on FarmLogs. That's impressive. I wonder how many of them are paying customers?

Especially given that most farmers I know are older (think Baby Boomer age) and are barely competent using the Internet never mind an app/SAAS like this.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Stat...
Which blog post are you referring to? (Did you forget to add a link?)
This is one of those situations that Contracting takes care of so nicely. It solves every one of those problems in the exact same way.

- Vacation: None. But they pay you enough that you can sort it out on your own.

- Paid Holidays: None. But they pay you enough that you can sort it out on your own.

- Health Care: None. But they pay you enough that you can sort it out on your own.

- Free Meals: None. But they pay you enough that you can sort it out on your own.

If you want to ramp down from 40 hours to 30 hours when you're on a contract, you simply do so. You'll find your pay adjusts accordingly but you still have plenty extra to take care of all those above items.
Agile is underspecified because it is a general philosophy. I.E React to change, rather than following a 12 months rigid plan.

There are different concrete ways to implement Agile, such as using Scrum, DSDM, or various other methods.
Secret Army Experiment Spewed Harmful Germs All Over S.F. in 1950
Why does mobile have to "win"?
You could totally do this. I think variation like this are great. I do this all the time. Depends on the type of developer I'm after. I've had advanced challenges/etc. One of my best hires went above and beyond my requirements and stated (in the pull request) that we could do X, Y and Z to improve the code and test coverage. I hired them and they helped me launch a product. But I agree, you can do exactly what you said. Feel free to take this and change it up. :)
I really tried to get through "The Black Swan" and Taleb's writing struck me as so pretentious and self-involved that it made it impossible for me to finish.

He strikes me as someone who is so desperate to be important and recognized that an assertion like this doesn't really surprise me.
Who Owns?
How is it divisive? Pointless questions deserve pointless answers.
You might also want to consider whether a B Corporation would make sense: http://www.bcorporation.net
Cloning comeback
No, just a lack of coffee. Fixed now. :)