skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It has a radioisotope heating unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutu_%28rover%29#Specification...
> Ruby is slow. Dynamic languages often are.

I'm not sure that explains the difference between PHP (for example) and Ruby using the same regex.

PHP: 0.07s

Ruby: 114.95s

Java: 0.75s (I expect the majority of this is once off startup time rather than java being slower than PHP once it's "up".)

Dynamic Languages are slow.. But that? That's something completely broken.

Whether or not it's ruby, his build of ruby, a hoax, or something totally unrelated to Ruby that's causing this 1600x slowdown is up for debate though..
Shame as well space exploration is still so primitive and infant that I root for any nation venturing out there. Too bad its clouted by military achievements.
Apple and Samsung Are Increasingly Dominant in Mobile Phones
Hi, Nick. :)

Indeed!

That said, it's great that more people are picking up Elasticsearch for new exciting things.

Elasticsearch has really pushed what constitutes a "search problem", and deserves lots of kudos for that! :)
It would be interesting if Apple would step in here. They could, given their obscenely vague appstore "rules", simply delete the CandyCrush Saga game out of the store as it is a copy of an existing game. That would force King to be a bit more creative in their copying in the future.

That said, "protecting" games has been a problem, almost literally forever. On the one hand you want folks to benefit from there work, on the other hand sometimes a 'derivative' is a much much better game. So do you cut off that like we've done with software patents? Or not?
Food Blogger Convinced Chick-fil-A to Go Antibiotics Free
It would be because of the pattern in this chart IFF it spooked enough people. Unlikely.

It could be because of the same things as caused it in 1929 - the pattern in the chart is (extremely weak) evidence of similarities, and so we probably should up our estimates of that likelihood by some epsilon - but (without rigorous analysis) the appropriate epsilon is probably small enough that it's below the precision available to human reasoning. Ignore it or investigate further, don't do anything based on this.
Your last sentence was "very hard to read"
Reminds me of the "Wear 15 pieces of flair" scene from Office Space.
My English teachers would have started with eliminating the contractions and then discuss "just."
> Lawyers, doctors, and engineers are all required to pass tests before they can practice.

Nitpick: Until they can practice on their own. They need to practice under supervision for a certain period of time before they can even take the final tests or otherwise receive final certification.

Also, engineers have the "industrial exemption". In most cases, if you work for a company (and thus do not provide services directly to the public) you do not require a license.

> Finally, and probably most importantly, professional are subject to fiduciary obligations to their clients that require a minimum standard of professional conduct--if they mess up, they can (and do) get sued for malpractice.

This I have an issue with; are you claiming that no one who works for a company is a professional? That to be considered a professional you must offer your services directly to the public?
This is true of GC in all languages.

Many a time I've seen people shrug off issues as "GC will handle it" in C# projects. Usually accompanied with the sound of many a developer crying whilst trying to work out what has gone wrong in production when 256Gb of RAM across several nodes disappears instantly. Memory ballooning, long GC pauses, reference leaks, swapping, VM over commitment are all waiting to hang you.
Right. And the frequentist version is also useful.

If you test one person and the the test is positive, then that person is the president (p=0.00001).

If you test a thousand people, and the test is positive for one of them, then that person is the president (p=0.01).

So you don't really need Bayesian logic to reason that you should test fewer people if you want a more significant result. (Note I'm not saying you don't need Bayes' Theorem, which everyone uses.)

Edit: I think most people on HN get their knowledge of frequentist and bayesian statistics from XKCD #1132. That's sad.
Disney Launches Startup Accelerator Program
What was interesting to me, though, was this bit: "Applying the same law which holds taxi companies responsible for the injuries caused by their drivers, whether or not they have a passenger at the time of collision, Christopher Dolan, the Liu family attorney, states that the change in technology doesn't change the legal liability for Uber."

If that's the case, and the law states that the taxi company is liable irrespective of whether someone is in the car, why shouldn't Uber be held to the same standard?
Sorry, I meant I'd never seen it called the second way (nested parens). I also haven't seen the no-parens version, which looks really bizarre!
I got sent an Asana invite from the boss earlier today. Apparently we are going all-in on using it.
Ghostly neutrinos caught shape-shifting in the night
This is a fantastic approach to the "But how am I going to be able to edit it?" question that inevitably gets asked by clients or bosses.

I've tackled the problem so many times and had so many different solutions depending on the client.

Instead of providing a stupid and bloated CMS to do things I don't want it to do and let the user break things that they shouldn't be breaking, there's this.

I could possibly just provide them with access to edit some markdown with a link or two and instructions on how to make the edits. It puts a bit more burden on the user, but it also means they don't have to pay to run or setup a dynamic and crazy CMS platform too.

If someone could productize this as a service, provide a pretty interface for it, and let it be an easy CMSaaS that gives me, the developer, lots of options and access, but provides a dead simple and easy editor that I could give to my clients, I think that'd be great.
Online accounts say there's a radiation source for heating during the lunar night, but it seems one of the solar panels used for normal operations didn't fold up properly (by folding up these panels are closer to the heat source) before the sun went down, and that exposed component froze and was ruined, which sealed the spacecraft's fate.

Source: http://www.dvice.com/2014-2-12/chinas-jade-rabbit-lunar-rove...
True, that's a valid issue. For me, it's not as I end up indexing the same document multiple times over the course of 2-3 days.
I kind of figured where this story was going when I saw the word "regimes" in the headline.
I don't really understand why a minority of people continue to belabor this. Anybody who has recently spent time in writing courses in a modern American institution knows that 'fewer' is greatly preferred to 'less' in this context, often to the extent of losing points if the latter is used. Students aren't going to care about your citations if following your advice means they lose points on their papers.
We wrote a tutorial about how we wrote our search for Close.io using elasticsearch and pyparsing:

"Sales data search: Writing a query parser / AST using pyparsing + elasticsearch"

Part 1: http://blog.close.io/sales-data-search-writing-a-query-parse...

Part 2: http://blog.close.io/sales-data-search-writing-a-query-parse...
I am surprised that this would pass in court as being a legitimate means of existing.
I'd be interested in knowing more details. It doesn't seem like some of their pages (e.g. https://asana.com/product ) would be very easy to represent in markdown, especially considering the image carousels.
I wouldn't say it is so much about removing adverbs alone as removing the adverb and replacing the verb with one that takes the place of both words.
Yeah. I was traveling, took a train, and left my phone in the car parked at the train station.
Dietary sugar intact/dietary carb intake - at the end of the day, it turns into sugar
Before any insightful discussion, may I suggest that we do not discuss generics?
Flickr cofounder launches ‘email killer’ Slack to the world
> Treating a suicidal person harshly ...

Wait, what? That's not what I said. I'm saying it's a mistake to give too much attention and sympathy to suicidal ideations.
I felt like OP went out of his/her way to avoid snarkiness. He/she made several positive comments, added a helpful suggestion, and only then prefaced a "pedantic" comment by saying "Oh, by the way, a small part of me can't help but notice this..." That's a lot of mitigating language to earn the label "snark."
Looks like it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Republic_of_Chi...

They had capability to produce required material decades ago.

They also have sufficient nuclear arsenal to warrant maintaining stockpiles of the stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_weapons_of_mass_destr...
Rails converts empty arrays into nils
What part of Scott Adams participation in anonymous forums with sock puppets was unclear to you?
Was this posted to Reddit yet?
How do I remove hyperlink markup from a piece of text?
Thanks, makes sense.

I definitely like Markdown's simplicity, but sometimes it feels limiting because the content I am creating includes block elements and special styles that are not in markdown's vocabulary (like a block for a warning).
Not by default no, but it easily supports dynamic code through 'dynamic'
I think we're saying the same thing. Universities aren't teaching security, so folks learn it elsewhere. Most people hiring new grads know this.
Google's Authenticator 2FA system is based on an open standard [1], and can even be implemented on your own/other web sites. Given the open nature of the standard, that can be considered an additional safeguard against NSA exposure.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Authenticator
> "Comparatively, some anonymous screeching on a message board doesn't seem all that worrying."

If only it was limited to "anonymous screeching".

Bear in mind that 4chan invented the term doxxing. We're talking about the anonymous mob inflicting real harm at many levels - from the mildly damaging (review bombs), to the extremely harmful (threats of rape, death, threats against family, home).

All of the above has happened, not just on 4chan, but in many other communities that are anonymous. It happens so much we have a term for it. It happens so much that Reddit had to make a site-wide decree to get rid of it (to varying degrees of success).

It's a level of abuse that only the deranged would engaged in, or a sufficient combination of sociopathy and anonymity.

We're not talking about "John Doe sucks and is a giant asshole!", we're talking about "Hey everyone troll John Doe by calling in bomb threats lolz!".

Symmetric anonymity is great. It guarantees that nothing exceeds the bounds of "anonymous screeching" as you put it. Asymmetric anonymity allows one side to attack a target that has no recourse whatsoever.
why does wolfram then provide a way to do so from a machine?
Does Node have an equivalent to the JVM's server and client modes? Node can probably assume that it will be hosting a long-running server process, skip the lazy JIT, and just AOT compile all JS code at maximum optimization.
Statamic includes a short YAML snippet at the top of the markdown files where you can specify the layout/theme you want to use (or you can just use defaults). The YAML can also include variables that can be used in the theme, such as "Headline," "Subhead," etc... and lists. It's pretty awesome.

Most of the carousels are partials where we feed in some basic variables around copy/image - but since they're at the top of the Markdown file, anyone can change them easily.
20 Years of Microsoft's Homepage
I suspect he just didn't know that Scott Adams, back in 2011, was found to be using sock puppets to defend himself on social media sites.
Protecting Against Link Rot While Embracing the Future
Alphaworks – Empowering communities to become owners
Well that sucks.

Is anyone here a big follower of the Chinese space programme? I follow "western" space efforts pretty closely, but with heavy military involvement, a preoccupation with face-saving, and the language barrier, I find the Chinese programme nigh on impossible to track. Do they have the same sort of spending split that NASA has with respect to the manned v. unmanned programmes? Or does their unmanned programme get substantially more than a pittance? As things stand, I'm not even able to tell if they are actually serious about space outside of military use, or if it's all just a prestige play. Anyone care to fill in some detail?
Not articles but there are two very excellent books on the subject that I can't recommend enough:

If you read calculus with about the same fluency as the comic books then "Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial" is awesome http://www.amazon.com/Data-Analysis-A-Bayesian-Tutorial/dp/0...

And if you would like a little more exposition (but still a mathematically sophisticated treatment) "Doing Bayesian Data Analysis: A Tutorial with R and BUGS" is fantastic http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Bayesian-Data-Analysis-Tutorial/...

The latter will also give you more details of how to approach classical, frequentest tests and summary statistics with their Bayesian equivalent.

Honestly I would say get both books as they're cheap and provide different insights. You only need to read a few chapters of each to see how you approach basic experiments from a Bayesian perspective.
No matter how well protected the phone or app is, the receiving service still only gets one factor of authentication.
> I find this sentiment alarming.

It's not a "sentiment", it's a case history. My brother created a list of guilty parties, people responsible for a suicide, but didn't include the suicide on the list. My nephew drew the obvious conclusion -- if he killed himself, this would place him outside any notion of responsibility, and he would get massive sympathy as well.

It was unbelievably irresponsible to portray suicide that way, and it had a predictable effect. But the responsibility for suicide rests solely with those who kill themselves.

> I've lost close friends to suicide. For what it's worth: I don't blame them ...

I do. To me, if suicides understand that they'll be held responsible, that they will be judged to have ungratefully thrown away the gift of life, they shouldn't expect sympathy, that might have a beneficial effect on the suicide rate.
I haven't had the experience of tutoring anyone in writing, but I'd like to. And I agree, that you can't place too much importance in style manuals ... they can give contradictory or just plain stupid advice. But good style manuals do more than set rules - they explain why the rules are there, and even highlight exceptions where breaking the rule is appropriate. They are indispensable for improvising your writing, provided you don't treat them like rulebooks. Read a few, then form your own opinion.

Now, unlike a style manual, Hemingway doesn't explain the reasoning behind rules, or permit breaking the rules in the right context. It's limiting, and won't produce beautiful writing. But I suspect it will have use for non-writers. I'm talking about people who write imcomprehensibly, and don't have any incentive to master the art of writing. Doctors, lawyers, and business executives come to mind. In my experience, people in these careers write like shit and don't have time to improve their writing. By adhering to these rules, they can improve their writing significantly without much effort. The result will still be somewhat awkward and contorted, but far less than what they would write otherwise (marketspeak / legalese).
Heroku definitely does. Even inside a single dyno.

Switch to at least 2x-sized dynos and use nginx-buildpack (https://github.com/ryandotsmith/nginx-buildpack) with multi-buildpack (https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi).

You'll probably need to modify/fork the ruby buildpack to do asset compiles twice (if necessary) and check-in both apps into the same repo. And of course modify the nginx configuration.
Statamic actually does include an Admin interface where you can do (basically) this. We really like having the Git version control and we really like the Github editor, which is why we don't use the Admin pages, but they definitely exist in Statamic already.
On point one - perhaps my expectations are lower. I think a CS degree signals a level of rigor that is absent in other degrees, but I don't pretend that the practicality is so high that people can be instantly useful. I assume that it takes 3 months of general training, and several more of "Here's how we do it here" before you can expect much. (As opposed to a Math major who would require programming training on top of it, or a History major who might be lost outright)
It's really interesting to notice the trade-offs. I went to a small-ish, teaching-focused college (The University of Puget Sound: http://www.pugetsound.edu/). And just as you say, I found that the faculty and staff was really supportive and concerned with our well-being.

And while the faculty was very strong, I sometimes felt jealous of friends from the University of Washington (the nearby Huge Research Institution) and what seemed like a more extensive CS program with more resources. I heard about some of the classes my friends took that our program didn't really have any equivalent for. I would read about some of the problem sets that sounded amazing, like a security class where you're given a VM image and the problem set is to compromise some of the programs inside the VM. Advanced curriculum like that seems difficult to develop without a lot of grad students around. A part of me has always pined for that experience I didn't get to have.

I guess it's hard to have it all.
Thanks!I wish you success in your endeavors.
Let me see if I can aid you in your confusion.

4chan has produced some startling examples of meanness and is widely know for it. It is also widely know for its anonymity. So when somebody denies that anonymity breeds meanness and uses 4chan as an example, I think they have to clearly address that conflict. To point out that conflict, I don't think I have to be an expert on 4chan.

When I gave the example of newspaper comments, I should have been more specific: the sites I had in mind were ones that were pseudonymous. Since we were talking about anonymity and behavior, I thought that was obvious from context, but rereading it now I could see that getting missed. Sorry for the confusion.
ChromExperiment: Valtexis by Random Studio
I bet the p-values on that site would be very high if properly calculated. Generally, if you are reporting correlations between a large number of variables, the p-values shoot through the roof.

Of course, TONS of people forget this and publish a p-value as if those two variables are the only ones under consideration. Which is just sad.
Tutorial: Simplified WordPress Theme Setup (Free Quick-start Toolkit)
New Jersey slaps MIT Bitcoin hackers with subpoena – and they’re fighting back
True, and the app itself doesn't actually delete the pictures off your device either. Still, the intention of the app is to share impermanent pictures, which is an interesting twist on things.
Conversely, writing at such a level that only graduate students in your particular field of interest can decipher your meaning must be the pinnacle of writing. As we all know, the purpose of language is to obscure meaning, not to communicate it.
Two Cultures in One of the Cultures
This is because of the greedy matching, and obviously a flaw in the ruby implementation details.
Chinese space program had come a long way. Interesting test would be how they handle this failure. Will they go assigning blame and scapegoats. Or will they learn from this mistake and improve quality control/redundancy for future missions.
Was that intended to be an example of a low value comment?

The high value response would have been to infer he didn't know the incident you were referring to, and then to explain it to him.
xkcd's version sounds similar, but simpler: http://xkcd.com/1132/
It's a nice API, but I don't think it's the API everybody wants.

Simple key-value store is quite useful in most cases, but it's not enough if you want to build really advanced applications, e.g. when you have a dataset that doesn't fit all in memory at once, but you want to filter/sort/search it (imagine GMail that stores e-mails client-side).

IndexedDB primitives are powerful enough to be an engine for a SQL database (and I presume was the idea given it's been created as the WebSQL killer).
True. Though I find corporate hiring freezes to be a reaction to organizational disfunction. If you starve your growing areas because you haven't found a way to keep your stagnant divisions from increasing headcount, then you have bigger problems. Apple used to be guilty of this. They would do hiring freezes, then when they'd lift them, managers would hire everyone in sight. There was no concept of internal transfers because you could never get a backfill. Terrible way to run a business.
a p-value of 0.05 or even 0.01 is stupidly high. it only takes a little thought experiment about what that means in reality to realise how permissive it is and you can find demonstrations of this without going particularly far, looking very hard or being especially well educated...

consider the wikipedia example with heads vs. tails.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value#Examples

the idea that 5 coin tosses can produce a p-value < 0.05 that 'demonstrates' that the coin is biased towards heads is intuitively 'obviously wrong'. even if we take it to 10 coin tosses (the p-value you get is 0.001 - which looks really strong if we accept that 0.01 is acceptable) it clashes with my own ideals for what statistical significance should mean. this is in a loose way a proof by contradiction that p-values of 0.05 or 0.01 do not have utility (at least for these kinds of small n).

aside from that consider running the experiment 5 times or 20 times. how many false positives do you expect? what is the expected number of false positives? is that significant?

it also bothers me how connected to the problem formulation that the value itself is. if we analyse the same situation with an identical test but a different formulation of the problem that the values differ?

why is five heads in a row less significant as a result when the test is whether a coin is biased at all rather than a test that it is biased towards heads only? sure i understand the probability involved there that we have all these potential coins biased towards tails that mean nothing in the first case - but there is something very deeply wrong with that.

shouldn't this be the other way around? if 5 consecutive heads is good evidence that a coin is biased towards heads, isn't it equally good evidence that it is biased at all? classical logic says that it is because being biased towards heads is a subset of being biased in either direction. the truth is that it really is equally good evidence - i challenge someone to explain why it is not! ( actually i kinda want to be wrong about that because i might learn something new then :) )

probability is counter-intuitive and useless for the kinds of small n usually used in experiments - the intuition about it recovers when we deal with sensible n - numbers like 1000 or 10000 - but these are still small n really if you need to scale up, or be confident that your result is correct. even at 100 samples its obvious that our idealisation of percentage and what happens in reality do not marry up neatly...

to make a very crude software analogy what about those 1 in 10,000 bugs? they are still a very real problem if you have millions of customers...

or - IMO even 10,000 is a very exceedingly small n to try and draw robust conclusions from.
Sure, they can claim that all they want. A judge would look at it for about 5 seconds and say "You're an employer." and that would be that.
As a complement to pure Bayesian reasoning, I recommend Mayo's "Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge". http://www.amazon.com/Experimental-Knowledge-Science-Concept...