skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my opinion there is a difference.

You can build a classifier that says "does the person have a 30% chance of defaulting this year." And you can in aggregate estimate the accuracy of such a classifier. However, for an individual example you don't know if such a classifier is right or wrong which can confuse partners. You say somebody has a 30% chance of default and they don't default (were you right?), or they do default (again, were you right on this single instance?). Obviously you can work something out- but you have moved to building a classifier where you no longer have an easily observable ground truth on individuals (only on aggregates).

You then want to move to forecasting and rating of scores or quality of sorting (which is what we encourage in the writeup).
This country was only progressive relative to countries that existed at its founding. The systems behind it are conservative by design, and I don't see how they can bring us up to speed with other systems running laps around us.
This is great, but I would recommend anyone doing a "beginner's" guide for python tools like this first refer the reader to virtualenv.
I'll check it out. Thanks :).
Worse:

> DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages.
Agreed. Both Haskell and much of the Lisp family support rational numbers, the latter with them automatically being used instead of imprecise results when doing divisions which can't be represented accurately. I miss them a lot when working in other languages.
Ask HN: new cryptocurrency?
anyone seriously working on a new CC? only interesting one I know is ethereum. namecoin is fascinating, but nothing happened much.
Just curious, what is your use-case in which you need better support for fractions?
> The BASIC language eliminated much of the complexity of FORTRAN by having a single number type. This simplified the programming model and avoided a class of errors caused by selection of the wrong type. The efficiencies that could have gained from having numerous number types proved to be insignificant.

I don't agree with that, and I don't think BASIC has much (if anything) to offer in terms of good language design.
Speaking as an American that moved to Switzerland about 5 years ago, I'm shocked and depressed every year I go back to the u.s. to visit family and friends. Not only is the u.s. decades behind Europe and nowhere near Switzerland in terms of infrastructure, healthcare, etc, but the people in the u.s. are the fearful and cowardly and willfully ignorant. Just depressing and I'm not sure if this is something new or if we were always like that and I just didn't realize before I got out of that third-world hellhole.
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?48501-Ba...
I understand that this is a very broad question but I wanted it to be more of a way to share your own experiences that we can perhaps learn from.

I think the steps you listed are extremely helpful. For example, what if I want to sell them a SaaS that helps employees manage their vacation times, and other paperwork, I envision these steps based on your suggestion:

1) Provide an easy way for employees to book off their time at work. Think of pain points. Think of solutions to those pain points. Translate into software features. Don't write any code yet, wait for validation.

2) Google or linkedin the companies. Any other ways?

3) Get contact information. Who makes purchasing decisions like this? HR? CEO? CTO?

4) Contact people over email or phone. Which is better for first contact? What should you write or say?

Hi Mr. CEO

I'm a local software engineer developing a tool that I
think can help employees book off their times easily.
Would you be interested in scheduling a call to hear
more about how your company can save a lot of paperwork?

Thanks,

Signed.

5) Sit down for lunch or coffee and make the pitch

"So my SaaS solution costs $1000 a month, it would do
features A, B, C, D, E and X that I think would help
your employees book off their time easily and save you
time and paperwork. If you'd like to see any other
features I'd be happy to add them. Now if you are happy
with this proposition, I will be starting development
and communicate with you along the way until the product
is ready to deliver. For now, I can send you a contract
for you to sign and an invoice for one month ($1000) to
get things started and a commitment to subscribe monthly on the
day of launch."

6) Profit???

How did I do? What do you think about this approach? Is it rude to ask for money for something you haven't built yet? How do you assure them you are not a flip flop and that you will actually follow through with the development and deliver it? Isn't market validation asking for the sales first for the idea you have and getting money paid to build the thing your customer needs?
There's lib-sass[1] a C implementation, but it's not at feature parity yet.

[1] http://libsass.org
Decimal floating point would almost definitely be slower than IEEE754 if implemented in hardware.
This is amazing! Does it have facilities for frame-by-frame animation and onion-skinning?
I believe he means the stuff that happens in js like 111111111111111110000 + 1111 = 111111111111111110000;

EDIT: not a javascript specific thing, rather a float one, methinks
The big gain is that is all just text and can be handled very well by the same version control system as the code is.

I can easily glance at what has happened to the docs just by looking at a diff, much like I do with all code my team produces already.

And being represented by all text doesn't mean this is what you give your customers. With a bit of work with pandoc etc. you can get a really slick and impressive end result.
Are you asserting that to "teach to the test", you'd force students to memorize definitions, a couple of mechanical procedures (solve for x, simplify the expression) and drill formulas for the area of a circle and square into their heads, while ignoring understanding and the ability to apply it?

The test had about 8 problems (out of 27) that are amenable to memorizing algebraic transformations or definitions. So "teaching to the test" as you describe it is a great way to make sure your students get a solid 30%.

To the point that it is known that US math tests tend to eschew even word problems [2] to a great degree.

There are about 8/27 word problems. The rest are geometric reasoning problems along the lines of the German test you link to (I don't read German so I can't compare except in general terms).

Incidentally, transfer of learning is pretty much nonexistent. Wish I had an online source, but all I have to link to is a dead tree: http://www.amazon.com/Transfer-Learning-Instruction-Educatio...

Incidentally, I'm really glad someone is actually engaging with the topic rather than just reciting memorized talking points. Reminds me of what hacker news used to be like.
The order of items in the dictionary isn't stable, but the order of .keys() is guaranteed to be the same as the order of .values() (as long as you don't modify the dict in between calling one then the other).

http://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtypes.html#dict.items
They are horrible.

Oh sure, they look and work semi-ok on my laptop's screen. But when I connect my large external monitor -- they just don't work.
What? The article title is "IPython: The Complete Beginners Guide", it serves its purpose.
What did you the rest of the time? There is difference between writing documentation, design work, attending mandatory meeting and checking facebook or video.
Yeah was thinking of giving a quick overview with a not-so-deep dive into the easier stuff like Naive Bayes classification.
But your suggestion makes sense as well. I like the supermarket example. Do you maybe have a list of these that I could demo? A link to a specific demo problem?

Thanks a lot
Yeah, that was what I was talking about. Without typing up an example its cumbersome to explain. But the idea is use a constant time access data structure. The easiest would be a set, but if (as I suspect) the documents are dicts, you'd need to lookup by a hashable key.

Thanks for giving the example
For me Markdown wins just because I'm used to dealing with it daily on GitHub.

Sidenote: Wish Github Flavored Markdown would adopt some nice things from Pandoc, like multiline tables.
>For those who are discouraged by the signup - I understand, but due to the nature of the game it is necessary to prevent cheating.

Can you please elaborate on why you believe signup is necessary to prevent cheating?
No:

* Continual reseeding happens to both /dev/random and urandom

* Continual reseeding does not improve resistance to cryptanalytic attacks on the RNG itself

* Continual reseeding does provide a degree of forward secrecy; if your box gets owned up and you lose the RNG state to an adversary, you eventually recover from it

* Blocking based on "entropy estimators" is an incoherent response to any risk that the kernel RNG faces; it has no relationship to any actual policy about forward secrecy

* The blocking /dev/random does is based on a misunderstanding its developer has about how CSPRNGs provide security.

You are seeing mixed answers because 'saurik doesn't like the tone of the "just use urandom" articles. He thinks it glosses over the issue of first-ever-boot cold-start-entropy. I disagree strongly that you need to care about that issue, ever. But he and I probably do agree about every bullet in this comment.
Great guide, learning iPython and iPdb (or pdb) are crucial to good debugging and other quick tasks in python.

Note though %timeit is also good for slow code since it iterates less times (usually 3) for slower code.
Cast to IEEE754 binary floating point number, perform exp()/sin/..., and cast back.

In any case, I don't think DEC64 is intended for those users that need to use cos() et al.
But why? That is the question I was looking to understand. Why is it inherently slower?
With 2FA, the string changes each time you log in.
Remember -- if you experiment with adding these "trivial" keys to your wallet, some software may generate transactions that return change to those exact keys (and it will be stolen in an instant). It's happened before.
The nice thing about both Kivy and haXe is that web apps are a strong possibility, and one I was thinking of doing anyway. Of course, with enough dev time, I could take any language/framework and make a web app from it. I wouldn't be surprised if there is already a library (or it's trivially easy) to generate JS or HTML5 from Scheme or some other Lisp :)
Would you care to lay out a scenario in which a scientific application might care about the decision that the Linux kernel RNG makes about entropy estimation? Place make sure your answer takes into account how the Linux entropy estimator actually works.
Edward Snowden's written testimony to the EU [pdf]
That's what he said, and he's asking why.
http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/02/25/safely-generate-random...
As if Google's naming policy is a check against a list of words... More likely; Google has implemented an algorithm that uses machine learning and several other heuristics to try and determine the probability that the name is real or not. Still sound like incompetence? Does a name like "Elaine Yellow Horse" seem real or fake? You simply can't win all the time when you deal with billions of people. Google's customer support and appeal process leave a lot to be desired, but calling them incompetent and racist is just silly.
Millennials Don’t Trust You
As a brazilian I get the opposite effect. I get constantly surprise about how much americans take for granted.
Just use the link to the CSS file in development an have your build tools concatenate everything for production. Certainly not a show stopper.
I know the author despises types, but sometimes types provide valuable semantic information. Like, indexing into an array using a float is completely unnecessary and meaningless.
Why does anybody listen to Crockford? He wrote a human-readable data format but refused to give it comments. He wrote an obnoxious linter that bans continue;. Now he's proposing to replace integers with decimal floating point type (what happens if someone wants to store a 64-bit integer?).

As a C programmer, he just seems off his trolley.
Well, your forefathers were busy stuffing people in ovens, so we had to spend a lot of money to defeat your country, rebuild, and then protect it. You can talk about the USA once Germany starts spending 4.2% of its GDP on defence versus the present 1.15%.

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/us-defense-spend...
Yet millions of people all over the world line up to immigrate to America (150M want to move to the US[1])! Something doesn't make sense.

A number of the "facts" in the article are misleading (infant mortality for example), but it won't matter. Those people who already think America is in the toilet will nod their heads because it fits with their world view.

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/153992/150-million-adults-worldwi...
"Although the federal government will pay for the expansion, many governors cited cost, even though the expansion would actually save money."

Quite an absurd claim here -- that expanding medicaid would save money? The author links to a survey that makes no such claim.
Why virtualenv?
Jeff Lawson of Twilio: When Ideas Collide, Don’t Duck
Great list, I do several mini-tutorials of python at http://runnable.com/u/mamcx. I try to pick several tricks for each theme
I'm really don't know much about the technical details of bitcoin, but why is a bitcoin address tied to a specific key pair?

Why isn't the address+balance just signed with a key pair?

That way me knowing a key pair wouldn't get me an address with a balance in it...

is there something i'm missing?

EDIT:
I guess it doesn't matter, since the address space is so large.
Either way, if i were targeting an account, i would know what key pair to attack..
We're wealthy enough as a country to occupy the planet and ensure basic dignity for a few hundred million people at the same time.
My number one concern with this approach is that it creates an extreme dependence on an external locus of motivation. This seems like it would be great if you want to turn children into excellent cogs for your machine, as in the industrial age, but it could be horrible for creating pioneers and innovators.

I would welcome approaches like this when combined with something like the kind of educational freedom given at a montessori school. In this case, we're looking at a chess team. So maybe the children are participating voluntarily or maybe they aren't.
You're right, we should stop wanting to improve a country and talking about its deficiencies once enough people want to immigrate to it. /s
Ironic subtitle: Our society lags behind the rest of the developed world in education, health care, violence and more

Ironic because, really, we are kind of leader of the pack for violence. We don't lag at all in that area. (Yes, I know what they really meant. That's not what they said./pedant)
Elcomsoft Forensic Disk Decryptor for BitLocker, PGP and TrueCrypt disks
There's a finite probability of landing on the combination of login+password+2FA-string at any given instance.
It makes more sense when you realize a lot of us don't have what you think we take for granted. And those of us that have it try not to pay attention to how easily it could come tumbling down.
Leah McGrath Goodman – The Face Behind Bitcoin
I think the author should come visit a third world country before writing articles like this one.

Why is this on HN, anyway?
This article is not about "improving" America, it's about trashing it. Why else would you use such hyperbole as to compare the US to a "third world nation" (which isn't that PC to be honest).
Since basic Markdown is so basic, multiple incompatible flavours of Markdown have cropped up, including Pandoc-Markdown, which can do footnotes.
Any idea why this is Mickens' last article? I've enjoyed quite a few of his articles but wouldn't describe myself as a follower.
OT: How do hackers on here stream 1080P mp4's to a Chomecast without choppiness and lag?
So... hunter2 is not ok?
Umm.. So much wrong with this comment. And the time German defense spending was highest was surely during the time you cite. This was also the period of America ascending rapidly on the world stage and becoming a superpower. Defense spending isn't what makes a country great to live in. The armed forces as a social welfare system isn't really ideal.
50% of commercial aviation fatalities being due to terrorism, well maybe if you're counting the people on the ground, (I'm not interested enough in fatalities to do the maths on that.) Disregarding, the ground fatalities however:

There were for planes in 9/11. According to the list I last quoted, there were:

92 people on a Boeing 767200-ER

65 people on a Boeing 767-200

64 people on a Boeing 757-200

44 people on a Boeing 757-200

=> 265

If the fatalities are 100% in this most recent crash, it almost exceeds the 9/11 aviation fatalities by itself. Excluding this most recent incident - and just going from the wikilist again - you only have to go back to May 14th 2012 to exceed those casualties:

2012

[...]

May 14 - 15 dead

June 29 - 6 dead

September 12 - 10 dead

September 28 - 19 dead

October 7 - 3 dead

November 30 - 6 dead

December 25 - 1 dead

December 29 - 5 dead

2013

January 29 - 16 dead

February 13 - 5 dead

April 29 - 7 dead

July 6 - 3 dead

July 7 - 10 dead

August 14 - 2 dead

October 3 - 15 dead

October 16 - 49 dead

November 17 - 50 dead

November 29 2013 - 33 dead

2014

February 16th 2014 - 18 dead

(+ 18 33 50 49 15 2 10 3 7 5 16 5 1 6 3 19 10 6 (- 21 6))

=> 273

So, I find it highly unlikely that 9/11 does account for 50% of the commercial aviation fatalities in the last 15 years since it would account for less than 50% in the last 2 if it had occurred in those years.

-------------

As for the other points -

I'm interested in incidents concerning aircraft, and not the number of fatalities in general. The question isn't what is your chance of dying in a terrorist attack, the question is what sort of figure can we hang off this plane vanishing being due to a terrorist attack. 9/11 is four aircraft - from that point of view it doesn't change the figures much.

I could go further back and increase the confidence level but I don't really see the point. This isn't the sort of scenario where a more precise number seems likely to matter, even if I were out by an entire order of magnitude, it would make little difference. It would still be the thing to bet against it being terrorism.

I might bother to get a more precise number if I were putting money on it, but that would largely be a matter of knowing how much money to bet rather than the direction of the bet.

Basically, if you want a more precise number, you'll have to do the work yourself.
Most the tools we have for WYSIWYG document creation lacks determinism and portability. For the latter, one could argue that there are open formats, but still, there should be a program that can interpret the format; whereas with plain text, such a need is void, as it is possible to view the document on any decent system. For the former, the argument might be that the modern word processors provide the facilities to deterministically lay out a document through the user interfaces they sport, but then because the formats they save are either are endemic to themselves or badly supported in other software* this feature is not of much use.

I can open a Markdown/ReST/Textile/... file with any text editor, including Notepad, Vim, Emacs etc., and also view it through more or less programs, or just cat them. I can pass them through head or tail; search them with common utilities and even edit them with some others. I am not bound to any programs in order to edit my program. If, on a computer I have to use, there is no Word, or Writer or Pages, I can still edit/read the document. I can read it online, via a browser. I can use programs that are decades old, and I also will be able to read the file decades later. When I send the file to someone else, I can be sure that they will be able to read it. Any usable operating system has a text editor bundled. This level of portability is just a dream for WYSIWYG editors. For these advantaged, I happily trade editing convenience off.

* Last summer, my cousins needed to use my computer for editing a docx document that was important for their undergraduate education. I was running Ubuntu OS at the time, so I told them to use the LibreOffice's word processor. The experience was bad; the document did not render properly, editing was problematic. This is the only case I can provide as an example to support my argument, as it has been multiple years since I used a word processor program.
> In any case, I don't think DEC64 is intended for those users that need to use cos() et al

He apparently has other ideas: "DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages."
Can you clarify the "so we had to" part?
Why did the US have to do it while other countries didn't have to do it?

(Not to mention your tone is uncalled for).
we actually working on that feature :)
I doubt the problem with American education is the funding or the fact that we bomb international test scores compared to other nations. For example, it's not a good idea to copy South Korea because of their sheer emphasis on acing tests and pure rote memorization rather than seriously understanding concepts.

Meanwhile, what we do know is that the American system of education is medicore and in some way, self-sabotaging. For example, the time we go to school and the sleeping cycle of students conflict, which reduce our ability to understand and retain knowledge. Summer vacation destroy much of the continuity in our knowledge, which must be rebuilt at the beginning of the school years. We don't use spaced repetition to study and retain knowledge.
I imagine it's because binary exponents correspond very well to binary arithmetics, while decimal exponents don't.

Imagine you have a floating point format which has 8-bit mantissa (i.e. 8 bits to store the digits, without the floating point). You're trying to calculate 200 + 200. In binary, that's

0b11001000 + 0b11001000 = 0b110010000

However, to represent the result you would need 9 bits, which you don't have, so you instead represent it as 400 = 200 * 2 = 0b11001000 * 2 ^ 1. Notice how the resulting mantissa is just the result (0b110010000) shifted one bit.

If your exponent is decimal exponent, you would instead have to represent 400 as 400 = 40 * 10 = 0b101000 * 10 ^ 1. In this case, the resulting mantissa has to be calculated separately (using more expensive operations), as it has no connection to the mathematical result of the operation.
It’s election time again
The Swedish Viggen locked on the Blackbird several times...
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/archive/index.php/t-659...
That article's way off. Our buses are really clean now.

But seriously, damned if i'll be lectured by an American institution on anything to do with morals or normative ethics.