skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But what does a 'fair coin' have to do with bets in the real world? Assume I'm standing on a street corner, flipping a coin . You observe 30 flips, and note that 30 times in a row it comes up heads. I then turn and offer to bet you 2:1 odds that the next flip will also be heads. Would you really take my bet?

No, you would walk away, despite your superior knowledge of probability. But let's say that it was only 10 flips in a row, as in your modified example. Would you stay and bet? If you would, perhaps it is you is is missing the forest. :)

More precisely, perhaps the problem is not their knowledge of probability, but the difficulty of modeling the real world with standard probability theory. The Bayesian approach above at least allows for the possibility that the coin is not fair. How does your model allow for this?
How FlightCaster Squeezes Predictions from Flight Data
thesixtyone (YC W09) is hiring software engineers
And he doesn't have a choice here? In everyday life you make a sacrifice to step away from that optimized, possibly terrible schedule. If DC really just cannot possibly stand to perform this schedule any more he can revert to just traveling normally and freely whenever he wants.

The only loss is the bragging rights to having visited every Jet Blue city in a month. His choice.
Arduino crib rocker
I think it's pretty true. That list is heavy on "plumbing" modules that are pulled in as dependencies. I don't know a good one that's more indicative of what programmers deliberately pull of the shelf for a project, which is what I was talking about.

Let's remember Greenspun used TCL for his commercial work.
$250 AWS Credit & a Netbook? Build a Twilio App by Midnight on Sunday
I've always felt that vinyl sales fit perfectly with an online store. The community that typically still purchases them for a large part already knows what they want and in turn don't need to be bothered by going into a store

Best Buy may be making a play into expanding the consumer market for vinyl, but I think it will be a while until its out of being a niche marketplace.
I realize “bad guys” don’t cease to exist—whether they “steal”, don’t share, lock up code, or have business models in mind you don’t like. But it’s not my fault they are that way, and neither it is my job to “teach them lessons”.

I don't think any significant body of code is written or licensed for punitive reasons. The difference between the MIT and copyleft licenses such as CC-BY-SA or the GPL is that the MIT license does not protect your users from hostile middlemen.
My outlook box is pretty large and it never takes more than 3 or 4 seconds. It's not the greatest search either, but it does handle substrings nicely and automatically. It works most of the time (though I'd still be much happier if it worked all of the time.)
I totally agree. When you put something open source, generally the more people use it the better. GPL often just causes problems. MIT is simple, and lets anyone do anything. If I open source something, that's what I use. Otherwise I keep it closed.
I must have misread or misremembered something, then. I had the definite impression that downvoting articles was supposed to be something some people could do, based on their karma totals.
I thought about that too. There are programs that can handle making PHP or C beautiful. GNU indent is one of them I think, and there's another one called TidyPHP? Something like that.

So you just generate and then run the code through that if you need it to be human readable. I assume most companies don't give a shit as long as it works ;)
No.

The closest you'll get is that very few lawyers will take your case if it completely sucks. And it can get thrown out pretty much off the bat from the the judge

Criminal cases do have grand juries which weigh the merits of a case before going to trial.
Republic Project launches, allows artists to sell album pre-orders
Could your instability be attributed to the fact that you might not be running the actual release version (or has been modified in some nefarious way)?
Says who?

irb(main):001:0> class Fixnum

irb(main):002:1> def doit

irb(main):003:2> puts "hey"

irb(main):004:2> end

irb(main):005:1> end

=> nil

irb(main):006:0> 2.doit

hey

=> nil

irb(main):007:0>
Actually, I appear to have the ability to downvote both this comment of yours (which is in discussion following my comment above about "curiosity") and the comment just before my "curiosity" comment, so I don't think the "can't downvote something in a subthread to which you've replied" hypothesis holds much water. It seems, however, that I can't downvote the immediate response to my comment by the guy with 8000+ karma. This may mean that immediately following responses and/or people with 8000+ karma aren't within range of my downvote capabilities.
The main reason I use MIT is so that I can use my open source code in my own commercial endeavours without "infecting" that commercial codebase, which needs to remain closed source.
Things of this nature cannot be predicted so far in advance.

This report is as useful as yesterday's racing form.
So theoretically, an organization with large enough pockets could literally destroy a competing organization with lawsuits designed only to ensure the victim expends large amounts of cash on legal fees, correct?

I'm wondering if this method of "business" has ever been attempted?
An Angel Investor Group Move That Makes Me Vomit
I've been using it for a week on a 1st gen MBP (32 bit) and haven't had any crashes.

I don't use Erlang, but I have a lot of packages from MacPorts (mysql5, mercurial, git, svn, xorg, perl5 and python26 ) installed without any problems. The only thing I've tried to build that failed is screen.

I did a clean install, so that may be the difference maker.
Yeah, but there's also a possibility to create a package yourself (or use this checkinstall)
I am using vs express for a long time but recently fallback to vs 2008. It is really hard to develop windows gui program with vs express. As a compiler and editor, vs express is good. But because Microsoft makes it so hard to program from scratch (the vs automatic tool generated tons of codes for ActiveX), personally, it is really an unhappy experience to develop ActiveX control with vs express.
Please allow me to add a couple of words to your quote:

"none of these things seem very desirable to Tichy, except maybe for the spacious houses."

I've lived in cities. I've lived in suburbs. I'll take the suburbs near a city by a mile. I won't pretend this isn't a subjective judgment, because it is. But so is the "I'd prefer a city by a mile" view, and being all mystified (or in some cases, angry) at the people who choose differently than you is not sophistication, it is simply provincialism.

The evidence abundantly suggests I am not alone, either. Given the choice, a lot of people prefer suburbs, or suburbs wouldn't even have come into existence.
999999999999999 - 999999999999997
MySpace (mentioning cost savings as one of the main reasons):

http://gigaom.com/2008/05/28/myspace-uses-gears-to-grind-dow...

http://developer.myspace.com/community/blogs/devteam/archive...
We need more, and better, filters
What Zed Shaw said
Lambdas and recursion are only a small part of the decision for a programming language. There are many, many deliberations in picking a language.

Availability on the target platform (cheap web hosters?), availability of libraries, familiarity with the language (of the entire team, both current and in the future), purpose (aiming to get to the market quickly, or trying to learn a new language?), compatibility or integration with an existing code base, et cetera.

All these deliberations taken together may lead to a decision to use PHP. If so, it is nice to have lambdas and recursion. "It's better in another language" is without meaning in that case, because the feature is so small compared to the other deliberations. It quickly turns into the better question: "is it good enough?"
Yes, guessing based on partial knowledge might make you worse off. But as Yvain's footnote 1 says, replacing 30 "I don't know" answers with 30 purely random coin-flip guesses has a 98% chance of improving your score. (I'd like to go on record saying emphatically that this statement doesn't need to be "tested". Recalculated, at most.) So if you have a coin in your pocket, it's pretty hard to rationalize answering "I don't know" to many questions instead of flipping the coin.
And you have every right to do that with the GNU Public License too, by the way.
Ask HN: What do you think of "Congregous" for a social networking startup?
Counterexample: the netflix prize.
yes, he talked very well.

Still, I had to pause and rewind the video several times, because he talked too fast. Thats because several links sprung up in my head, and ideas came.
Tiny Scala Primer
This is an excellent article. I follow alot of the guidlines already but there is some important ones that I am missing. Thank you.
I don't think Smalltalk has code=data. It has object-based metaprogramming, i.e. the code that you write turns into objects that you can write other code to manipulate at runtime. But perhaps that's a distinction without a difference? I don't have enough experience with Smalltalk to say.

I was expecting someone to suggest that stack-based languages are fundamentally different from tree-based ones.
It might be simple, but I don't agree that using a permissive license is apolitical. Understanding this, passing your views off as "pragmatic" seems dishonest.

The OP links to djb's site - he seems to conflate rejecting EULAs (which I agree with) and rejecting copyright on software; am I reading him correctly? (I mention him here because nobody can claim his stance is pragmatic at all.)
Maybe I'm just getting incurably academic, but I think "I found a bug!" is not nearly as interesting as "I found a bug!" and one of:

1) It affects millions of people!

2) It affects large amounts of money!

3) It is a great example of a new or rare class of bug. Here's how you can avoid introducing similar bugs into your code! Here's how we can detect these things automatically! etc.

Here, the only thing that springs to mind is IEEE floating point being used internally by Google Calculator for some reason, which I find hard to believe. Where's the insight?
I wasn't thinking of academics who are making new things so much as bloggers who aren't.
I always tell people from out of country to skip the big cities. New York is just London but dirtier and more rude, and without the great ancient architecture. Once you've seen one big city that isn't Paris you've probably seen them all.

I advise them to go to Las Vegas because there's nothing like that anywhere. I advise them to go to Napa, which I'm told is still distinctly original though has closer comparisons in Europe than Vegas does. Some of our National Parks are incredible.
You're nitpicking unnecessarily. When asked a 'do the trains collide?' math question, do you point out all the safety precautions in place that would prevent the collision?
I just want to know why you were even trying to calculate that figure in the first place?
This is a pretty good description of what's (probably) going on:

http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2002-10/msg00290.html
So, what's the alternative? Give up the concept of "fair coin" when trying to teach statistics? This seems unlikely to be a useful pedagogical move! How is anyone supposed to understand Bayes Theorum before they even understand probability?

Mathematicians have to be able to specify priors. Insisting they are unrealistic rather misses the point that the entire reason the phrase "fair coin" appears in the first place is an explicit acknowledgment of the unreality of the situation.

If you want to more rapidly move to a Bayesian system when teaching, I'd understand completely, but we still have to start with "fair coins" before we can get around to considering how to prove they aren't fair. (I will be first in line to say many school teachers, being generally poorly trained in mathematics, completely fail to understand this point, and correspondingly ask the "gotcha" question about "what's after 29 heads?" without fully understanding the issue themselves.)
Windows 7: the grown up Vista
Ironically, it's the very lack of change in Windows 7 that is what users like most about it.
I guess it's just a reminder not to trust a search engine with your fiduciary responsibilities?
What about:
4) It's not obvious how this bug could happen! Let's think about it!
In Python:

>>> 999999999999999 - 999999999999997
2L
I was curious as to what caused this. Posting to HN seemed like the fastest way to get an answer.
I found it on 4chan.
Clearly someone wasn't using 'bignum' when they should have.

Pretty sloppy to not even detect overflow on the input.

another one:

http://www.google.com/#q=999999999999999999+-+90000000000000...
Ah bugger. I didn't realize that... I assume that these days everyone uses email verification as a best practice.

Sorry if I came off snooty in my last comment, I appreciate your response and thoughts in general! The whole deal had me worried!

I guess I can probably change my passwords back now :-p

I also just looked back and saw how bad my spelling was on my last post, I guess I am more tired than I realized!

Thanks again!
-A
I've yet to see someone sue a cellphone company because the phone's 'user experience' confused them, causing them to lose an important call...
My bad, meant Stockholm
> I firmly believe that if we (the collective we) don't start paying more attention to aesthetics, we are not going to survive this mess.

I'm still waiting for any support for that outlandish proposition.

I like pretty houses, but I'm pretty sure that ugly ones won't kill me or anyone else.
Exactly. People fail to understand this all of the time.

I'd be pretty impressed if they got one court to agree that Google was doing something illegal by failing to comply with an order from another court. Courts are understandably loath to castrate each other like that.
Looks like something out of Myst.
An empty ad-generating blog that simply links to:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/44623
Which values an hour of our development labor at, what, $10?
It's not really overflow. It's more like insufficient precision.
New iPhone enterprise apps to help manage your network
Wolfram Alpha tells me the answer is two :p
And, the prizes only go to the winner.
I love that story and have quoted it many times (though, Code Complete? really, just read Weinberg). But it doesn't apply here. Gmail search certainly works. It just doesn't have every feature.
Self-Organization and Conway's Game of life (With Interactive Javascript Canvas)
> But a vegetable hedge can get pretty high in a few years.

A "vegetable hedge" isn't natural in most places - it's the result of significant human activity.

Note also that the house itself, while pretty, is unliveable by most folks, especially those with kids.

> are you telling me it's not technically possible in most places or that it's culturally not welcome where you live?

Of course it's "technically possible" to grow the relevant plants in most places, but your claim was far stronger.

I've no objection to you wanting to live in a forest. My point is that many people don't and that forests are unnatural in most places.

> I'm just supporting the idea that more aesthetics and efficiency in architecture could improve our lives further without damaging the environment.

Actually, you're just asserting that idea. You've done nothing to support it.

I've already asked twice for some support for the claim that such aesthetics are relevant to survival.
I think the name is fit, but we already have far too many social networking sites.
> I had a long bus drive through New Jersey a few months ago - saw a lot of different suburb landscapes there. I think I know how it looks like.

New Jersey isn't particularly representative of the world, let alone of the world in a "natural" state.
Btw, Moore is looking for 3 million in VC for his 40+ core Forth chips - http://www.colorforth.com/GA.htm
I didn't mean to get "all uppity". If it sounded that way it's because I sarcastically borrowed some of mhb's wording to make my point. I was just a little surprised that the top comment on HN is "...completely miserable way to waste a month" instead of "hey, this isn't for me, but it's an interesting idea."
no worries.

i guess your email just got scraped from somewhere and used to register a spam account?

registration into email verification is starting to die off a bit in the newer web apps. mostly because they want to make the process of setting up an account as quick and easy as possible, provided the app is trivial enough (don't want to this for something like banking). email verification requires you to focus on something else besides the place you're registering for, as well as possibly waiting around for the email to come in.
I love the design for http://omnominator.com/. How do they get their inputs to be slanty? A quick peek at the CSS didn't reveal much.
Insufficient precision implies too little bits to store the number in.

These are unsigned integers, they could have been represented as integers in a 64 bit unsigned value, if the number of bits in the variable destined to hold the input is not enough and you keep on working as though there are that's overflow al
right.

It should have simply thrown an error: operand too large.

I have a dark brown feeling that it won't be long before it does though :)
Oh, come on!

1. They (Europeans) usually visit the most European places in the U.S. - especially New York City and San Francisco. Since NYC and SF are basically uglier, scarier versions of the premiere European cities, it's natural for tourists to go home with a negative impression.

New York may be scary. I don't think it's ugly, I personally find the skyline surrounding central park to be both thrilling and beautiful, but I suppose that's just a matter of taste. But New York definitely isn't a "version" of any European city. American cities pioneered the skyscraper (they weren't alone, London and a few other cities outside the US did this in parallel). I've lived in Paris and New York, and they are utterly unalike. Europeans visit New York to experience something different, not a version of home, and they get it. Some love it, some hate it, but I'd be amazed if they came home saying "yeah, Mahnattan is just another version of Copenhagen."

2. However, very few Americans live in such cities - even if they can easily afford to. Why not? Because the natural habitat of the American - including most affluent Americans - is the suburb.

Dude, stop, just stop. No, Americans can not easily afford to live in Manhattan or San Francisco. I had to stretch incredibly hard to afford a small 2 bedroom house in an unfashionable corner of SF. I could have afforded a nice, spacious 3br in a distant suburb much more easily. I'm just amazed by this claim. Every month there's another article in the SF Chronicle about another family that wanted to stay in SF but moved out to the suburbs for financial reasons.
True, but unlike practically everyone else they didn't allow their work to fit the expanded time available.

Again, how do we know they didn't account for it when they buffered initially? Maybe they had a different internal timeline (end of aug) vs. an external timeline.

Only way to know is if one is in the Snow Leopard team or has access to that kind of info.
Basic summary: the grass may look greener on the other side, but there's no place like home.
Interestingly, you also created a top Google result for this search term (indexed in around 10 minutes):

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls...
I'd like to be able to filter by license. More specifically, I'd like to be able to show banners only for copyfree licensed projects.
Ideally, yes, but that doesn't appear to be an option. Given the choice between instant and incomplete results, and slightly slower but complete results, I'll take the latter.
I second the blah's, FP has god awful and misleading articles.

The best example I could find is here: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/08/20/scenes_from... where the writing seems to be blaming oil extraction for the duckweed algae. However oil kills duckweed algae, the reason the algae is so present in the salt lake is because of sewage been dumped into it. I remember my parent's garden pond had a major outbreak of it because birds kept crapping in it, and one of the actual treatments we were referenced to for it was actually a petroleum based oil.
Just to be clear, the reason that is the case is because the GP owns the copyright in the described scenario.
Our entry for Rails Rumble 2009
Theoretically yes but there are some practical issues that can make this complex.

I don't doubt its been tried.
999 999 999 999 999 - 999 999 999 999 996 = 3
+ or - 2 margin of error
I think your link goes to a blank page.
This seems like an oversimplification. She isn't suing because her blog was publicized, she is suing because her personal information was released without her consent. Now, obviously google was responding to a court order, whether or not she has a case is a different discussion.
Fair enough - luckily we don't all have to live in the same place, or the same kind of place. Actually I have nothing against living outside the city. I can imagine moving outside for the scenery and closeness to nature. But definitely not because I love shopping malls (again, to each their own).

I think in Europe most people move outside the city when they have children and want them to play in the garden. It is easier to afford a house in the suburbs. If they could afford houses in the city, I suspect more people would stay.
The Pirate Bay shut down today
LowDown, Straightlist, SmackSale and CelebrityPassage sound like names of porn sites.
Because the natural habitat of the American - including most affluent Americans - is the suburb.

This is the most nauseating sort of exceptionalism. It belies the following facts:

1. In most American cities, it is actually illegal to build European-style cities. American consumers literally have no choice but to live in suburbs.

2. Public subsidies overwhelmingly support suburban development - highways, road "improvements", low-density public infrastructure, property tax rebates, and so on. That's a huge artificial incentive to buy suburban.

3. The most valuable places in the USA are those dense, mixed-use, walkable neighbourhoods that most resemble European cities - think Beacon Hill in Boston, a collection of tall, narrow, three-storey brownstones on tiny lots that would be illegal to build today (see #1, above).

4. Those American cities that have lost the least value during the economic downturn are those places that are the most urban in design: dense, walkable, bicycle-friendly, transit-friendly, and so on. The American cities that have had the sharpest drops in property value and the highest rates of jeopardies and foreclosures: those places that are the most suburban in design.

5. Whenever a city builds good urban places (as opposed to shitty urban places like most American cities), Americans move to those places in droves. Think Portland OR, which has developed according to clear principles of density, diversity, and sustainability for the past few decades and has enjoyed very strong population growth. (Aside: for the past several years, Portland has had an unemployment rate higher than the national average. That's because so many people move there without actually having a job waiting for them. A huge proportion of those people end up starting their own businesses - so much for the idea that liberals are anti-business.)
I don't even want to know why it was posted there...
Well you can also go somewhere meant for doing computations and get an accurate result.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=999999999999999+-+99999...