skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Precisely. Emptiness as practiced by a lone determined fool. See niece/nephew of your comment. I did it through disciplined meditation on emptiness and compassion in turns, and a sort of retreat from the world, as I had a little money put away and few expenses. It was wonderful for a while. I felt very happy. I literally felt that I'd dismantled everything that I thought I was. I no longer knew what I liked or disliked. It was very difficult to have an opinion about anything. I certainly wasn't hacking. I moved through the world in a sort of wide eyed daze (probably due to over-oxygenation :) It felt like I got maybe a quarter of the way to wherever it was I was going, although I have no way of knowing.

But life demands, and I stopped my practice and dove back into it with little thought, and that's when things got bad. I had no drive, no motivations, and didn't have a clue who I was anymore. But I also wasn't meditating, which can serve as preventative medicine against the effects of these things in the "real world". I felt kind of clueless and naked, like an amnesiac dumped in the middle of a big city.

Well, anyway, long story short, you'd be surprised how powerful these ancient techniques can be, and you'd be wise to seek guidance from someone experienced before you go dismantling yourself all willy-nilly :). I'm doing wonderfully now, though. And I'm not currently practicing.
What padding mode is this using? Looking at the code, I think it's using raw RSA to encrypt the data directly. That may be vulnerable to several attacks.

I may not understand your application correctly, but it's unclear why you're even using public key crypto. It appears that you must type a passphrase to access both a public and private key that live on the same server. Why not just use a symmetric key?

Cautionary advice about rolling your own crypto: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySQl0NhW1J0
The author pointed this out; see "optimizing even more" under http://matpalm.com/median/erlang_multi.html
For someone who already knows about what is Sentiment Analysis, you are better off skipping the article and can directly go to http://research.yahoo.com/user/13 (author mentioned in the article) and reading her papers.
There's a pleasant irony here, too, since that's an overgeneralization.
No, it turns out, we're not even the protagonists: we're just the latest model vehicle our genes have constructed to travel around in.

PG: Did you write this on etherpad? Can you share that link? I wanted to get a look at how this essay was shaped, specifically the above mentioned sentence. Thanks!
OK. I thought I missed a hidden pun.
> How is that qualitatively different from training it on all your data

It's different for the simple reason that to really verify a hypothesis, you don't just test it on the other half of the same data. That's just step 1.

What you need to do is work out the further implications of your hypothesis, and test those. When doing so, one of three things will happen:

1) You remain an astronaut. In other words, your work is so far out that none of its implications falsify or corroborate any existing theories, and all require their own experiments. This can be good (i.e. ground-breaking work), but for your hypothesis to become accepted as anything other than an interesting diversion, you will need to wait for the rest of science to catch up, or to keep building out implications until you can connect what you're doing to existing theories.

2) The implications of your hypothesis directly corroborate an existing theory. This is useful, but a bit boring. It means you've basically discovered yet another implication of an existing theory. Experiment some more, and then publish.

3) The implications of your hypothesis contradict existing hypotheses or theories. This is exciting! This is where the real science lies. Now you get to design a series of experiments to figure out who is right, who is wrong, and why. You debug your hypothesis and/or the existing science 'til it works, possibly overturning established wisdom along the way.

4) A combination of (2) & (3) occur. Woah! This is really exciting. You've discovered that the implications of one existing theory falsify those of another existing theory, uncovering a fundamental flaw in our understanding so far. Well done! You've got a lifetime of debugging ahead of you, but your contribution is likely to be truly important.

> there is no getting rid of models.

True; and models are very useful. But there's a big difference between models used as an explanatory / predictive tool (i.e. Newtonian physics), and models used as a substitute for Nature when doing experiments (i.e. what's done in Computational Neuroscience, my field). The latter attempts to duck the issue of doing real experiments that are complicated / expensive by running the experiment on a computer.

Now, this is certainly useful - but to be science, it must be accompanied with a solemn understanding that "What you learn here don't mean jack." It's just a model, and probably a bad one. God doesn't use 64-bit floating points. The only possible use is to help you design a better experiment to try in the real world. But if you never get to doing that, then you've wasted everybody's time, because you got stuck on step 0 (Hypothesize).
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In my experience, the best down-to-earth definition of science, referring to the process that the scientific community collectively performs, as measured by conference talks, proceedings and journal articles is:
Science is anything which helps scientists think about their field in new or improved ways; with the comment that the ultimate goal (in the natural sciences) is to arrive at a testable theory.

The intermediate steps very often do not contain anything testable or repeatable.
Yea, there are lots of different definitions of 'cloaking' in SEO. Didn't know that Expert Sex Change did that with referrals. A lot of people did it in the past by looking at user agents.

I had some friends who would send googlebot to a clean, keyword-optimized piece of content, but the user would get sent to a page plastered in porn ads and would cookie stuff the crap out of their system.
I liked the question and after thinking hard about potential algorithms, I came to a different conclusion:

- In general for data sets of this size, you don't want anything more then a linear algorithm or less preferably.

- Also, because a median is a statistic measure, it's use will be of a predicting nature. (Why would anyone need the exact median of a trillion numbers?)

- Because of the uncertainty involved with predicting and the size of the data set, I think a sample approach would be appropriate.

- A sample size of 1000 - 10,000 numbers per machine is enough for significantly recognizing any reasonable distribution.

- We could take the median of those 1 - 10 million numbers directly or we could apply curve fitting techniques to gain a lot more insight.

Of course if someone could provide a reason for needing the exact median I am completely wrong.
Haikus on HN?

What has the world come to now?

Still, I can't resist.
Your friendly neighborhood flag-revering American has a suggestion for you: there are two design elements of note on an American flag. The first is the color scheme: red, white, and blue. The second is the motif: stars (generally plural, number mostly unimportant although it is canonically 50) and stripes (generally plural, number mostly unimportant although it is canonically 13).

If it doesn't have all three of red, white, and blue or both of stars and stripes, the designer almost certainly wasn't going for an American flag. For example, the overwhelming majority of Americans would not connect a white star and a blue star paired together as recognizably American.

American flag iconography also tends to use wavy lines, for the "flag fluttering in the breeze" effect. Additionally, it overwhelmingly features the flag oriented horizontally with the blue bits in the top left.

For a good example of modern American flag iconography, see the Obama O logo (which is, incidentally, probably the best logo I have ever seen in politics or otherwise, and I say that as a Republican). You don't remember McCain's campaign logo (that's a statement, not a question, nobody remembers it) but it had a Navy Star rather than a flag at its centerpiece.

Sorry, I get a kick out of this stuff. Tangent over.
That logo is so 80's it makes me wonder if they're going to turn back on all the analog cell sites in the city and hand out Zack Morris DynaTAC phones.
Smalltalk would be trivial to model with s-exps: (object message args)
If you're interested in playing with Python bytecode, you would also be interested in the following:

Byteplay: http://code.google.com/p/byteplay/

Philip Eby's Bytecode Assembler: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/BytecodeAssembler

Bytecode Hacks: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bytecodehacks/

Happy python bytecode hacking!
It does solve a market inefficiency. To me, that highlights a different inefficiency - imagine what a couple of bright YC founders could do in the rechargeable battery market, or the solar cell market - if they only had enough money to enter industries with higher barriers to entry.

I can hold out the hope that successful founders will enter other industries with their next startup.
The date of the article is sep 1, 2009.

That's 6 days from now.
Yes there are plenty of omissions. As for free, there are plenty of commercial products on the list already.
Nice, how this comment and pg's answer illustrate the point of the essay.
Eh? Thats not true.

The only time this would work is if the distribution of the numbers was symmetric (or close to symmetric).

If you have

1 --> 599,999,999,999 times

4 --> 1 time

10 --> 400,000,000,000 times

Your average will be about 4.6 (a little higher) and your algorithm will return 4 as the answer when it should be 1.
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Though this link doesn't belong here, but I totally enjoyed ... used to be my most fav instrumental from a rock group 18 yrs back, and still is.
Thats a good point. Two things come t mind though. One is that since its an interview question they are probably just using this to test your knowledge of (distributed) algorithms.

The second is that you might want the exact answer if you are using the statistic to convince someone of something and you don't want to leave any room for doubt.
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Around the time I heard about PG's `Y Combinator' I had just rediscovered the Turing fixed-point combinator while playing around with Scheme.
Well, I'm a student and I have some occasional queries which are answered pretty well here. I respect the opinion of YC community as their average geekness level is much higher than the crowd. Am not into startup or something but I still love the opinion of people here. Whenever I need to find a opinion about i go for searchyc. When I needed to buy a laptop or needed a suggestion regarding programming .. YC is always there with a wonderful solution. Plus I get to know the opinion of things happening in current scenario related with IT field.
Thankyou YC :D
especially as he will loose... fast, agile little buggers, I'm speaking from experience.
Lovely explanation of Zen. Thanks.
The YC confidence is sometimes even better than VC capital. One of my previous startups raised a round with first round capital, and I was the 4th employee there, but it didn't make us confident like YC does.
Lisp is a family of languages, so how can there be a single standard implementation? If he means Common Lisp, well, CL is a standardized programming language; is there a de facto C implementation? how about C++? Of course not! GCC is the most widely available implementation, but you would be foolish to write GCC-dependent C code.

SBCL is not harder to install than GCC, in fact, it's trivial to install and upgrade (compared to the nightmare that is a libc upgrade) but you don't see people complaining about C being hard to install or lacking a canonical implementation.
Well, that's the more sophisticated view of course. To me it looks like something on a poster for a movie about Navy jet fighter pilots.

The US Navy star design: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevestr/434646324/in/set-72157...
"Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist...."
Is 'socialist' such a dirty word to the author, who also describes these countries as "developed democracies" in the same sentence? I actually find this quite shocking. Give me the British NHS any day over the American health care system.

There are many, many flaws in the NHS, but what it does is pretty awesome, even if a lot of the time it's not perfect.
when i read the article, i got the impression (especially from the last sentence) that the author shakes their head at the insane, wasteful, selfdestructive behavior of humans.
This is true and does apply to most of Europe, as well. It is not as bad as 15 minutes for Peter Gibbons, but you never actually work for full 8 hours.

IMHO, if you get the job done in 4 hours, someone else does it in 3 hours, someone else in 10 hours, and someone else in 13 hours, there is nothing wrong with being that 4 hour guy.
I think it solves an ego inefficiency more than a market one. If it solved a market one, we wouldn't know until well and truly after a market had been established and true scales of economy observed. So far that hasn't happened yet.
Excellent! Very succinct summary of my typical thought processes when helping others. Wide adoption of this chart may decimate many IT departments....

Although it may need an extra point right at the "START" - if no "start" then check power supply - solution to a "computer problem" I had to fix this morning!

I wonder if this somewhat captures a hacker's thought process, and if this is significantly different to "Not Computer People"
Slava, you didn't need anybody's endorsement to feel competent my friend. You're a first rate hacker, Startup or not. Good luck with rethinkdb, get industry contacts, work on the "suit" image and you should be fine. You're destined to greatness.
do you think that in the entire history of humanity, there is a kind of animal that hasn't been tried for all kinds of work?
BBC NEWS | Americas | Police on murder suspect's death
I'd say that's the publish date for the print article. Don't you just love old media ;-)
So... that logo made me go "what?", and a few seconds later think of Lisa Simpson performing a sexual act, before finally realizing that it says "2012".

Conclusions: I'm deranged. That logo is horrible.
I could live with that, if Gruber didn't make a point of serving up "claim chowder" every time someone else rushed to print a juicy tidbit without checking the facts. If you are going to throw stones...

I agree that in general Gruber has well-researched and thoughtful pieces. I would have more respect for his retraction if he didn't spend most of it telling me why it wasn't his fault.

"But, trust me, it was AT&T’s decision."

and then

"My source [...] was wrong."
Yes, and it's annoying. My PC runs Linux and virtually nothing Apple says in those adverts applies to Linux.
Calculating the average is in O(n).
Calculating the median is in O(n).
What features would you offer with a URL shortener?
I recently launched a url shortener as a 'bit of fun' more than anything. It took less than 4 hours of my time and $100 of my money to build and bring to market.

I'm now wondering what features I should add to make it more attractive and interesting to use. Interested to hear Hacker News' users thoughts!

UPDATE: thought I should add that I already have a REST API and that I'm working on making the entire database of key/value pairs available. Wondering what to do after that.

Thanks,
Ben
It's not that easy. If you do marketing and other "business" type stuff, your body will demand some sanity and just good ole programming. I can completely understand people being "sidetracked" implementing novelty code they will never need. They're not wasting time, they're recharging their batteries: sometimes you just want to work on something tangible, verifiable, and get a quick satisfaction fix seeing it working.

Lately, most of my work is CSS, input validation, architecturing URLs, and reading as many web design "top 20" blog posts shopping for UI elements. Pathetic. However, between doing that, I have also written a completely unnecessary server-farm management package for my site, completely with load-balancing, health monitoring, backup, change propagation, hot configuration and other stuff I probably would never need (let's just say that if I ever needed it, I would also need a physical server rack.)
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"We did it because it seems such a great hack."
Haha, Slava in a suit. snort
But the reality is competition breeds hatred.
Effective callbacks are also nice.
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Ask HN: How to avoid high redirecting costs from phone provider?
Hello everybody,

this is my first post, I hope it fits the subject.

I am working on a web project / startup where I'm taking care of almost everything (accounting, ads, partners, users, blog, etc) at the same time I'm studying full-time, so I am not able to be in the office all the time. I have a fixed line network phone (is this the right word for it? Not mobile, but home phone.) there, but because of the university I'm not able to be there often. Is there a technical possibility to connect the phone with a server / computer (which is connected to the internet) so that I get an email or SMS with the number of the person who called on my mobile phone? There is of course the provider possibility but that costs me 0.20$/call + the minutes talked on the voice mail, so that's not a solution in the long run. I've been looking a little around but I wasn't able to find a solution that could exactly fit my needs.

Paying someone additional to stay in the office in office hours isn't a solution either.

Thanks for your help!
Interesting article! In hindsight everything is distorted and seems so natural, however, it doesn't teach you much about the _current_ reality -- how can you tell if your company is suffering from a product or marketing problem _right now_?
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The curse of knowledge: Mistaking your beliefs for those of others
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Of course, you have to do some marketing. But I think that if you're investing time in marketing to be able to survive, then you're doing something wrong ... you either chose the wrong market, or your product is not good enough.

From my experience, improving your product (which is not equal to adding more features) is the best way to get new customers. That's because marketing that's not properly targeted is as good as no marketing, and let's face it ... technically inclined people suck at it. Even Spolsky, which is what I call a marketing drone, in his interview on "Founders at Work" confessed that they got more customers from incremental improvements than through marketing plots.

On the contrary, I think the main problem of software developers is that we rarely finish what we start.
Actually, even be worse here. E.g. if all the numbers are positive you will get an overflow pretty quick, so you'll need a better datatype. So if you are dealing with b-bit numbers you'd need O(n * log(bn)) to calculate the average.

(Usually this doesn't matter, but since n >> b it does).

Edit: Notwithstanding my earlier comment that average doesn't work, merely commenting on the run time of average.
In what way, and which case?

People have gone to jail "forever" for the final crime of stealing a box of candy. You can pound that til it's flat, but that is the truth. The other offenses were not violent.

And the woman who had her kids taken away because of the breastfeeding pic? I don't think that was exaggerated at all.

http://www.dallasobserver.com/2003-04-17/news/1-hour-arrest&...
I don't see why so many people congratulate him on admitting that he made a mistake.

He got it wrong. He admitted it. Congratulations in order? No. It seems to me that it's a fairly natural way to do things that doesn't require a back pat, or are we really so arrogant?
All data and parameters associated with any open publication
should be available to anyone interested in it.

This will be fun for all LHC results; nobody can [or is willing for that matter] read, let alone truly(!) interpret LEP data anymore.
In Japan, waiting times are so short that most patients don't bother to make an appointment.

At my local hospital they stop taking new appointments for the day at 10:30 in the morning, sharp, because they're booked by that point. I got myself there at 11:00 while severely ill, was told by the receptionist to come back tomorrow, stupidly decided to walk home rather than protesting or calling a cab or ambulance, and very nearly passed out in the middle. A coworker wondering why I didn't come into work dropped by my house, found me, and took me across town to a different hospital.

Aside from nearly dying in the street despite having both insurance and ample means to pay for treatment, my experience with Japanese healthcare has been mostly positive.

P.S. Don't get me started on dentistry, though.
Twilio does that and inbound calls can be as cheap as 3 cents/minute.

If you choose to use them, try to fit your voice message into under a minute. Whenever people call your number, twilio will play your "thanks for calling, we have your number, we will call you back" message. The Twilio API can send missed calls to you in email. You can also have the option to request the person dial a different contact number + extension. Also try to do the debugging and implementation using their free trial account and make sure you don't have any script that initiates and outside call based on some computational event (this screwed me, big time.)
Sabrina Shroff, a public defender who represents Mr. Aleynikov, responded that he had transferred less than 32 megabytes of Goldman proprietary code, a small fraction of the overall program, which is at least 1,224 megabytes.

32M is more than enough source to compile to 1224M of binary. This is C++ right?
I imagine anyone who works in law enforcement is also well aware of the fallibility of memory, they just don't bring it up in the court room.

Nope, they leave that to the lawyers.
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My bank use a unique 12 digit number and a PIN I've chosen (and THEN my full name, address, etc).

I don't have my account set up for telephone banking.

I don't go on holidays, except perhaps local expeditions. Easy peasy to get home.

Your forged death certificate wouldn't get you very much - I keep the majority of my money in other accounts.

Don't get me wrong, although I keep my money fairly secure I know what you're getting at. But, I think it's a big leap of faith to assume that someone who has a go at guessing known easy passwords is also going to fill in their bank account details too.