skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be interested to see the results of the first part of this. I've heard of those studies (perhaps they were just stories?) where groups of people collectively estimated things like number of jelly beans in a jar and were actually pretty accurate on average.

Obviously it's not going to be like that, because some of these things people can actually know - but I'm still curious.
While we're mentioning paid alternatives, I'd add Scalyr (http://www.scalyr.com) to the list. Does all of the above, with plans based on log volume instead of number of servers.
You can start pv without an estimated size, run du in the background, and then supply the estimate to pv once it's calculated using the '-R' (remote control) option.

A bit clumsy, but it shouldn't be hard to write a little script to do it.
I'm a complete idiot. You're right--it's well worth printing a single card at position 1 (or 0 ;-) and throwing away the rest of the sheet. Doh!

Also, thank you for giving me the search term "id card printer". I didn't even come close with my fumbling attempts at things like "print business cards 1 at a time" and so forth.
They're hypothetical inferences, but the downside to using actual realistic examples is that even when they're meticulously researched, people nitpick them to a degree that baffles me. Like, asserting "but the probability of the evidence is either 0 or 1, so it's clearly impossible to ever make any inferential reasoning work".

The examples here are well chosen to eliminate the usual attacks on inference. They're ODD. But they're not invalid.
Thanks. I didn't know these existed either. I'm learning a lot today.
Done and done. Thank you.
Does the Netherlands get hurricanes?
I grew up in a suburb south of Detroit, graduated high school in the early 80's. Many of my neighbors, and parents of friends, were involved in the auto industry in some form or fashion. If we weren't making cars, we were making pieces of cars, chemicals for making pieces of cars, machines for making and repairing cars, and so forth.

There seemed to be an inexorable cycle: During good times, we'd be making cars like crazy. Civic leaders all warned that we shouldn't be so dependent on one industry. "The Silicon Valley of the Midwest" was mentioned as early as I can remember.

During bad times, the car plants would shut down. Civic leaders said that we shouldn't be so dependent on one industry.

When things turned back around, we always went back to making cars like crazy. And pieces of cars, etc. Civic leaders breathed a sigh of relief but warned that we shouldn't be so dependent on one industry.

So, if Detroit is picking up right now, I'll wonder the same thing that I've wondered before: Is it just because there is more demand for cars again, and everything else is just a trickle down from making cars again, and pieces of cars? Or is it something else?
The overconfidence/underconfidence issue is similar to that expressed in the book 'How to measure anything'. The author claims to have trained people to become better estimators, by presenting them estimation challenges, and providing feedback about how often the actual value was within their stated range. IIRC people were asked to present a range for which they were 80% confident. If the answer was within the range too often (e.g. 90%) then their ranges were too wide, and if not often enough, they were overconfident. Over time, most subjects improved their calibration.

I started (yesterday) working on a simple web app to train people in this way. It's not yet ready to try out, but you can bookmark it here: https://github.com/rahimnathwani/measure-anything
I listened to it on Audible... and found it enjoyable, but I think that would be down to the narrator.
http://www.flair.zone

Shoot me an email if you want to chat!
You are discounting a LOT of Bill Gate's history. Yes, he did miss the "internet", (as someone who worked with Microsoft in Australia) he literally turned the company around in 6 weeks.

But if you still say Bill "missed" the internet, you are discounting Netscape vs IE wars.

The internet in the 90's was a very different place to the internet today.

But before that, Bill Gates got a lot right! Eg Excel vs Lotus, Word vs Word Perfect, Windows vs OS. The whole history of DOS.

As others have said, its like saying Steve Jobs is a failure because he was sacked by the company he founded (Apple).
If you can find that, provide a link. I strongly doubt people are particularly good (without applying some sort of rigor) at estimating beans in jars.
The Economist published a chart in April showing some of the (American) colleges with the highest and lowest rates of return on investment over twenty years. The article admits that the study "surely overstates the financial value of a college education" because it compares college graduates to non-attendees without trying to adjust for differences in intelligence, etc., so take it for what it's worth.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600131-too-man...
I am going to challenge that belief by asking you to do the following:

Try solving the blue and red pots problem, given only a single observation.

Now try again, this time with two observations.
The software my team works on at work is java based, and make pretty extensive use of aspects with Spring AOP. Generally, I've learned two lessons to reduce the 'what the Fuck just happened here?' problem.

First, the method being given the aspect should be annotated. @LogsArgs or @Transactional. None of this 'oh we just use an auto proxy to apply this to every method' bullshit. Tell me you're doing something.

Second, the annotation should be and to tell you exactly what it's doing with just the name. @LogRequestAndResponse. What does it do? Exactly what it says. If you can't describe the end result easily, then how will the next guy have a clue what just happened?

Whenever I've followed these, I don't regret aspects very often. When I stop following them, people get confused.
How to handle division by zero in a language that doesn't support exceptions?
One thing to be aware of with that series is that the pace and.. quality take a serious dip around books 6 to 9. If you find yourself getting bored or bogged down at that point, it's worth skimming, reading synopses, whatever, to keep with it, then pick it back up around book 10. Or just be aware that it gets better again. (Although the first few books were still the strongest IMO, except for possibly some of the Sanderson stuff. Here's a guide: http://jasonrpeters.com/2012/12/11/the-complete-guide-to-rer...
Cool, didn't know about that pv had a remote control.

Anyway, if cp -R had a progress bar it would behave the same way, i.e. it would have first to recursively stat the source the same way as du does, and only then it could start reporting a completion percentage.
If you acquire a company with $x million in cash. How is the money handled?
Engineering stories are too hard for the general public to understand.
Microkernels vs. hypervisors (2008)
Here's how I see it. Self-determination is the goal. But that means individual self-determination as well as collective self-determination. We should be able to decide how we want to live our lives, but the collective should also be able to decide what sort of society they live in. Now my problem is with the "in any capacity" part of your statement. I think there is a tremendous range of beliefs that are consistent with recognizing both sorts of self-determination. But saying that society should have no power to decide how you live your life, in any capacity, rejects the second sort of self-determination entirely.
All being a "functional language" means is that it's easy to write with a particular paradigm in the language.

You certainly can write similar code in ML, Java, or C - or whatever language strikes your fancy. It just helps when the type system is lined up with that goal, such as forcing you to denote where side-effects occur, and ensuring only functions that expect side-effect based code can operate on them. (For what it's worth, I've used both ML and Scheme to write similar style code as part of a programming languages class; and similarly, the C code I write relies on the functional ideas as much as possible.)

I just like the combination of Haskell's syntax and type system, so I prefer it to something like C (where functions aren't exactly a first class datatype, and the type system is somewhat weaker).
I don't know anything about this deal, but as far as I know Caviar has been growing leaps and bound, with many new cities launched recently very successfully in terms of order volume, etc...

Caviar's growth potential is really strong, (and they are not burning a lot of cash at all - they were operating profitably in SF for almost a year): Grubhub is stuck at the low end of the market, and there is a real opportunity to be a true partner at the high end (which they are doing).

Disclaimer: I am a small investor in Caviar and shared an office with them for 4 months
This is good advice. You do lose the transparency of the approach in this case, but you are otherwise stuck in a higher-order form of callback hell if you don't.

Though one wonders if they could get rid of even this if they just had some dynamic scoping.
Reading about macro typesetting systems made me wonder about whether someone had done it in Lisp, and then I saw your post! Scribble looks really interesting, I might have to have a play with it for my book that I'm working on.
I guess a few people are still talking about it because it sounds significant, the name sounds as if it's competing with OOP, instead of being the gimmick that it is.

We do the same thing in OOP (without the "spooky action from distance" you've noticed) with the Decorator & Strategy patterns, very simple patterns, even those who don't know about patterns are probably using them without knowing.
Water would be my first guess.
Here is one explanation of Cuban American political beliefs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_American#Political_belief...
The FBI surely must have known about the nasty divorce (the TA mentioned it was very public at the time). So, did that fact get into consideration while evaluating Feynmann?

I might be a bit naive, but I don't want to assume it was a simple witch-hunt.
Let me guess! Sea levels will rise 2 ft +/- 2.5 ft right?
> My secondary concern is that too many people think "all-natural" or "organic" means safe.

Too many? I have yet to meet a local-grown organic all-natural afficionado who wasn't convinced this means they are automagically eating healthy and safe produce [and possibly saving small underdog farmers' lives] to boot.

Very few people realise that most (or at least a lot) of the time organic and all-natural is just a marketing ploy.
Just started The Power of Full Engagement by Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr. I believe it was recommended here a while ago. Starts off a bit weak, spending too much time almost trying to sell you the book it feels like, rather than getting down to what it's actually all about - you know the type, like those "motivational" videos that spend an hour talking about how great it works and how many people have changed their life without ever actually saying what the ___ "it" is. But it's not as bad as those, and I'm hopeful that as it gets into the real content it will be useful, since their general framework makes a lot of sense. (The key tenant being to focus on managing energy rather than time.)

I'm also eagerly awaiting the next Patrick Rothfuss Kingkiller Chronicle book. (Despite the low-fantasy sounding name, the series is excellent. I think it's probably the only fantasy series I would strongly recommend people pick up despite the fact that it's not finished yet.)
Lithography guiding finer block copolymers pleasingly follows Feynman's pantograph talk
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html
Very few cluster sizes in enterprises reach this limit, and by limit I mean 1k -> 2k nodes. In reality, there's very little demand for namenode scalability at the current moment, but once this changes, the community will implement it.
You may be thinking of rainymood?
What do you use that is so expensive?
Annotating the Methods seems like an anti-AOP pattern to me. Of the comments become code and get filled with AOP stuff, it's not an different Form putting the calls into the methods themself, beside some performance improvements when running the code without annotations. But the code will be littered with stuff that should be outside of it.
> on your exact interests is the goal of a great curation.

You might be interested in signing up for the beta at http://recent.io (disclaimer: I quit my job at CBS/CNET earlier this year to found this company). We released an alpha version to early testers last month, with the beta to come soon.

We recommend articles based on what we learn your interests to be, and that selection of recommended articles is the best I’ve ever seen.
If anyone is interested, Detroit Labs[1] is a SF statup-esque software development company in Detroit. Not everything in Detroit is a shithole like the news will have you believe, Quicken loans recently moved to the city and brought a ton of jobs and their are some very nice areas of the city. I just yesterday attended a hackathon[2] for the Detroit Public Library that had many attendants.

[1] http://www.detroitlabs.com/

[2] http://www.automationalley.com/a2_nws_eventinfo?id=a08600000...
Not _all_ providers listed on LEB are unreliable or unprofessional. My favourite VPS provider is one I found on LEB. They have fantastic routes to mainland China, which means I get ping times of ~85ms vs. at least 250ms with Digital Ocean.
It's much easier to believe abstractly or understand the problem from afar.

In Australia we have a lot of advertising to highlight the dangers of disasters to try and counter this psychological phenomena.

I expect people will continue to try and work around the symptoms of global warming long before they start to work towards a real viable solution.
It's silly unless you know the numbers involved (revenues, growth, etc..). As far as I know nobody knows these numbers today (I know the ones from 6 months ago and they were better than most startups hope to ever get to).
> The problem is poorly thought out city planning over the last 40 or so years, not a recent sea level rise.

Exactly. The article says there has been about a 10-inch rise in sea levels since the 19th century. That's plenty of time to plan and adapt.
Another common ruse was setting up a fake adultery with the help of an accommodating friend. One spouse would take a picture of the other spouse and the friend coming out of a motel room. Instant grounds for divorce.
Why would they try to hide it? They didn't think it was anything unusual, nor something to be ashamed of.

If you buy a new house today, it may come with stipulations that you keep your lawn cut to less than a certain height. That does not mean that short grass is a motivation for new housing developments. It's simply what everybody does.
Strange Radio Signals Mystify Astronomers
Since utopia is implied you can assume the population is healthy, well-fed, well educated (possibly for free), and has a low crime rate across the board.

This alone would pretty much ensure there are no lazy/stupid people. Stupidity is largely a factor of health and education, laziness mostly a factor of social norms (encouragement, expecting success, role models etc.)

What I'm saying is that on average people behave the way you expect them to as long as they know what's expected.
We can probably replace many instances of (s)he or he/she with a singular they. As the Wikipedia article says[1], this is not a recent phenomenon. If using he in a gender-neutral way or in gender ambiguous situations is somehow not politically correct, we should use the word they to replace all instances of he/she or (s)he or he or she where the gender is not important. This is probably the case in over half of our usage of he/she or (s)he or he or she.

Instead of: Barack Obama is the current president of the United States. He was born in 1961.

Say: Barack Obama is the current president of the United States. They were born in 1961.

Fight the madness of people getting mad over gender of pronouns with a greater degree of madness. It is the only way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Customizable control interface for the Raspberry Pi
Os 12 melhores jogos de Neo Geo
actually, i didn't either. you posed an interesting puzzle.
Hulu to Stream ‘South Park’ as More Players Jostle for Online Rights
My general impression before reading the article is the Iron Dome, while technically impressive, wouldn't help ease the systemic problems, because if rockets become ineffective enough, other means of enacting violence/getting the point across will be used.

Meanwhile, aggressive action gets cheaper for Israel from a human casualty perspective if they don't have to worry about further pissing people off who have rockets. Cynically speaking, lowering the cost of something makes it more likely to happen :(

If, however, Iron Dome gets to a point where Israel feels safe enough to delay/attenuate/cancel a ground invasion as a mitigating/retaliatory tactic, one possibility the article mentioned, then it could be a net benefit. Does require self-control, though. And I don't know how safe people will feel if rockets are being fired in their general direction, even if you get very good at shooting them down; I doubt it is something you get complacent about.
Similarly, some of the answers were unnecessarily vague. For instance, I actually happened to read just yesterday a blurb about racing horse speed, and I knew that while racehorses can reach around 30mph, the very fastest horses can apparently reach sprinting speeds (briefly) of around 50mph. So which answer does it want? (This was especially frustrating since for most of the other answers I had no friggin' clue...)
Use php.net like a dictionary, its not something you read from start to finish, its what you use to look things up.

Read a few tutorials, do a hello world script and work your way up, eg, calculator, comment thread, blog, etc.

Learn by doing, id say only read when you are trying to accomplish something you are actually doing. Reading a book without writing any code will get you no where.
Twitter Spam by Popular Media Orgs
A practice on Twitter that really bugs me is the constant re-posting by media organizations of their tweets, sometimes reworded, but often the same tweet, over and over. Popular media outlets such as Vice, Forbes, Fast Company, and Ars do this regularly. I understand the need to push articles and capture our attention, but when does this cross the line into spam?

For discussion, I propose Twitter create a duplicate and similar post filter, that collapses similarly worded posts from Twitter accounts. Particularly those posts with the same link. I believe that by doing so it will reduce the "scroll time" needed to read a Twitter feed for a given time better, allowing for more consumption and a better experience.

Thoughts?
The projections are all over the place (thus why I was so vague) but I don't think they went quite as far as to have error bars that went into the negatives. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
The deed covenants on Long Island came from local requirements in Nassau and Suffolk county. It was there, but not necessarily directly related to the people building subdivisions.

The key issue that drove suburbanization and eventually the "white flight" phenomenon was transportation and infrastructure. There was no housing to be had in NYC, period. NYCs government was so corrupt, inept and broke that it couldn't build anything.

I grew up in Queens, much of which was horror show in terms of infrastructure and mostly built in the postwar era. My dad reduced his commuting time to Manhattan by nearly 30 minutes -- by moving or family 100 miles north.
Well, certainly nothing stops you from using the immutable version and calling it mutable (it just happens to do no mutation!). But my point is that it's a nontrivial modification compared to other approaches to enabling snapshotting, and it's a good tool to have in your belt for that kind of situation.

Particularly interesting, genuinely "persistent" data structures (as used by Okasaki in Purely Functional Data Structures - which is a fantastic read and tons of fun) can give amortized worst-case bounds even in the presence of a malicious consumer of the data structure picking which operations to run against which historical versions of the object.
By what mechanism does the ETF go short on real estate? Stocks are fungible, so borrowing shares to sell them makes sense, but I just can't make sense of the mechanism for real estate.
that's a great little read. Just in talking with friends and hearing conversations in South Florida, it certainly feels generational. As far as voting, as the younger generations start to vote more, I'm sure we will see a major shift in the political landscape in SF (not San Francisco lolz).
Aw shoot, where my comment above says "2100G" that was supposed to be "2^100G". HN ate my double-asterisk.
Yep. I’ve heard complaints about “filter bubbles” before, but have always found these to be entirely theoretical — not a critique of an actual implemented system. In reality, as <chris_va> says, a “filter bubble” is different from a “viewpoint bubble.”

An example: If our recommendation engine at http://recent.io/ concludes you’re interested in Barack Obama, it will (surprise!) recommend articles about Barack Obama. It doesn’t filter by political viewpoint. You’ll get articles from both lefty sources and right-leaning sources.

Also, of course, we offer “top news” if you prefer!
Quick, somebody put together the app that does some Bayesian work to score people and their quotes, research, funding, etc. to show on a scale where their tendencies would be expected to be for a given next statement. Let's get META!!! on meta-analyses.

What's interesting is the turf battles going on over what I would say are details vs the "news you can use."

Industrial agra => :P tasting + less desirable enviro impact.

Alt agra => less offputting, better enviro impact, but big hand waving around potential to be capable of scale and affordable for current and future population.

I get a sense there's this looming dread of having to deal with someone saying, "We can't survive (or will have a bad time) as a species if we sit back and slurp big agra, but we can't realistically keep everyone around/afford it if we try to help everyone eat 'correctly/safely'."

If the organic path is the moral path, is it OK to allow food costs to increase substantially? Is it OK to disallow the big agra calories and nutrients which likely enable subsistence for those unable to fight over spots for their Teslas and Priuses at Whole Foods?
Perhaps it's not the "going to college" that puts one at an advantage, but the "being able to go to college." In other words, the people who are able to make the choice to go and afford it were already at an advantageous position.
Thanks for that, I was struggling for the right words when I was writing the post.

I would really like to see another crypto currency come out that addressed the validating client issue. I think that could also get more people interested in it too, since they would be earning money just by running the client.
More like +5/-1
Web based version of Access? From what I've seen of it, SalesForce seems like it could fit the bill.

Didn't strike me as particularly well done though.
Regarding insurance, my mother recently purchased a house in the area and her insurance costs rival her mortgage payment. It's astonishingly expensive. My insurance payment in Northern Virginia is less for a year than hers is for a month, on a house that cost 4x as much. So it's already a massive issue and will only get worse from here.
Our Best Bet for Colonizing Space May Be Printing Humans on Other Planets
Just curious but could this be possible to get around by having multiple copies of the python interpreter installed on your sytstem? Maybe possibly changing some config strings so the GIL thinks it's something else.