skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its hard to pick the one true reference. It is of course covered in Vapnik's two books. Just to set expectations right, these arent what I would call hacker friendly books, they need a fair bit of maths. I think another good one is the book by Devroye, Gyorfi and Lugosi, you will find more examples here. You could also google "statistical learning theory" that would give you lots of relevant hits, in particular course notes.
Just qualify it:

"online learning" algorithm

That gives me 10 relevant hits out of 10 on the first page.
All of the guided "ask X to introduce you to Y" systems that I have seen are... poorly implemented. The thing is, asking for an intro is complex; it depends on your relationship with the person doing the introduction, and with their relationship with the end target, and with how beneficial the potential relationship between the introduced parties is perceived to be.

You have a limited number of "waste your more important contact's time" tokens. You get more when you successfully introduce someone who is useful to your higher-status contact,

The odd thing is, even in an unsuccessful match, where you introduce two people and they don't establish a relationship they both find pleasant, if you connect a lower-status contact with the higher-status contact, even if the match is unsuccessful, you are still seen to have done your lower-status contact a favor, even though you have annoyed the higher status contact, so if the lower-status contact is someone you want to curry favor with, it might make sense to introduce them even if there is a lower probability of them forming a mutually profitable relationship with the higher-status contact, but normally it's a matter of "how interesting is the potential relationship between the two people I am introducing," which takes some thought and often times means not making the introduction.

The upshot here is that I'm not going to just right out introduce two of my contacts. I mean, I will if I think they can have a beneficial relationship, but I generally feel pretty weird when someone directly asks me for an intro to another specific person, rather than 'Hey, do you know anyone who is good with X" - because with the latter, I can talk to each person individually, and I can silently drop the whole thing without telling the other they were rejected, whereas if X asks me to introduce them to Y, and either Y says they are not interested or I think I would annoy Y, then I've gotta reject X, which can be awkward.
"Why am I being fined just because they booked a room for my party? "

Because you agreed to those terms?
Just because you agreed to a crappy deal for you doesn't get you out of it. If you don't like it, don't take the deal?
We are talking about wedding receptions, it's not like random hotel guests. These have real contracts, deposits, etc (and they said they take it out of your deposit).

"It seems unenforceable to a lay-person because it puts the burden of controlling third parties we can't control on us. "

This is incredibly common.

For example, almost every contract you would ever sign for selling software, etc will say something like "you agree to indemnify us if a third party sues us over intellectual property issues in your software".
This is clearly enforceable in almost all cases.
You have literally no control over who chooses to sue them.

As for not making sense, the law makes perfect sense in this sort of case - you may freely contract for almost anything.
it's looking more and more like Reno is the location of the battery plant. The governor and Musk have both made statements recently about it and Tesla had something like 300 people working on something here. Work is currently stopped though so maybe the site isn't suitable or the state has done something stupid again.
Drop-In Chat had a few different XSS flaws. They should all be fixed now. Thanks for finding them and pointing them out!

Sorry for the slow security fix, I was traveling after leaving YC Hacks. Please do let me know if you find anything else wrong.
Very interesting! I wonder where on the flash the firmware for the SD card is stored -- or perhaps it's stored in the controller EEPROM? If I could dump it out, that would be very valuable indeed.
Those who wear suits and ties see them as tie dye and jeans.

Those who wear tie dye and jeans see them as suits and ties.
Thanks for the encouragement. What we have is certainly just a first step. We will continue to keep making incremental improvements now that YC Hacks is over.
I question the claim that reporting is a small part of what interactions with the business domain is about. For many shops, I'd wager the opposite claim is true, honestly.

Of course, there is a very thin line between "reporting" and "transforming to better deal with explorational algorithm." That is to say, my assertion is that it is when folks try and come up with "one true model" of their data that thing start to suck. Whether in ORM land or straight SQL land. Or just flat out "in memory" land, honestly.
Maybe, if they're buying the memory at market prices. I believe that for high-volume NAND flash consumers, there is probably more of a spot-pricing scheme in place: for whatever reason, if Micron had a whole bunch of 64Gbit MLC around because (say) HTC stopped making a phone yesterday, then Transcend would be plenty happy to scoop it up for a low price.

(edit: Googling for NAND flash spot pricing results in http://www.dramexchange.com , which seems to confirm those sorts of suspicions. I think the market is probably pretty volatile...)
So true!

With Hibernate there are a lot of things happen under the hood. And all you can do is either struggle with Hibernate, or hope that those under-the-hood-things won't have a strong impact on your app's performance.
You've just broadened the definition of ORM so that any SQL abstraction layer in an OO language becomes an ORM.

That's a rather nonstandard usage.
Hi waitingkuo. Thanks for the encouragement. Currently I wouldn't recommend using Drop-In Chat in a production context as the code is too new and not really stable. When we get to the point we think the product is ready for production use we'll make an announcement.

At this point we do not have plans to add video conferencing support.
Ask HN: What's the simplest way to integrate a blog onto my website?
The blog doesn't need any fancy features, but should fit in with the look of the website. Should I customize Wordpress or is there an easier way I'm missing?
this seems to be a great project. But the demo on your site which is in horizontal mode is so hard to see ... I have problem with my neck after watching it ...
But great job !
"Hypothetically, if you were to launder $500,000, how would you want to do it?"
>FTP is insecure

Really [0]?

>however, you're getting dangerously close to the anti-PHP stereotype of the average PHP developer

I think you're getting dangerously close to coming off as condescending and insulting.

Despite what you may think, plain old fully managed shared hosting is still massively popular, especially here in the UK.

Our client base are design and development houses who want a reliable, tinker-free fully managed, predictable and secure environment. These folks aren't as backwards as you think, they already have a development workflow that works just fine. They push their stuff to their htdocs folder (via FTPS) and it just works. We even support WebDeploy (also secure) on the Windows platform so they can build MS deploy packages and push them up.

Most of our clients do use source control, they're not that naive but not all of them have drank the Github Koolade. They're happy with their own private source control arrangements.

It's an environment and process that's tried and tested so they can get on with building apps that pay the rent and keep the lights on without futzing about with dynos and droplets and the like. Not only that they can pick up the phone and within two rings get access to an experience frontline engineer who will fix a problem or answer a question within a couple of hours.

I can speak about this from experience as an engineer who works for a UK shared hoster. Admittedly we're not a bulk shared-hoster like GoDaddy, our services are tailored towards the needs of business clients, not someone's granny deploying a Wordpress site with pictures of cats.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol#FTPS
I was an Extraordinary Alien – For a Week
Hackers will hack just about everything except their personality even when it can be to their advantage.

I do not go to Starbucks with the intention of striking a conversation with strangers and try to find something interesting.

I do go out with the intention of talking to whomever I want to talk to even if my second thought after realizing this is negative, and even if I am afraid of others reaction.

It fails most of the time, but I think over time I will get better at it.
They're initially prefixed because the standard is not finished.

Many of them are _still_ prefixed because WebKit has a policy of never removing prefixed features, even if they implement the unprefixed one. So people feel no compunction about using the prefixed stuff in production, and since they only test in WebKit they don't notice when they're using the -webkit-prefixed version even though every single browser (or every browser except WebKit, in some cases) supports the unprefixed standard version.
I think it's pretty clear that (s)he's talking about ActiveRecord.
> offering $2.3 million ... also offering $13 million

$15.3 million seems like a paltry incentive compared to what I perceive the cost of a launch facility to be. Can someone in the know clarify how generous these grants are, especially relative to the cost of a launch facility?
Reminder/Tip about viewing the top Hackernews stories
http://news.ycombinator.com/best
It's a delicate balance between being polite (toeing your partner's comfort zone), provocative (so they actually have to think about the answer), and funny or interesting (catch them off guard, be entertained).

When you're starting out you'll accidentally dip too far off either of these scales, but you can just apologise and calmly change tactic. Eventually you'll intuitively "feel" the conversation. And remember, some people are just too prudish, boring, or disinterested to be good conversationalists — feel free to politely "thank you" out of a conversation.
I've used Tumblr, Wordpress, and Jekyll. My preference is Jekyll, as I find it the easiest to use and can be served very cheaply via S3.
The most clever press-releases I've seen in recent-months have taken the form of guest-articles / guest-posts on places like TechCrunch. Of course it can't be a hard sell (no overt plugs). But they can be an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge of [insert-your-vertical] and come off as an expert in that field. Somewhere in the post the magazine will reference who you are and where you work, and that alone might do more benefit than any traditional PR syndication service would.

More info:

http://venturebeat.com/guest-posts/

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/27/guest-column-column/
Ask HN: Why does % of ownership matters more than number of stock options
I recently got my stock option grant letter and to make some sense of what I could potentially be getting I simply took the number of options and multiplied it with a reasonable sales price and then subtracted my total cost (number of options * strike price). Upon looking up on the internet, I found numerous articles indicating that 'the only number that matters when it comes to stock options is what % of company you own. I dont understand why % of ownership matters more than number of options I have. Because with the latter its very simple...num of options * sale prices...% of ownership it seems like complicates things unnecessarily. Can somebody explain what I am missing??
Both Japan and Korea used to have cheaper labor costs and they used that advantage along with manufacturing improvements to maintain their industries to the present day through economies of scale and lack of competition from other countries (once they've been driven out of the industry, like the U.S. and Greece).

It's roughly analogous as if the rise of Honda and Toyota in the 1960s ran all the U.S. car manufacturers out of business.
I don't believe work has stopped, and it is infact the battery plant. From what I have heard there are still a few states in the running.
Hi scrollaway. Thanks for the support.

XMPP seems really great in a context of needing to inter-operate with other servers. However, for our use-case all communication was in a silo of a single site so this was not a major benefit to Drop-In Chat.

Our team wants broad broad browser support (for legacy corporate deployments) and a well-tested client side module. BrowserChannel, which is used for gmail chat, is very widely deployed and well tested.

Maybe I'm missing something, but even if we went with XMPP, wouldn't Drop-In Chat still need a way to stream messages from the server to the client? If so, we would still need to rely on a transport mechanism like websockets/XHR streaming/forever iframes for the in-browser real time message delivery. BrowserChannel/WebChannel bundles up this abstraction nicely and hides all the ugliness of dealing with browser quirks for streaming message delivery.
I think "mindshare" was the term he was looking for.
I am looking for a room in Bay Area
Hello everyone, I just came to SF to study my master degree in IT Management at Golden Gate University, I am temporarily staying in a Hotel now, but I need to move in to a house, If anyone looking for a new roommate or anyone wants to move in also, I am fully available, I am non-smoker, don't do drugs, don't do parties, and generally quiet programming stuff. But if anyone does these stuff, I am very open. I am 25 year old male who is energetic and adventurous. Anywhere in the Bay Area is ok with me my school is in financial district but I can take bart or other transportation choices, I love to do any kind of sports and love to create web applications for people. Hit me at yunus@engineer.com Thank you very much.
I believe the difference here is that one is an ORM framework, while the other is just objects bound to a database.

ORM frameworks usually allow you to drop down to SQL. But then you're stuck in that terrible world of depending on poorly-documented and soon-to-be-deprecated (or already deprecated) internals. Which are pretty much guaranteed to not fit what you really need anyway. Then you have to bridge your hack objects with the "proper" ORM objects. Your crufty hack objects will probably never be seen as first-class citizens in ORM land, forever banished to edge case hell.
If your priori are that strong, why bother with the data?
Tuning consistency levels for your requests (R/W/N values) can only guarantee read-after-write consistency at best. It doesn't guarantee strong consistency like what HBase provides.
That's because this CSS is using CSS transforms.

And while IE and Firefox have supported unprefixed CSS transforms for a while now, Chrome and Safari only support the -webkit-prefixed version of CSS transforms so far. So if you want to do transforms, you have to use -webkit prefixes...
As a fellow chess coder I find this very cool, but we should be careful with the use of the word "strong." What ELO (for the non-chess people, rating) does this play at? I very much doubt it's truly what most would consider "strong" nowadays. In fact I doubt it plays above even 1500 - that's not strong. Great example of a simple chess engine in Python though? Surely!
Crashing != hacking
Ask them nicely to extend for another 30 days. Most companies I've asked to do this have been happy to do so.
"And this is advice for introvert? Many introverts... "

Better being awkward than being a pusillanimous.

So what if they burn? It is not the end of world if someone finds you awkward, or laughs at you. It is the end of the world if you want to improve and do not have the courage to look stupid temporarily until you find your own path.
It's just a plugin, go the chrome app store
If the owners are reading: the site is completely unusable on android browser. Viewport will not scroll or zoom. I can get the side nav to pop out, but none of the menu items does anything.
I have a neighbor who is 68 years old with a small build and routinely lifts and moves 250lb 18-24' horse gates all by himself. He hired me for a few days for help him do a large horse gate move and I blew out my back on the third day. I have a large build (235lb 6'1"). I have no problem lifting two 50lb feed bags even though I am out of shape. I was very surprised that that this device could only lift 60 kilos (132lb). I wonder what the battery life is and/or if it is coupled with a power source/cable.
Texas is right-to-work state. Musk is a smart guy.
The difference is that they look like different sizes to the user because of the different viewing distance.

The really user-relevant size is subtended angle, not linear size, which is why the "px" unit in CSS was defined the way it was.
>I mean no disrespect to the soldiery, but why use soldiers for this, and not the DIA/NSA/CIA/various other TLAs?

I specifically said that I wasn't advocating this as a military mission. I was just stating that if it was a military mission, the Soldiers themselves wouldn't be the reason that it fails.

>Grunts wearing camouflage sitting in front of a laptop trying to outbrain someone seems humorously perverse.

A grunt is an infantryman. Not all Soldiers are grunts. The Soldiers that work as security analysts do it as a full time job. They still have to take a couple PT tests each year and qualify once or twice a year with an M16, but they spend most of their time doing their job.

I'm not sure how wearing camofluage affects a person's ability to use a computer? They are people like everyone else.
I seem to recall reading that it is advantageous to launch a rocket closer to the equator, and Cameron County is at the southern tip of Texas. Wouldn't it seem more likely that location played a bigger role in SpaceX choosing Texas than the incentives?
You don't need a validation set. I'm pretty sure you still want a test set.
At this point dropinchat.com does not support sending messages to more than one user. However, we do plan to add that feature as our team has time.

The documentation on dropinchat.com mentions "groups" as a set of users which are allowed to see one another and message back and forth. Our team thinks this use case might be helpful, for example, for a website administrator to limiting communication between members on a given organizational team or individuals in a certain building, etc.
I have no idea whether or not this is a sound legal / business decision. And yes this could just be "taking off the steering wheel" in a game of chicken. But damn, you have to respect an entrepreneur for taking a stand.
1. This is a vocabulary and syntax quiz, mostly.

2. The code is unreadable (formatting) on a phone after 1.5 Manhattans.

3. Anybody else read the title in Robert Pollard's voice?
Google is just a middleman between you and webpages, Facebook is just a middleman between you and sharing your stuff. Everything is a middleman.
Not being a rocket scientist, I am unfamiliar with some details. Aren't there only a very small number of launch sites even viable for consideration in the US for this kind of activity? Something about being close to the equator, and not landing your rocket on a major city. So, South Texas and... ummm...
In case you want to buy them before their possible bankruptcy: http://zenmagnets.com/the-zen-gift-set/
When data becomes dangerous: Why Elon Musk is right and wrong about AI
Another App Store Story
John is correct. There are different types of extra pay, but they don't have anything for tech related jobs.

The allowances in the Army are for things like jumping out of a plane, scuba diving, foreign languages, combat pay, etc.

The Army still has this attitude that if you aren't outside all day, running around yelling at people, then you must not be doing any work. I'm not sure if that will ever change.
No. While in check, the only legal moves are those that take you out of check. It is checkmate (and you lose) if and only if there is no legal move that would take you out of check.

Also, a move that would place yourself in check is never legal.
Sorry for the XSS problems. They are fixed now so it is safe to visit and test again if you like. Thanks owenversteeg for warning everyone.
Salt all the way. We moved digedu's highly distributed infrastructure from puppet to salt and couldn't be happier with salt-cloud, salt-master, salt states, pillar and jinja.
You're completely right.

The U.S. is so far ahead of the rest of the world in almost all defense technologies that it's a hard pill to swallow politically that there could be one relatively-small segment (non-nuclear surface warships) that we'd be better off actually buying from our closest allies.

We export so much defense equipment to our allies, that you'd think it would be okay to maybe possibly import one thing that's built better and cheaper elsewhere. But no, we'd rather subsidize our shipyards to continue churning out ships designed in the 1980s...
There's a lot of truth to that. Many places use 7-10 mph over as a threshold. Smaller tickets always get plead down, and cops get measured by collars or tickets.

I don't think skirting the limits has much impact on behavior as the limits go up. In my personal observation, I've observed little if any difference between highway driving on the Deegan Expressway in NYC (50 mph), i95 in South Carolina (70/75) or the mass pike (65). Once you hit 70-80 mph, driving requires more attention.

On the other side, you have absurd local limits as well. The standard for streets in most towns in New York was 35 twenty years ago. Now it's 30, with zones as low as 15 or 20 mph near schools. It's a scheme to get bigger tickets and more drug arrests in "school zones". I wish they'd just get to the point and put up a toll barricade.
As the ban of ZenMagnets's primary opponent was in 2012 [1], and the government seemed to want to ban ZenMagnets [2], I find it amazing it is still out here in the business two years later and with a record sale $700k last year (a jump from $50k in year 2012).

So nothing happened during these two years?

----

[1] Banning Buckyball Magnets Is Statistically Ridiculous:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eliyahu-federman/banning-bucky...

[2] US Government Wants to Ban Zen Magnets:
http://gizmodo.com/5932638/us-government-wants-to-ban-zen-ma...
The way they phrase it, "magnet sphere," makes what they sell seem so arbitrary. It really helps them make the case of pro-democracy, as if it could be any object banned from sale simply because we cannot trust consumers with them.
Uber already has a ton of users and more importantly, drivers. If I visit SF what reason would there be to use this guy's cab service vs Uber? I already have Uber on my phone.
"We will combat the CPSC’s magnet prohibition until triumph, or until a glorious death of insolvency on the legal battlefield."

I like this guy. Where do I donate? Or should I just buy magnets?
Good!

The way that Bucky Balls was abused was insane. They voluntarily went above and beyond to ensure that their vendors knew how dangerous they were for small children. They required a signature on a super non-standard document agreeing to indicate that they are not a toy for small children.

(I had to sign one to order them wholesale for my last company.)
Were there really no significant algorithms invented after 2002?