skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is this just bad use of stats?

The article's premises are based on the regression lines he's put on them, but the're at best very loose.

Looking at the second graph in particular, where the author's point is that the positive skew is unexpected. It seems to me that (1) the line is only just positive anyway; (2) no error bars or survey methodology is evident even though we're talking numbers lower than 0.5 in 100,000; and (3) it's clear that outliers NY and NJ not only form part of the regression, but are skewing it dramatically.

I can't do it at the moment but I bet that if you remove those two outliers, the line will tip negative (as expected).
Absolutely right, Anders Ericsson has called Malcolm Gladwell out for misinterpreting his results for this exact reason. Not sure how widely available this is for playback but "More or Less" did a great podcast on this earlier this year: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01sqly1
Great effort, lovely little device. Building your own hardware is not easy to do cost effectively!

But a few niggles:

- Quoting RAM and flash in Mbits? Whilst that may be the norm for buying components, I'd argue most people familiar with OpenWrt and the Raspberry-Pi generation are going to miss this detail and think "Oh wow, 512MB RAM and 128MB flash!", when in fact it's 1/8th of that.

- There's some mention of a standard shield, but no information on what it includes or when it will be available.

- Like others have said, that scrolling on the website is extremely annoying.

Regardless, I will definitely be buying one anyway.
I wonder what would be more cost effective, freaking out and updating en masse every 10 year, or keeping up and upgrading/rewriting old programs as time go...

I'm thinking the second, but I might be wrong..
Worldwide commercial launch revenue in 2012 was $6.5 billion. Growing, but unlikely to explode any time soon. Global advertising spending worldwide was $509 billion. The valuations make total sense in the context of those figures.

Until there is something useful in space other than satellites, market value for space companies won't be that high.
I should come out with an app that disables this app, and charge something like $5 for it.
Changing conventions for units and moving toward standardizing across all scientific fields to the SI units (meters, etc.) is useful, but this article isn't about changing units. This idea of a new set of abstractions for representation and exploration of physics is a much much more powerful idea.

When I first learned special relativity, I remember struggling with my intuition and having to rely on unfamiliar formula to find the answer to even simple problems. The farther one goes in physics the more one has to trust the equations (electo-magnetics, special and general relativity, quantum physics, etc.) and the math itself starts to obscure whats happening. Having simpler representations and more powerful abstracts is an exciting possibility. I saw this again when trying to solve some simply stated problems (e.g. a particle falling off of a frictionless sphere), mathematics like Lagrangians which I didn't know when I first attempted this problem make the solution so much easier.

As an analogy for those that aren't really interested in the mathematics, these ideas are a bit like the jump from algebra and infinite series math to integral calculus. Although, in theory, one could solve many problems of physics without calculus (see for example [1]), the use of calculus immediately opens up a better understanding and the ability to describe and solve more realistic problems (like cars that don't travel at a constant speed).

[1] "Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun" by David Goodstein
Slight correction - it has access to your friends who have also used the facebook login for that site.

If you're the first person to login, the site will get an empty list. Only the set of your friends who have previously used the service, will show up if the service queries fb for your friends.
Publishing in multiple journals is heavily frowned on (and most journals will not republish work irrespective of copyright) since it is normally done to (a) boost publishing records and give the impression of greater productivity (CV padding) & (b) increase the authors' citations (i.e. the impact of the work) & (c) add undue weight to a hypothesis, by increasing the apparent number of papers that support it.

However, this is not a barrier to including papers in institutional repositories etc, simply to publishing in multiple journals.
Of course. The point was not about my own situation, but to draw the nearest analogy to "don't believe in marriage" at all that I had at hand.

I am really less upset about the people who are asking the question than I may have made it out to sound. It's very important (and would conversely be missed if missing) to have family and friends who are interested, even if they are all asking the same question where it might feel like pressure that we just don't want to have right now.
There's a bit of discussion of how differential forms fit into the geometric calculus framework in [1], which is probably the most concise and readable introduction to the geometric calculus approach to differential geometry. All the machinery of forms is available as part of geometric calculus.

Geometric algebra/calculus has a more direct way to deal with metrical information using the dot product. Forms only use the wedge product: in problems where the dot product would be useful, forms simulate it by applying the hodge dual twice, which is a less intuitive and less direct way to get the job done.

[1] The Shape of Differential Geometry in
Geometric Calculus, see section 19.4 for the bit about forms http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/Shape%20in%20GC-2012.pdf
Quote from http://www.upowertech.com/p/technology.html: "carbon-free and emission-free"

You're telling me that you get enriched fuel, plant production, transport and waste management (plant and fuel) emission free?!? How do people fall for things like this? "I doesn't produce emissions if you only count the parts that don't produce emissions". Brilliant.

And don't even get me started about the super secret "nano-nuclear" tech they claim to have or the cooling using "proprietary technology".
True, yet so depressing
appfog also has a free tier?
Can anyone comment on the read/write performance of SPI flash? Seems like it would be similar in performance to SD card, but without the wear leveling?
How does this compare to the iOS course by Stanford University on iTunes?
If you're going to have your team agree on any style rules at all, then automated style checking is the only way to go.

Let the computer yell at people so you don't have to.

Nobody wants to be the pedantic jerk who has to leave comments on a PR about whitespace or single vs double quotes.

When you use an automated style checker, you presumably catch those errors before a PR gets submitted and nobody ever has to be the bad guy/girl.
It's not permanently rejected. It has received what is called an office action.

Trust me, Facebook eventually wins almost all office actions after some trivial claim modification and/or clarification.

Worse patents than this get through the USPTO. The people with the expertise to reject such patents don't work at the USPTO.
I like this, I think as an aphorism it actually has a good bit of descriptive power.

A while back I started learning the guitar - having learnt drums and (some) piano as a child with a teacher and structured learning, I decided to teach myself at a much slower process for 'fun'. I'm probably somewhere between the proficient and good categories now and I think this trajectory matches my experiences.

What is an important take away for people is that you can learn something, and it doesn't take that long for you to get to a point where it is useful, enjoyable and satisfying. So many adults shy away from learning new skills unnecessarily. Learn to play guitar. Learn to code. Learn to paint, learn to speak Dutch, learn to write poetry, learn to bake, learn to woodwork. Your life will be richer for it.
I'd say (without much knowledge of SpaceX's financials) that it probably shouldn't be valued any higher. I'd argue it's fallacious to compare with WhatsApp because it's obviously overvalued.

Adding some perspective:

Ferrari enterprise value: $6.03bn

Heineken enterprise value: $11.857bn

American Airlines enterprise value: $10.666bn

KFC enterprise value: $19.492bn

Audi enterprise value: $17.731bn

Clean water for the entire planet: $10bn

Top 50 college football programs: $15bn

World's music industry: $16bn

Mozambique's GDP: $18.9bn

Sources:

http://www.thedrum.com/news/2014/02/20/19-brands-facebook-co...

http://list25.com/25-things-facebook-could-buy-with-19-billi...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10652397/Face...
When you buy a game on Steam, what kind of license do you buy? I think it's a license that allows you to play the game, i.e., use the binary. But I'm certainly not a lawyer.
How ageist of you. Teens are savages and not really people, so it is totally cool if we walk all over their autonomy as people and dehumanize them.
Could you explain "triple-Pareto"? (I might be messing up by parsing it as an economic term.)
> more informative logging.

> var foo = function realName(){};

Nice trick, thanks! The "anonymous" function is especially annoying when profiling code, so that should address that annoyance. I often struggle with picking names, but another post here shows that "foo" can just be reused as the function name.
Huh? What HOAs are you talking about? At least in Texas, every HOA I know of is just allowed to pass rules about upkeep of a persons property (they also manage community resources). They have zero say about who can and cannot live in a given area. Also, HOA rules can never supersede any local/state/federal law/ordinance.
I don't think so. You might have to work for them or buy a T-Shirt like I did.
This is what you are telling your grad students, OP ?
It's a Node.js example
I think Swift will take a little time to mature. Right now not only is the compiler buggy, Swift introduces some massive new functionality and style which will take time to propagate.

For better or worse, I think Swift is trying to play the same game as Scala—being just enough OO and just enough FP to get everyone on board. I think it's an exciting space (I'm personally quite convinced that OO and FP represent roughly dual things and that there's a happy medium somewhere) but it also means there will be a longish period as "Swift style" is developed and propagated.

So for all of those reasons, I think it's worth sticking with ObjC for a while unless you like a little bit of pain and want to be on the bleeding edge.
Such a poor attitude! This isn't Science magazine. The entire article -- a hypothesis anyway -- is prefaced by "words I would have wanted to hear as a child". Were you expecting him to run experiments for this piece?
How do you feel about "Open Office" and "Libre Office" piggybacking on the name of the Office suite that was popularized by Microsoft?
Yeah, I realize my view on this is a bit skewed. A lot of the examples people give where C++ is still justified are things that I have done in my career - image processing, video editing, rendering software, CAD software, solving large sparse matrix systems, etc.

On the other hand, there is a reason why native apps are popular on the iPhone. Likewise, some games are programmed in high-level languages, but the performance advantage of C++ keeps it dominant in games. Between games and mobile devices, I'd say C++ isn't going anywhere any time soon.

C++ can indeed be very bloated, like you say. On the other hand templates do allow for code reuse without the function call overhead.. I believe std::sort is faster than qsort. For me, if there was another language that was as well supported as C++ but allowed higher-level structures and programming methods, I'd be very much in favor of it. For now it looks like new versions of C++ are the closest there is. Nobody really likes C++ for its elegance, it's just a very practical choice.
I use Kate as my main editor, and I have contributed $100 in the last year to the KDE project. That is a bit more than the cost of a Sublime license, at least.

It is not about cost. It is about freedom. And there is no way I'm giving someone money to take away my software freedoms if I have an alternative. And I will always give the free alternative the money I would have spent on the proprietary one.
I recently started reading "Letters from a Stoic" [1] and I'd highly recommend it. It's a collection of letters, each a few pages long, written by Seneca. I read one a day and have a pen nearby as I'll typically find at least 5 useful pieces of advice or useful ways of looking at things differently.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Letters-Stoic-Epistulae-Lucilium-Cla...

Edit: in fact the letter I read yesterday was, like the one posted here, on life. Some things I liked from it:

"...death ought to be right there before the eyes of a young man just as much as an old one. [...] Every day, therefore, should be regulated as if it were the one that brings up the rear, the one that rounds out and completes our lives."

"To live under constraint is a misfortune, but there is no constraint to live under constraint."

"Whoever has said 'I have lived' receives a windfall every day he gets up in the morning."
Pretty sure hoisting is totally unrelated to global variables. If a function is defined in a scope, it'll only be hoisted to the top of the scope.
I usually recommend Learn Python the Hard Way to people who want to learn Python, but I'm very wary of recommending it to people who have never written code before. There's a lot that LPTHW glosses over or assumes you know that can be very very frustrating and discouraging for beginners.

That said, I'm not really sure what to suggest as an alternative. I know Codecademy has a Python course; perhaps somebody here could comment on its quality?
$0 is not a bad price for something that will always be behind of Sublime's curve.

I used closed and open source software. It just feels much better if I see a bug, fix it, place a pull request and be done with it, than discuss with some devs in a bug tracker if and when they want to fix a bug I hate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQwCYyoRskg
I agree wholeheartedly. If a decentralized social network were easy to implement well, someone would have done it by now (Diaspora is the only thing close to this I can think of).
Desktops+laptops+tablets+smartphones, there are 12 computers in my home. Toss in the 'Things' and you can double or triple that.

What Jef could not realize at the time is that 30 years later, not only would everyone have dozens of computers in their home, they would leverage a million more computers via the Internet, and at virtually zero direct cost to the user.
Only at first glance. They are valued at 10B$ and they still only launch less than 10 rockets per year. When they reach 100 or 1000 launches, their value will go up with the same ratio or even more.

This is something WhatsApp can't possibly do, as their market can't grow much more, but space is only starting to.
I'd engage if you're up for a long-term commitment. The good news is: the problems you're experiencing are pretty standard; the bad news is: it's going to be a slightly painful road ahead to crawl out of that hole.

You're not going to be able to fix everything at once, there's going to be some amount of triage necessary, so you've got to prioritize your concerns. Figure out which changes give you the most bang for your buck. If you can prove your value by making a few small strategic changes, leadership might trust you to do bigger overhauls later on.

If it was me, my main concern would be that the engineers don't want to get their hands dirty. That's a really bad sign. Perhaps the biggest change you could implement short-term would be to flip that culture on it's head. Set some team goals around testing-coverage %, and documentation-coverage %. Encourage small teams to pick a small part of the codebase, refactor it, write tests for it, and write documentation for it. Reward them heavily for every little increase in coverage. Make sure they feel pride of ownership. Make sure they know they're not responsible for 13 years of code...just their tiny corner of it. The main goal is to stop the developers from tying their perceived self-worth/value to NEW features; that can lead to a "slap more lipstick on this pig" mentality. You want them to feel like investing time/energy in the current codebase is worth it.

Little by little your metrics will improve. Eventually the codebase will be stable enough (and the team will be productive enough) that you'll be able to say "okay, I want 3-5 developers to split off from the herd and start a ground-up rewrite". And that's where the real fun starts.
"Usually you'll be a happier JavaScript developer if you hack together a parameter-replacing method like util.format in Node."
+
"You could implement something similar using the piece of code below."

I don't think you can ask more than this, everything is clearly laid out...
>more likely to become hackers //

Isn't it only the ones who are already likely to become hackers that will circumvent the devices in relatively complex ways? Curtailment of liberties is entirely normal for us as it's a simple aspect of our environment.
Willem Dafoe and Ellen Page Beyond Two Souls: Making of
It's because companies that sell products like this sell what makes a good sales pitch; they don't understand that things need to actually work as advertised.
If I can share a suggestion: the phrase "Born to be proud" comes off as a bit arrogant and doesn't sound natural to a native English speaker. If you're proud of the product, or you're trying to convey the idea that it was created with good intentions, some different wording might get your point across better. Something like "a better open platform" or "born to be open" [even though that also doesn't sound natural either, unless you know what 'open hardware' is].

Here i've cleaned up some of the copy from your sales page:

"WRTnode is a high performance, low power, small, inexpensive development board intended to run OpenWRT OS. It also easily ports open source software based on Linux.

Today, more and more devices are connecting to The Internet of Things. The WRTnode is a small node which can connect to the internet all by itself and perform complex tasks, like detecting a cat running by, or identifying your speech and twittering it, or checking your email and speaking it to you, or learning how your room is laid out and finding garbage to sweep while streaming video to you over the internet.
[..]
Open Source hardware for OpenWrt
[..]
[remove the line "smart machines' heart"]
complete set of high performance I/O
[..]
Local dns uses i.wrtno.de, wrtnode.lan, and openwrt.lan
[..]
default WRTnode ip 192.168.8.1
[..]
WRTnode additional features (source at github.com/WRTnode):"
People -- or rather, myself, since I can't speak for everyone -- do not find it offensive as much as nonsensical. The far right was never tolerant, by any definition of far right. Racism is also inherently not a trait of the far left. When we find a leftist government/organization enacting extreme racist policies such as mass imprisonment, deportation or execution, we know there's something deeply wrong with it, and we usually denounce it ("how can they call themselves leftists if they do this!"). But the same policies by a far right government would surprise no-one.

I'm willing to concede many points, for example:

- That some branches of the left can be "conservative" at times, if we define conservative to mean "staying with the satus quo". For example, if the status quo is a leftist society. Also, individual people may be conservative as a general attitude towards life, regardless of political ideologies.

- That some groups historically called leftists were so in name only, or had right-wing traits at the same time.

- That the more extremist left and right wing at times are cosmetically very similar, especially when their discourse is at its most strident.

But the Nazis were far-right, paying only lip service to worker's rights. Most Western entrepreneurs were also anti worker's rights, which is why they initially saw Nazis in a very good light. They were definitely not "more tolerant" than the left.

I do not consider the Vatican or the Church as right-wing organizations, by the way. More like conservatists, which I have already agreed is a more broad classification. There exist sub-groups within the Church which belong to the extreme right, of course.
Absolutely. It's all very well and clever until you can't read all the text on the final page because it flows off the bottom.
This is exactly my plan with most of my hobbies. Just continuously do it now and then and you ought to get better at some point. It still needs dedicated practise, though. Just "doing" it is not enough.
I used to write my BIOS password on a piece of paper and stick it inside the case. It was only there to prevent casual snooping.
> for something that will always be ahead of Lime's curve.

What makes you so sure of that?
I find the negativity about this surprising.

I live in a low income area - you would wish many parents around here cared this much and would helicopter their kids. I fear many of them are doomed from the start.

I think this app is a last resort measure, not like a block on computer use but if the kid is being bad about something to get them to respond.
Here's an alternative point of view - Technical Debt is the way that software grows when people take the easy route. If it's easier to add code to an existing method than it is to add a new method to a class, then it shouldn't be a mystery why there are so many large methods.

The reason software goes bad is because bad is easier than good.
Fixing Bad Data in Datomic
Madrasa Daily – Fun how-tos delivered to your inbox
Greedy Indian Telcos want WhatsApp and Viber to pay them
No question, I would swerve to my death in order to save a child's life. My robot surrogate should do the same.
The past (IRC) is the future (Slack)
Without even know what an AbstractAdapterFactory is I guessed Java. Can someone explain what it is?
Generally, when people advertise about "carbon-free and emission-free", they are talking about the powerplant's operation. Likewise with cars, they are advertised based on their operation. Asking about the rest of the supply chain is generally a good thing (and having critical reading skills in general), but phrasing it the way you are ("How do people fall for things like this?") comes off in an extremely negative light and is not helping your argument.

EDIT: Moved other response to address your other post.
>The perfect app for helicopter parenting //

Alternatively the perfect app to allow you to let your children have freedom to go out by themselves but still to coerce response when it's needed.

It seems a reasonable quid pro quo to me - I give you this tool which is the pinnacle of consumer communication devices but if I need to talk to you then it's locked until you respond.

Doesn't it mean that children who aren't so trustworthy get the benefit of being allowed out when otherwise they wouldn't?
Not requiring a computer operator for missions is a major achievement, let alone landing on a carrier. I wonder how well they will do in poor weather and night. If they can land drones in such weather it would mean they could take over for pilots who have difficulty landing in the same situtaion
I thought this was meant to be surprising, but it's Java after all.

Anyway, I'm nut sure what this is really meant to show. The only reason Java has so many references to that is because Eclipse project has an AbstractAdapterFactory, and it's a big project.

I'm sure it would be possible to doctor similar results for abstract class names for any major language by looking at large project code bases in that language.
if its just sharing the car, then there's already carpools? uber is a way for people without a cab license to operate a cab service?