skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So, for Bob's case, (....) so that our estimator Z = g(X_1, X_2, X_3) = 1 - (1/3) (X_1 + X_2 + X_3) is an unbiased estimator of p. We expected something else? This was difficult? (....) For Alice, a different derivation is required.

A different derivation that you tried (I saw your comment appear briefly). You proposed Z=1/N, which is (as before) the maximum-likelihood estimator. And the likelihood function is the same for Alice and for Bob, so it is not surprising that we get the same estimate p=1/3 in both cases. But after "proving" that "again our estimator Z is unbiased" I guess you noticed that this was not in fact correct. Did you expect something else? What was the difficulty?

> My point is that from Kolmogorov we have some rock solid foundations for probability and, then, do not have to consider either frequentism or Bayesianism.

Both are based on probability, how is probability going to replace them?

> So, students struggling over frequentism or Bayesianism can relax and just f'get about these two.

Sure, they can avoid thinking about the different approaches to inference... and just do it in the frequentist way. Assuming that the unknown parameter is fixed, that the estimator is a random variable, that the criteria to select an estimator are the unbiasedness, consistency or asymptotic distribution... all of these are frequentist considerations (even if you say that you "do not have to consider either frequentism or Bayesianism").

You never answered my questions about Alice and Bob getting different interval estimates (even though the outcome of their experiments is identical and their model for the loaded coin as well). We've seen that they agree on their (MLE) point estimate, but their confidence intervals will be different.
I imagine you accept the frequentist idea of confidence intervals, and agree that they will be different because the distribution of potential experiment outcomes is different.

Do you think that Alice and Bob can get different conclusions from the same model and the same data?

Carol performs another experiment. She starts by rolling a die to see if she'll do it like Alice (even) or like Bob (odd). So with 50% probability she will throw the loaded coin 3 times and with 50% probability she will do it until she gets a tail. She gets 5 on the die, she throws the loaded coin three times and gets 'HTH'. How will you select your estimator for p? Do you use the results you obtained for Bob? Do you repeat you analysis considering the mixture of both experiments?
> In exchange, the company must invest a minimum of $3.5 billion in manufacturing equipment and real property in the state—a threshold that is much lower than the $10 billion state officials expect the company to invest in Nevada over the next two decades.

At the same time Texas loses having a high tech manufacturing base. How would this have been a net negative on Texas?
I am very surprized by this statement:

"In general, we don’t start introducing startups to investors until a maximum of 10 days before Demo Day"

I know for a fact that accelerators like TechStars start introducing startups to investors 4 weeks into the program. They actually have groups of investors come in and talk to the startups. Although, they don't talk about investments, but everyone knows there is a vetting element in there.

Accelerators are very different nowadays from what its roots. Many YC companies (as well as TechStars companies) come into the program with significant traction. (See note)

I always had the expectation that accelerators are about helping young startups to figure out what they do. Although the reality is that they are all fund raising bootcamps to help startups that already know what they do to raise their round easily.

I am curious to hear YC founders on their thoughts of accelerators, especially, the traction you have or your peers already had before YC.

Note:
e.g. Memebox - YC company was already on 1.5 million runrate before entering into the program and have already raised 1+million dollars; There are many more examples, in both YC and TechStars which I can list if anyone is interested
So many people throw themselves at this space and then no one really uses their offering.

I have a loyalty card for my supermarket so they'd know almost everything I buy. If they made that data available to their users, this space might be more accessible.
I think pilots are already meant to do that to a certain degree - i.e. monitor their instruments, navigation, and understand what the autopilot is doing at all times. I think its called situational awareness.
Many police cars have dash cams that would have captured the signal. Were you able to press the issue and get a copy of that recording?
I literally cannot understand your second paragraph. Way too many vague pronouns and probably typos.
>But what about something like malware attacking you from an adserver that didn't happen to get blocked by AdBlock or Ghostery and you're not running NoScript or you whitelisted the domain (perhaps supporting a company you were happy to help support from ads).

Assuming you are talking about a fully silent "driveby" on a modern browser like Chrome: There's a very good chance such a dedicated and advanced attack will also bypass all AV products at the time you are infected. To this day it's still quite easy to bypass any AV if you know what you're doing. If the malware author himself (I'd say "him/herself" but I have encountered very few female authors of advanced malware, Joanna Rutkowska being the only exception I can think of) is the one launching the browser exploit campaign, he likely also knows full well how to get it past any AV.

Personally, I run AV just as a simple "stupidity guard" for myself. I would pretty much never get infected with malware through regular browsing; I work in information security and fight malware daily. But there's that chance I get really drunk one day and do something stupid, so it's nice to have.
Hopefully they will be held accountable for "broken" cameras...
It's clear that he has a copyright, since he's the original creator. All computer software is subject to copyright. He can even have been said to effectively police it when he ok'd github flavored markdown so he didn't abandon it or weaken the copyright.

Trademarks depend, I dunno the details. Knowing that would help.

The actual question is whether Markdown has indeed become so generic in programming that it no longer holds a copyright.

I think, yeah, maybe, since there is a standards movement going on.
Doesn't seem to stop their Sec Treasury appointees from Goldman-Sachs...
Heh, stool input and output. Cool name for a fecal transplant company. Too bad poop.io is already taken. If you wait too long, your own startup's name might be taken, too:

$ whois stool.io
Domain stool.io is available for purchase
Please visit http://www.nic.io/ for more information
> 1. Rename the project.

Sure, how about BTM? Does that stand for Better Than Markdown? No, not at all, it's just three random letters.

I'm a little amazed Gruber is so protective of "Markdown". It's a mess and it's been a mess for years. It's like meeting a guy who brags about designing the Ford Pinto gas tank, or being the comptroller at Enron.
Dash cams are historically "broken" and footage goes "missing".
I expect the same to happen here.
I used to think I had this problem, too. I developed an elaborate categorizing and indexing scheme. I tried to apply it outside of my personal knowledge, creating a crawler/indexer for research and web sites in one my areas of interest. I thought "if only we organize things better we can change the world!"

I realized over time that the collection wasn't the hard part. It was the categorizing and simplifying. The author hits on it a few times:

"It is the extraction and organization of the information that takes time...
I know full automation is not feasible, since the imposition of meaning onto the raw information is something that I must do, not the computer."

In my experience, the simplifying is really where you get all the gain.

What is simplifying?

It's distilling a complex research paper into a few key data points.
It's naming files well so that you can search them with Spotlight.
It's learning to write more clearly.
etc.

That last one -- clear writing -- should have been obvious. Good writers manage to convey so much information in so little space. How do they do it?

The parallel to programming should be obvious. When you name things well, they become very easy to find and use.

We can expand this to a bigger point: if you really want to get smarter, you need to be learning to simplify because your brain can only hold so much at once.

It's like learning the law of gravity rather than cataloging every time an apple falls from a tree.

The following unintuitive conclusion arises: you should be looking to make your "Personal Knowledgebase" more difficult to grow because it forces you to go through the simplifying process sooner.

I stole this idea from someone on HN: anytime I find an idea or quote that I think it important, I clip it into a Word Document and print it out. I keep these in a binder. I have gone back to these notes so many more times than anything that I have in any digital form. More significantly, these bits of information have influenced my life more often and more deeply.
I completely disagree that there isn't a general implication that this is for wives of HN users.

Another example: "Show HN: SportsRank, Fantasy score prediction I built for my Bros."

Is this for just my Bro, or am I making a statement about who I think will use it, specifically Bros. Similarly "my wife" makes an implicit statement that your wife (who obviously cooks) will want to see this.
I have no affiliation with Engadget (in fact, I've spent over a decade working at competitors to Engadget). But I've found that it makes sense to evaluate news organizations' output on an article-by-article basis. Even the best news organizations can screw things up on occasion, and even excellent reporters can be assigned derivative stories by their editors.

The article-by-article approach is what http://recent.io/ uses in its pipeline, which is working very well in testing so far.

More to the point, this looks like a perfectly decent story and an engaging read. The writer even managed to avoid being snarky about Samsung trying (sigh) to second-guess John Carmack!
Nobody is paying for anything. They're just deferring revenue. If they hadn't, that future revenue would exist somewhere else and wouldn't benefit Nevada. Now, Nevada will receive more jobs in the short term, more revenue in the long term, and lay the foundation for more industries to take advantage of (rails, roadways, power, etc.).
I don't know any of these folks and don't have any dog in this fight but to belittle the creator of markdown by saying his contribution to the tech community as meager is silly. I am completely out of the hipster tech loop and found myself thinking just today "man I wish this editing software allowed for markdown".

I don't know what your contributions are to the tech community but I'd be well chuffed if any of my tech contributions had the wide reach of markdown.
Being productive with Emacs – part 1 (2009)
The article the completely obvious:

/* implemented in another translation unit */
void zero_for_sure(void *data, size_t size);

void func(void)
{
char securedata[42];
/* ... */
zero_for_sure(securedata, sizeof securedata);
}

The key here is that our zero_for_sure is an external function in a separately translated file. In the absence of a stunningly advanced global optimization that peeks into other previously compiled units, the compiler has no idea what zero_for_sure does, and so it has to earnestly pass it the given piece of memory.

In turn, zero_for_sure is just this:

void zero_for_sure(void *ptr, size_t size)
{
memset(ptr, 0, size);
}

The compiler has no idea where ptr might come from since this is an external function, and so it cannot optimize away the memset.

Only if the compiler could consider the whole program together could it still optimize this.

In fact, you don't even need this function, just a dummy external function:

void zero_for_sure(void *ptr, size_t size)
{
char securedata[42];
/* ... */
memset(securedata, 0, sizeof securedata);
commit(securedata);
}

Of course, commit is a noop which just returns. But the compiler doesn't know that because commit is in another translation unit.

The only optimization card that the compiler could pull here is since securedata is going away (so that it is illegal for commit to stash a pointer to it), it's okay to call commit with a pointer to some other block which contains zeros, and not actually securedata.

With any trick like this, you should inspect the object code to make sure it's doing what you think it's doing.

Oh, and sizeof doesn't require parentheses when the operand is an expression; they are required when a type name is used as an operand.
Except all manner of systems are built on top of it. Does he come off as a jerk in this argument? Yes, but we shouldn't belittle his previous accomplishments because of that.
Being productive with emacs – part 2: Emacs Lisp
Excel means you don't need to explain things to a programmer and you can change your mind as things evolve.

One problem is, no user interface. I am working on a way to add a user interface to a spreadsheet. A few early adopters are using it, see www.cellmaster.com.au
> How would this have been a net negative on Texas?

Not for Texas. For Texans. These tax reductions are given out to those with bargaining power, leaving those without to pay the bills. Mainly, the average tax payer.
> I've recently came into ownership of a certain bridge

Sorry, I'm saving my money for this sweet deal that's coming up on the Eiffel tower.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-smoothest-con-man-...
Grabbing for "ownership" of an effectively abandoned project after two years of work doesn't seem unreasonable to me. They're trying to take up an old project and continue development from where it left off.
As an aside: util.clean_html() has been dropped from NLTK 3.0 which has substantial API changes[1].

The recommendation is to now use BeautifulSoup or something similar.

[1] https://github.com/nltk/nltk/wiki/Porting-your-code-to-NLTK-...
Also, please find some less perfect celebrities. I can go on reddit's male fashion advice and find things that fit skinny people all day, and I can even find things to make Chris Farley look good (because there are only two sizes on MFA, skinny and fucking huge), but try to find fashion advice for a Zack Galifianakis. Doesn't exist.

When you're skinny, it's not hard to look good or copy styles. Little more difficult when you have a few pounds.
Um, my employers certainly think so as they pay me a large amount of money based on that concept and invest in all manner of lawyers to back it up.

We can argue about what are adequate and reasonable IP laws but a large percentage of the tech industry is based on the legal ability to own ideas and concepts.
Nvidia files a lawsuit against Samsung and Qualcomm
"I'm sorry about squirting my water bottle at your chest, officer, but I really can't afford a felony conviction right now."
The conflict of interest I see is more along the lines of when it comes time for the government to pick a service provider, for save, Maps, Docs, Email, etc, Google being part of the bidding (with say Microsoft and Apple as the other bids) creates the appearance of favoritism.

Of course, one could argue that in many cases, Gmail is a better solution than Exchange or Outlook for the government workers, but Google as CTO will forever taint any wins.

I don't think the Goldman comparison works. In those cases, industry reps control the implementation of regulations or help draft rules or laws, and that is a much bigger conflict of interest.
>In the absence of a stunningly advanced global optimization that peeks into other previously compiled units

You'll be surprised, but this stuff exists since late last century, known as Link-Time Code Generation (LTCG):

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc301698.aspx
> (and I'm really curious what was said here, because if he'd said no after they'd put in two years, what was the plan, exactly?)

I would guess the answer to be "Release it anyway", because Gruber's blessing is not something that was considered a requirement.
I didn't get that impression:

> We haven't heard back after replying last night, and I'm not sure we ever will, so in the interest of moving ahead and avoiding conflict, we're immediately renaming the project to Common Markdown.
Basically. We did found a Montessori school this last year that my wife is the owner/lead teacher of that will bring in a reasonable amount of income, though nowhere near my current salary.
That has nothing to do with taxi regulations and everything to do with a complete lack of law and order in the countries you mentioned. Even if it's just 1% easier to kidnap a foreigner because they got into the wrong taxi than just to point a gun at them and grab them off the street, you're going to see it become the dominant form of kidnapping. Doesn't mean taxi regulations would do anything to solve it.
From the article, "Some people will try this with secure_memzero in a separate C file. This will trick yet more compilers, but no guarantees — with link-time optimization the compiler may still discover your treachery."

https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/LinkTimeOptimization

http://llvm.org/docs/LinkTimeOptimization.html
Mutiny implies that they took it over from someone who was owed some kind of loyalty. "Salvaged Markdown", maybe.
He's linking to the products... why would they send a cease and desist to a website sending them targeted leads?
The whole issue comes down to laying a claim on Markdown.
MailTheme – The Easiest Way to Manage Transactional Email Templates and Themes
http://www.process.st/2014/09/mailtheme-manage-transactional-email-templates-themes/

MailTheme is an app that plugs into your SMTP provider and lets you separate the design and content of emails. Create as many email templates as you want, manage the design from one place (“the theme”).
So because they're the bullies with the biggest team, they're right?
It depends on your level of effort when running. I can only provider you anecdotal evidence for myself and from the author of the excellent: http://www.amazon.com/Lore-Running-Edition-Timothy-Noakes/dp...

Basically, if you are well adapted to running and it does not take a lot of mental effort to run, you aren't really draining your "bucket" of mental energy for the day very much, so you get the positive effects. However, if you go into a place where the training takes a high degree of concentration (say, running easy, but a lot), or by running very hard, this is a heavy cognitive load task that requires much concentration due to the pain, etc.

So, basically, its the same as walking for a lot of people. As long as you are in a reasonably comfortable zone where you can think, it works well.
Thanks! It's a straight forward shell script using wget.
It just needs twitter handle and working folder name, downloads everything.
It's funny that dogs love to go on a walk too. All the different smells are so stimulating for them.
Oops - I should have called it out more clearly in the blog.

The biggest difference we have over XMPP is probably that messages in Matrix get synchronised over all the participants of a conversation... so you get distributed chat history for free, and no single points of failure on group chat (as you do with XMPP MUCs). And obviously Matrix is plain HTTP+JSON rather than messing around with XML.

One of the reasons we built Matrix is because, in practice, pretty much all the current big players started off using XMPP for developing their chat solutions: Google Talk was originally XMPP; I believe Facebook Messenger was built out at first on ejabberd; WhatsApp was originally XMPP etc; even APNS was originally XMPP!

But ALL of them have ended up mutating it to a proprietary closed standard - and nobody has even tried open federation other than Google's misadventure with Talk. So, unfortunately, it seems XMPP hasn't ended up being the interoperable web-for-IM that we all hoped.

Now, I have absolutely no idea if Matrix will be more successful in solving the problem; the hope is that by keeping it simple and using HTTP APIs there's more of a chance that players of all sizes will start exposing Matrix APIs for federation. Only time will tell. It's also worth noting that end-to-end encryption is a relatively recent potential obstacle: given iMessage and Telegram etc are all end-to-end encrypted, for them to ever federate with Matrix we'll need to support the same semantics and crypto. Hopefully we're going about this the right way (although end-to-end crypto isn't formally specified or implemented yet), but will be an interesting challenge. And one that XMPP hasn't tried to solve at all, as far as I know.

(disclaimer: Matrix is my fault)
> One definition of "Common" means prevalent and it seems to
> me that this word was picked not to solve the above problem
> but to get around it by making Gruber look like a dick for
> objecting again to the same problem.

Or, alternatively, the largest sites that all use Markdown wanted to figure out how to build a Common Markdown format that they could all agree on (or Standardize on), since the original hadn't been touched in a decade.

Yes, the License does say that derivative works shouldn't use the Markdown name. And yes, I'll even agree that it's a somewhat classless move, assuming you ignore years of context. "Github Flavored Markdown" is a thing, has been for a very long time. Not a peep from Gruber about it. It is highly reasonable to expect that "Common Markdown" (or even "Standard Markdown") might not raise any hackles.

C'mon, you really think folks are sitting around, plotting the best way to steal John Gruber's one serious project?
Monetize this by using http://www.viglink.com/ and watch the dollars pour in!
This could be viewed as layered ontologies, moving from the largest dataset to the most abstracted. Our categories are necessarily personal, but they eventually overlap with generic ones. Presently we don't have good tools to associate personal categories with those of larger datasets, because categories span apps, platforms, orgs & license regimes.

Classified data
Corporate data
Licensed data
Books
Open internet
Personal notes/kb
Human brain
I truly do not understand this. Why would you want to dilute presence? Why would you want to create an expensive phone accessory when the hardware changes constantly and the software is extremely fragmented? There are plenty of scenarios where I can see usinga Rift, but very very few where I am 'mobile' and want to experience VR. Of those cases I can't see any where a dedicated and occasionally updated set of hardware isn't a better development experience than trying to deal with VR hassles on top of all the standard android ones. Please someone point out what Carmack gets here that eludes me.
I don't get Gruber's reaction. These guys have done a huge favour for Markdown, resolving real-world compatibility problems with the first ever unambiguous spec. Surely this is a good thing? If Gruber really wanted Markdown to succeed, isn't this the right direction?

If multiple independent implementations of an idea start appearing, sooner or later this is going to happen. And at that point what control can you claim to have other than the name? These guys presumably have their own code, and I'm pretty sure sites like reddit have a heavier investment in Markdown than Gruber.
As pointed out in the press conference, this will bring ~$100B to the state economy. So it would probably be a net positive for you personally.
Even if they're just eating around the circumference, they get to eat a lot more for each step with a wider circumference.