skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very cool!

I've read that LDA doesn't work well on short documents.
Your approach of concatenating all tweets for a user appears to work quite well. One other technique I've seen is to concatenate multiple tweets together that contain the same hashtag.

One of our intern students at 99designs did some work on applying LDA to classify graphic design tasks:

http://99designs.com.au/tech-blog/blog/2014/01/22/Swiftly-Ma...

.. you might find it interesting. :)
"Start vomiting and suing the maker" is the type of overstating the problem that I'm specifically referring to.
Painfully, American families are learning the difference between median and mean
I see that, but that reading makes it a meaningless statement. Mojang owning the rights to some subset of the Bukkit source doesn't give them any more power to continue the project than anyone else. They're clearly suggesting they have some kind of proprietary interest in Bukkit that allows them to decide whether the project continues or not.

The context of that quote is:

> As Jeb announced on twitter, Mojang obtained rights in the project over 2 years ago

The tweet from Jeb says that Mojang "bought" Bukkit, and a subsequent tweet says that they "dug up the receipt to be sure".

The previously hired Bukkit devs have also said Mojang "acquired" and "owns" Bukkit.
Why is Facebook asking for users preferred temperature scale?
I'm sure Monroe had plenty of time to do many things. Perhaps javascript is less interesting to him than formulating answers to what-if submissions. There's nothing wrong with asking experts to assist in their area of expertise.
One thing worth keeping in mind: it's no longer possible to purchase "raw infrastructure" on the Rackspace cloud; new accounts only have the option of "Managed Cloud" [1], which includes a service charge (minimum $50/month/account, on top of the hourly rate per server):

> We don't offer raw infrastructure without service. Because it takes more than high-performance, reliable infrastructure to succeed in the cloud. It takes full-featured, optimized platforms, and the expertise to run workloads wherever they'll achieve the highest performance, security, cost efficiency, and scalability.

> That's why we include high-touch service and expertise with every account.

(disclaimer: I interned at Rackspace this past summer)

[1] http://www.rackspace.com/managed-cloud/
Lobbying? There are probably a lot of entrenched interests that don't want the ISP/TV provider monopoly to go away. I guess for TV, there are actually 3 to 4 options available for most people (Dish Network/DirectTV/Cable/Fiber). But for broadband, there is usually only 1 option, or 2 if you're lucky, and they also happen to be selling you content.
I read this book when it came out in 2009. The essay contains all the key parts of Crawford's philosophy. The book is a little more academic in places, which is fine as far as that goes.

Personally, I like it when authors demonstrate values like this through the story of the craft itself.

There are a number of books in this vein, including Clapton's Guitar: http://www.amazon.com/Claptons-Guitar-Watching-Henderson-Ins...
what's the high level plan for AppFog?
They sponsor a nice stadium in Seattle.
A website that both provided a starting off point and a unified reference would be a great improvement to the CL community, on the same level as Quicklisp.
I'm not aware of any studies/references, but AFAIK it's been shown that rapid feedback is very beneficial to most kinds of teaching (and anecdotally that seems to work well for me, and anyone I've observed/taught). As another anecdote, my dad spent some time teaching Norwegian (ie: native language, so substitute eg: English as appropriate) in primary school (ages 10 to high-school) at a small school (tiny municipality) -- and always corrected essay assignments as soon as they were handed in, so kids got them back ~1-2 hours after finishing. For that one class everyone had great progression in writing, spelling, grammar -- and perhaps most importantly -- enjoyed getting essay assignments. To the point that the teacher taking over the class(es) couldn't understand why the kids demanded to be allowed to write essays...

As for "standard teaching" -- is there any such thing? Many students, single teacher teaching -- with low degree of interaction and freedom is pretty poor teaching. I'd guess it's also rather common -- but is it really the standard we want to attain?
I think you mean https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?package=most - which doesn't look too bad.
There is a 13min video with Sir Ben Kingsley as Al-Jazari on Youtube "1001 Inventions and The Library of Secrets":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZDe9DCx7Wk
If you open a bug in Trac the core team may be open to changing the default behaviour.

https://code.djangoproject.com/
Imgur is about instant gratification. As you cycle through the best images on the web, there's an oddly satisfying instant gratification effect after each one. This is the reason for both having 1 piece of content on each page, and having 140 char comments.

The longer the comment, the longer it takes to read. Ain't nobody got time to read walls of text on the Internet anymore. People want their Internet quick fixes, and 140 char comments allow you to skim through and continue on.

In Imgur's case, people visit for their quick fix, and end up getting lost in a rabbit hole of viral images. Fun fact: When people visit the homepage and start browsing from there, they average 44 pageviews over an average time of 22 minutes!

While Imgur don't have "subimgurs", it does have tags. Like game of thrones? Check out the best game of thrones images on the Internet: http://imgur.com/t/game_of_thrones/top/year

I don't want to split the community into subcommunities where you have to follow certain ones over others. This would lessen the affect of discovering something you didn't know you liked, and would lessen the instant gratification affect imho.

Also, I disagree that the user submitted section sucks, and for those wondering, just over 50% of front page "viral" content is from user-sub: http://imgur.com/new/viral
Statistics serves as a tool to overcome our cognitive biases. But what if these biases are at the center of learning?

Take for example the Gambler's Fallacy where a player believes she can predict the outcome of a coin toss with greater certainty than is possible. Obviously she cannot. But if I had to design a Machine Learning algorithm, I would certainly want it to always assume that a pattern existed. That way, if the data were predictable, the algorithm would be able to take advantage of it.
Isn't this a pretty old site? I previously bookmarked this site 6 years ago...
I've come across rationalwiki.org a few times in my travels. Nice work. Glad to see you are a fellow HNer.
Where does all Earth's gold come from?
Imgur was bootstrapped for 5 years and profitable the whole time.

Also, less than half of Imgur's traffic comes from reddit.
Now you can touch and feel 3d images
50% of images on the front page of Imgur come from user-sub. The algorithm that runs the front page was designed to do that.
I dunno. Art plays by different rules. The opportunity to make art is often fleeting, inspiration is a harsh mistress.

It's easy to expect more out of artists. Good artists make finished works look easy, even when it could never have been. It's much harder to appreciate the insane number of constraints that come baked into every single project whose only judgment and exposure comes in that 5 second time between when you first see it and when you get bored of it and click to the next thing in your feed.
This site has been indispensable to me throughout my degree, and I know I'll be using it a lot this year as well. Happy to see their redesign!
I disagree. User-sub is actually a really good time. Maybe you're just browsing user-sub/newest first? Try this: http://imgur.com/new/viral
The lack of TCO in the standard is almost a non-issue considering that most of the implementations support it. Even Allegro has long done TCO on local calls (calls to functions defined with LABELS or FLET, within the scope of that construct).

The only people who need to worry about TCO are those writing portable libraries. Everyone else can assume it, at least for local calls, which represent 98% of the times that it matters anyway.
The only gripe I have is that they say the kids are using the apps for 30 minutes every day, for six weeks (presumably, that's 5630minutes, not 7630) -- but I don't know how much math kids that age get in school? Is it 45 minutes a day? Every other day?
> If a cop can learn enough to catch someone then it is possible to explain that to a nurse or an electrician.

You think a cop did this? No... the FBI has technical personnel. Just like any corporation, they have different departments to fulfill different needs.
They have a mode allegedly capable of disconnecting Glass from its owner's tethered phone WiFi. If you do that to someone wearing Glass, I believe you're no better than the so-called 'Glassholes' you're fighting against.
New to me, and quite useful for a hobby project. Thanks!
The battery life is crucial on a device like this. Moto screwed this device up big time. Old outdated processor that isn't as power efficient as current gen processors. Battery that lasts 24h at most, for a watch, that is off unless you turn your wrist. I would have paid more for higher battery life and a modern processor. This processor is from 2010, I just don't understand.
A smarter algorithm would refrain from betting on the coin.
Recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8270759
I worked on scalac for two years, so I know most of the same warts and issues; I also have had my differences with Martin in the past. But you know what: he has been courageously innovative and has come up with code that works pretty well considering the risks taken for Scala. Most people would have thought what Scala was trying to do was impossible (combining FP and OO with type inference? But semi-unification is undecidable!). But he did it, and you know what, scalac isn't that bad either. Heck, I've done much worse, but the point is to just keep trying.

You want everything to be a nice well understood package because its "easier that way?" But sometimes it isn't easy and the code isn't pretty; not because the programmer is horrible, but because the problems are hard and not very well understood. Does that mean we should shy away from the problems and just do something safe and conservative like C#? If everyone thought like this, we would make no progress.

Kudos to Martin for being fearless, and let's hope he doesn't cave.
"He seems to be effectively saying "license the whole thing as GPL" or otherwise you can't use my contributions."
I think this is what he is saying, and agree that this is reasonable to do :)

"He may instead be trying to get them to release the original code as GPL, which is probably not needed to comply with the GPL in this case."
It's a bit of a grey area, depending on how it's linked, used, etc.
What is naval about these charts? They look like maritime or sea charts to me. (Naval is the adjective form of navy, the oceangoing arm of a military.)
"Could it be argued that the definition of a derivative work used in the GPL is a condition for distributing the GPL code? "
GPL does not redefine derivative work, or else, yes, you could argue that ;)
Correlation vs causation is not actually a complex mathematical problem. The issue is more philosophical.

Bayesian networks are a highly sophisticated and flexible framework for thinking about causation. And yet the essence of Bayesian networks can be captured in much simpler methods like Instrumental Variables or simply regressions with controls.

In all cases, the true distribution of observables (which we can estimate from samples) combined with some assumptions about the possible nature of causality (either very sophisticated in the case of Bayesian networks, or very simple in the case of instrumental variables) lead to the actual causal relationships.

Where do these assumptions come from? Consider a randomized trial. Even though physically, it is possible that some hidden cause influenced both the random number generator which selected patients into a trial, and also whether patients will get better. And yet people universally believe that there is no such mechanism, and so they believe that randomized trials prove the causal relationship between taking a drug and getting better.

No physicist ever wrote down an equation proving this. It is simply something we deduced from our human understanding of how nature works.

Put simply, causality is not a physical notion, neither is it a statistical notion. It is a part of our intuitive understanding of the physical world, in which a higher level notion of causality exists, beyond that described by special relativity.
For those who don't want to do it themselves: https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0
This comment would be better if instead of insulting its audience, it taught them something. Many people here would appreciate a chance to improve their "relative understanding".

As it is, although it alludes to questions of substance, it doesn't actually say anything about them, and therefore is just noise.
Performance of Nimrod is very impressive.

There was another post a year or two back, where someone was making a small game and found Nimrod to be the winner, after C/C++ (sorry lost the link).

Garbage collection is also pretty interesting.

http://nimrod-lang.org/gc.html

There is a real-time feature to it, it basically says "collect garbage but not more than X microseconds a time". That would be useful for some applications like games, hardware controllers, low latency audio or signal processing.

I wish some big company (Google or Mozilla) would have taken a look at Nimrod before going and building their own language and then promoted and marketed it. I guess that almost never happens. Is that arrogance, not invented here syndrome, legal issues with copyright...?

And as much as I like Nimrod, I feel there also a bit of language-fatigue in the community. There are so many new-(ish) platforms and languages (Go, Rust, Swift, Dart, Clojure, Scala, Julia, Elixir). Yes they all have cool things and are slightly different but I wish there were less new languages and more stable languages, with better documentation, and a large library ecosystem.
Yes.

This is why, when folks say "CLA's are not necessary, you'd just remove the code" (like bradley kuhn recently did), i think they are very very wrong :)
Yes. I've been using this site since I started an internship at a power company in high school and I used it all the way through undergrad too. It just looks like they redid the design.
The only in-class exams I had there were organic chemistry.
Old sites that are good sites are welcome on Hacker News.
For better or worse, the "someone" who will offer the bundle will likely be Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Their entire business model is based on bundling content to provide it at lower cost than an a la carte.

It's unlikely things will change for them just because they move away from a cable box to apps. In essence that is what they are already doing. Even today you need a cable subscription to access at least a third of the content on Apple TV.
Ask HN: Should I keep building my site with all the funny reviews from Amazon?
Today I've been hacking away on fiftyfivegallons.com - A site to collect and display all the funny reviews from Amazon, Yelp, Airbbnb, Apple iTunes, etc. Should I keep building it? If you'd like to submit a funny review, I've got an open Google Doc going: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Mml6GaOHVWJtRHupAw7QVBmsTDl9foUTl_nqsCPRwB8/edit?usp=sharing
That's great if you know a priori that you cannot predict the outcome of what you are betting with.
> Additionally, the fact that one can import existing Java libraries is a huge plus [to Clojure].

Armed Bear Common Lisp http://abcl.org/ is a JVM Common Lisp with this feature.
But doesn't Mizar void the argument that we need a new foundation as set theory has not been conducive to mechanized proofs?
Is this just copying the local temp files? That's what it looks like from a quick glance of the code.
The problem with that argument is young people spend so much time online. So, it often ends up as a 90$ / month bill for 4-5 hours a week of entertainment. What's really missing IMO is leveraging the huge backlog of entertainment where Netflix only scratches the surface. Cable was great when there where few options for cheap mindless entertainment, but what people want in entertainment not just the NFL or the latest gossip.

So, I suspect long term we are going to see a push for more 'timeless' entertainment. You might only get 100k viewers this year, but if your still pulling 50+k viewers in 20 years that's a lot of revenue over time. Make a great cooking show and it's still worth watching even if it's 20 years old, a travel log of eating establishments ages poorly.
Real innovation would be maximum bits for minimum dollars. Otherwise you are just standing athwart innovation.
> It is possible to implement it in C++, but the implementation winds up being ridiculously complicated.

It may be more verbose in C++, but its not more complicated, and its definitely not "ridiculously" complicated.

> I just implemented something very similar in Common Lisp and it wound up being incredibly simple.

Maybe for you as a lisp programmer, but for me I find the lisp code incomprehensible.
And 30 minutes is about the point where sitting stationary becomes physically bad for you. To the previous poster, try sitting and playing a strategy game for 6 to 10 hours. You should feel like shit afterwords.

Putting my adult body through sitting in a school desk 5 days a week, my health would be in serious trouble within a few months.
Interesting coincidence (?)...right now (6 PM PDT), "History 2" channel is showing season 3, episode 2 of "Ancient Discoveries", "Machines of the East": "Examining the inventions of Arab engineer Al-Jazari, who lived in what is now modern Turkey in the 13th century, whose designs included a water clock and a variety of geared mechanisms".
This question is bound to be a can of worms. There has been a great deal written about the matter, particularly in regard to observational studies.

Drawing causal inference is overwhelmingly likely to be wrong when there is a good chance that unknown variables are influencing the correlates observed. In health-related sciences that more often than not is the case.

A few years ago there was a study correlating hours of TV watched and ADHD symptoms in children. The news media picked up on these "findings" and of course the causal influence of TV on ADHD was reported.

It was obvious that saying watching TV caused ADHD was absurd, that other variables weren't taken into account, e.g., some other characteristic of ADHD kids prompted watching TV more than other kids.

There was a great article published in PLOS several years ago (ATM I don't have the link) showing mathematically that the odds were about 1 in a million that an observational study like the above would turn out to be a "true" causal relationship, and the author concluded most published studies were junk.

In experimental studies, variables are limited and controlled as well as possible. With fewer and known variables, correlations would have a greater chance of revealing a reproducible causal relationship among events.

The discussion gets tripped up when it comes to defining "cause" or "causal relationship". The theory is controlled as an experiment may be, there's a possibility that unknown variables were present and affected the phenomena occurring in the experiment. Conclusions can't be absolute, but only true to some probability.

I think the history of science over the last 100 years or so has something to say about the nature of "causal relationships".
For things like detergent, motor oil, and some categories of food, Wal-mart offers zero differentiation and lower prices. i really can't think of one thing where I think "Oh, I have to go to Wal-mart for that." The only reason is efficiency, and hence price.
None of those things constitute a "dumb pipe".
> a decrease in population would eventually correct the offset

a.k.a. lots of people die
Well, yes. In either of the links -- I was thinking about the two normal-priority forwarded bugs for "most" (files starting with dash, sigpipe) and their age...
Was it responsive before? If it wasn't, it is now. Great and readable on my phone.
Dox a tool to run python tests into docker images (tox for docker)
I'm thinking along these line but for C language, and how development experience in it could be enhanced using some combination of smart-editor and llvm.

I like to call it semantic C programming. Essentially the simplest use case is that C syntax highlighting would always be 100% accurate if the code is correct (most current editors used some kind of regexing to parse a language syntax of highlighting purposes, which is a losing battle IMO). Another use case is that if I download someone else's C code, I don't have to read it in their coding conventions; my editor would translate it to my preferred coding conventions on the fly.

However an llvm-editor-C combo is much more powerful than that (it seems, though I still have to refine my ideas). Essentially it's the orthogonal direction where you could take C, compared to taking it towards the OO enhancement resulting in C++ language.

In this way you could add language features on top of C. For example you could setup your editor to understand your OO constucts and generate corresponding C code. But then you could add features to C that even C++ does not have.

Based on my discussion with other people, by this point in the discussion, lisp starts to get mentioned. And for that reason alone, I wish to learn lisp properly someday to be able to have a better understanding of this idea.
There are torrents of TV shows with the ads cut. That hasn't made a dent in broadcast TV.
"The Bluetooth phone-to-watch connection is unstable and loses connection randomly. Every android wear device we've tested does this".

I've tested all of them (literally), on 3 very different phones (GS5, LG3, Moto X) , and never experienced this.

Without any more data on the test environment, one might think they would stop to check whether the problem is on their side if it happens all the time on every device.

It's like saying
"Every table we tried had objects roll off them. Therefore, they are bad tables" (or you know, the floor you put them on wasn't level)
Right, a Muslim scholar in Persia could be seen as a Persian scholar or a Muslim scholar. However, Arabs often end up looking at their contributions as Islamic Contributions, or rather Arab-Islamic dismissing non-Muslim Arabs. To your point, there were many non-Muslim Arab scholars.
> it falls extremely short for lack of community and open-source libraries/frameworks.

This is one area I'm hoping to improve. I've already built the ORM, auth system and template engine. Now I'm doing the web framework, pretty soon the admin panel, then a couple of pretty project sites and i'll be on Hacker News.
Junk science is putting innocent people in jail
Wow, I love how those threads are full of people who insist the OP is full of shit and that Silk Road doesn't even have a public IP address.

Maybe we'd have fewer incidents like these if keyboard jockeys were a bit more teachable. Even super 1337 h4xx0r5 make mistakes, often obvious ones. Software is complicated. Let this be a lesson to any of us who may dismiss a correction too quickly.
Arab is not really generic. It is an ethnicity. An Arab does to have to be living in Arabia. Cizre at that time, was inhabited by Arabs. Al Jazari was an Arab, living in Cizre (Jazeera Ibn Amr in Arabic). It happens that this city today is a Turkish city.
I don't understand your assertion. Bodega vs. Stop & Shop vs. Wal-Mart to buy Tide detergent. Wal-Mart adds nothing to the product, but delivers it more efficiently. That is the definition of a "dumb pipe." Can you explain how that's not a dumb pipe?