skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Focus on 3 Products: Homepage, Mail, and Photos. Make a commitment to turn these into THE most useful services on the internet. Easy to use = Yahoo's strength

2. Move everything else to a division called Yahoo Labs, maybe spin it off into its own company that can experiment more.

3. Invest heavily in the developer culture and developer ecosystem, and optimize for attracting new talent to the company.
I would love it if Opus became more popular, so that I could save disk space – most of my 105GB music library is MP3. But for now, since I can’t listen to opus-format music in iTunes or on my iPod, I don’t use it for my music library.

What I do use Opus for is encoding lossless recordings that I make with WAVE Recorder (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tylab.wave...) on my phone. These are usually recordings of ideas I have for music. I don’t mind the compatibility problem when encoding those recordings as Opus because I never need to access those voice memos anywhere other than my computer. Also, I refer to them rarely enough that even though I have to use VLC to listen to those files, and VLC has a worse interface than QuickTime Player for my needs, I consider the disk space savings worth it.
"A simplified but useful picture of the goal of scientific research is that scientists obtain large amounts of data about the world via observation and experiment, and then try to find regularities and patterns in that data.

But a regularity or pattern is nothing more or less than a method for compressing the data: if a particular pattern shows up in many places in a data set, then we can create a compressed version of the data by describing the pattern only once, and then specifying the different places that the pattern shows up. The most compressed version of the data is in some sense the ultimate scientific description.

There is a sense in which the goal of all science is finding theories that provide ever more concise descriptions of data."

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4456v1.pdf
I've never seen an explanation for why APOE1 is rare to non-existent. I feel like understanding that may give useful clues to the larger Alzheimer's question. Do you have any insight? While the population frequency of heterozgosity for the 2 relevant SNPs

* http://snpedia.com/index.php/Rs429358

* http://snpedia.com/index.php/Rs7412

is low, but not low enough to justify the near total absence of E1/E1.
Did the Vikings Get a Bum Rap?
Well if they scale this up a bit - they can use it to fly planes.

"Brain in a Dish Flies Plane" http://news.discovery.com/tech/robotics/brain-dish-flies-pla...
this is called setting up filters, there's no trick to it, it's pretty simple to set up filter and ignore people you don't want to respond to. 7000 is 22 a day, assuming a 6 day work week, that's pretty low volume to handle, I would venture to say that you could probably manage to read more than 9 emails a day (40% of 22)

People feeling like they have to apologize sounds like you've made people feel guilty for emailing you. I can't help but find the whole comment a little self important and pretentious. You have time to fritter on hn, yet manage to only read 9 emails a day and reply to 3 a day, that's pretty lame. If you worked at my company and managed that, I'd have to let you go.
I can follow the steps, but not see it. Like turn-by-turn directions, but no map. Perhaps also because I couldn't come up with it on my own - I don't see the family of which it is an instance (partly, this is the magic open-endedness of mathematics, it's not predictable).

But I'm seeing more: start with some primes. They needn't be consective or ordered, just some primes. Any old primes will do. eg 2 and 5 are OK (skipping 3).

Now multiply them all to get p. Obviously, p is divisible by all the primes we started with, because we just created it by multiplying them. eg 2 * 5 = 10

Note that p will generally be quite a bit bigger than the primes. Typically, you'll have the primes bunched up near the left of the number line, perhaps with some primes skipped between them, then a big gap to p, and continuing to infinity on the right.

Now we add one to p. This is just to the right of p on the number line. This p+1 is either prime or it isn't.

1. If it's prime, then there is a prime other than the ones we started with. eg 10 + 1 = 11

2. If it's not prime, it has divisors. This proof claims it must include divisors that are prime but are not among those we started with. <-- THIS IS THE BIT I DON'T GET

You can keep doing this, including that new prime (ie either p+1 itself or a prime divisor of it), showing there are infinitely many primes.

So, yes, it's the second part.
The lesson? Include a developer API with your site, so people don't have to undermine your security to use it.
These projects are amazing, and I only wish I knew about them a few years earlier. I studied C. elegans quite a bit when I was in school, and I also worked with D. melanogaster for a genetics project. I wonder how OpenWorm will help shape research in the years to come as it matures. It's a really nice surprise to see useful, open software that it so pertinent to the things I spent so much time studying - I hope I can still reach the people who picked up on my old projects and share these tools with them.
Sweden has a fairly complex large pneumatic pipe system for garbage, I'm not sure what city has it.
Doesn't Ubuntu ship dash as /bin/sh already? dash isn't ksh, but it is minimalist (and not vulnerable to this).
Of course they don't need email, they can all see each other! Try working in a company where projects routinely span a handful of countries.

Most email isn't personal anyway, it's often machine generated by the various tools we use, reports of bugs changing status, servers coming online, servers going offline, jobs finishing etc etc.

email is actually there for a reason, it's just just there to interrupt you. At work you are expected to maintain contact with those you work with and email is one of the ways we achieve this across time zones and geographic boundaries.
Excerpts of two comments on that article:

"In the past, there were two big Breweries in Copenhagen. Carlsberg and Tuborg. Carlsberg supported the sciences and Tuborg supported the arts. So, if you were a well known scientist, Carlsberg gave you free beer and if you were a well known artist, Tuborg gave you free beer."

---

"The house that Niels Bohr lived in was called the Carlsberg Honor Residence (Carlsbergs Æresbolig), and was the home of people deemed worthy from 1914 to 1995, of which Niels Bohr was the most well known (he lived there 1932 to 1965).

Before Bohr it was the home of Danish philosopher Harald Høffding (he lived there 1914-1931), and after Bohr it was the home of the archaeologist Johannes Brøndsted (1963-1965), astronomer Bengt Strømgren (1967-1986), and professor in East-Asian languags Søren Egerod (1988-1995). Egerod was the last person to live there, and it is now the Carlsberg Academy."
I would guess well over 50 percent of the population can easily get into that range.

Stepping on your phone can easily generate twice your body weight in force. While running a heal strike can easily be three times your body weight. Hopping on one foot can go beyond that. http://thebodymechanic.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/giandol... http://www.barefootrunning.fas.harvard.edu/4BiomechanicsofFo...

You might argue that's not what we are talking about, but a phone in your back pocket could easily be subjected to more than your body weight when sitting (flopping?) down on a wooden chair.

PS: One of the classic cellphone tests is driving a truck over the thing. For courtiers it's not uncommon for someone to drive over your phone and generally rugged phones can easily service that.
What do you mean. I dont get it. It's just a skill, as everything else.
I don't think this is correct. The input is sequential, so the hardware prefetcher should be very successful: the only misses will be 1/4096 for the first entry into a new 4KB page, and even this could be avoided with a single judicious software prefetch.

He's counting 8-bit bytes, and thus has 256 entries per table. Using 64-bit counters, this is 8 * 256 = 2048 contiguous bytes per table. 4 tables gets him up to 8KB. Modern L1D is 32KB.

Alternatively viewed, 1700MB/s is 1.7 billion table additions per second. A processor is running at about 3.5 GHz, which is 3.5 billion cycles per second. Thus his current algorithm is takes ~2 cycles per byte. A branch prediction errors costs 15 cycles, and thus would be relatively very expensive.

You'd probably be right for the 16-bit U16 version, though.
I've moved to more of "pull" approach recently, and it seems to work pretty well too. (I used to use on Gmail interface, but now I'm mostly on Gnus -- whenever I have moment to check my E-mail, I simply hit 'g' key to check to see anything new.)

I still have notifications sent to my phone (which also comes to my Android Wear watch) but since I've configured the notification to let me know messages meeting certain criteria, it's much better than "push" driven E-mails.
Link doesn't work for me. Has it been moved?
Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does
I write and release open source code. I also write and release closed source code. Gpl takes that choice away. Us bsd developers use this license so we can work together to improve our individual end projects through sharing our knowledge and time with each other. I am very regularly contributing to open source projects that I use. For the benefit of other developers and for the benefit of myself (its more convenient for a bug fix or new feature to be pushed upstream so I don't have to recode my changes)
Nope, it's not necessary. Test it with a vulnerable CGI app and call:

subprocess.call(["date"])

Or if bash is not your default shell:

subprocess.call(["bash", "-c", "date"])
"with the recent proliferation of iOS device sizes and aspect ratios the days of drag & drop UI in iOS are long gone"

This casual false statement makes the rest of your comment seem very questionable.
Yeah, it does. I meant Debian, but it looks like Debian changed too. My bad. My point was that changing /bin/sh from the distro-chosen one to something else could cause problems.
Show HN: Quotable alpha, never forget a funny moment again
Take away a man's fish, and he won't eat for a day. Take away a man's ability to fish, and he may never eat again. Fishing requires capital investments, and some people are without those capital investments. Or fish.
I took my inspiration to take similar measures from that same source, and I can say it makes a huge difference in my concentration and productivity.
Right. However, AVX and SSE registers aren't just big 512-128 bit numbers. But rather arrays of bytes/shorts/ints/floats/doubles.
> Your quote concerns variance, not bias.

What were you originally referencing in terms of bias?

> Do you think policymakers and politicians should stop trying to improve teachers, and instead simply try to reduce costs? I.e., pay teachers less, increase their turnover (so that we don't have to pay expensive but ineffective senior ones), etc?

I mean the answer to any of those types of questions really depend on what kind of school system you want to create as a whole, you could go either way on any of them and have either a good or a bad school system depending on the overall design choices. But my point was that I don't think that VAM has much to say about any of these questions, because whether or not it's theoretically possible to measure teacher performance doesn't say much about whether or not good and bad teachers actually exist and whether or not they have an impact on students learning/lives. My point was that the reason we can't measure teacher performance isn't because the difference between good and bad teachers is small, even though it is relatively small in the grand scheme of things.
The problem with Occam's razor is that there is no generally agreed-upon notion of simplicity. Occam himself believed it proved the existence of God, and only God. After all, what did you need material reality for when it could be "explained" as God's dreams and imaginings? To Occam that was far "simpler" than the messy reality of matter, and the messy reality we know of today would have been anathema to him.

"Simpler" theories are not ab initio more likely correct. The world is full of "simpler" theories that are wrong: the four elements, the caloric theory of heat, Newtonian dynamics and gravity, and so on.

"Simpler" is a purely human notion, and a heavily culturally laden one at that. For this reason, Occam's razor is best left in the dust-heap of philosophy. It is never useful in doing actual science, except now and then by accident.
Honesty, if you use Swift as just a 'Better Objective-C', then it isn't that much better.

However, if you abandon the Java/Objective-C style of one file per class, traditional OO, and instead program as if it were lisp, using a file per 'topic' to build up solutions out of func and structs and iteratively develop protocols and classes as needed to integrate with the UI, you will find that it is a much superior language to Obj-C.

The OP is certainly doing it wrong with his air coding approach - which makes sense in objective-c, where the building blocks are so heavy, but with Swift you can just get something simple working, and then iteratively refactor, with the type system acting as your support for correctness.

If there is a problem with Swift it is that knowledge of Objective-C doesn't provide any real clue as to how to use Swift effectively. For me that knowledge came from having also built shipping products using Clojure, Scala, and Ruby.

Tldr; If you program Swift as if it were obj-c, you will be disappointed. It takes a different style to get any real leverage from it.
Excellent point. One thing that I'm noticing is that other tools are becoming just as busy as Email for me. At times I feel like there isn't a difference. The volume of email is what bothers me. But now if that volume is being transferred to Slack (sorry to point them out) I'm still stuck with the same problem. It's the people behind the tools which cause the problem IMHO :)
I don't see anyone here talking about insidious, negative "competition" at least
My Fitbit reports the number of flights climbed - it's the Fitbit 'One' model. Along with my daily 10k steps, I have a flights climbed goal that I track through the website. Maybe it's a different model that doesn't track this?
Nah it wasn't that one. I think it was a startup. This one is pretty good. It might be enough. Thank you for sharing.
There is nothing simpler or more elementary than the quantum mechanics we already know on that page.

Don't take his word on how quantum mechanics is thought. While we don't teach undergrads it, there is a conceptually simpler approach to quantum mechanics: Feynman's space-time approach. Not only it is conceptually simple and intuitive, it most importantly gives an elementary understanding to the principle of minimal action (sum over all possible paths in space-time) but it also offers a way of calculation that is much better suited to certain class of problems. Now, that is useful.

If you're a layman, you can read "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter". If you know some physics and maths, you can read: http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_03.html

That is how quantum mechanics is made simple and intuitive (and that is superior pedagogically).
Not by introducing new and strange additional concepts such as negative probabilities as basic things just because you can.

The reason we don't teach path integrals in the undergrad is, we expect students to actually use it for calculations, and unfortunately the mathematics is much more involved in comparison to matrix mechanics or wave equations where you can get away with "basic" maths.
If you have a very good intuition and understanding of quantum mechanics, it is doable though, see Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol. III (not sure how many percentage of the students will actually be able to absorb the intuition along with the new information though).
You certainly have to make some trade offs. But as long as you achieved what you want to do, how could that cost be "unacceptable" in any sense? You expected it and wholeheartedly embraced its existence in the very first place!
I would use IRC instead, but I guess depending on the company they might not be as familiar with using it.
MSR per-chance?
This is a topic that I'm actively researching on for my startup (www.vacationlabs.com) and would love to know what other experienced people think.

Our Rails app has grown over time and we ended up doing everything in a monolithic way to get stuff out faster. However, now the app is so big and tightly coupled that newer members of the team find it very hard to contribute. Therefore we are thinking of breaking it down into smaller apps which talk to each other using some sort of APIs -- either JSON/HTTP or MQ.

The MQ use case being considered is this -- the core transactional part of the system handles just that - maintaining tour availability and keeping track of payments. Everything else will be hived off to a mini-app which is notified of booking/payment related changes via a pub/sub model. So the email notification system will subscribe to the new-booking, booking-cancelled, payment-received, etc events and will send out emails appropriately. The billing system will subscribe to another set of events and will bill the customer appropriately. And so on.

Is this the right use case for an MQ? Is using an MQ worth the additional dev-ops related complexity that it brings along? in our case message delivery needs to be guaranteed, else extremely important business functions will not work. How do we deal the MQ unavailability? In normal cases if the DB is unavailable your system is down. Is this how MQ should also be treated? If not, how do you deal with the situation where the core DB transaction is complete, but for some reason you're unable to publish an event to the MQ? If the pub/sub system were built on top of the DB itself this problem would not arise because publishing an event would be part of your DB transaction itself.

Is there a sane way to build a pub/sub architecture on top of a DB, especially Postgres, which is what we're using. If not, any recommendations for which MQ we should be using for a guaranteed delivery pub/sub model?
Placing emphasis on money above and beyond anything else means yes, more than anything philanthropic. If money is the one and only end goal then everything else falls behind, and everyone loses in the long run. There is nothing neutral about conquest.
Admirable case study. Seriously, this takes a lot of courage and discipline to pull off. Kudos to the management team!

However I'm really beginning to doubt the legitimacy of the claim that Email is the root of the productivity drain. People complain to me about SMS and phone calls the same way they do about email. I highly doubt the solution is to shun the medium/tech. The best way is to simply tweak the people who use them :)
If you going to pick nits like amateur philosophers and don't like the name Occam's razor, let me put it in more direct terms less open to "weird" interpretations so that hopefully you'll see what I'm saying: "just because I can" is not a good justification to put unnecessary concepts in a theory. We already know about probability amplititudes and we do understand them quite well (path integral formulation). There is no need to introduce crazy things such as "negative probabilities" into the theory, because 1) it doesn't make sense as a fundamental concept (and it just isn't) 2) more importantly, it is not needed 3) and it doesn't add anything new to our understanding of nature or predicts anything at all.
Much simpler derivation of Lorentz transform: http://www.jackpenkethman.com/speedoflight/speedoflight.html
I tried something along these lines a decade ago, offering infrastructure for developer relations, for companies that were interested in productizing and licensing their technology to developers, but didn't know what to do.

Found no buyers, because the companies that were interested in outsourcing this, weren't interested in changing their internal practices to accommodate the feedback that their new customers were providing. I would have been fighting against the people cutting my paycheck.

The companies that were willing to change their internal practices, weren't interested in me, because infrastructure is not the hardest part of this: culture change is.
Why do the 3-color passport stamps have to be distributed normally? If some patterns were more common than others, than couldn't it explain the 55.55%?
money, of course. position yourself well and investors come a-callin. buy yourself a lambo.
That's actually not correct. From what I can tell, most theories with god in them that also predict reality can all be converted to a simpler theory without god.

The problem with all your examples is that Occams razor says "choose the simplest theory that works", not the simplest of all possible theories.

I explored this idea in more detail here: http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/why_to_reject_complex...
Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language(4th Edition) is updated for C++11.
From the article:

"And here's the kicker: Windows can actually run Chrome OS web apps even better than a Chromebook because you can pin anything, not just apps in the Chrome OS web store.

At this moment in time, we stand on the cusp—dare I say the threshold—of a new era in Windows computing. Up until this time, the low-end of the PC market has been marked by large, heavy and bulky PCs because that type of machine is cheaper to build. These PCs don't get great battery life because they don't need to: They're used around the house, not lugged around on cross-country flights or to and from a workplace....

Outfitted with 4 GB of RAM, a surprisingly OK Celeron N2830 processor, and an actual hard drive—i.e. not solid state storage—the Acer has handled everything I've thrown at it."

So pinning things makes it better? Having 4GB of RAM is nice but newer Chromebooks are starting to get built with 4GB. It's easy to get a low-end Windows PC with 2-3GB RAM so that argument is a wash. The hard drive versus SSD one seems to be misguided. With a 16GB SSD vs 500GB HDD, the SSD will fill up but it will be fast. The HDD is 5400 RPM; it will be a bottleneck. I give them points for having a large screen size for that price.

I wouldn't say better than Chromebook. Maybe, as good as.
I agree with you, but FYI, many dictionaries are now listing flack as a variant spelling of flak. So, I wouldn't consider the OP technically wrong, despite flak being clearly better.
> Go is just not a very good language.

It certainly could be better (this is true of everything that's not perfect), but it is being improved (and it's open source, so you and I can help make it better). I already prefer it over many other languages.

> It would be completely irrelevant without the Google name behind it.

You mean... It would be irrelevant if Google and other people who work on it (being open source, many contributors aren't Google employees) did not make it what it is?

That's like saying... <any product> would be irrelevant if <those who made it> didn't make it as good as it is. It is a true statement, but how is it useful?
Ok, granted, my experience is an anecdote, but downvoting me without disputing what I'm saying? Pure cowardice. At least counter with your own anecdote, don't downvote. Or let me know why I'm being downvoted, simply disagreeing shouldn't result in a downvote, that just kills the conversation.
that's not likely