skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Articles I've written have been on the front page of HN, Slashdot, and major subreddits multiple times.

2) My game has grossed more than the OP. We're doing just fine without a PR agent.

I'm not complaining about coverage, we've gotten about as much coverage and done as well or better (in a slightly longer timeframe). This feels a bit weird b/c my point is not to talk about my own game, but the context establishes my point.

My point is to provide data that contradicts the hypothesis "geez you wrote this article and people liked it! Bet it helped sales, huh?" I have seen many positive post-mortems by many high profile game devs, and every one I've seen share data on the "did your articles increase sales" has never shown correlated sales spikes of any significant size. My experience is exactly the same.

To further explain: positive written PRESS does not correlate to sales spikes all that much either, unless you attain simultaneous, saturation-level positive coverage across everything.

Ask the OP if his articles have moved the needle on sales. I bet you $100 they're tiny blips at best.

That's not to say these articles are not worth writing -- just that they DON'T lead to sales spikes.

To be clear, thanks for your 2 cents. Just trying to make it clear where I'm coming from.
except he didn't quite say that. What he said was:

"this article is terrible and should never have been published in any reputable news source. These claims of being "verified" or "replicated" are completely false, not least of which because there aren't any claims as to what is going on the first place."

Now, that last bit could be interpreted as you interpreted it, but I think he was commenting specifically on this claim. This claim which has been out there for years.

This is not like electricity or some other phenomenon which is not yet understand, but whose effects can be replicated in laboratories around this globe. This is a snake oil peddler with a secret black box. No one can replicate it, no one can study it.
because they technology isn't ready.

I am forever amazed that people think an eighty thousand dollar plus car that barely does more than two hundred miles per charge is some kind of breakthrough.

Its more of a marketing masterpiece than much else. If there were a sustainable market for these cars the big guys would have been all over it. Color me impressed if he delivers that 3 before 2018. Can't even get the X out on time and its just a lumpy S.

What makes the i8 interesting is that it looks futuristic and its use of carbon fiber. However the i3 is likely the better candidate as its use at the price point it has is more of the story than the fact it has a battery
It has a very small and efficient gasoline engine, so it is definitely not gas guzzling. BMW i8 offers somewhat agile acceleration, but relatively low all electric top speed of 120km/h (75 mph), so I would shudder calling this a supercar in anything except fuel economy and price.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i8#Production_version
Germany defaulted 3 times in 100 years, you can find the dates on Google (if you can't let me know, I'll help you). Greece has defaulted 3 times (actually 4 counting 2010).

I'd say it's a modus operandi. One even might assume that making world wars is a modus operandi given the fact that it happened twice the last century.

> 3. Tax cheaters always find moral explainations for their behaviour.

So does anyone else[1] [2] [3] (there are least another 4 well known cases).

[1] https://anestis.quora.com/Links-to-credible-sources-about-Gr...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Greek_bribery_scandal

[3] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/19/greece-military...
Firstly, someone needs to explain to me why smart people get worked up over vendor marketing. Since the beginning of time it has always been about exaggerated claims, bold, specific numbers e.g. 80% better and always targets those who make purchasing decisions. Do people really expect them to say, "Hey our product is great but you know you probably don't need it. But maybe buy it anyway ?".

Secondly, the author seems to have conflated two different parts of the data science picture. Yes great analysts who do amazing work is important. But it relies on (a) having data available and (b) in the right format. For those of us doing significant volume ingestions it is not trivial to do this. Hadoop is painfully slow and overall data science end to end tooling is slow, fragmented and incomplete. Some of us do need vendors to be bold and coming up with new technologies/approaches.

And the point about IBM is just stupid. Did you ever think that maybe Watson DID help them slow their sales losses ? Weird that a data scientist would make predictions based on inadequate data.
Exactly - the human with domain knowledge is vital. I get scared when I see people trump up black boxes. Black boxes don't help with "Which questions should we be asking?" and "What are the missing variables?"
You only would fire in short bursts in order to conserve ammo and to avoid massive recoil altering your shots. Also you lean into your weapon (assuming the buttstock is against the shoulder)

Edit: I should mention that I have had training with various weapon systems - I have fired the M16, M4 Carbine, M249 SAW, M240, and M27 IAR.
Sure, there's some of that. But it goes the other way, too, as exemplified by "The Big Bang Theory". Things "nerds" are interested in are regarded with contempt by non-intellectuals.
Tuition in America is crazy, which is bad for social mobility, I agree, but professors and scientists are less than 2% of the top One Percent. They are completely swamped in numerical terms by the non-geeky categories of executives, medical, finance and law:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/12/28/who-actua...
I find it hard to make a strong connection between the pairs of images. The population density was different, I don't know the time of day or day of week, and can think of other factors which help explain the differences.

"Watch pedestrians casually mingle with horse-drawn buggies, street cars, and slow-moving early automobiles"

I've also seen modern scenes of people casually mingling with slow-moving modern automobiles.

Then there's Pierre Curie, co-discoverer of radium, who in 1906 slipped, fell under a heavy horse-drawn cart, and died.
solson - Please check out my labor of love http://HockeyBias.com and let me know if you like it! Thanks!
For now I'm going to keep it as an email list. If the participation is high enough, I'll start posting people's completed projects to the site. Kind of a "completed projects" gallery
"[...] literally murderous [...]"

Exactly. This needs to stop immediatly. Suicide rates in Germany are 4X (!) as high as in Greece. Germany is living on an extreme austerity program since more than 10 years - the Agenda 2010 implemented by the socialists in 2003. Cuts to unemployed people, cuts to families, cuts to everyone, stagnation of income for over a decade except for the top 1%. Where do they think this should end?

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra... )
The Dawn of the Project Designer
>I never would have guessed that. The tech press keeps telling me how hot mobile is and how lame PC's are.

There was an interesting discussion on this topic here a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879927

It's really sad to see some indie devs (or even, to go off on a bit of a tangent, projects like GNOME and Ubuntu Unity) killing themselves following the "PC is dead, mobile is the future" hype off a cliff instead of focusing on the much more stable and receptive PC userbase.
This is awesome. I have been asking Heroku for this for several years now.

Some add-ons are not backed up by solid support/ops teams so this is extremely valuable to anyone considering relying on them for production use.
Time management: daily work schedules of historical figures
Agree on both counts. This question seems to have an appropriate level of difficulty for the student rank and written in a fairly intelligible manner. Can't speak to the rest of the test, but I don't find this question off sides at all. And yes it is very likely too late.
I'm certain that when I was in secondary school most of my classmates would be able to answer (b) and (c) of that question since it's a standard 'set derivative equal to zero' question. Part (a) is indeed vague, and they want you to prove something that's incorrect, but it's not hard to see what they want to hear. Ugh, that brings back memories of answering vague questions in such a way that you know will make the teacher happy, but is actually incorrect. I remember one instance where a question on a physics exam asked us to solve a problem that did not have an unique answer (it boiled down to 3 variables and only 2 equations). So I wrote as my answer an explanation why the question could not be solved, which the teacher gave 0 points for. Later in the exam review in class I asked him what the correct answer was, and he gave incorrect reasoning. After I politely pointed out that his answer was incorrect I got 15 minutes of "public shaming" in class about how stupid I was and how dare I disagree with him. Afterwards I sent that question to a physics professor in a university, who also said that the question could not be solved. I sent that to my teacher which only made him more angry. Luckily those days are over.
>Taking part in the things most inherent in your culture is arguably a good thing.

Like being overweight? Eating fast food? Watching the latest wastes of time on the tubes? Because fuck everything about that. I do as I damn well please and spend my time on things that interest me. If that "alienates" losers, who cares? I have more to offer the average portly dimwitted plebian than they do me.
I don't think they are emotionally or technologically ready for that leap yet. I think they will be able to make it and they better, but I don't think Germany as a whole is really ready to deal with what that means.

I don't even think that many Americans have fully grasped what electric vehicles mean. It essentially means, at the very least, a seriously diminished car culture. There is no tuning and tweaking and fixing in electric vehicles. You get an OTA update like announced today, or you swap out one of the few modular components and be done with it.
Profiling NYC street blocks with data
Facebook Engineers Turn Hackathon into Drone-a-thon
Having so little evidence and information about the phenomena http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#Observational_eviden... the entire theory around black holes is a mathematical model that probably has nothing to do with the real phenomena.
How are all writes immediately consistent? What if two clients make simultaneous writes to each shard? Or more extreme, what if there is a net split and writes continue on both shards?

I suppose I could just ask if you have an architecture document floating around :)
> you've done it all your life

Me personally? When did I do it?
Luck or Skills?
There's no way Heroku are going to let you clone their design and use their brand like this.
and probably, with todays fuel prices and 80 mpg runs cheaper than all-electric
I'm not sure how I feel about this article. On the one hand, it had a weird highbrow tone. It reads a bit like an ivory tower academic discovering what "the poors" are up to. Some choice quotes:

"Albert suggested that sports reflect the go-to topic for small talk and building rapport across class and context"

"Sports are popular because people, in general, find them fun to watch".

No shit! Lots of people like sports. Did you really need to go to a talk at MIT to figure that out?

On the other hand, I applaud the author for challenging the social conventions of the people around him. Disdain for sports is pointless social signalling that is ultimately divisive. Another quote, that I particularly like:

"This ignorance among highly educated people limits our ability to communicate, bond, and build relationships across different segments of society. It limits our ability to engage in conversations and build a common culture that crosses our highly stratified and segmented societies"

Edit: I would also like to add one perspective that is perhaps more appealing to the intellectual crowd: Sports are a magnificent showcase of kinesiology at the highest level. The same people who scoff at football probably also marvel at the latest ATLAS robot from Boston Dynamics, which is a poor analogue of the human machines on display in any high level sporting event. I could give a dozen examples. Anything from hitting a baseball thrown at 90 mph to ice-skating to a running back evading tackles. I can't believe we take this for granted.

Imagine bipedal robots powered by ham sandwiches that have visual/control systems capable of tracking objects thrown through the air and leaping to catch them, all while evading attackers and coordinating with team mates.
As not a physics PhD it seems so much easier to realize that GR's equivalence principle fails at the event horizon, in which case black holes are a mistake of GR. (Let downvotes commence since I must be a crackpot.)

Let a particle be above the horizon and escaping to infinity, as GR allows. By definition of a black hole, a signal can't be sent from below the horizon to the escaping particle. In an inertial frame, signals can be sent between any two points in the frame. Then an inertial frame relative to which the escaping particle is at rest can't extend below the horizon. That's a violation of the equivalence principle, because (we'll call this law of physics K:) inertial frames can wholly contain other inertial frames, and the inner frames can be extended to fill all of the outer frame. But as we've proven, a frame falling through the horizon of a black hole violates law K. An inertial frame relative to which the escaping particle is at rest cannot be extended to fill all of a frame falling through the horizon. Texts on GR tell us that an inertial frame can fall through the horizon, but we've just proven that such frame cannot be inertial without violating the equivalence principle. That principle is the core of GR, so black holes need be rejected as a mistake of the theory.

Black holes are predicted by the Schwarzschild metric. That metric can be tweaked to not predict black holes, while still agreeing with all physical experiments of Schwarzschild geometry to date. In the tweaked metric the escape velocity is always less than the speed of light (including at r < 2M), so that escape is always possible in principle. Singularities vanish (with escape always possible, no body need implode to one), so no quantum gravity is needed to make GR compatible with QM, and much better agreement to Occam's razor. Also solves the black hole information loss paradox.

Please downvote this major advance of physics if you haven't already.
I've always been a football fan, but never cared too much for baseball, basketball, or hockey (probably because the season has too many games and it's hard to maintain interest). When I was doing construction sales, I made sure to scan the sports page every morning to ensure I had a few tidbits to throw out about every sport. Worked like a charm, especially in construction.
This explains how malware might get information out of an air-gapped computer, but how do you infect the machine in the first place? That would seem to be the harder problem.
The current finance minister says they cooked the books: yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/04/24/greek-statistics-are-back-primary-deficit-presented-as-surplus-with-eurostats-seal-of-approval/
Also, let me say that I personally don't see any problem with CS being more popular with boys. Sure, I hope many more women go into the field because it's a great field! So don't stay out for bad reasons (e.g. "can't do math" - what?!, "it's not social enough" - BS, my college experience was all about being social, albeit with other CS nerds , etc.). Get kids (boys and girls) excited about math, building things (wth is more empowering than that ?) early and watch what happens.
Hey fellow Clevelander here, if you're interested just last week someone hit me up for some long term (3-6 months) JS contract work. Contact info in profile, I have a line on a couple other opportunities but this one might float you while you figure out your situation
Are the users leaving because of reported severe issues? Are the revenue declining? Can you related revenue decline to reported "severe" issues? Do you know or understand the constraints your CEO is working under? While there may be merits to your and developers' concern, you also need to understand the priorities of CEO.

I have stopped counting the number of times, I hear developers wanting to redo the current version. Every time, there is a new developer or a developer with new technology/language skill, the rallying cry is always how the current version sucks and we should be rewriting it.

CEO priority is to make sure business stays as an on-going concern. S/he can't afford to stop the business so that you can rewrite and make current version look pretty in your favorite framework/ technology/ style of the day. You need to be customer driven and customer focus.

As long as customers keep using current version and not leaving, your goal is to delight them enough to keep them from leaving, keep adding value so that they stick around and new ones come onboard. The revenue from customers is what makes the whole thing work from you and CEO continuing to pay bills, get paid what they may be worth on regular basis and may get raises time to time.
Every time I hit CMD+OPT+SPACE on my MBP a system finder window keeps popping up. Did I miss something?
I suspect many of us older coders don't pull all-nighters because 1. We've not left critical codding to the last minute. 2. If critical coding is not completed, you realize doing it at the last minute usually means crap-code. 3. Code produced at 3:00AM after 8 cups of coffee is usually crap code. 4. Good Project Management skills either learned formally or over 20-30 years means the team has created a good WBS so you are not coding at 3:00AM. 5. All nighters usually mean something is being done wrong. Geezer-Geeks know that.

Coding is a marathon, not a series of crazed sprints. Nuff said for now.
> So, maybe your course covered the sonata-allegro from, tertian harmony, major-relative minor, key modulation, medieval, classical, rococo, romantic, modern, etc.

Yup, this sounds more like it. Although we also covered topics like identifying common themes in music, how to listen to different soundscapes, and other similar topics. (Of which I cannot remember right now!)

We mostly covered classical music, but I ended up with an appreciation for a wide range of music styles. My Pandora channel list got really weird. :)
> "It implies that there is no valid reason for liking X."

Taken more charitably, it merely implies that one does not understand the valid reasons for liking X.

There's a difference between saying "there's nothing of value here" and "I don't see why this is of value" -- one is phrased as an objective statement, while the other is a statement of perspective.

Long ago, my wife told me she didn't understand why people liked a particular music genre I listened to. I had her listen to a couple of favorite songs and talked about what I thought was interesting about them, and as a result she developed a mild fondness for the genre which grew over the next several years. She wasn't expressing contempt; she was expressing a lack of understanding which was overcome as a result of experience and education.
>tl;dr everybody likes sports, and if you don't like sports than you're weird and might not really be human

That is absolutely NOT what the article states. The articles argument is basically "If you don't like sports, you might be condescending and exclusionary about it. Sports are a near universal conversation topic. If you try getting into them just for the social benefit, you might find you actually like them."
I would love to see a reference list to corroborate or rebut the claims.
Glad you liked it!

I definitely echo the sentiment of wanting to use these sorts of power-user-only tools. But I think Moxie's recent post, They Live[1], does an excellent job of explaining why we shouldn't accept that the tools are too hard for everyone else, then just hoard them for our own use anyway.

[1]: https://whispersystems.org/blog/they-live/
I think what you're interpreting as contempt for sports is more of a contempt for people not being able to take the hint that not everyone is interested in same things they are.
"capable of firing more than 800 rounds a minute—in some models"

No -- in no models. Cyclic rate of fire != number of rounds you can put through the weapon within one minute. Even if you figured out a magazine that could reliably put 800 rounds through without a stoppage, you'd melt the barrel at about round 200-300.
>it was more about bailing out the German bankers who'd lent Greece more money than they should have.

Considering the fact that private holders of Greek debt lost ~80% of their money in the default, I think this is a ridiculous thing to say.
Germany is importing work (which is not measured in the usual import/export KPIs) on massive scale with money going back to the originating countries. This has been going on with Italy and Turkey over decades (60-80), with Poland in the 90s and currently with Spain and Eastern European countries.

Real import/export KPIs would take this into account. Then I would assume Germany is a net importer not exporter.
No matter how good the SEO ... someone will always tell your client it's horrible. And "prove it" with an SEO report card. And then no matter how much good you did, your client will always have that thought in the back of their mind that maybe it could be better.

Little do they realize it could be a lot worse.

Here's some of the crazy I see far too often:

- SEO guys that run paid traffic through their client's affiliate programs, to generate commission on top of the regular fees they charge.

- SEO guys that offer a short-term contract initially to reel clients in, use the initial fees to actually purchase products from said client's website, and then use perceived increase in performance and revenue to get a long-term contract paid up front, and then disappear.

- SEO guys that charge for plagiarized blog content.

- SEO guys that convince clients to pay thousands of dollars to add "meta keywords" tags.

- SEO guys that rewrite click farm traffic to make it look organic.

- SEO guys that install "backdoors" on their client's hosting accounts to continue monetizing the website via backlinks long after they've been "fired".

- SEO guys that hold businesses hostage with duplicate websites (similar to this story).

- SEO guys with english-as-a-second-language, that charge for "Content Marketing"

- SEO guys that charge their clients thousands of dollars to setup and maintain Facebook, Twitter, a Blog, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, then do nothing on them for years and hold their clients hostage for additional fees when said clients realize they're not getting their money's worth and want account access.

- SEO guys that register the domain name and hosting on the "clients behalf"
Hey thecolorblue, if you are interested in some contract work I'd like to talk to you. You can find contact info in my hn profile.