skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Survivor bias doesn't really matter here, because we're looking at only the best.

In order to properly correct for survivor bias, you'd have to count the # of funds that were created in the past 40 years, and then figure out (assuming a normal distribution of performance), what you expect the best fund performance to be. He has to beat that number to be considered genuinely better (rather than being the luckiest).

For example suppose that the volatility of the S&P 500 is 10% per year. In a 40 year period, the volatility is thus 0.10 times sqrt(40), the central limit theorem, or 63%. So, a 1 standard deviation move in the S&P 500 over 40 years is 63%.

To outperform by 2% per year, is 1.02^40 = 2.28 = 128% gain.

63% * 2 = 126%

So, this guy performed two standard deviations above the mean over 40 years. That certainly is within the realm of random chance, considering he was the best/luckiest.

Therefore, I conclude he did not outperform the market by a statistically significant margin. Actually, I'd expect the best fund to be 3 or 4 standard deviations above the mean (given the # of funds), so this result is an argument AGAINST active managers.

Actually, the volatility of the S&P 500 is more than 10%, so I overestimated his performance. It's closer to 15% long-term, but it's varied a lot over 40 years.
On the general topic of how much we can rely on compilers, even using old and well-understood languages (C++), consult Mike Acton:

http://www.slideshare.net/cellperformance/gdc15-code-clinic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
From a quick look it seems like he is more of a value investor than a rapid trader.

Just to make sure for the people who are claiming he's a unicorn/the top end outlier of a normal distribution...do you claim the same about Buffett? Or is it different because Nicholas basically charges for the stock picking and with Buffett you invest in "his" company?
Lets not forget that Singapore executes a higher percentage of its population than any other country on earth and canes people slicing into flesh.
Subscribe, Discuss, Submit: the European Parliament on Reddit
Driverless Car to Begin Cross-Country Trip Sunday
I thought they mostly executed foreigners getting caught running drugs through the airport?
Hindsight is 20/20. An index fund is still better than choosing whatever fund someone tells you to. If you can travel in time 40 years ahead and know that your non-index fund is going to be THE one that outperforms, then sure, go for it. But if you don't have that time machine, index fund is the wiser bet.
For all his shortcomings, LKY has shown the world how well a tiny city-state can do economically with geopolitical leverage and strategic thinking. Especially when it comes to diplomacy vis-a-vis the West, most Asian political leaders are confused (and confusing) at best and belittled (and bewildering) at worst, but no leader of the West fucked with LKY in his prime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VexrmTacOAA

Once in awhile, I watch that footage of Meet the Press to remind myself what a sharp political leader he was. RIP the benevolent dictator.
The laws of kosher are actually used as an example of a law that we don't know the reason. It is kept only because G-d commanded.
Debian Wheezy: just ./configure, make and sudo make install from within the source directory.
> The Observium Community Edition only receives critical security updates between 6-monthly release cycles and it is intended for small non-critical deployments, home use, evaluation or lab environments.

-- http://observium.org/wiki/Edition_Split#Observium_Community_...
Do yourself a favor and take a look at the photographer website - http://www.astrophoto.fr

The pictures of the Shuttle docking with the ISS are just amazing.
Most of this, pre-eBay. The article mentions conventions, but I wonder what the primary avenue for his sales was?
Ok, how about

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/semantic%20web.do

Ranking 845 doesn't seem to me to cut it.
A Sense of Purpose
Correlation does not equal causation.

Technology multipliers are the cause of income disparity.
This part seemed a bit of an exaggeration
One of the greatest leaders of modern times.

Singapore was a backwater country with no natural resources when he came to power. It's since evolved into one of the primary economic hubs in Asia, with a higher per-capita GDP than her former colonizers, Great Britain.

To transform a country in such short a time is nothing short of remarkable.
Pm2-ssh plugin: Expose a fully capable terminal within your browser
DuD on FF.
Would down-vote it immediately, if I could.
Start your own company, and you're free to try that out. Trying to force your own will on someone else's company and business plan is an economic road-to-ruin for everybody. Just ask the US Auto-makers.
33,655 Ph.D. on food stamps
Minigun? Have you seen the size of the shell fired by the GAU-8? It's designed to shoot through the top of the tank, either the turret, or the engine. Quite easy to do, even against modern tanks. Now whether it can do so against modern air defenses is to be determined.

And the primary anti-tank weapon of the A-10 isn't its gun, but the Maverick missile.
Clang 3.7.0 (experimental) + -march=skylake gives you AVX512. zmm all the way, baby! 256 bytes processed in the inner loop!
A personal account of how call out culture has harmed teaching
> The kind of benefits that teachers and the police ask for are universal in western Europe

Not at all. The average U.K. universal pension is about $9,000 per year. The average U.K. teacher pension payment is only $15,000 per year. The average Chicago teacher pension payment is $42,000 per year.

Moreover, average teacher pay in places like Chicago is far higher than in places like Germany or the U.K. http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/48631286.pdf (D.3). A Chicago police officer with 2.5 years on the force makes $65,000. A U.K. officer with double the experience makes only $46,000 per year: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-12678661.
> what is the value according to which people should be paid? Who should decide it? Not easy.

On the contrary, it's economics 101. I have a feeling our disagreement is due to definitions so let me be more specific about my intended meanings.

There is a minimum price at which you are willing to not switch vocations and there is a maximum price at which you can be profitably employed. The latter is what I was calling value, as in "value to the company." Relative bargaining power determines where on that spectrum your salary will be. It's arguable that the final price is "value" but that's not the meaning I intended. What should happen is a question for the philosophers. What does happen is up to us.

The Wapping dispute is an example of a union failing to recognize that the value (same definition I was using above) of their employees had fallen below their asking price. Sure, it happens -- I have no doubt that unions increase friction, which is bad and hurts the economy. But underpaying workers "because you can" is also bad, also introduces friction (increased need for loans, decreased ability of workers to bootstrap), and also hurts the economy. So I don't buy the argument that one is better or worse. As far as I'm concerned it's a zero-sum power struggle, philosophically and morally speaking. I'd rather be on the winning side and I don't begrudge others for wanting to be on the winning side.
You could say the same thing for the UK.

Yes, i do realize there are vast differences between immigration in the UK (or the west overall) and Singapore, but find that blaming class differences and/or the mistreatment of poor immigrants to policies is to simplify the issue.
You might be interested in these SO answers regarding "Real world Prolog Usage": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/130097/real-world-prolog-... The answers are replete with claims about good use-cases for Prolog.

Michael Hendricks' talk at last year's Strange Loop on "Production Prolog" gives an excellent high-level survey of the uses, advantages, and drawbacks of Prolog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_eYTctGZw8

BTW, I have played a tiny bit with Flora2 myself. It seemed really neat. If you're interested in the intersection of OO and Prolog, you may also want to look at Logtalk[0]. FWIW, if I understand your meaning correctly, it is very easy to "pass rules as parameters to other rules" in vanilla Prolog. It facilitates all sorts of higher-order approaches and is very good for meta-programming.

[0]:http://logtalk.org/
I do believe that top developers are 10x as productive as the median. I don't see this as an indication that top developers are particularly good, though; rather, it's a commentary on how awful the median developer is.
Companies Are Tracking Employees to Nab Traitors
The example is the same. ImplicitCAD is a prototype project written in Haskell. OpenSCAD is mature, active, and written in C++ and other languages.
I work for a large private sector union. Unions are not perfect, nothing is, but they are also completely democratic institutions. But, the decline in union membership does not tell the whole story about the decline of wages in America.

I believe the decline in wages and union membership reflects a shift in how people value themselves as human beings, and their relationship to their fellow man.

The biggest obstacle to increasing wages to more equitable levels comes from the mentality: "At least I have a job", "I will be rich someday", "I can make it on my own", "I'm only going to work here for a year". These thoughts are what has allowed wages to be pushed to their lowest levels in recent history without any push-back from the work force.

Unions at their core are nothing more than a group of workers who get together to negotiate a contract and are willing to take action to force the employer to sit down and negotiate. This used to be understood, but at some point unions became viewed as some sort of "servicing" entity that drew its powers from a mysterious legal paper. Members forgot that the union was THEM.

Thankfully, the labor movement is starting reverse course from decades of this mentality.

The truth is that, the only power which workers (unionized or not) have is to withhold labor in a coordinated manner. Contracts are meaningless without the power of a strike. Without workers being willing to all withhold labor together, union or not, wages will continue to decline until a moral crisis is reached.

Sorry, that was a bit of a ramble, but "unions" are just groups of workers who have a 501(c)(5) paper with IRS that allows them pool money together to organize.
Shot Towers: The Buildings That Revolutionized Ammunition Manufacturing
Show HN: Recapp'd – Improving NBA boxscores
your link is broken; you should be able to edit your submission to fix it.
In Chrome, bookmarking a site boosts it nicely in the suggestions (that's almost the exclusive reason I bookmark nowdays, without caring to categorize).
I've bookmarked HN so "ha"+down+enter is sufficient.
But for most sites, Chrome single bar works well as-is.
oDesk has mainly repeat clients who don't get frustrated by the 20+ bots/agencies/morons for every 1 real applicant.
You and splike both made good arguments.

I just want to point out that it's possible to pick out winners better than random quess if they have advantage over others.

Case in point: Warren Buffet. He is good investor who has beaten the S&P 500 decade after decade. But he is not beating the market because he makes series of good decisions. He beats the market because he has structured his business so that he has several advantages that others don't. The heart of his empire is his insurance companies. They create steady stream of cash even in the bad times when company valuations are low. Buffet don't have to loan money when he finds good investment or sell his other assets when he finds good investment. This already gives him severals percentage points advantage over others and that advantage compounds over decades. Also, he is in the position where he don't have to play martingale strategy [1] to please investors, because he and his friends own so many shares in the company (he is not in the payroll, he is in the charge).

[1] The real cause of the financial crisis - An MIT Blackjack Team perspective by Semyon Dukach
http://semyondukach.blogspot.com/2009/01/real-cause-of-finan...
FEAR and Doom 3 were the most impressive from a graphics standpoint I'd say--HL2 made a lot of progress with animation, but Doom 3 was really quite notable for its unified lighting model, some cool animation tricks (IK) for grounding characters in scenes, and its pervasive use of render-to-texture for things like cameras and interactive displays.

That said, Farcry and FEAR were probably the most impressive games from an AI and gameplay standpoint. The physics in Farcry were waaaay better than in HL2.
The first Erlang Compiler and VM were implemented in Prolog iirc.

Erlang's syntax was also influenced by prolog.

EDIT: apparently i recalled correctly: http://www.erlang.org/faq/academic.html
Semantics don't have to map 1:1 to still have a meaningful relationship.

Java object references are mostly like C++ pointers. Even though you can't do arithmetic on them, the way they behave during assignment and parameter passing is identical. The primary qualities of a pointer are that it points to something, copies of it are shallow (and cheap) and point to the same thing, equality of pointers implies equality of the objects (but not vice versa), etc. All the same in both languages.

Nothing in Java is like C++ references (except the word reference) because the primary qualities of references are that they alias the objects that they refer to, they can not be rebound, and operations on them act exactly the same as operations on the aliased objects, with no dereferencing operators necessary, including assignment.

Once you understand that, you can begin to grasp how Java can be fully pass-by-value and yet your function can modify a list and the caller will see the change.
Actually, it doesn't really matter that much for me. I mean each time I do something else. Maybe something around the house or the office, talk to someone, do some physical job (like scan/print documents) or pay the bills, do your ebay/amazon shopping... It doesn't even have to be a typical "rest" each time. Anything that is just not The Big Thing - not writing code in my case.
The same paper is available here without filling in a form:
http://insideanalysis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Tokutek...
It might be better to use the permalink to the particular APOD entry in question: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150322.html
I've seen worse.

An old Dell laptop, which originally came with Windows, repurposed as a Linux laptop. It had been used exclusively as a Linux laptop (the Windows partitions had been overwritten by the Linux install) for several months if not years, when one day, its lock screen displayed a Windows desktop (I don't recall if the laptop had just returned from suspend or not). Moving the mouse dispelled the "ghost" screen and showed the normal lock screen.

The only explanation I could come up with for that was that, somehow, that particular screen had survived intact in a corner of the video RAM, for months, until a bug in the Linux video driver made it appear.

Makes one wonder how long can information survive in a laptop's video RAM. The laptop had never completely lost power (it has a battery, after all), but it had been powered off daily; it wasn't left on suspend all the time.
Glass to hold and transport milk is more of a waste than plastic. You can tell because the cost of using plastic is evidently lower.
http://www.implicitcad.org/faq#implicitcad-and-openscad
What's funny is I don't know what I was downvoted for. Was it because someone thought I thought such postings were worthwhile or do others think it's worthwhile and didn't like my chiding.

In either case, the absurdity shines through.
Things I've Learned About Sending Email
I believe the current intention is to move all the Freebase facts to Wikidata. It's been noted on the Wikidata mailing list that the notability requirements for Wikidata are much less strict than for Wikipedia.
Doesn't simply replacing the table/tr/td with a div with "margin: auto; text-align: center" work? Seems to yield the same result, at least in Firefox.
How Two Cold War Spacewalks Came to a Common Technological Solution
I got 25x on sum_naive_python() and 6x on sum_native_python() (PyPy 2.7.3 vs CPython 2.7.6 on Intel Arrandale), using timeit to measure time and not cycles.

But IMO it's a nice article anyways. I'd wager the final implementation he comes up with is faster than PyPy.
Demo of it working: http://jsfiddle.net/ph7cghLd/
If you had the same number of monkeys as you had fund managers, I'm sure at least one would also do well for 40 years. Statistically, one of them is bound to be lucky.

(Nothing against this guy - probably a combination of skill and luck, which I doubt he'd deny.)
> What's the point of micro-optimizing a 3ms function call when each request spends 8 or 9 seconds inside the SQLAlchemy ORM? Well, sometimes it's nice to practice those optimizion skills anyway

I have a different opinion on those 3ms optimizations:

"It all adds up"

Stopping at one 3ms optimization is not going to move mountains. But doing that 10 times is already 30ms. Imagine that you found 100 micro optimizations. Now we are talking!

So keep calm, optimize on. This is how compilers get better over time.
The economist recently had several articles supporting the right of sex workers to work legally and openly, and is supportive of gay marriage: when you say they have a 'bizarre fixation on people's recreational proclivities, especially sexual ones' , are you suggesting they are against those things or supportive of them?
Tabletop robot UR3 can be worker's third-hand helper
Not sure why you're being downvoted. HN seems to have an aversion to the idea that some people can beat the market. Yes, it's hard, but there are certainly strategies that have performed well historically (value, momentum, selling volatility, as well as the more specialized ones you mentioned), and look like they'll do so going forward.

It's odd how very few on HN doubt the ability of HFTs to make money, but when it comes to active management the assumption is that no one can really add value.
Here is a speed test from Gizmo 3D Printers https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzJyZAYMFc-IlK3Eu20TGvA

More tests and hopefully faster printing to follow
Java does pass all arguments by value. The issue is that you don't understand that the value of a Java object reference is the same as a C++ pointer, which means passing it by value into a function means simply that you've copied the pointer, nor the object, and mutating that object inside the function is simply following the pointer copy to the same pointed-to object, so the caller also sees the change.

Note that it you change the pointer (object reference) directly, instead of following it and mutating the pointed-to object, the caller would NOT see the change. Like "x = new Foo()" inside a routine would not change what was passed in at all.

But if Java was pass by reference, then things would act differently.

Please learn Java. It's not about not knowing other languages. It's about not knowing Java. This is all in the JLS.
The only way I can see to reliably scrub VRAM would be to use the GPU as a "dumb framebuffer" (without video acceleration), like in the good old days. Then to scrub what was used in the session it should be enough to draw a black screen, do a page flip, and draw a black screen again.
List of contaminated cell lines
Uber for XYZ
Singapore will also execute anyone for simply possessing a firearm.
Rules and leadership get renegotiated periodically, just like a company's board of directors and shareholder ballot initiatives are voted on periodically. A rule set is not a permanent structure.
DotLisp – A Lisp dialect for .Net
The GNU Manifesto (1985)
There is also a fantastic interview with Steve Jobs from playboy:
http://longform.org/stories/playboy-interview-steve-jobs
Playboys in the woods
> This Fund Manager Has Consistently Beaten the S&P 500 for 40 Years

...

> The Nicholas Fund, which he has run since 1969, has topped the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index by an average of 2 percentage points a year for the past 40 years and has beaten it every year since 2008.

Was 2008 already 40 years ago, or is the title using "consistently" in a figurative sense?
New room rental startup giving away PS4
As was calling Duda & Hart's book "infamous," but I'm guessing he doesn't know that has a negative connotation. That was my textbook at MIT, and I found it quite useful!
Twitter Latest to Face Sex Discrimination Lawsuit
We are an LA startup that is giving you a chance to win a PS4 when you sign up on our site with a Facebook account!
Drawing is on April 1st!

We strive to connect travelers at different locations and help those on a budget.
The Emotional Price of Entrepreneurship
We feed our chickens our kitchen scraps and leftovers. We also house them under our apple trees so they can catch any windfall and eat any bugs or rodents that arrive. We move the straw out of the rabbit runs and put it into a container in the chicken run, so the chickens also pick the seeds and bugs out of there, too, and start the composting process so all that material can get recycled. They also fertilize our apple trees with their waste, and the compost that comes out of this process is used in our gardens.

So the chickens pretty much take care of themselves... lets talk the next step up - the rabbits. They feed on the grass and other plants that grow in our fields, as we move their mobile runs around the property. We also provide them with straw and alfalfa that has been locally grown. (We do buy that from one of our neighbors.)

So yes, we do feed our animals - but a lot less than one might think, and most of it comes from our own land. We take advantage of materials that would otherwise be waste, and use them to have a more sustainable operation. It will always be true that the same amount of resources could produce more plants (if your gardens grow perfectly)... that math is inarguable. But if you build a full ecosystem around your animals, you can do fairly well.
They're using different representations for solid geometry.

ImplicitCAD is using implicit surfaces / functional representations, while OpenSCAD is using a boundary representation (which is a lot more common in commercial packages).

Implicit surfaces are a very nice representation and make certain operations very easy: booleans become MIN or MAX functions between two functions. However, it becomes much harder to do feature-based operations -- a task like "bevel that edge" is tricky when the edge is an emergent property of the function, rather than as part of the model's explicit representation.
If you know any of the RELOADED (or FAIRLIGHT?) guys/girls - say thanks for me! Their work has introduced me to the demoscene, infosec and reverse engineering.
anyone else not clicking on the link since it's playboy.com?