skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a scientist who uses MCMC to sample the parameter space of a model and dataset, to get some idea of the uncertainties on the models parameters. These parameters are all continuous (albeit at the finite resolution of floating point numbers). Can someone from a CS background explain how this set approach connects to my idea of MCMC?

For any scientists, I'd heartily recommend emcee [1] as a sampler. This uses Goodman-Weare instead of Metropolis-Hastings, which works a lot better in practice, without having to figure out proposal distributions and so on.

[1] http://dan.iel.fm/emcee/current/
I did a 4 year undergrad in Ireland, and was required (as was everyone in my year) to write a thesis. It was supposed to be novel, and a few people just made apps, but the majority of people actually did try something novel.
They are selling them on the UK Dell website, maybe that might be easier to order from here?
Depends on what you do. I work on a large c++ codebase, and running a full rebuild chews through about 20GB of ram, and almost 100% cpu utilisation on my workstation, for about 15 minutes.
I'm reading Thiel's book right now, and have some mixed opinions on portions of it, but it's certainly an interesting read, and makes you think.
I bought the new XPS 13. The fan runs all the time, even when the machine is idle. Other people have reported the same problem. I returned it.
My friend's wife is java programmer. She uses a thinkpad with 16 gb afaik. From what he told me she opens up like 5 different java projects in eclipse and 16gb is gone.
Developer laptop
hello awesome community,
any recommendations please on developing laptops, which will need to be robust/resilient to some traveling (30% of time), battery lasts more than 4-5 hours, at least 16GB RAM, SSD, AND not heat itself up to the point where I can't hold it on my lap, no matter if the CPU goes 100% for long times?
thanks,
Unus
Why not do a simple Raspberry PI? at least it can be updated - runs raspian
http://learn.adafruit.com/onion-pi
16GB RAM is not a requirement for everybody.
I think most people realize this anecdotally but the switching costs are too high for many to remove themselves.

Personally, I have many connections exclusively only on FB - I don't have their emails, phone numbers, etc - that I remain on FB only to be able to message them.

I wish I could automatically message them and easily collect their email/phone #s with minimal effort...probably a way but I haven't looked into it.
Bamboo: Lua web framework based on Mongrel2, ZeroMQ and NoSQL
The 64GB HDD on the Chromebook is quite limiting too though. (Especially if you develop with multiple virtual machines.) I suppose you could use an external hdd but that seems bulky and I'm not sure it would be as quick.

I might try and hold on to my x220 for another year and see if 2016 offers any better ultrabooks.
I think it still would be Python. Can't think of any language that has leap-frogged the Python that Paul Graham described back 11 years ago.
That's growth hacking for you ! disgusting and way too frequent.
I faced exactly the same disillusionment when I visited Japan in 2007.
Barrett Brown stripped of prison e-mail after talking to press
Sans Windows.
Show HN: Get pinged when standards hit 90% browser support
Just because one big project relies on emails does not mean they scale better. They work for the kernel because with that strong organization pretty much anything could work for the kernel.

Criticisms in the interview were essentially about low discipline that Github interface allows, and how they were not willing to adapt to the kernel needs, not about fundamental deficiencies of pull request based model.

So far nothing has been said about why pull requests via a website might handle less load than pull requests over email.
What is Go?
Neither is 8GB but they should still have the option.
I get depressed reading HN because a lot of the stories are about people my age who are making a lot more money than me.

Then I tell myself that they probably haven't saved as many lives as I have.

Then I have to tell myself that this doesn't pay the bills, dammit.

HN/slashdot/FB in moderation, kids! Now you know and knowing is half the battle.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9327901
Daala is way more exciting technically as well. Of course, being more exciting is not equivalent to being better, but with such a novel approach (lapped transform), Daala may just shake up the state of the art, while the rest merely refine it.
unique Running puzzle for iOS
To me, unless you have a big park of machines, these systems are a total overkill

I think that's an important point, and one which container vendors are not going to labour, as they want as many people as possible on their platform, even before they really need it. A lot of people are trying to use docker or coreos who really don't need to, and as they're not the focus of containerisation efforts, they'll suffer as they find out they're not really tailored to what they want to do, which is just get their small web service running reliably with the minimum of fuss, and be sure they can rebuild it or move it between providers easily.

If you have 1-10 machines which don't change much, use Ansible or similar to get predictable (re)deployments and don't worry about using containers.

If you have > say 10 machines, this sort of stuff becomes more useful, because you are herding cattle, and need the infrastructure necessary to keep that herd going, even if a few die off from time to time - then you can scale to hundreds easily as your business grows, you can manage lots of workers reliably on one VM in containers etc, etc.

For probably 90% of websites out there, with a sane setup that's never even going to become an issue and they could run easily on just a few servers.
Sorry for the late response.

It's less about oversight, and more about what I could do. In my first full-time development job, I was working under a lead developer who was seriously badass at mentoring people and making sure they knew what they had to do (though I don't think he realized it - it was his first time being promoted to a leadership position!). To this day, when I'm feeling stressed out at work, I'll think "What would Rob have advised me to do?" and it makes me feel more secure about my decisions.

Junior developers are often really idealistic and ambitious, and I would like to be in a position where I could reward and facilitate that instead of crushing it (which happens all too often).
I really can't follow your logic.

On the contrary, Google spends a lot of resources to make web faster, research shown that faster web sites creates better user engagement and satisfaction, hence better revenue.
I agree that it is verbose, but I am not convinced that S-expressions are the solution. In a complex, deeply nested XML document, you should be able to tell where a given tag is inserted without counting parentheses.

> there is no obvious way to transform any xml to an object (pojo is the best aproxymation, but how do you differentiate between a sub-tag, a text node, and an attribute?)

That's OK. Just don't use XML to serialize data structures. IMHO, the use cases at which it is good are a lot closer to use cases for which HTML works than when you hesitate between XML and JSON.

> it's essentially typeless (how do you serialize a number? how to differentiate it from a string? from a boolean?)

That's not entirely wrong, but you can enforce a lot of things via XML schemas (eg, something like XSD or RelaxNG).
There's more to life then making money! Perhaps they have a terrible social life and you are doing much better. Work to live, don't live to work

But yeah, I know that feeling.
French link for this product.
http://www.dell.com/fr/p/xps-13-linux/pd
note that the ubuntu version is noticeably cheaper (-70€) than the windows version with identical configuration. This is appreciable.
I built this over the weekend because browser support is a moving feast. I'd find myself exploring SVG, thinking "That's great - I can't wait to use it." And then not noticing that there is basically 95% support now.
I find it strange they still use this as a selling point. My only computer is a Dell laptop from 2008 (Studio 1737) and it wakes from sleep (Windows 8.1) in ~1 second. Sure I don't have connected standby but to be honest I don't really care for it. I open the lid and in a second Windows is up and running again. This machine originally came with Vista and it has always worked this quickly as far as I can remember.
Watch Your Browser Code Darth Vader and Reddit on Its Own
with half the HD space ? I don't think so. The Dell machine actually looks way more interesting than a Chromebook that requires a hack to run Linux. I'm amazed how people here are trying to sell Chromebooks so hard it feels like they're paid to do that.
One thing that has always stuck with me is the phrase "Facebook is only a collection of the highlights in someones life". Most people only post the positive stuff about their lives to facebook, which makes their lives look way more awesome then they probably are.
The money influx won't stop, it will get worse over the next few years.

Consider the case of Europe. Negative yield curves but trillions in pension funds that need a positive nominal return (5% or so). If they invest even a portion of their portfolios in negative yielding bonds they then need to buy assets with growth potential to even it out, with PE and VC being the most attractive due to their illiquidity ironically.

This isn't like 00 when you could sell NASDAQ and buy US government bonds yielding 6.5%..
FYI, the X250 unofficially allows 16 GiB RAM. 16 GiB sticks are rather new (came out after the X250) and are still insanely expensive, though (around 400 dollars, last I checked).

> I use virtual machines too, but remotely, and mostly automatically for continuous integration.

I'd love to do that, but our internet is far too crappy for that – we upgraded our offices from 2 Mbit/s to 10 MBit/s last year, and there are no faster options even if we wanted to –, hence I have to carry the VMs on my laptop (X230 with 16 GiB RAM and 2 SSDs).
What exactly is negative in my comment? Is extracting max profit bad? Or open-sourcing work?
Seeing this, today's startups all of a sudden don't seem so innovative any more. After all, this one is a useless proposition that people actually paid money for. Ah, the power of a fashion meme!
How the Hippies Saved Physics (2012) [video]
Between more RAM and a bigger hard disk I'd always pick more RAM. On my development machine I have a very minimal setup (i3, no desktop environment, Emacs, compiler, debugger etc.) and not more than a couple of big repositories checked out (Linux, Hotspot). I can see why this might not work for other kinds of development setups though.
Google Adwords update for free software downloads
I think the ThinkPad X250 should to the job.

-MuhPirat
The ultimate guide to getting started in web design
Updated and fixed.
As far as I can tell from his Wikipedia bio, Thiel hasn't done anything significantly innovative since PayPal. It looks like he supplied money for some other things, but that's about it.
You mean 2010. Sandy Bridge laptops from 2011 already had 16 GiB RAM.
If you can live with 64 go of SSD, the new Chromebook pixel looks quite interesting (with crouton in order to use linux).
I had the very same issue as you, but I managed to buy one of the previous versions with en-US keyboard by kindly requesting it to an agent via e-mail. They were able to fulfill the order even if the option didn't show up on their website. Note the delivery might take longer than any of the pre-configured options though.
Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

"In this book, I tell you everything I learned from starting, growing, and selling CD Baby, compressed into an entertaining and useful one-hour read." from https://sivers.org/a
NASA Extends Campaign for Public to Name Features on Pluto
This is actually the only thing holding me back from getting a new machine. I need one, badly. But I also need at least 16GB RAM. I have 8 in my current (very old) machine and it is by far the biggest restriction I have. Getting a new machine with the same amount of RAM is pointless and I don't want to get another machine this big but my options are limited. I can't find many ultrabook's with 16GB though :(
Why is this getting downvoted? I use a device with 1GB for development.
Stalking often could make you feel depressed. But facebook in my case helped me meet with very old friends without any effort so thats a plus.
The Internet of things: Of sensors and sensibility
In the case of Electricians and Plumbers the time requirements for becoming licensed are steep. In Maryland for example to become a "Master" electrician you need to work in the field for 7 years as an apprentice. That's kind of nuts when you consider that's about the same amount of time it takes to train a doctor.
The m3800 they sell has 16gb of ram, fwiw.

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=cump38...
The spam border is the law.

Read it, understand it, don't spam.
I think since 2014 use of 8GB in mainstream laptops was a standard. It seems like they just slapped Ubuntu on a mediocre spec laptop and called it a day.
I used to have a pet rock called Trevor. I lost him in a house move years ago. I deeply miss Trevor. I regret taking him for granite.
The results of this study can be explained by 2 plausible hypotheses:

* Users have been trained to expect that if a random site spins the beach ball for a few seconds it's unlikely to get better. Akamai customers are a mixed set of smaller web sites, and these often have an "eternal progress meter" as failure mode of video players.

* Viewers in the Akamai mix are impatient because content includes a lot of emailed links, and ancillary (eg news article related) content

Neither of these would apply to Netflix and Youtube
I am using mSATA SSD drive via USB3.0 and it is quite fast and small.
I would encourage you to read this:

https://medium.com/matter/the-shut-in-economy-ec3ec1294816

I suspect these people your age making a lot more money lead lives similar to what's described in this article. These do not seem like happy lives to me!

If you're actively saving lives, that is more valuable than all the money in the world, and I thank you.
I would strongly recommend also testing for when things fail. This is the hardest part in troubleshooting and building a reliable system.

You can make do with READ/WRITE LONG if the disks are SAS to generate medium errors, be aware that it may kill your disk if you do it too much to the same disk.

You can also use relatively inexpensive SAS/SATA link error injectors from Quarch.

Be sure to test hot pulls of the disks to simulate a hard failure.

Simulating other soft failures is much harder, sometimes the disk just stops responding but doesn't go offline so the system finds it harder to detect the case and may reach timeout conditions.
TI-89 Bitcoin Diceware Tool
I use a mechanical keyboard in the office, and It's definitely louder than the membrane keyboard I use on my laptop. However, I don't bottom out my keys anymore, and the click of the keypresses is quieter than anyone else in my office who types more aggressively and bottoms out.
Typeform is hiring for several roles, including Development and Marketing:
Apply www.typeform.com/jobs
(or contact georgina@typeform.com)

Preferably on site but also considering remote and intern candidates.
Of the two, 1) is the less bad option. This seems obvious to me. It is wrong to treat the scroll bar as only visual element and not an input element; that's what I take issue with.

> Like it or not designers usually don't spend time on the subset of the audience that clicks and drags the scrollbar. They spend time drawing a pretty looking scrollbar.

If the designers in question, who are working on a user interface element, don't consider how users will interface with it, it's fair to criticise them for not doing their jobs.
Anything that could not be remotely controlled with a joystick? You put the task on, the robot just gives control to the operator at critical moments?
Nono, they are leveraging the market opportunity to generate viral leads with growth hacking.
"Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside."
Why 'zero rating' is the new battleground in net neutrality debate
I don't think you understand my dilemma. Let me try to clear it up with an example. Let's say you have the following history:

- Commit 1 -> Commit 2 -> Commit 3 (master/default) - current branch

Now Commit 3 is the HEAD of your current branch (master, trunk, default, whatever). The way I understand your "problem" is if you want to create a new branch based on an older, non-HEAD commit.

For instance you checkout the current branch on based on the state of the branch as per "Commit 2", and make a new Commit "Commit 4". This creates a new implicit branch:

- Commit 1 -> Commit 2 +-> Commit 3 (master/default)
+-> Commit 4 (implicit branch) - new current branch

Now you have two branches. How do you switch between them? How do you operate on those branches? Do you cycle them? Do you have to remember the last commit-message of a branch to find it again?

To be absolutely clear: What I'm curious about is how do you relate to and navigate between branches when they are all anonymous? What mechanisms do you have to aid identification?
:'(

Brings the film 'Office Space' to mind:

Michael Bolton: You think the pet rock was a really great idea?
Tom Smykowski: Sure it was. The guy made a million dollars.
IMHO Scala would be the present day equivalent. Go would be a close second.
How does that help? You still need a skilled operator, surely?
He's the philosopher of silicon valley, philosophers dont do, they think.
Techcrunch
Techcrunch is getting Domain Name Mismatch error, while accessing over HTTPS. As Wordpress is sharing SSL certificate with techcrunch but the certificate is only valid for *.wordpress.com

Huge name like Techcrunch should get their own certificate to protect traffic. Earlier, if certificate has been issued on www.domain.com and if someone try to access https://domain.com (without "www"), in this case approacher may get this error. But now major CAs are offering both www and non-www protection with single certificate.

In case of CA root/chain/intermediate certificate has not been installed, approacher may get such error. Website owner should install certificate properly to resolve this error.
Got curious and tried it from the Netherlands. I get one version of Ubuntu supported XPS 13, with no customization options whatsoever.

I just wonder what kind of logistical mess Dell must be. If I order an Apple, I get the same options anywhere on the planet (with the exception of keyboard variations, but at least I can always order English international), and the customized laptop gets shipped straight from China.

Surely having all these localized variations just makes things more complicated?
Whenever I get those kind of thoughts I remember that the last thought I will have on my death bed will be : what good did I leave to this world?
Make sure you read all the news stories about rich people who are depressed, and have horrible lives. Probably a lot more common than you think.
I know that some developers have a need to run a large
number of local virtual machines, but I do not really
understand why, to be honest.

If you're developing a website, and you want to test on several versions of Windows and IE. Or if you're developing something that needs to work on several versions of Linux and you want to make sure it works right on several different distros. Or if you're developing something that uses Java on Mac and you want to make sure it works if the user has Java 6 from Apple, or Java 8 from Oracle, or both.

Obviously, there are ways to struggle through if you don't have much RAM - for example you can run 1 VM at a time and be constantly stopping and starting them. But if testing is a PITA, and it means you do a day's work before you test properly and find there's a problem, you might have wasted that day's work :)
I'm pretty skeptical about the explanatory value of the "highlights reel" theory. Anecdotally, most of what I see on Facebook is people sharing links to stuff, liking posts by public pages, saying happy birthday, and so on.

Couldn't it just be that, uh, Facebook is kinda boring? Or, as the article mentions, that "depressed feelings and lots of time on Facebook [...] go hand in hand," in other words, lonely/isolated people habitually look for connection on social media, but the kinds of communication that happen there are not very interesting or loneliness-assuaging.

David Foster Wallace's 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram" describes a similar tendency but with television as the substituting technology:

"Every lonely human I know watches way more than the average U.S. six hours a day. The lonely, like the fictional, love one-way watching. For lonely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness—in fact there exist today social and support groups for persons with precisely these features. Lonely people tend rather to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. Let's call the average U.S. lonely person Joe Briefcase. Joe Briefcase just loathes the strain of the self-consciousness which so oddly seems to appear only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear to watchers. He sits out the stressful U.S. game of appearance poker.

"But lonely people, home, alone, still crave sights and scenes. Hence television. Joe can stare at Them, on the screen; They remain blind to Joe. It's almost like voyeurism."
"I would expect ..." that's the problem. Expectations fail when both sides don't have the same expectations. As there is no way in JSON to specify what type a field is and as dates aren't even specified in the JSON, you aren't sure if dates are in epoch time or any common or uncommon variant of ISO 8601 (or worse, non of these two options).

JSON hasn't been designed for binary data, so it's not surprising that it lacks a binary data type. There are several options besides base64, you could e.g. use yEnc or BSON.

But unless you have really large binary data (in that case I would instead of embed it in JSON, only embed an URL in JSON and let the client download the data separately), I wouldn't bother with another encoding than base64. It is easily compressable and this is handled transparently, so you reach such a low overhead that it is hard to justify using a non-standard option like yEnc.
I really dislike the use of operator overloading for things like this, I prefer a more verbose but idiomatic solution.
That post was still quite full of equations my brain didn't feel like processing at this time of night.

Used some google and found a stackexchange answer that I thought was clearer

https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/165/how-would-you-...
Looks like the dietary "guidelines" of the past decades are essentially BS. Especially the "low-fat" wave that came as a consequence.

At least low salt consumption has no consequences (of course if you abstain completely from salt it will have, I'm talking about "normal" low consumption here, however salt replacements, high in potassium, may have)
In interested to hear you elaborate more on what you consider to be genuine about such an email. Most spammers believe that their emails aren't spam.
Totally unsurprised -

Unhealthy levels of facebook use, particularly apparent addiction to those annoying invite games are pretty obviously not the behavior of a happy person. When ever I get a slew of invites to Candy Crush or similar, it's always from someone a bit tragic.

I mean, who else has the time to sit at home playing Facebook games, but the lack of motivation to go and do something more worthwhile?