skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's your explanation: because tree rings represent an indirect measurement requiring a set of assumptions, while temperature measurements are direct measurements and require none. In the event of a conflict, trust the direct measurement over the indirect one.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
Wow, I'm really impressed with how stable the performance is with EC2. All straight lines.
Law of unintended consequences: Twitter billboard
Well, if a group has your original source data, they can try to reproduce your results and/or challenge your process. I gather that the results are not likely to stand up to scrutiny.
This is why I was happy they jacked up the parking rates in Chicago - they now roughly match the actual value of the spaces for a given moment in time. I hope they do so in Boston now that I live here (technically Somerville).

Here's Felix Salmon's excellent analysis of the deal (with help from Parking Ticket Geek): http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/11/24/chicagos-pa...
There is another route to become a Quant, similar to become a start-up founder in software/internet industry. You can just learn to trade by yourself with some simple trading strategy. One popular strategy is "High Frequency" automatic or semi-automatic trading. A friend of mine has achieved such a good result which allows him quit his day job. I'm not saying this route is for everyone or easier than learning at hedge funds or investment banks though.
Anecdote: I've applied twice with NASA's SBIR program and been denied twice. It has the advantage of being 'free money', besides your time required to apply (the first time I took about two months of weekends and evenings to put together an application; the second time I did 1/2 week full-time), and the disadvantage of being extremely competitive. The competitors are often firms which do little but SBIR, full time, and they have serious advantages from knowing the system.

(Example of not knowing the system: on my first application, I put forth a very ambitious workplan in order to entice NASA with a high bang:buck ratio; this backfired completely as they loved my proposal except for its unrealistic workplan. D'oh!)

However, I'd still say it was worth the time, as they forced me to do a lot of explicit planning about where I was taking product development, and now I have two well-written proposals that I can cut-and-paste into various new incarnations for other audiences.

That said, my company will never be doing that again. :)
peter thiel has said it before as well. if you don't have solid distribution and you are a consumer internet company your company is worth nothing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SRfBaKAiUM

at 2:37
As a market geek (did I make that up?) this would be my dream job (if i have to be employed by someone else) but I wonder how many quant jobs are outside of NY? Live in Boston at the moment.
Surely if the original data sets upon which important decisions will ultimately be based are missing or destroyed, such that the results can't be independently reproduced, that alone ought to be cause for concern and discussion.
Deliberately dishonest? I'm not sure how you can discern cloudy thinking from malice. The DARPA:Internet YC:Reddit comparison is about as useful as stating the number of startups you've funded -- none of this data is sufficient to draw any meaningful conclusion.

Techniques for comparison that may provide some utility: investment efficiency, total investment adjusted for duration of program, applicants per dollar invested, and so on.

I am surprised that you are engaging in a debate about the relative influence of DARPA funding and YC. It seems like comparing Apples to Filesystems.
The thought that someone couldn't walk down to the local store and buy an external hard drive(s) to store this data is unlikely. Heck, a general call out to the community to find storage would work (ask google, they would do it and index it).

No, I believe malice is really the only explanation. Raw data allows reproducibility and intelligent debate.
Very low storage, poor memory/$, unestablished company, but good results in a less than scientific performance comparison by a blogger. Yeah, lets switch right away. (Linode is awesome, but the reasoning is poor)
What makes people so susceptible to nonsense in public
discourse? Is it because we do such a miserable job in
schools teaching what science is all about—that it is not a
collection of facts or stories but a process for weeding
out nonsense to get closer to the underlying beautiful
reality of nature? Perhaps not. But I worry for the future
of our democracy if a combination of a free press and
democratically elected leaders cannot together somehow more
effectively defend empirical reality against the onslaught
of ideology and fanaticism.
With MinGW you can cross-compile from Linux (and perhaps also from FreeBSD). Imho Cygwin is not suitable for applications like tarsnap that should be very reliable and fast.
There are a ton in Boston as well as Chicago. MIT even has a center dedicated to it: http://lfe.mit.edu/
Must have Mac OS X Software
Did the amazon pricing consider reserved instances? A small instance is $300 for the year - which changes the price/performance ratio.
General Fusion: "It's a long shot, they say, but well worth a try." Read that as It's got less than a 1% chance it might work, but compared to the potential gain it's still worth looking at.

ITER on the other hand has an 85+% chance of working (net energy gain) and only costs the US ~1billion. So while ITER might cost 50x as much it's more than 50x more likely to actually work. Also should ITER work as well as expected a working fusion reactor that could produce 1GW of base load power could be built in 10 years. ITER's initial design was for a 500MW power plant, but ITER was scaled back to a demonstration device to lower cost and reduce risks.

PS: All fusion devices produce a lot a radiation and need extensive containment and decommissioning costs. The only way you can build a 20 million$ fusion reactor is by avoiding actually producing significant amounts of fusion. So all projects that say we can demonstrate fusion for < 50 million are not going to produce significant amounts of electricity.
It would actually be very interesting to get a graph of all the papers that are based on the altered data. I get the feeling it would be a significant percentage, and not having the raw data would make things painful.

humm..... citeseer with evidence / result tracking....
Absolutely breathtakingly ironic, to hear these words from Scientific American.
Real time, real discussion, real reporting: choose two
I am redoubling my efforts to actually learn programming, for the sole purpose of outcoding this yahoo. Shouldn't be hard.
You shouldn't hire terminally ill people at all. Turnover is expensive. Also, the chronically ill drive up insurance premiums. For that same reason, you shouldn't hire people over 35. Another reason not to hire people over 35 is that people under 35 will work 80 hour weeks for no additional pay. That's also a good reason only to hire offshore developers, or, better yet, H1-Bs from H1-B bodyshops: they can't quit, or they'll be deported.
How long until Apple gives him the smackdown? I'm starting a pool. I take week 3 from now.
Shorter Gladwell: "if you seek certainty, and someone gives it to you, sooner or later you'll trip over a rounding error and fall flat on your face."
It is very funny that many of the people that spent 8 years saying amen to the broad war against science by the Bush administration are now "oh, so chocked!" by some out of context comments and suppressed data by some researchers in a UK university.
The high frequency trading is a term used to denote automated trading in intervals of tenths to hundredths of second, in volumes of even hundreds to millions $ in one transaction, so that is not something an individual would do. Automated trading by itself is of course feasible for almost anyone determined enough.
I just read it for you and there's not a single reference to linear algebra, it should be a safe read.
"I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false."

Science can prove negatives now? That's news to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_proof
finally, a reasonable discussion of this issue. For over two years I've heard rumblings from my sience-y friends that GW was being overhyped. I don't know if anyone had any specific data, but there is some sort of pattern-recognition thing where you just smell that something is fishy.

None of this means that human-caused GW isn't a fact -- what it means is that proving it and quantifying it are turning out to be very difficult. What the email scam shows is that people on the 'right' side of the debate (ie proponents of human-caused change) at some point went over a bit to the dark side, and decided that "failure is not an option" -- ends justify means, etc.

This saddens me because I don't want 'my' side (liberal, rational, forward-thinking) to be guilty of the same anti-science bullshit that GWB and crew were. If science becomes completely politicized, it will cease to be science. Where will be then?
Totally makes sense, especially having read the book PayPal Wars where the author--who led PayPal's marketing--talks of day to day strategies that helped PayPal acquire users consistently and cheaply.
That seems kind of weird - if they don't show the data, they might as well not bother with collecting data at all. They could just make it all up.

Why then, would they bother to mail it around, as they did in the quoted email?

I suspect there are some other reasons.
HAHAHAHAHAHA !!!
The surface station audit is almost completed BTW, Check out the graphic at
http://www.surfacestations.org/
That's a great idea. Will do.
True in that Blank's been saying this for a while. But VCs only recently have started openly blogging/talking about distribution and sales openly.
JQuery Lesson Series: How to Add Options to Plugins
China is a Communist country, but I have yet to meet an actual Communist
I concur, the only reason to destroy the original source data is if you know your work won't stand up to scrutiny and will discredit your work. Irony here is that now it isn't a matter of if there work would or wouldn't stand up to scrutiny, now it's a matter of ethics and they're clearly discrediting themselves by their severe lack of ethical behaviour.
I use prgmr, but it's only personal use right now. I paid the annual for the 1GB plan. The monthly cost is quite low and it gives me my own little server to deposit all my apps on and what not. I'm very happy with it. The performance is good enough for me.

I have had no issues at all. Highly satisfied customer here.
It seems that if the karma incentive was reduced on political articles, people would have less incentive to post the thoughtless ones.

This is backwards. Usenet had political flamewars despite having no karma.

People post to political threads because it makes them feel good to stick up for their particular causes. Emotions that reward us for signaling our allegiances and general loyalty are one of the cognitive adaptations that allow our species to solve the Prisoner's Dilemma to benefit from cooperation, specialization, and trade.

Start reading Robin Hanson: http://www.overcomingbias.com

or Comeuppance: http://www.amazon.com/Comeuppance-Altruistic-Punishment-Biol...
So you're suggesting that despite years of education and learning from mistakes, investors never learn from their past mistakes, and that all of these crises

Well, given the words "all of these crises" ... you tell me, do they?
A world awash in debt
Sounds exactly like the music industry as my friends describe it to me. Major labels anyway.
The DNS tools are considerably better IMHO. Take a look at the screenshots on their site. It's pretty cheap so if you have a significant amount of hosts with Slicehost it's worth picking up a linode for a month just to test yourself.
this is actually partially true. A lot of the investors that are putting their money in dubai and the emmirate states do believe that these countries and investments will not fail and the world community will not let them fail. The reason being these places are suppose to be the model for whole islamic world. Showing a vision to the whole islamic community of what is possible when there is strong economic relationship with the global community and the westernized world. A huge catastrophic failure in these areas will greatly hinder globalization in the middle east.
Chicago is another place for quantitative trading.
I don't know much about it or what's involved in the course work. I never looked into it and didn't know anyone doing CE.

However, I have heard it can be one of the toughest degrees to complete.

Sorry for the late reply.
All the OS you need which is not much
war against science

I'm not familiar with that war. Is it "outlawing stem cell research", when all he did was say we wouldn't use federal tax dollars to do it? Or is it not toeing the line as far as Kiyoto, because "all scientists agree the end is near if we don't"? Refresh my memory as to this "war against science"? I'm interested.
I'll join in with alleging bias. Here's a representative sample from the Los Angeles Times front page a few weeks ago (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-climate-...):

From a tree-shaded plateau facing Mt. Kenya, the worshipers gaze anxiously at its melting ice cap and wonder: Is God dead?...The scientific community is divided over the causes of melting ice caps in Africa. But many experts believe the retreating snow on Mt. Kenya is one of the continent's clearest examples of climate change and global warming.

There are two layers of bias here, one obvious and one subtle. Obviously, "The scientific community is divided over the causes of melting ice caps in Africa" means that some experts think the melting is due to global warming, and some experts think it's not. Long-time observers have come to expect the Times (and the MSM generally) to choose the pro-global warming interpretation every time.

The subtle bias is that the Times wrote this article at all.
Scientific American has been declining ever since Flanagan left its masthead, twenty-five years ago. Try American Scientist (http://www.americanscientist.org/) instead-- it reminds me so much of what SA used to be.

(And don't get me started about the Judean People's Front....)
As I understand it their license to (some of) the data did not permit them to do so.
I think this plays into the theme that there is a lot of room for people to be more concise in all forms of communication - especially email.
You won't find it at Best Buy, obviously, but we sell a software product that starts at US$1.4 million, not including any support or customization. (It's a super-small niche product and saves our customers tens of millions each year, so we have no trouble getting our price. In fact, we've been told we should charge more by a few customers.) Several of our companies sell software in excess of $100k. Price is completely unimportant. Value is supremely important. That's true whether your selling off-the-shelf software or bespoke software. Interestingly, our unit sales often increase when we raise prices.
Hmm,

Try as we might, IQs don't actually follow a bell curve. There are many more on the high and low ends than would be expected by looking at the curvature in the middle. Whether this is a measurement error or something else, we don't know.

Also, because of the unique position of the USA in the world (and especially places like Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Pasadena, New York) an awful lot of the right hand side of the bell curve for nations like China, India, Russia, etc. are currently living here, and often working for tech companies.

Additionally, when you do happen to get extremely brilliant people excited and working on the same thing as you in the same organization, the effects are magical. I've experienced nothing else like it.

Finally, when you're in Silicon Valley, you get the sense that there are maybe a couple thousand serious players who, if you look close, are directly involved in or are supporting most of the major efforts. It is a small world -- it seems like it's about two degrees of separation, give or take. You really get the sense that the right kind of people are the crucial ingredient that fires the whole engine of innovation here.

IQ is probably one of the less important characteristics in most positions in most companies. But it's still an ok measure for something important.

But much better to have people who are not merely good intellectual generalists (high 'g') but who are actually alarmingly good at the actual things you need to do in your company. There are as many times more of these as there are distinct things to do.
One thing a lot of people have seen with Amazon is high instance to instance variation. Generally if one starts up a batch job of 10-100 odd instances all doing the same work, you'll see up to a 10x difference in throughput between best and worst instances.

I'd speculate amazon has many different generations of hardware deployed and the EC2 Compute Units do not really capture the differences between these, particularly when it comes to memory bandwidth.
Cleveland Hopkins Airport shuttle passengers treated to yoga
I wonder if the Slicehost numbers were generated on an older slice? He did note that the writeup was six months in the making. If he was on older Slicehost gear and the latest Linode gear, that would make some difference, at least it seems like it would.

At one point I had the Slicehost crew set my account to provision slices in their newest datacenter in Texas. Things seemed snappier after that, though there could be several reasons why and it's hard to know if it was just a matter of newer hardware running the Xen dom0.
Yes, "Automatic trading" may be the more appropriate term in my post.
For people like me who don't need a lot of performance is more important other issues like support (quality and response time), backups, documentation, provisioning, uptime etc.

I'd like to see a more complete comparison. I personally use Rimuhosting and Rackspace, I'm happy with both.
It is as you say, you must make a choice, trying to have both becomes very confusing. In LFE (Lisp Flavoured Erlang) I went the other and added proper scoping. It is the lack of scoping which I consider to be the most confusing and has caused some strange features.

Having mutable variables is definitely possible but I don't really see the problems with immutable ones. You get used to it very quickly.
Linode has been awesome since I got a VPS through RailsRumble with them 2 years ago. Till this day, I still use Linode and they have the best price for VPS as well as features that you get FOC unlike slice host.

And you know what's great about them, they have been quietly supporting the Rails Rumble community and it's time we show them our support for being best at what they do!
sarcasm? i like to be authentic 100%. i try not to think to hard about how "business" really works. i like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, rather than think everyone is trying to manipulate a self-centered win.
Seems to me that he talked about two things:

1. We have sooo much data, its just too hard to ask "what is the useful information"?
2. The second problem is more deeply rooted in the system and that is with the people. More the number of people, more the difficulties in managing them.
I've had a linode for 2 years and never had a downtime due to them.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't those two the only providers he reviewed that have an affiliate program? Everyone's a critic. :)
The explanation on Wikipedia is really fun if you haven't read about comparative advantage before:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
Out of curiosity, why do you put the word skeptic in quotes? Do you imply that my skepticism is not genuine? Believe me, it's genuine. I'm no "skeptic", I'm a skeptic, proud and true.

If what you say is true, that's really good. It's probably not true, judging from the comments in the source code, where the guy laments on his inability to verify the very existence of some of these stations. That's not to say the stations he wanted, didn't, at some point, probably exist, it's just that time passes and the world moves on, people retire, and filing cabinets go to the salvation army.
The Museum of Lost Interactions
My first observation was the standard deviation on some of these measurements, Zed Shaw would have a heart attack on some of these measurements, and I don't believe they should be trusted. The best way to measure performance is to run your app on it, as synthetic benchmarks mean next to nothing compared to your actual application benchmarks. Finally, if you are this worried about performance, you should probably be looking at running real hardware anyways, like GitHub now is.
No, this is the set of raw data beneath the corrected data all the papers are based on. It isn't Darwin's notebook, it is the set of species that Darwin studied. If you removed all the fossils and a lot of the species and tried to prove evolution you'd be in the same ball park as what is going on here.
Secrecy in science is a corrosive force
The only time it is sensible to do this with variable names is when they are some form of logical progression, for example when threading a state variable through the code which may be modified.

f(..., State0) ->
{A,State1} = foo(..., State0),
{B,State2} = bar(..., State1),
{C,State3} = baz(..., State2),
Res = fubar(A, B, C, ...),
{Res,State3}.

Otherwise you just create confusion.
ZSync Open Source OS X/iPhone Syncing Library
Did you have any setup problems? I tried Prgmr a few months ago and my instance wouldn't boot for some reason. Tried emailing the support but didn't get a response. It was only $6 to give it a shot, but I guess I'm not smart enough to use it.
Could someone link to the error model spec? I hadn't heard of this and my Google-fu isn't picking anything up.
Contrary to popular belief, Google is not an innovator. Even their own CEO has admitted this. Google takes existing ideas and improves upon them, they rarely invent new ideas.

Think of a new idea Google has come up with. News? Gmail? Search? Maps? nope... most of their innovative stuff is acquired, not innovated internally.
Sure. I'm in a very similar situation, so we might be able to give each other a heads-up.
IQ has fat tails. There are many more people with IQs over 160 than the bell curve would predict.
So... 3 winners out of 30 applicants, that's a 10% chance of winning, or $10k expected profit six months down the road. Suppose it takes 2 weeks to prepare...

Can you spend 2 weeks in a different way to generate > $10k in extra money 6 months down the road? If the answer is yes you should probably stick with your other work.
>Nonsense claims had more difficulty gaining traction in the days when print journalism held sway and newspaper editors had the final word on what made its way into homes and when television news consisted of a half-hour summary of what a trained producer thought were the most essential stories of the day.

Yeah, lets all take a moment to Remember the Maine, the poor babies in Kuwait that was throw out of their respirators and the "you provide the pictures, then I will provide the war" qoute.

'cept, of course, that those were all lies by the media.