skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Regulating a business because we think they're doing it wrong is just as bad as doing all sorts of other proactive measures to help them stay in business.

I totally disagree. That statement is too general and each application depends on the specific case. Take for example General Motors. Should car manufacturing be regulated? Certain not, the marketplace will determine the efficiencies there, and at worst case give people inferior vehicles. However, it absolutely made sense to provide government assistance to GM, even though GM was run incorrectly, because of the broader reaching effects of letting it fall at that time. Now, we ask should the financial industry be regulated, and we see the answer is different, because the case is different; our entire dollar based economy is intertwined with the liquidity of the financial markets, so a worst case scenario there can trigger a severe economic depression, as we almost experienced. Different cases determine the need for government interaction, and the system as a whole is too complex to use one cookie cutter argument to apply to everything.
This is a dupe (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=954586) - I'm sure it wasn't intentional but links coming from Google Reader are adding a fairly long trailer that HN isn't recognizing as dupes.
HTML Email Starter Template
HTML Email Starter Template, free download.
Unfortunately my favorites are a bit on the mathy side, so you may want wait for other commenters with better advice. But, there are two books I really feel should not be missed. For statistics: "Statistics, Third Edition" David Freedman, Robert Pisani, Roger Purves. For machine learning: "The Elements of Statistical Learning" Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman.
Did you read the title of his post?

"I Read Through 160,000,000 Bytes of Hacked Files And All I Got Was This Lousy E-Mail"

It seems to imply to me to be a complete refutation of all the stolen data.

I'm usually a fan of 538 and feel pretty level headed in my opinions on global warming, but Nate could have definitely done better.
> How is that unfortunate?

Because your comments may dissuade people from reading the article who may otherwise enjoy it.

> Do you really think that I'd be poised to launch the next Earth-shattering blogazine, if only I understood the subtle point of this article?

No.

> Or were you just trying to be clever, without demonstrating any insight of your own?

No.
Here's more of the same:

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !"

While I agree that much of what I've seen quoted could be explained, I can't see any reasonable way to make this one seem benign.
Umm.... no overhead. Slicker integration...

I really do think you are missing the point mainly due to being a power user / hacker. A lot of my friends who are casual computer users a) have netbooks and b) are a perfect target market for this.

Some are already asking me about Chrome OS with interest.

Try to think of it as if your a joe user with little technical knowledge.
PogoPlug Version 2 Lets You Access All Your Media Files Worldwide
I've never played poker online, but I've played some with friends. For me, the fun is in playing against people you can see because you can read their faces. Could anyone explain how online poker is fun without this talking/visual element?
Reid Hoffman, Biz Stone & Stephen Fry talk about Twitter
Great point. We chose Rackspace.
But it was more our software and database changes that we're getting a handle on. We haven't even looked at what many concurrent users do to our site yet. It needs to get shaken down, in a big way.
Totally agree. We have local test setups, but even our dev site is on Rackspace (we also have remote virtualbox servers on our machines now which can mimic the main and dev sites).
Hey thanks for the list, any particular preference for one service over another to make sure it's up?

Any idea why this was downvoted?
This is probably not what you're looking for, but while trying to figure out if you could still download a free copy of Drake's out-of-print Fundamentals of Applied Probability Theory...

[HINT: The answer is yes: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...]

...I found this potentially interesting page full of references:

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/probability.h...

I post it here so that I can find it again later, but I fear that this is not the answer to your question. These appear to be more probability theory than nuts-and-bolts statistical analysis [1], and they may require more math background than I have (and I managed to handwave my way to a solid state physics Ph.D.)

Try browsing around the MIT OpenCourseWare site. One of the great things about online courses, even if you don't take the courses, is that they often publish syllabuses that contain a lot of good textbook references.

[EDIT: Ooh, look, if you follow links from the page I mentioned earlier you get here!

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/teaching-stat...
]

---

[1] Not that I can reliably tell the difference. I know just enough about probability and statistics to know that I should probably study them some more. ;)
My point was that democracy is a horrible system, it doesn't work well, and you end up with idiotic laws decided just based on what the mob majority want.
However, it's pretty much the best we've got so far, but that's not saying much.

Democracy is fine if the majority are sane, have good morals, etc etc. But the majority of people in the US believe in god :/ The majority watch "American idol" and think the height of cuisine is macdonalds. Doesn't bode well.

Just my 2c anyway...
I'm working on some casual card/board games, so unfortunately I can't really use Flixel since it wasn't designed for that (primarily vector images, uses events rather than game loop to keep CPU low). But Flixel looks great, and I wish there was a library that could do what Flixel does, except geared for that use case. If only Canvas was up to the task of handling vector images and animations as well as Flash does.
Google will be having a permanent sidebar
Acquista il libro "Tutorial pratici per iPhone SDK"
It isn't.. But why do something twice if you don't have to?
While I agree that node is interesting, this article is little more than blogspam. A better introduction is here:
http://www.nakedjavascript.com/going-evented-with-nodejs

(posted 4 days ago here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946143 )
Avoid this Antivirus Program as Seen on TV | TechJaws.com
Ztodo: simple per-directory todo list manager (zsh)
We are building on top of Django, and currently have most of a prototype up and running.

...back to coding...
His post is pure strawman: say the "enemy's" entire argument centers around one post, then downplay that, then announce that there's nothing to see here folks, move along, move along. It's far more devstating than that. Excerpt:

At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote:

Mike, I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc !

Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs [ed- McIntyre and McKittrick, AGW skeptics] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it !

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/hera...

Update: Here's a summary of many of the emails. This gives an even stronger sense of what a strawman argument Silver used. Interesting stuff:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cu...

From that link: Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI [Freedom of Information Act]. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)

and this:

Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code.
Addicted To Being Good? The Psychopathology of Heroism
For example, in our job board application, we might store open, expired and filled listings using a table-per-class strategy: [image of some class hierarchy]

That ain't no man's soft delete, boy. You want to know what soft delete is? Well that's too bad, cuz there ain't no delete. Move from one table to another? What in tarnation?

Boy, you need yourself the sequence of actions that produce some kind of result. You don't store the result itself, ya'll just go an' fuck it up or something later. "Posted a job offer for Tractor Operator at 2009-11-21.12:44:26." See, that there's an action. "Accepted job offer for Tractor Operator." There's another action. Now what's the status of that job? You get your list of actions, then figure it out. Yes, it's taken, you would have just injured yourself on that tractor anyway.
It was not intentional.

Thank you for pointing out the "long trailer'. In the future I'll remove it.
Isn't there something better than flash out there? Flash sucks for linux.
Conventions at Light Speed: What Hackers Can Learn From SF Fandom
fyi, The Elements of Statistical Learning can be found here as a free pdf

http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/
What's being done "twice"? The goal isn't to run specific applications or frameworks, it's to run Ruby code.

If they're going to tweak the VM to handle one specific use cases while ignoring others, then it's a not a Ruby VM.
An AS3 to objective-c framework? If that's the case, I love to talk to you a little bit more. LeftRight Studios, based in Pittsburgh, is my startup and we develop mobile games.
My initial comment was only intended to remind people that it was in fact a blogazine that was declaring the death of blogs and the rise of blogazines. I don't mean to dissuade anyone from actually reading the article for themselves, we just need to be aware of whose opinions we're listening to.

If you're going to criticize someone for "missing the point" you should at a minimum explain what it is they don't get, that way you demonstrate that it is not you who has missed the point
Does Flixel (what's in a name) somehow depend on the grapics being pixelated, or does it also handle vector graphics? I had a quick look through the documentation but didn't really find anything about this?
Concrete5 CMS Review and Commentary
So do you think that success of MacOS X (derived from FreeBSD)does not show benefitsof BSD model? Or Microsoft's use of NetBSD?
And also, many developers put off by GPL( I am for example),

The objective reasons for being not as popular I think, that FreeBSD never positioned itself as a desktop system, and many small things (such as how fast it boots) are neglected. Yet, overall simplicity and order is attractive to me; a lo easier to understand internals IMHO.
The three database clustering users.
DIET TIP#4
There's still the possibility of getting stuck at a local maxima.
Yes, it is a GPL module they want you to load. On the other hand the protocol is itself is so simple, you can write your own implementation of the wsgi module in 15 min. and stop worrying about that. (without looking at their python_wsgi source of course)
Japanese industrial policy seeks pretty much three things: competitiveness of the Japanese export industry, assured supply for the Japanese domestic markets, and preventing China from screwing us. They have a curious frenemy thing going on: increasing economic cooperation with the aim of effectively establishing economic mutually assured destruction if either restarts the more traditional Japan/China relationship. (Japanese industry essentially can't survive without Chinese raw materials at present -- rare earth being only one example of hundreds. Similarly, Japanese investment is fueling much of China's economic boom.)

Sidenote: Notice the California NIMBYism versus global warming angle? I suppose our coming global apocalypse is worth any effort to stop... as long as it doesn't require radiation in California.
If you like that game try Hook Champ, same mechanic but with powerups, unlockables, great graphics and a committed developer with a major update already submitted.
If you are starting from scratch without a very strong math background, I'd recommend:

1.) Head First Statistics -- Pretty good, but beware the section on Bayes Theorem which is a bit off. This is a quick and casual intro, but worthwhile. I used it to refresh me on my college stats course (which was a long time ago), and I like it. There's also Head First Data Analysis, which I haven't read but could be a reasonable companion. HF Data Analysis uses Excel and R.

2.) Using R for Introductory Statistics (Verzani) -- Good explanations and exercises, and you will also learn R. This second point is actually pretty important, because it's a very valuable tool. Whereas the Head First Stats book walks though pretty simple problems that you work out in pencil, the Verzani book has many real-world data sets to explore that would be impractical to do by hand. That said, I think it's valuable to work things out in pencil with the first book before you move on to this one.

After these books, Elements of Statistical Learning seems to be the current favorite.
What's the meaning of "open letter" in this context?
#1 Thought Leader: Steve Jobs by Fake Steve Jobs
A Summary of the Great CRU Data Hack Emails
somebody else manage the infrastructure

I submit that this is an overly simplistic view of what "the infrastructure" is, a view common among those who write software: the infrastructre is anything that isn't the code they write.

There are very few scenarios where a non-trivial site can be kept up (that is, not "dysfunctional or down" as the OP mentions early on) with merely application code and generic, undifferentiated, off-the-rack infrastructure.

To scale even modestly, one must customize. The customization can start with the web framework and can eventually lead to hardware components (though the "lowest" I know of is Google's custom mobos). There are also operational considerations, such as

I think there are two separate questions for any enterprise. The first is, is further customization an optimization. The second is, is the optimization premature?

To suggest that, for all startups, the answer to the first is always "no" and/or the answer to the second is always "yes" would be overly broad.
Planned Changes to Next Ubuntu Version 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)
It's an excellent cookbook of useful SQL queries with well written explanations. I've used SQL for decades, but after reading a few articles, it was obvious that I could learn some new tricks. The articles are bite sized an tasty.
Losing Weight and Geting Muscles the Smart Way
Go with a low-end VPS from Slicehost or Linode. It's the most friction free option.
I like the other half of the statement "obviously no deficiencies".
Excellent idea! I especially like the idea of using the `chpwd()` hook to display the current tasks when entering a new directory. I must steal this idea and Bashify it.
Poker is, at it's essence, a big math problem. You can win by by applying game theory more effectively than your opponents.

Playing online lets you engage in a large, dynamic math game.
some players in a controversy were revealed (gasp) to have strong opinions

Foul ball. This is not what was revealed.

They're shown to have acted on those opinions, at the very least, unethically manipulating the presentation of study results to exaggerate the conclusion they agreed with.

Any maybe more than that. Depending on the context (which I don't know), it may show that they actually manipulated the data, which calls into question all further research that uses the data coming out of that study.
Google's Chrome OS hits BitTorrent
8 Ball Champion - Sports game
A million inserts into a table a year is causing performance problems? Assuming 200 work days and all accesses being in a four hour period that is about one row inserted every three seconds. DBs are not my bag, baby, but that presumably should not be killing you.

At the day job, when we do a soft delete as defined here, we tend to create a view of the active rows in the table. Accessing through the view rather than the table prevents many of the "Whoopsie, missed a WHERE clause, now I'm summing over deleted records" errors. I'm told it also improves performance but take anything I say about DBs with a grain of salt.
Work at Home Heaven
A part of the disconnect between the way computing power is packaged and the way people would like to use it, is the way computing power for "information/organizational" functionality is divided from "entertainment" functionality.

For most of what people want to do, a netbook has enough or almost enough horsepower. Heck, even an iPhone has enough power for most of it. The only thing you need a full-blown desktop for is for heavy duty Photoshop, graphics software, gaming, or something demanding like that.

So, note how the form factors are disconnected from capabilities:

- iPhone - capable of word processing, but lacks a keyboard to do a lot of
it comfortably
- All-in-one desktop machine - often capable of demanding gaming, but
marketed as the email/web machine for your grandmother.

I see computing coming in two major forms in the future: highly portable, or home/office integrated.

Much of our personal data will be on devices sized like the iPhone or Blackberry. They will be small enough to go everywhere with us. What doesn't fit there will live in game-console like machines in our homes, or on office workstations/high-end laptops, and will move around using the network. As networks get better, much of that will live in the "cloud."

Given better form factors (dockable screens and keyboards and other, newer input devices) the "go-everywhere" device will subsume more and more of our computing tasks. There will no longer be netbooks. There will be "things that allow us to word process/schedule/surf more comfortably" by providing better form factors for interface, but the data will live in our pocket and be synced with the cloud. There will be "other things with the compute/graphics/storage horsepower for specialized tasks." These will be the "hubs, consoles, workstations." These will be the only stationary things, because they will be the only things that have to be stationary.

Everything else will be interface. (The OQO will live at last!)
Programming Collective Intelligence also has high marks from a lot of programmers whom I respect: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...
From Oxford to Wall Street
That graph puts a smile on my face. Looks like something right out of a web 2.0 blog.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/access/id/38939/name/jr_mtre...
Not if you want it to run in a browser.
Batching Mechanical Turk Jobs at the Command Line
Are you working for someone else's company? I'm trying to figure how can you develop for the iPhone if you don't own one. Even if Bill Gates and Paul Allen managed to write a Basic interpreter (IIRC) without having access to the machine, most people prefer testing their application before offering it :-)
The coffee house could be our greatest invention
Tip: Don't write a post about keeping a service up when the service is still down.

http://victusmedia.com/ - Blank box on right?
I believe the latest version of flash builder is supposed to provide the ability to compile from flash -> iphone app directly.
For DM, try http://cs345a.stanford.edu, just browse through the slides they are pretty good. Also, if you can find - go for some video lectures about the topic. [try MIT, Berkeley ocw sites].
Fans of this will probably also like Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties. ISBN: 0123693799

It's unfortunate that a lot of new programmers are relying on their framework's ORM to abstract the SQL away from them, weakening their understanding of it.
A reoccurring them seems to be "I would rather delete this data than let it be publicized due to a [Freedom of Information Act] request."

If I had an abundance of charity in me, I would say he's a pompous git who can't stand the thought of The Enemy winning even a single centimeter against him. The uncharitable explanations all rhyme with fraud.
I'd love to build up a nice little web framework with node.js, maybe using some of the work from v8cgi.
Morgan Stanley’s $9 Billion Check
here: http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/
and yotube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E :)
is this what they are talking about?
http://skrrl.org/font
Hrm, in the HN source v3.1, there's a function canonical-url that strips off anything after a ? in the url, but only when the site is in stemmable-sites* . If used to find dupes, this would work. However, there are only two places in the entire source (reported by grep) that refer to the variable stemmable-sites* . The first is in the definition of canonical-url. The second is assigning a table to stemmable-sites* . As far as I can tell, no urls are ever added to the table by the code, only by hand.

It seems like stemmable-sites* is used to tell what sites don't use the query sting (the part of the url after the question mark) to differentiate pages (see: on Wikipedia the url http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elvis differs from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elvis_Costello only in the query string, but the two pages are different), so they can be safely removed, and still get the same page.

The problem here is that google's adding query strings to other site's domains. Now, these query strings don't change the page. However, HN assumes by default that they do, so it doesn't remove them in the canonical url. Since google is adding them to every link, you can't add a set of urls to stemmable-sites* and let canonical-url strip off the query string. It seems like you could remove any arguments with field names utm_source, utm_medium, or utm_campaign, but that would assume that no site uses the field/variable pairs to differentiate pages.
Yeah,I've been living here for almost a year with the intention of getting in-state rates
Yeah, I was just helping him correct a misspelling in the post, that still hasn't been caught.

"Here’s a sample of what CSS rules this mixin hanldes for you:"
Riding on Square Wheels
The line between reasonable and unreasonable skepticism is razor thin.
Unshackle Your Domain - Explicit State Transition Models
Gosa R&N Xplorer Africa Safaris - FriendFeed
It's not directly related, but I just ran into an interesting article on data analysis. It includes pointers to some good texts on topic, but also has some tips which aren't covered in the standard texts.

"Three Things Statistics Textbooks Don't Tell You" by Seth Roberts:
http://sethroberts.net/about/2005_Three_Things_Statistics_Te...
Thanks mmt.

For the folks that have created many web apps many of these questions have default answers based on experience but for a first timer like me I can't afford to learn by failing at every fork. I need to minimize my failed choices by searching for external input from people that have been through it before.
It's only a few months until the whole government gets kicked out - including evil mandleson and his cronies. I have quite a bit of faith the Conservative government will undo a fair bit of the damage Labour have done.
I guess Canvas is out of the question, if you want folks on IE to be able to use it.