skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I studied graph theory heavily in undergrad, started working in a genetics lab, and spent ~7 years in a bioinformatics PhD program focusing on biological networks. Barabasi was, at one time, the brightest contemporary star in my scientific pantheon.

Suffice to say, his publications (and most biological applications of network theory) are fairly meaningless beyond advancing careers. It's a case of cool sounding math that is misused and every PI wants to show that their tiny area of study is also scale-free/subject to cool network effects and therefore worthy of a publication pointing this out. The math is incredibly shoddy all around, and I was burned on several occasions by sticking up for actual scientific principles and pointing out when the math contradicted the assumptions they were trying to prove.

As an aside - this is my main distinction between Research and Science. Researchers do an excellent job of confirming their hypotheses via whatever model they can lay their hands on. Scientists falsify their hypotheses until no suitable model is left. I've met a lot of Researchers in my experience but couldn't truthfully tell you a true Scientist since the system discourages their existence.

Anyway, my advisor wanted me to SCALE-FREE ALL THE THINGS. The way that everyone gets a power-law in their system is (1) plot their system on a log axis, (2) do a linear fit, (3) voila the slope of the linear approximation is now the exponent of your scale-free power law system, no need to apply any statistical tests to show that your original system is actually exponential! And if you did want to take that extra step, just fiddle with the data until it does fit within your chosen margin of error.
For some ungodly reason, I haven't seen any windows laptop with a nice trackpad that doesn't break in 6 months :(. At least my Acer netbooks have reliable trackpads (no gestures or anything, but ...)
>Its 1963. It is raining. I'm dawdling which Mum doesn't like but I'm coming home by my self now. I have my yellow raincoat, wellies and souwester on. I like those because they look like the seamen on the tugs.

>I'm watching the rain running down the gutter on the side of the road - the road cambers gently to the curb so the cross section of flow is wedge shaped with a slight curve - water running fast but there is a stable pattern of waves at an angle to the kerb that stays the same. The water is running through the structure of waves. How does the structure of waves stay there if the water is moving? I drop leaves in the water and watch them race down the hill under the waves that stay still. I stay for what seems a long time (probably about 2 minutes!) and listen to the rain on my hat - little rattling sound. Then carry on home.

>Most of my work in physics was (in one way or another) to do with that question. I don't think you can schedule that kind of experience. In praise of dawdling.

This was beautiful.
I'm personally a huge fan of the Maryland flag. It reminds me of a coat of arms more than just a flag.

Looking at all of the state flags [1], it seems that the Virginia style "detailed seal on a blue field" is pretty common. Thinking back to my time in New Hampshire, I'm realizing that no one really flies the NH flag except for government buildings. In the absence of a remarkable flag, the late Man in the Mountain is usually the thing that you see used to symbolically indicate, "This is New Hampshire", if any symbolism is used at all.

South Carolinas is another flag that seems to get a lot of love from its citizens.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_U.S._states
> The Internet is becoming the opposite from what it was in its early days.

The Internet is unchanged. You don't have to use any of these private services that run on top of it. You can still run your own, and you can still reach any IP on the 'net. Now faster than you used to. What's to complain about?
All of human history contradicts you. Music has been and will be made irrespective of 20th century notions of copyright.
Offering manual memory management would be a huge win. Even if it's just hints. For instance, if a function was pure, then we know the arguments to it can't escape. So suddenly we can safely allocate many things right on the stack. This can be a huge win in high perf scenarios.

I'd also love an arena system, so I could provide a context and allocate objects in it and enforce they never leak. (Say, per request in an HTTP app.) Then the GC could just free that chunk in one go, no matter how much garbage I've loaded in it. I know that generational GC is supposed to handle this in general, but it isn't free, plus fails when some requests take a long time (and thus all their stuff gets promoted).
Paranoia Text Encryption
Abstract questions are great when you don't quite know what to hone in on, so that you don't get prematurely bogged down in specifics. Specifics which might be superflouous to your question, or maybe even misleading. They are also great when you want to have a general conversation with a general crowd, where more broad and general questions and topics can facilitate more discussion with several people, whereas more concrete, opinionated and assumptious questions would only attract a few others if anyone. As for myself, my own suspicions and enquires are a bit more focused and opinionated than you might get the impression of here.

As for asking more concrete questions in this place, I see little point. At least as far as your benefit is concerned since you know everything on this topic already.
Why not just:

curl ... | less
I wonder if Google takes reports about Google pages not following their polices seriously. Also I wonder if the same guidelines apply for major software websites, I don't think download.com follows most of these requirements.
That doesn't sound like a terribly hostile tone. Yes, there was a little bit of hostility, but nowhere near the level that would lead a support person to give up on helping you.

Remember, people in support are used to a somewhat hostile tone. People get in touch when something is wrong, and so it's fairly common for people to be frustrated. If they just responded with "sorry, can't help you" to every support query with a slightly hostile tone, they wouldn't be providing much support.

And yes, it is also good to try and assume good faith and not vent your frustration at a support person who had nothing to do with whatever issue it is that you're frustrated about. But it's a fact of life in support that you'll have to deal with some unhappy people, so you need to be able to deal with it.
Start simply and work your way up. Networks can be complex beasts with a lot of moving parts--especially if you're moving across sub nets--and if you have high traffic volume etc.

For your immediate problem, traceroute would be a good place to start to help figure out where you're dying on the local network. If the switch is eating packets and connections, the traceroute should die at the switch.

With the switch being faulty, before you assign hardware as a cause, check the bandwidth load you're pushing across the switch. If you're saturating the link and trying to push more stuff through the switch than it can support, it will cause what appears to be connection loss. Also check for a feedback loop somewhere, i.e. someone plugging a cable back into the switch creating a packet storm that doesn't die.

Learning networks takes time and experience, and each network is a different beast with different usage patterns, hardware, and characteristics. A couple useful rules of thumb that I've found helpful when dealing with network debugging are as follows:

1) Start simply. Ping/traceroute/tcpdump/nc (netcat) are your first best friends on Linux and should be the first place you start when you're debugging by hand. NC is a pretty sweet program because it allows you to set up arbitrary TCP connections between two machines without having to standup a full software stack. nc -l <portnum> to set one up. This can be incredibly helpful if you have software that's supposed to connect over the network and isn't work, set up a nc instance on the target port to see if there's a connection attempt. If so, it means the bug is further up the stack.

2) Networks can be complicated beasts with a lot of interchanging parts that interact in complex and sometimes unpredictable ways. Start simply and work your way up in complexity when trying to ascertain cause.

3) Make sure your system logging and system monitoring are paying attention to your network activity and issue warnings when things happen like connectivity outages. Decent monitoring software can save a lot of debugging time because it'll tell you want happened. Our IT guys used Icinga to monitor everything. Bit of a PITA to setup, but worth it to be able to see what/where things were going wrong.

4) Bandwidth isn't finite. Check your hardware to see if it's saturated. We had several issues where our internal network traffic was saturating the original network design causing everyone on the network to experience absolutely torrid performance. After we rewired the network and isolated the chatty boxes on their own switches, network performance improved drastically. Don't assume the network in general hasn't outgrown the network design or that burst traffic isn't overloading the setup. It's possible and also explains the intermittent outages.
A slice is:

type sliceStruct struct {
array unsafe.Pointer
len int
cap int
}

I think you both _mean_ the same thing, just the previous poster is focusing on the entire struct itself, and you're focusing on the 'array' member of the struct.

Or I'm just babbling.
I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would having more doctors not be a good thing?

Also, what do you mean residency programs are the bottleneck? Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice medicine? Then we should increase residency programs. Whatever. I'm no expert in the field, just seems to me like more doctors would be a good thing, same way it would be good to have more of any profession that's highly in demand.
It appears to have been originally posted in June 2000. The internet was still quite a ways from the "all human knowledge within five clicks" state that we take for granted today, along with the assumption that any reasonable statement should be immediately supportable with links.
Browser usage is in the user agent string. Country is in the IP address.

You don't need a third party analytics system for them.

And none of this information will ever be used it is just gathered and sent to a third party.
> That OSX is just a mod of various components plus an old era Unix kernel at the core. You literally validated the point.

Mach is not an “old era Unix kernel” and OS X is not exactly a vanilla Mach:

http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx/arch_xnu....

It has a BSD subsystem but plenty of other different things, like a completely custom device driver model (IOKit).

Secondly, you just called everything above the level of the kernel a mod, when that's where most of the code and almost all of the significant differences live. Is Android also “just a mod” on top of Linux?

> OSX has weird bugs like the beachball cursor which is something that simply shouldn't happen in a modern OS. The last Windows to have a global lock like that was 9x.

Windows 10 and most X window managers have the same thing for the same reason: you see the busy cursor when an application stops responding to events within some defined timeout. It's not due to the Win95/Mac OS Classic-like “global lock” you're thinking about but rather access to an unresponsive shared resource. I most commonly see it due to either doing blocking network I/O in the main thread (e.g. Outlook) or making the mistake of assuming that the filesystem won't block which affects just about every app with a network home directory or flaky drive, but it's also common with things like web browsers using a large cache directory where the startup blocks for awhile while the file system churns through millions of files.
There's more cargo cultism in security than pretty much any other field of CS/IT that I am aware of. "Best practices" are cargo culted with zero understanding as to why they exist.

"If firewall equals secure, then MOAR firewall equals more secure!"

Blocking ICMP, of course, makes the firewall more firewally.

I try to explain that (a) firewalls are practically useless alone since most threat vectors today are "pulled" not "pushed," and (b) things need to actually work... but nope.

Unfortunately in security black hats tend to be more skilled than (most) white hats. Really good security people are some of the most knowledgeable people I've met, but there don't seem to be many of them. They also tend to be terrible salespeople (like most techies), so the bad checkbox-ticking "security firms" are the ones who get enterprise contracts.
I re-read the conversation after reading your comment, and find them assertive but not hostile.
The link seems to have exceeded its bandwidth. The Internet Archive has a version here: https://web.archive.org/web/20141026151912/http://etloh.8m.c... (And it appears to be basically unchanged since June 2000, which explains the lack of sources that some commenters have objected to.)
Please elaborate a bit. I am unfamiliar with both terms
A more moral strategy would be to foster user awareness with threshold mechanisms: "You spent more than [threshold]$ today. We won't accept any more purchases until tomorrow."

I wonder why mobile app stores haven't implemented such a mechanism.
The Tell-Time Heart: Updating Edgar Allan Poe with the Apple Watch
Breaking the Bank – Developing an Exploit for Venmo Money and Credential Theft
I just listened to the 99pi episode about the history of the Portland flag, and although roman mentioned how much he loved the Chicago flag, he didn't go into detail about it. Great read, thanks for posting!
> it will continue happening as long as politicians can be bought to keep it legal.

It's quite a complex issue. How do politicians regulate games without infringing on players' freedom? How do they discern lawful play from illegal play? Treatment, prevention and awareness is the only practical solution.
Why not at least try? I'd like to see something that is from a statistics or math source that does not resort to "colloquial" distortion to justify such use.

And note, I didn't down vote you in spirit of promoting a healthy discussion, you instead have, so who's really unwilling to hear opposing opinions?
I found the following passage most striking:

> "I lost my husband two years ago to throat cancer," she explained. "He was the love of my life, and I started doing this just to — I was out of my mind and spent a lot of time at the cancer center." ... Singleton says she never recovered from the pain of her loss, and that’s why she keeps coming back to the slots.

The person quoted above is in need of counseling and support. Instead, she's getting a drip-feed of low-cost morphine to mask her loss, like a debtor going from pay-day loan to pay-day loan to stay solvent.

Academically, we seem to have strong evidence linking stress to reduced impulse control. I'm no expert in the matter, but surveys such as this [1] seem convincing. Despite this, the popular conversation seems to stay away from root causes and instead ends at the label 'addict.'

I wonder what percentage slot machine and clash of clans-styled mobile gaming revenue is due to this kind of coping-related addiction. downandout's comment [2] suggests it is probably quite high.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2732004/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557208
Yeah, when Joda arrived, my Java programming life quality really improved.
Not sure that was a counter as much as agreement, based on parent's comment after the quote :-)

EDIT: now I'm confused. The comment I thought you were replying to appears to be a different comment now and the original deleted. Maybe I'm going crazy.
Before permanently altering the demographics of a nation that was recently successful (the USA ranked highly in nearly every standard of living metric a scant few decades ago), let's try implementing social theories based on "estimates" in a nation with nothing left to lose.

There are plenty of other nations available for globalist theorists to potentialy help and likely destroy.
Fashion is a matter of taste, isn't it, and ultimately as void of real meaning as the renderings of the "Opinion of Google"? I suppose perhaps your analogy fits more well than you perhaps expected, but not in Google's favor.
Good lord, I had no idea how bad the situation was. Check it out, they are still locked in angry debate, with new comments going up on the talk page as of yesterday:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gamergate_controversy

——————

@Gamaliel: What new accounts? What does your closing and hiding of this thread have to do with new accounts editing the article? The thread had nothing to do with new accounts editing the article or not editing it. We were talking about how people respond to reader feedback on the talk page, not editing the article. What kind of grounds for closing and hiding a thread is this? As the grounds given for closing and hiding this thread make no sense whatsoever, I will open it again after waiting an appropriate amount of time. Chrisrus (talk) 20:40, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

——————

Chrisrus again unilaterally declares that “the grounds given for closing and hiding this thread make no sense.” They make sense to the rest of us. This is simply disruptive editing. Will someone please take the appropriate steps already? Thanks! MarkBernstein (talk) 21:23, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
i think you're thinking that Lispification is some kind of goal for the language, but it's not. the lispininess is just one aspect of the language, which is why i think calling it a lisp isn't fair to Mathematica -- it's more powerful/abstract/general than that (in particular because everything is essentially quoted by default - though in their raw forms i suppose both lisp and Mathematica are essentially equivalently capable). the precise character of the lispy aspects of the language (eg the language not "really" having safe-locked closures) is imo just an implementation detail.
1) It's less profitable.

2) The popup might "break the spell" and frustrate players. They would likely move to more compelling activities.

People who are severely addicted to slot machines don't care about winning or losing. They just want to keep the flow. Every distraction is detrimental to the experience.
Since the last part of the brain to mature is the prefrontal cortex which involves planning; perhaps adolescents simply can't imagine long enough into the future to under stand why they might want so much money and stuff, whereas an adult would be considering retirement and worrying about longterm stability.
Regarding the 2%, you're assuming that the data from Bwin - an Internet gambling site - is representative of the casino industry as a whole.

And that 10% account for 90% of revenue doesn't mean that those 10% are addicted. There's obviously a long tail of people that only enter a casino once a year or less, which will obviously contribute little to its revenue. That doesn't mean semi-regular players must be addicted.

I don't doubt that there are addicted people, but I don't agree that the data you mention indicates a large problem.
Thanks for the kind words! I actually agree that L1 error is often more practical, and didn't mean the post to come off as prescriptive. (In fact, part of my motivation for writing it was that L1 error seemed to have much better practical properties, and I was curious why people used L2 despite this!)
Agreed, sadly. And nice username for the topic at hand - mind shooting me an email? This is a topic near and dear to my heart.

One time I had worked for about a year on some non-trivial enumerative calculations of pathways and flow patterns within metabolic networks. I was due to present these results, pre-publication, as a large multi-departmental talk. The night before the talk I was preparing some visuals and I noticed some oddness in the subnetworks. Upon further investigation I realized I had a bug in my code that reversed a significant number of edges. My conclusions were completely blown and redoing the calculations would take a week at minimum and I couldn't be sure that I would see the same phenomenon in the corrected network. My advisor told me to present that day anyway with mocked visuals and that I would probably get the same result with the real data. I refused on principle but that had repercussions.

Biologists as a whole don't have the best mathematical education and they seem to only appreciate math when it confirms their theories.
"Two thousand years ago, Aristotle’s “Physics” was a wide-ranging set of theories that were easy to state and understand."

I'm having a hard time imagining that anyone comes away from just having read Aristotle with the impression that his work is easy to state and understand. Science is great, but let's shed ourselves of the need to belittle other disciplines in order to make our own accomplishments seem more grand.
Interesting, I was in the same upgrade boat, but went back to 10.8 on my Mid-2011 MBAir. With only 4GB of ram, 10.10 was killing me, constantly spooling up the i7 & fan to screaming levels.
Simple infographics tool for non-coders
You can in VPC just fine. The ELB has a regular security group.
I'm perpetually amazed by the breadth of your knowledge, Fedor. It's unique that your attention spans traditional compiled code all the way to Node, and even includes Bitcoin. What is it that drew you to the latter two?
He specifically mentions the DC flag as another great flag design, and it is included in the imagery when he is talking about drawing a 1x1.5" rectangle when designing flags.
Thanks for the article; I wish I had read it before competing in a Kaggle contest where the score was based on absolute deviation. I ended up finding quantile regression and its relationship to the median eventually, but this article connects all the ideas very nicely.
From the title I expected a piece about how this affected their business. Graphs showing downloads before, during and after; etc.
College Board Puts Code.org in Charge of AP CS Program
> I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would having more doctors not be a good thing?

I never said that it wouldn't; I said that having more medical schools would have literally zero impact on the number of doctors practicing medicine.

> Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice medicine?

Yes, because medical school isn't where you learn to practice medicine; residency is.

> Then we should increase residency programs.

There are so many political barriers to allocating the kind of funding necessary for this that it's not a realistic expectation anytime for the foreseeable future.

> I'm no expert in the field, just seems to me like more doctors would be a good thing, same way it would be good to have more of any profession that's highly in demand.

Sort of - but the medical field is rather complicated to a degree that would be tough to summarize in an HN comment. In short, yes, this general principle is true, but in the case of medicine, there are enough confounding factors that it's not as simple as "more residency programs → more and better care". If you could hold everything else constant, yes, that may be the case, but in practice, this wouldn't happen in isolation, and there would be a lot of other effects.
First Warm-Blooded Fish Discovered
Some people would stop working just because it would be kind of silly not to, considering their circumstances. Some other people would stop working because why bother when those lazy scumbags aren't doing anything either, and others would stop working because being productive just gets you assraped with taxes.

All in all, it just doesn't "work".