Hacker News Reader

Bill_Dimmon Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

Very interesting statement, considering that Sargon (the guy Patreon banned) was directing his offensive language AT the alt-right (i.e., he is against the alt-right, not part of it).

Bill_Dimmon Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

I don't think "100% in-house techs" is right. I have Comcast Business and my line was recently cut (probably an accident by apartment maintenance). The tech who came out and put in a temporary line was from Comcast, but he said a contractor would come out at some point in the future to put in a permanent one (hence, he could not guarantee that I could get a notification when it would happen).

Bill_Dimmon Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B

Actually looking forward to MS's UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn.

Along those lines, maybe they'll fix the very broken email alerts for group postings. For quite a while, my experience has been that if I have it set to weekly digests I do get them weekly as expected, but if I set a group to daily digests I get nothing at all. So I get nothing at all for the groups that I have the most interest in. I opened a support ticket about it but got nowhere with it. I don't know if this impacts everyone or just some subset of users, but I've seen others complain about it.

Bill_Dimmon A Simple Web Developer's Guide to Color

I've found Vischeck to be helpful: http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/

Bill_Dimmon A New Breed of Trader on Wall Street: Coders with a Ph.D

Here is the breakdown for the quants at the bank I worked for in 1995-1999 (I may have forgotten a few people):

Cornell physics PhDs: 3

Harvard physics PhDs: 2

Princeton physics PhDs: 2

Univ of Penn physics PhD: 1

Other physics PhDs: 2

Cornell applied math PhD: 1

Other applied math PhD: 1

Cornell mechanical engineering PhD: 1

Univ of Chicago finance PhD: 1

So, if by "dropout" you mean that they didn't complete their PhDs, then no, that's wrong. If by "dropout" you mean people leaving physics, then yes, it's very common (especially for theorists -- all physicists on the list above where theorists except maybe one or two).

Bill_Dimmon An introduction to variable and feature selection [pdf]

The fpr and fnr should be swapped (note: I haven't read the rest of the paper yet). Specifically, it should be:

ROC curves plot (1-fnr) as a function of fpr.

Bill_Dimmon MIT Mathlets: Interactive mathematics visualizations

For the few that I looked at, clicking the "Description" tab tells you almost nothing. Clicking the word "Help" in the upper right gives a much more detailed description.

Bill_Dimmon Why the CDC Tracks Wireless-Only Households and Their Risky Behavior

DSL is available without telephone service, at least with Verizon in Pennsylvania. It is called "dry loop DSL." 3 Mbps / 768 kbps is costing me more than the price they are advertising for 50 Mbps / 50 Mbps FiOS (which I can't get) without contract. So it exists but it sucks, and I'm not sure you actually save much (or anything) by getting DSL without telephone service.

Bill_Dimmon China to begin two-child policy

About 20 years ago, when I was a grad student, I attended a colloquium where the speaker (a physicist, for better or worse) had computed the number of people that the planet could support if everyone consumed natural resources at the rate that Americans do. His number was 2 billion. I don't remember who the speaker was and I don't know what assumptions he made -- I don't know how much error there might be in his result or how improvements in technology might change it. If his number is even close to being right, "global populations will peak in my lifetime" isn't even close to being adequate unless you expect the bulk of the population to be satisfied with remaining poor while a small proportion of the population devours the planet.

Bill_Dimmon Show HN: Experimental “Text-To-Color” engine I wrote for fun

Neat. It would be helpful if you could go in the opposite direction (enter RGB values and get the name of the closest color). I find that when I'm making a chart or graph and I cook up some color in GIMP, I don't know how to refer to that color in the text of the document that references the chart.

Bill_Dimmon Block and Unsubscribe

In a similar vein, but with physical mail, I made a donation to the local PBS TV station years ago during one of their fundraisers. They sent me a postcard with my name misspelled in a way I had never seen before. I then received solicitation mails from several other charities with the same misspelling. Nothing says "thank you for your donation" like being sold out for a few extra dollars. I never donated to them again.

Bill_Dimmon I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

> Better Business Bureau link?

Is lacking a BBB link supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing?

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/business-bureau-best-ratings-m...

Bill_Dimmon What us worry? Ashley Madison says it added over 100K users last week

Should we take 100k new users to mean 100 new Ashley Madison employees generating 1,000 fake accounts each?

http://abovethelaw.com/2013/11/ashley-madison-should-take-be...

Bill_Dimmon Lawrence Lessig wants to run for president in an unconventional way

> Except I've never once seen such a claim actually made by any politician. So at the very least it seems likely to stand out.

Marco Rubio made a claim like that on Meet The Press two days ago.

> I intentionally have no access to the donor list

That would require doing away with the $50,000 per plate fundraising dinners.

Bill_Dimmon Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?

All of the C++ books by Scott Meyers are excellent -- very clear and insightful.

Bill_Dimmon Former Apple rival IBM could become the biggest buyer of MacBooks

I (not original poster) have a Dell Latitude E5430 with the upgraded backlit keyboard and I like that keyboard a lot (vastly better than the standard one on my old D620).

Bill_Dimmon Show HN: Spot the Drowning Child

Sidenote: I tried sending the link to my brother's work email and it was blocked by Symantec.cloud email filtering. I don't know if that means that Symantec is blocking links to spotthedrowningchild.com due to detecting malware there or whether Symantec email filtering is just garbage.

Bill_Dimmon DHI Group plans to sell off Slashdot and Sourceforge

it seems like it's a pretty important part of being a slashdotter to hate on the staff

I wouldn't go that far. I was on Slashdot for a very long time and witnessed many changes of ownership. Sure, there are always a few people that will grumble when anything is changed, but I don't think any of the ownership changes caused that much uproar before Dice came along. Auto-playing video ads of models walking down runways on Slashdot? Adware/malware bundling on SourceForge? Dice made it really clear that they didn't have an ounce of respect for the community. I think the bulk of the community would have tolerated reasonable efforts at monetization, but Dice went way beyond reasonable.

Bill_Dimmon China stocks drop over 8%

Not really (at least for the US -- I don't know about the UK). The unemployment rate is only low because so many people have given up on looking for work. The labor participation rate is at its lowest level since 1977. Here is a nice chart:

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-pa...

Bill_Dimmon China stocks drop over 8%

The China market is pretty limited in reach; not many foreigners and not even many institutional investors

How much money do Chinese investors have invested outside of China? If they bought Chinese shares on margin, they may end up selling assets globally to cover.

Bill_Dimmon Dear Google Mail Team

Which is presumably done so that if you forward the newsletter to someone else they can't (accidentally or maliciously) unsubscribe you by clicking the link.

Bill_Dimmon Ask HN: How do I keep child porn out of my site?

This is a bit complicated: what if you had some sort of capcha that required users to classify images as nsfw/sfw/illegal?

If the user normally encounters photos on the site by requesting them (e.g., by entering a search query or browsing a friend's album) rather than having random photos thrown in their face (like HotOrNot.com), I would think you could run into some very upset users (and possibly legal problems) if you are throwing random photos that might contain disturbing images in their faces. I mean, if you go to a website intending to browse photos your friend took of his boat and the site throws up some random child porn on your screen, you'd be pretty annoyed, right?

Bill_Dimmon SSD Prices in a Free Fall

Backup drives stored in a vault probably don't have access to electricity.

Bill_Dimmon SSD Prices in a Free Fall

https://blog.korelogic.com/blog/2015/03/24

Bill_Dimmon The average American woman now weighs 166 pounds – as much as a 1960s man

While you have a point, weight doesn't go like height cubed (you don't grow equally in all directions). I read an article a while ago (can't find it now) that looked at the exponent for various species. I think it was typically about 2.5 rather than 3. I suppose you could look at a BMI chart and back out the exponent that is assumed.

Bill_Dimmon Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

I remember thinking "I guess they want to get more of the tech community's mindshare to promote their job board" when Dice bought Slashdot. With the way they've alienated the tech community by trashing Slashdot and SourceForge, I wonder how many tech people will use their job board now.

Bill_Dimmon CEO of Mandriva says employee lawsuits put the company out of business

I think changing your name to be a rather obvious trademark infringement is a pretty bad place to start (Lindows)

Uhm, what? Lindows became Linspire. Mandriva was originally Mandrake (renamed after merging with Conectiva). As far as I know, Lindows never had anything to do with Mandriva.

Bill_Dimmon Engineering Statistics Handbook

That is a nice piece of work. If you click on any of the 3D graphs you can grab them and drag to view from different angles. Very cool.

Bill_Dimmon What Two Programmers Have Revealed About Seattle Police Officers

Did you perhaps mean "penalty" rather than "procedure"?

Bill_Dimmon How Old Do I Look?

They should really run this against a bunch of photos from a dating site to measure the difference between the claimed age and guessed age and then compare to the result from whatever training set they used. I'm guessing they would get a bimodal distribution for dating site photos -- some people claiming to be younger than they are, and some people giving their actual age but using very old photos.