randomknowledge

Here is an old video about the Dutch system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlApbxLz6pA. Looks pretty similar to me.

Personally I would recommend mathematical analysis by Pugh. Goes into as much depth as Rudin, but more approachable and a great selection of exercises.

Reading the article, and then seeing responses posted here, I am starting to think hacker news isn't the place for these kind of discussions. Any time any kind of contentions topic is posted a small number of people, similar to those described in the article, come out of the wood work and feel the need to share their uninformed opinions.

On an unmoderated forum like this one, perhaps it is better to keep the discussions restricted to subject like programming languages and operations systems, and avoid inadvertently providing a microphone for those with an axe to grind.

For background see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact. Basically growth of southern cities has meant demand for water from the Colorado river has gone up while rainfall in the region has decreased. There is still a surplus right now, but that won't continue indefinitely.

The most charitable interpretation of the claim I could think of was that the author meant the few exceptions illustrate why the other companies are moving away from ruby.

Not sure what niche the all wheel drive fills. Most people I know with that kind of vehicle justify it as something they take up to the mountains every winter. While I'm sure it would handle great on icy roads, I could see the range being a problem, especially as this probably is less energy efficient with the higher profile. The other thing vans and the like are good for is packing heavy on road trips; same problem.

Remember that everyone above median income is going to end up paying what they receive right back to the government in taxes. Only half the adult population will actually see this money as a check and not just a tax break.

Here are the 10 rules from his slides, though he goes into a lot more detail in the video (he starts going into the rules at around 14:00):

1. Get good at something Really good. Get good ts as many things as you can. Being good at one thing makes it easier to get good at other things.

2. Getting good at stuff takes practice. Lots and lots of practice.

3. Get OBSESSED Everyone at the top of their field is obsessed with what they're doing.

4. Doing something well and thoroughly is it's OWN reward.

5. Show and Tell If you do something well and you're happy with it, for FSM's sake, tell EVERYONE

6. IF YOU WANT SOMETHING, ASK. If something piques your interest, tell someone, if you want to learn something, ask someone, like your BOSS. As an employer I can tell you, people who want to learn new skills are people I want to keep employed.

7. Have GOALS Make up goals. Set goals. Regularly assess where you are and where you want to be in terms of them. This is a kind of prayer that works, and works well. Allow for the fact that things will NEVER turn out like you think they will, and you must be prepared to end up miles from where you intended.

8. BE NICE TO EVERYONE. Life is way to short to be an asshole. If you are an asshole, apologize.

9. Fail You will fail. It's one of our jobs in life. Keep failing. When you fail, admit it. When you don't, don't get cocky, 'Cause you're just about to fail again.

10. WORK YOUR ASS OFF Work like your life depends on it.

"Individual programmers can contribute by writing a compatible duplicate of some Unix utility and giving it to me. For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-written parts would not work together. But for the particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent. Most interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility. If each contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work with the rest of GNU."

This stood out to me. Back in 1983 online collaboration was unheard of, and it was only the incredibly modular nature of Unix which made the project seem at all plausible.

I would consider that a success. The free software ecosystem has grown much larger then any one project or organization.

I have never seen a psychiatrist refer a patient to see a psychologist or a cognitive behavioral therapist, and they have no incentive to really.

Plenty do, and there are questions about the efficacy of those techniques as well.

The tube is steel, shouldn't be a problem. The electronics are only a small fraction of the cost. It is mostly just the cost of the tube, pylons, and land.

During the bush years "conservatives" [republicans] tended to be more in favour of government surveillance, while "liberals"[democrats] tended to be more opposed. Now that Obama is in power conservatives are more opposed while liberals are less opposed. The switch would suggest that at least some of these individuals (on both sides) are motivated by politics and not principle.

from the article: "The government repeatedly made accusations of terrorism against Anwar — who was also an American citizen — but never charged him with a crime. No court ever reviewed the government’s claims nor was any evidence of criminal wrongdoing ever presented to a court. "

Of course there are details to work out but it is fundamentally a solvable problem. A tax on any coal natural gas or oil should cover most of the bases (per ton of carbon contained). If it is being purchased for a use that won't end up in the atmosphere (IE carbon capture and storage), the burden is on the purchaser to prove the case for a tax write-off.

I guess the take away is that you should keep your essentials on your person while flying. Those items list are all small enough to fit in pockets or unobtrusive bag. Having them ready sure make things go a lot smoother in an emergency situation.

I suppose the emergency info should mention that anything you absolutely can't leave needs to be kept on your person.

Of course most people will thing "aw it will never happen", but if they hear the same message every time they take off people will probably get in the habit of not leaving their wallets in their luggage.

Not to mention if the trains are faster you will need fewer trains to transport the same number of people in the same time interval.

I the united states, studies have indicated that food stamps produce an economic return of $1.85 for every dollar spent. I would imagine additional cash spending could have a similar effect.

The headline was "Men's Biceps Predict Their Political Ideologies" you can't rule out political idealogical in a study about political Ideology. There is a spectrum of belief within political parties which explains why the association remained.

Lets see, amongst the poor, blue collar workers (doing manual labour) tend to be more conservative. Amongst the wealthy, feelings of entitlement are correlated with time to go to the gym. Evolutionary psychologist: if you keep publishing nonsense like no one will take your field seriously.

The rebuttals seem pretty weak. The only substantive criticisms made were already addressed or changed. Most of the "point made" basically amount to name calling.

I agree he could have presented his data better. I also recognize that there is some correlation. None the less, the story was about how averaging can be used to make a correlation appear strong than it is, and going from 0.3 to 0.99 certainly meets that criteria. I was responding to the claim that the data might already have a strong correlation (presumably on the order of 0.99), and I was arguing that no "natural" strongly correlated data would have a scatter plot like that.

I might add that discussions like these, Illustrate a broader problem with the hacker news community. Rather than discussing the facts of the story, many of the posts are instead about the less relevant detail about how the author chose to present them, despite the fact the the authors point is still effectively made (and if the 0.3 were included there wouldn't have been any doubt)

BTW: tmoertel did some analysis on the data: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125851 and the correlation appears to be around 0.2, which is pretty weak.

Okay hows this: unless the author of the original blog post is deliberately deceiving the audience but putting a bunch of points on top of each other then one can tell there is no line which most of the points lie near.

I agree that a scatter plot is not the best for showing data with that many data points, but frankly it's kind of irrelevant. The point the author was making was just that it isn't that hard to cook up some data that is not highly correlated, but will be if you bin and average it.

Correlation means how well the points fit on the line. It is unfortunate that the author did not include a regression line or R^2 value but none the less one can tell there is no line which most of the points lie near. That data is absolutely not strongly correlated.

You seem to be confusing correlation and significance. Having lots of data points makes the correlation more significant, it does not make the correlation stronger.

Hardly. The Lousiana law also made allowance for "supplemental material" on climate change, and Kopplin himself mentioned that "We don't just deny evolution... We are denying climate change and vaccines and other mainstream science...". Evolution denial is in the title but climate change denial is not because evolution is the main issue Kopplin has focused his activism on.

That isn't actually true. Cleats or no, the power comes from the down stroke not the up stroke: see http://roadcyclinguk.com/riding/bike-fitting-the-myth-of-the... . While there are good reasons to use cleats (mostly so your feet won't come off the pedals), I haven't seen any evidence of significant efficiency gains. Furthermore there are plenty of ordinary shoes with sufficiently stiff soles to cycle in.