skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not an expert, but I believe the Labour Party approached MySociety for advice on a specific project that was related to their expertise. Tom acts an appointed general purpose advisor to the Tory party in a private capacity, which is substantially different.

Consider this case: If a defence company CEO advised a political party on defence spending, and recommended they invest in particular types of projects that happened to be his company's expertise, and his company ended up wining the contracts. Would you be happy with this situation ?

I'm not say Tom/mySociety are bad guys, far from it they are awesome guys and they've done great work. But we can't hold those we like to a lesser standard than those we dislike.
For me I am the exact opposite. You might ask me what a delegate is and I might say, "Uh... I don't remember." Yet it is something that I use every day in my programming, I just don't usually think of it as being a delegate.

I was fascinated when I took my first C++ class and learned that using a pointer was called referencing and dereferencing. I had been using C++ for years on my own and had always thought of it as:

x = &y; //X equals the address of Y.

x = *y; //X equals the value at the address Y.

To me that made more sense than calling it "referencing" and "dereferencing".
The Importance of Professional Personal Injury Assistance
Personal injury is a very broad area and often a layperson can easily be overwhelmed by the legalities involved while making a personal injury claims. Very often the victims of personal injury have to fight with huge brands and corporate institutions. Not everyone will be able to face them and make successful claims. Even if you have a valid claim, they will try to give you the lowest settlement possible or try to make you believe that you do not have any claim at all. Unless you know what you are doing and your State’s local law, it is highly complicated to make successful personal injury claim.
I think this could be a game changer. But sadly, they might infringe on countless number of telecom patents if they introduce more than basic features (call handling,enhanced IVR, enhanced conferencing, and etc).

They have to walk a fine line.
TSA Threatens Blogger Who Posted New Screening Directive
I didn't see any claims of accuracy. It looks like a fun thing to see what people who happen to have tweeted are working with, nothing more.
Games for Windows Live has been available for quite a while now but has been a dismal failure because they charged you a premium for it (as they do on Xbox 360), as opposed to other services like Steam which are all free. This seems like an extension (and hopefully a reboot) of this.

Xbox Live is quite good and if they just included those features across the spectrum of devices and services ( and didn't charge an annual fee), it would be a good move on Microsoft's part. When a game comes out on both Xbox and PS3, unless I hear that one platform has unique features, I almost always purchase the Xbox version so I can hook up with friends to play multiplayer, or simply compare progress using the Achievement system. Tack on an app store (as they do on the XBox) and it could be a good revenue stream for them.
Erik Gates (mythbusters rocket guy) dead at 47
OnLive technology demonstrated at Columbia University
Starting a new business is hard. It takes time and energy. While I applaud the ambition, wouldn't it be a better idea to focus on one or maybe two new projects at a time?

Once they are established and doing well, adding another might not be a problem. Starting a bunch of new businesses all at once seems like a poor strategy.
Actually, my webapps are full of threads. Again, Imperative style is not the wrong way, and FP the right way. They are just different. Why not let people find their own way ? Just give the information they need to make up their mind. And why not be honest and tell them that learning Haskell is probably more painful that learning to deal with the mutable state.
Correct. Girls provide themselves when other women want you, but when you're in a dry spell and they might actually be able to help you, they kick you because you're down.
Can you please elaborate about "psychic defense lessons" ?
I don't think it's paradoxical. There's a reason "smart genes" didn't proliferate throughout the human race, giving us all (the genetic potential for, at the least) 150+ IQs. That reason is that they're a reproductive drag.
The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery.

...yep.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1022695
http://styleguidance.com
All of NASA's blogs
There certainly are. I just think its the most effective method for VCs. Its probably not for seed stage investment - as Y Combinator has shown.
Actually, it is a vetting methodology. You get recommended by someone that has worked with you, or that trusts someone that has worked with you, or who has seen fit to invest in your company. Its a chain of reputation.

As to networking being the do-all, I think you'll find that most startups are a product of networking: its how teams form, its how they get funded, its how they grow. In fact: the network IS the wealth of an ecosystem. I'm not talking idle chit chat over martinis, I'm talking shipping and selling products.

I'm not saying the system is perfect. I'm just saying it isn't irrational, it works the way it does for a reason, and it isn't very hard to participate if you're determined.
316 arguments is clearly an exaggeration, but there's a reason programmers are admonished against global variables. For example many of the classic Unix utilities were built around a pile of global variables, and they could be quite difficult to understand.

Sometimes you see people making fun of programmers who have eliminated the pile of global variables by passing around a pointer to a structure containing all the variables instead. But this actually is an improvement because the type signature of each function now indicates precisely what state can be modified.
Get Glue: The Network That Sticks To You
This is only half of the story.

The other half is that a person with a large number of prior sexual partners is more likely to cheat in a long-term relationship, less likely to be sexually satisifiable by one person, and less able to form the intense bonds of trust and love that a relationship requires.

Thus, the "puritannical" stance on casual sex is as relevant and useful today as it ever was. In fact, it's more useful now than it was 1000 years ago; although STDs are much more curable, raising children is considered to be a 20+ year, shared process, making the intact family desirable.

What's disgusting is the double standard-- the stud/slut dichotomy-- that allows men to behave badly with few consequences. My opinion is that women have the power to end the double standard; if women stop being attracted to promiscuous men, for a man to be slutty will be seen as being as foolish and self-damaging as it is for a woman, and the double standard will disappear.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943304
I totally expected this to be about best practices for code indentation and stuff like that.
The Search for those Perfect Eyeglasses
Engineers are smart enough to see how fucked up everything is; their lack of social skills make it easy for them to justify its violent destruction.
Technically, if you're in space you're among the stars, at least as seen from earth, even if you're actually far away from them, slowly using up all of your oxygen in a ship which will soon become your tomb.
Max, I sorta glossed over the Europe bit. It could be kinda hard to move to S.V. from Europe, as some friends will attest :) I concede that I had a rant in me, and you triggered it.
I understand -- I think we are just here for very different reasons, which is a consequence of coming to a website that now has one zillion readers. My primary interest by far here happens to be serious (preferably very stuffy) programming language and computer science discussion. (I'm interested in many other things, but I have other communities with which I prefer to discuss them; HN seems like kind of an echo chamber personality-wise.) My upvoted submissions are a good list of the things I like to read here: http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=mquander

I also personally have absolutely zero interest in startup and business discussion, which puts me far outside the target audience for very many articles here, although I leave them alone since that's the stated purpose of the site. So I recognize that my tastes may not represent HN any better than yours, if such a thing can be measured.

Is it ethical, then, for me to flag articles which I think are not worthwhile posts? I'm not sure. Your comments make me reflect on whether that's an OK thing to do or not. I do wish there were a downvote button on posts, that means "I don't think this should be highly rated, but I don't think it should be killed either." I would prefer to use that.

One thing, however. Your stated policy is: "If something doesn't fit your areas of interest, feel free to not participate, don't penalize us that do want to participate." That seems like a principled and friendly approach. But I'm not sure it scales. The front page (and the comment threads) only have so much bandwidth. Taking a "tolerant" approach without a big redesign to allow some kind of filtering means that the result will be simple majority rule, leading to a lot of very general interest posts about politics, current events, business, and technology. I know that many posts which would interest me greatly would then be buried on page N; judge for yourself whether this is the case for you.

Now, it would be awfully judgmental to say that's a bad thing for a website; after all, it's providing a whole lot of people with the sort of thing they want to read. But there are so many websites that provide that kind of discussion already that I wonder if a "rarefied" niche site isn't a more valuable place in the greater ecosystem of the Internet.

I voted your comment up because it made me think hard about the consequences of my actions.
Ah, I remember it being posted a while back. Ramen profitable yet or just for fun?
VIM Destroys All Other Rails Editors
WikiLeaks which provides anonymous leaking services for things just like this has recently stopped due to lack of funding (and this document would likely have been leaked there if it hadn't been stopped).

Please consider donating to them (they need both money and technical services/expertise) at http://wikileaks.org/ to help them carry on if you'd like to support the freedom to whistleblow.
I like ear buds, as long as there isn't too much ambient noise (e.g. if you're on an airplane, it's impossible to hear anything with ear buds, and you need over-ear headphones).

Also, you probably mean decibels, not decimals. :)
> This is called the free market and it doesn't require a fancy computer program to work.

That's right. All it requires is an ideal world.
I have had the same experience in a lot (all?) of my math classes. I never really understood integrals and differentiation until I saw them come up in a physics class. Once I saw the practical application of those things, I didn't have much of an issue in actually solving them. That's the primary reason why I hate math courses. I know there are practical applications to everything I'm learning, but I just can't see them.
Sounds like this means you can get successful by failing?
OK by me.
Wholesale Ed Hardy Man Underwear
One common scenario for government action is that some problem isn't being solved well by market-based solutions, so a solution needs to be imposed by force. A communication technology would be of use here to help determine if a coercive solution is necessary and if so, which solution would be best.

For example in the early 2000s, Enron's bankruptcy and other corporate scandals illuminated a problem with corporate accounting. The Sarbanes-Oxley law was passed to fix this problem. Now it seems generally recognized that the law was flawed.

The problem could probably have been addressed better if there had been more deliberate and open discussion.

Hacker News has a Feature Request page (see the footer). I imagine if there were a feature request that had overwhelming upvotes and no significant negative discussion, then pg could feel confident that such a feature would be good to implement.

Something similar could be done with legislation. If there is a particular piece of legislation that has overwhelming "upvotes" over a sustained period of time, and no significant counter-arguments, such legislation could probably be safely passed with the confidence that it has been thoroughly vetted.

Legislation that doesn't have these overwhelming upvotes for a long period of time, or has significant counter-arguments, probably shouldn't be passed.

So it seems to me that collaboration software could be used to select good legislation for passage.
I don't claim to be very experienced in functional programming, but doesn't his whole argument simplify to "State is hard in a pure functional setting" ?

I was under the impression that this was a simple and fairly well understood problem. Either use a functional abstraction for state, a reduce with state or perhaps a monad if the state needs to be carried through many types of operations, or manage it in an impure way, using STM with a global state perhaps.

I don't see how this is any knock against the functional programming paradigm. I always understood the rule of thumb to be "use purity as much as possible, and be impure only when it's explicitly needed." Modifying a global state seems to be a pretty obvious case for using an impure function.

Am I misunderstanding this?
I think there are a number of people in world who consider suing just another version of the lottery. If you know what you're doing and find a lawyer willing to work for little or no money up front it's not that expensive so why not sue a huge company for frivolous reasons. Sure most of the times you'll lose, but if you do win you're set for life. You never know when some crazy judge/jury just might rule in your favour .
not that while back :P, it's only been a month since we launched. Adding some adsense January 1st, will see how that converts
Frasier Seasons 1-11 DVD Boxset
How 12 Hours, 2 Guys, 6 Cups of Coffee = 1 iPhone App
I'm not sure about the 'newline-is-linebreak' idea. I can see how for user-submitted content it's there for people that have never used Markdown before, but I like to wrap my text to 80-characters when I'm composing so that it's not stretched across the screen.

I do this because I don't know of any way in vim to set a 'soft word wrap' so that lines are soft-wrapped at a specific column instead of just at the max width of the buffer. (Creating a fake vertical split is not what I want.)
The self-help book Bill Clinton used
2000-2009: Microsoft's Decade of Shattered Dreams
So like, all of the hard stuff. Implementing a protocol wrapper around Terracotta should be cake. Of course, it does force the end user to learn how to administer Terracotta, which non-trivial in it's own right.
Why is it better than Voxeo?
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who started his new autobiography, My Life, with a reference to the book:

When I was a young man just out of law school and eager to get on with my life, on a whim I briefly put aside my reading preference for fiction and history and bought one of those how-to books: How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, by Alan Lakein. The book’s main point was the necessity of listing short-, medium-, and long-term life goals, then categorizing them in order of their importance, with the A group being the most important, the B group next, and the C the last, then listing under each goal specific activities designed to achieve them. I still have that paperback book, now almost thirty years old. And I’m sure I have that old list somewhere buried in my papers, though I can’t find it. However, I do remember the A list. I wanted to be a good man, have a good marriage and children, have good friends, make a successful political life, and write a great book.
Haha...I feel on the internet, anything that wasn't yesterday or today was a while ago.
OK. Naive Bayes is ridiculously simple.

[EDIT: Oops, it looks like I myself managed to get it backward on the first write! Whaps self in forehead. Rewritten now.]

Let's say your user likes 40 items and hates 60 items. So the prior odds for likes/hates are:

4:6

Then it turns out that, of the 40 items the user liked, 4 of these or 10% are tagged "green", and of the 60 items the user hated, 12 of these or 20% are marked "green". So the likelihood ratio for "green" is:

0.1:0.2 (Given that an item is hated, the user is twice as likely to tag it "green" than if the item is liked.)

Then it turns out that of the 40 items the user liked, 8 or 1/5 are tagged "red", and of the 60 items the user hated, 3 or 1/20 are tagged "red. So the likelihood ratio for "red" is:

4:1 (Given that an item is liked, the user is four times as likely to tag it red.)

Consider a new item tagged "red" and "green". The posterior odds equals the prior odds times the likelihood ratios:

16:12

57% probability of liking it, claims Naive Bayes.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

If multiplying the prior odds by the likelihood ratio doesn't seem justified as a way of getting the answer, see http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes - there ought to be a shorter version of this, but I haven't gotten around to writing it.
You sir, are the man!

That's exactly what I was looking for.

For some reason it just wasn't coming. Thanks!

I'll worry about the hard stuff if/when Naive Bayes has problems.
Wikileaks needs hacker volunteers
An ideal world doesn't have problems. The real world has problems that are messy to solve. "Solutions" often have unintended consequences. The free market, by not relying on coercion, generally does the best job at arriving at a solution that optimally balances the interests involved.

For example, the reason we don't have lines forming in front of filling stations is because the free market regulates gas prices. When government intervenes by mandating a cheaper price shortages occur.
I work from home, and coworking sounds nice, but I have the problem that I never seem comfortable at the same temperature as others. Basically, when I'm comfortable in jeans and a T-shirt, everybody else is sweating and ready to strip down to their underwear. It wouldn't bother me quite as much if I was only cold in the winter, but everybody turns the air conditioning up in the summer and I end up wearing a pullover all year around.

Does anybody else have this (or the opposite) problem? I'd love to have an office with a "hot" zone and a "cold" zone. In fact, vent the machine room waste heat directly into my office and I'll be perfectly happy.
"They alleged that the iPod (1) comes with 'stock ear buds...designed to be placed deep into the ear canal rather than over the ears"

Moral of the story: It's hard to win when your allegation is factually incorrect.
I hadn't realized they were struggling, they've been responsible for some amazing scoops. I thought it was worth calling out this appeal for volunteers as a new item:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023663
Sending people to the moon and the atomic bomb were as much political as scientific. Without politics, I doubt either would have happened when they did.
FWIW, I find these sorts of arguments unconvincing because (a) there is no particular reason to think that solutions involving little or no coercion will be good solutions (b) there is a vicious circularity in the relevant notion of "coercion" (as pointed out by GA Cohen) and (c) there is no general situation-independent notion of an optimal balance of interests that's worth having.

>When government

I love how libertarians use "government" as a mass noun, as if governments were formed out of some kind of homogeneous toxic gloop.
From Moleskine to Market
I do the same thing. Markdown lets you do this already, you just have to have two spaces at the end of each line.

One thing that I feel like Markdown is sorely missing is the ability to link to anchors within the same document. It would be nice if each heading had its own anchor tag.
I must have been seriously tired when I gave you the original answer, but I frantically scrambled back and rewrote it and it should be correct now. It's really scary the way my ability to do elementary math deteriorates after going on a two-hour walk.

Please reply so I know you got this and that you didn't run off to use the wrong original answer.
Dear Giles,

I hope your businesses become very successful and you become too rich and busy to blog.

Sincerely,
A fellow hacker/entrepreneur leading a life of quiet desperation
All my methods take 1 argument: the entire state of the universe and everything in it.
Book Online at discounted rates with chiloe-palena-hotels.travel
I think this is the 3rd time this has been posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1020981

flagged
So in other words, they aren't required to pay back their ill-got money.
Also, you probably mean decibels, not decimals. :)

Thanks for catching my typo. ;)
Or, more to the point: "I program computers to do my bidding. Great fun to do, boring to talk about." Then unapologetically move on to something more there-and-then-worthy, using any cues to --as parent suggests-- give her a chance to talk about herself and (esp.) her interests.
> .eml and .mht are actually the same format.

.mht uses MIME/Base64 to store all of the HTML and external files together, but IIRC it's not exactly the same as an email because the headers are different/missing (i.e. I wouldn't make sense to have a To:/Reply-To:/Cc:/etc header)
Getting to one of my original questions, just to tie up the thread, yes, I will need to track totals of like-tag1, dislike-tag1, like-tag2, dislike-tag3, like-tag4, dislike-tag4

But I will not need to keep track of like-tag1-tag2, like-tag1-tag3, ... like-tag1-tagn. dislike-tag1-tag2, etc.

Because I can pre-compute a couple of totals for each tag and then compute the likelihood off the totals. But if I had to track the cartesian product it would become almost impossible to precompute anything. (I want to prevent having to walk a tree or sift a list each time I make a prediction, as it needs to all happen very quickly)
Let’s see, I liked “GSM: SRSLY?” (Chris Paget, Karsten Nohl), “DECT (part II)” (Erik Tews), “Black Ops Of PKI” (Dan Kaminsky), “cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/fuckups” (Fabian Yamaguchi), “Fuzzing the Phone in your Phone” (Collin Mulliner) and of course also softer stuff like “Conlanging 101” (Sai Emrys) and “The Lost Cosmonauts” (Brian Dunning).
It is decidedly bad practice to transport such a personal disagreement between threads.
It would be nice if they said how much money they need and what their expenses are.

I also wonder if they could work with a recognized non-profit in order to make gifts tax-deductible (e.g. give them money to EFF, then EFF funds wikileaks).
Great stuff. I talked to the CEO of a very large company once (you probably have something made by them on your desk) and he said that essentially they simply see it as a cost of business. There is no way to avoid being sued, there is no way to avoid losing some of the lawsuits, no matter how silly.

It's truly sad.
They're playing the lottery, they don't see it as wasting their time. But they're wasting everybody else's time.
Exactly I think this is the most dangerous aspect of downvoting that really overshadows any other negative implication of removing downvoting.

I mean if you weren't upvoted, I doubt that would discourage you from posting stuff.
It's time for the TSA to go.
The topic of politics has no bearing whatsoever on my statement of incredulity that any sane person could draw such a conclusion as to think science is bullshit. The text could have read "...thinking science is just more made up bullshit like [Santa Claus]" for all I care.
Terrorism is not spam; it can't be crowd sourced
In response to crowd sourcing anti-terrorism