skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A) I'm not asking for advice, just sharing something I found humorous in the context of the remark made.

B) If you will notice, I said nothing about dating. I don't date. I don't plan on having that change.

C) Given that initial testing failed to turn up my mutations, that my diagnosis (of a mild variant of the condition) is new-ish and was quite cutting edge when I got it, that they keep finding more mutations for this condition, and that I have spoken to a number of people who had to be retested after more mutations were identified to finally get theirs properly cataloged, I am of the opinion that DNA testing can confirm someone is a risk but cannot prove with 100% certainty that someone is "safe". Therefore, a bias towards men who are not of predominantly white European genealogy may be the only real insurance that can be had.

D) The answer "I've had a vasectomy" works just fine for me. I am 44 years old and have serious health issues. So I have no specific plans to have more children. But my first child was not planned either and I am not past menopause. Sh*t happens. That's the piece that concerns me.

But thanks for talking to me. That's almost always a Good Thing. :-D
Ask HN: Accounting software for startups?
Hi, I was wondering whether straight up Excel / Numbers is the preferred option for startups or whether there are more sophisticated options for basic cash flow / income statements / invoice management etc?

Any suggestions or useful software that has worked before?
Last night I watched most of Ryan Dahl's 1 hour video on Node, built it, and played with a few examples. I must admit that I like it much more than I thought that I would. The video is good (but too long) for understanding the motivation of event oriented processing, but if you are short on time, just spending a few minutes building Node and running some examples is informative.
There are two ways a for loop like that implemented:

The first way, which I prefer, is to make the binding of i to its value inside the loop body, this way you get a nice fresh binding on each loop iteration, so if you iterate the loop 5 time you get 5 bindings.

The other way, which I loathe but is still an arguably "correct" way to do it, is to make one binding of i outside of the loop and then modify it on each loop iteration, so no matter how many iterations of the loop you have, there's only one binding.

As far as I'm concerned, the first implementation is obviously the better one because the instances where this benefits you come often while the instances where the second implementation benefits you is very rare and unidiomatic. I think the second implementation is used for better performance but that's a mistake.

I had this problem of perceptions when I switched from Common Lisp's Loop to Iterate. Loop, for all its many big shortcomings, had the decency of making a fresh binding on each new iteration, though IIRC the standard specifies that bindings can be established outside or inside the loop context. When I want to make a closure based on the value of an iterated variable with Iterate I have to do an explicit binding...
Yeah, I figured it out from context, but before I did, I was like O_x.
One of my friends, who is black, says he avoids black women due to the way they act. Perhaps this has something to do with it?
There is a very nice implementation of a concurrent skiplist map in Java collections: http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/C...
Come and work for me - I'll give you $600 a month if you work 5 days a week. If interested -> max@cubeofm.com.
> We know deep inside that HTML5+JS+CSS is where the future is going.

When I compare the state of the tool suites for HTML5+JS+CSS to XCode, I can't help but think of Visual Basic 4. In my opinion, Visual Basic 4 was the first tool that made it easier to build and test GUI-driven database apps. In a similar manner, XCode is the first tool that makes it easier to build mobile apps. It doesn't hurt that Cocoa is such a well-designed framework. From the recent articles about Android development experiences I've read (UI building in Android being an unholy mess of GridBagLayout and XML), it appears Apple still has the best-in-class tools for mobile development. Yes, it is a closed market, the AppStore. However, unless you have a top-200 app, it's likely your customers will find your app by searching for it, not browsing. This is highlighted by the recent change that makes keywords mandatory for app submission.

Until HTML5+JS+CSS is easier to develop, I believe mobile development is going to favor the iPhone SDK because it makes it easier to get something together.
Security in the computing cloud a top concern
Nginx WebServer Best Security Practices
This is the user. This is the user telling you the application pisses them off at random intervals and for unknown reasons.

Worry is not part of this conversation.
I would rather be paid by the task and not by the amount of time worked.

This seems to be beneficial for both parties:

a) Payer sets value for the service he wants and has that service delivered by a specified time (or I don't get paid)

b) I deliver as quickly as I am able to, thus achieving my desired goal of minimizing time spent earning the money
The bookmarklet only allows you to submit pages.

This extension displays the top 15 HN stories, gives links to them, and also gives a link to each of their comment pages.
First, a Web service that "meets an unmet need." Back in 2005 I built a "code snippets" site using the then-nascent Rails in just over 24 hours. I then spent a second day making the design more "Web 2.0" a few months later, but otherwise did little except mention it here and there and add my own code into it. It made ~$800 a month from Adsense for a couple of years and then I sold it to DZone for $30,000. Perhaps the lowest time vs money work I ever did.

Second, sell a killer screencast or e-book. You'd need to actually be good at making one of these, of course, and have a very good presentation. If you have domain specific knowledge, though, you may have something valuable.
Not necessarily, you can make a really high-level DSL to express validation rules, that encompasses both client-side and server-side logic, and then you generate the client-side-only validations from this model while not including the server-side, "secret" validation code.
Empathy with a security guard working for a big corporation, harassing people?

What good is that going to do?

Making his life a living hell on the other hand, will cause the next idiot to think twice before he joins them.
here's how I made $300 last month (working 4 hours a week)

- Write articles (around $150).

- Make something (script, firefox addon) for a client (around $100)

- Google Adsense (around $50)
"I feel like I have information that MUST be valuable"

I dunna about that, information is pretty FREE these days
I think this is a truism. People want you to get to the point as soon as possible. The problem is in knowing what the point is. Some people just want the big picture. Others want all the minute details.

I think a more common problem is that when I do get to the point, it's not the point the other person was looking for. So I instead end up with a "why don't you understand what I'm talking about?" feeling. Of course, nowadays, I'm smart enough to know that this usually goes both ways.
How do you make money by writing articles, and what kind of articles? Are you talking tutorials on some tutorial site that buys them or are you writing journalistic reports for blogs/news industry?

Or something else entirely?
* A shitton of people are already using it on the daily

This is actually a problem. Majority of that shitton use js without knowing what they are doing. It's a copy-pasted code for some client-side validation. Even the so-called framework-users (jQuery and Prototype) depend blindly on plugins for their job.
Heh, surprised that pointing out a dumb comment is gathering such a firestorm. Nothing against yummyfajitas but yes, this was a dumb comment: linking to some data doesn't change that one way or another.

The great thing about hacker news is that people aren't worried about voicing ideas backed up with data - even if in wider society you'd probably get denounced for it.

True. The problem is that if you're going to make an inflammatory argument, people are going to expect it to be well thought out. This particular one wasn't. Backing up one of your premises with data doesn't make the conclusions any more valid.

To me, the comment was so obviously flawed and inflammatory at the same time that it looked like nothing more than a troll, implying that OKCupid is censoring the real reason for the apparent bias against black women on the site: they're just fat. Think about the argument for a second: it claimed that a pairwise comparison between black women and white women could explain black women's poor response rate as compared to all races. That doesn't make any sense.

If OKCupid had NOT filtered for that data would you consider the comment equally valueless?

Clearly not equally valueless, but still pretty dumb, given the reason above, and equally inflammatory.

This is a triumph of the scientific process IMO :)

I agree.
But people will pay copious amounts of money to not have to read that information themselves, in other words; teaching and coaching that information can certainly be valuable.
No downvote arrows appear for me either, so it's not just you. They appear on other items, so it's not just me. The item is only a day old, so it's not the "stale-out" feature. It appears to be just that item.

As with other measures PG takes to try to prevent abuse of the system, and occasional abuse by people of people on the system, it may be that there is a mechanism by which he can disable downvoting on a given item.

In this instance it wouldn't surprise me. Completely guessing here, but healthcare is one of the topics that can provoke intense reactions, and people can get very heated, and downvoting can pile on, even when it's not really justified. Replies and comments can get unpleasant, so disabling downvoting may be a defence.

I'm not defending the way the system works, and I occasionally wish it were more open, but this site is still working reasonably well despite its popularity. I think that is mostly because of the occasional draconian and obscure measure.

I've given up worrying about wrinkles like this. They still annoy me on occasion, but I shrug and move on. The site continues to decline, but less quickly than others I've been on. I accept that I won't know everything about the way the site works, and part of the reason for that enables it to continue to do so.
For that type of stuff, I use rentacoder, because the tasks are usually different and require different skills. So rather than using one person for the same task, can always get the best person. Also, the problem with working with people trying to optimize time is that they don't want to add the polish. If the project is technically done, they don't see the point in spending time polishing it, since they want to get paid immediately.

For someone who works fulltime, however, one can invest time showing how to do some things that require a long ramp-up period.

If you really want to make money fast, then rentacoder is a good choice, though it does not scale.

If you have a couple of month ramp up time, then you can look at making simple shareware - but this is not a good idea for something to do in panic mode.
the willingness to upgrade your browser is going to be significantly faster as time goes on.

You may be right. And then again maybe not. It's going to be fun to find out!

I would note that IE6 persisted until now not because anyone wanted it to -- Microsoft hates IE6 more than anyone, since every IE6 user is both a support timesink and a potential paid upgrade that hasn't happened yet -- but because it sits in a niche. There are people who bought old machines that haven't worn out yet. And there are businesses that built a bunch of stuff on IE6 and see no reason to upgrade.

And the nature of the universe is: Things diverge over time. (Yet another side effect of the second law of thermodynamics.) The number of niches and their diversity is growing now, and they will continue to grow. In ten years there will still be people, somewhere, running IE6. There will also be people running all sorts of other things: Old iPod Touches running obsolete versions of Mobile Safari, eleven-year-old car navigation systems, smart phones and book readers of every description, obsolete gaming hardware (have you noticed that you can still buy a brand-new Playstation 2, ten years after it launched? Have you considered the implication: There will certainly be many PS3 units in use ten years from today?)

The good news is that, thanks to ubiquitous Internet, companies are increasingly able to force customers to use the latest-and-greatest browser technology by pushing upgrades out over the net from on high. But is (e.g.) Sony really going to officially support the PS3 forever? What about the manufacturers who go bankrupt? And, if the market ends up demanding that manufacturers support multiple decades worth of their legacy hardware, is that really going to tend to encourage innovation in web standards, or is it just going to make such innovation that much more costly to implement, encouraging the tendency to embrace the status quo because it is "good enough"? We'll see.
I think you're reading the shootout wrong. V8 is faster in most cases than Lua in those benchmarks. Often by a fairly large margin. The gap between V8 and Ruby and Python is even larger.
A Job Ad that is Ideal for a Budding Startup
Only some types of information.
"I dunna about that, information is pretty FREE these days"

Yet, it's pretty expensive. The most used resources of information are schools/uni and they are the most expensive.

Books, videos, tutorials, Seminars... are also paying. There are free valuable information, but it's rare.
I was thinking the same thing. That quote describes our society pretty well.
In my experience, I find I can do more with less in the Clojure REPL. Groovy is really way too close to Java to even be notable. If you're just doing Java, then maybe it's fine as a Java REPL. Groovy advertises itself as being a dynamic language for Java devs who don't want to learn anything.
I fully agree, but I also think Apple is moving in that direction with Dashcode, although it doesn't really provide the full functionality of Xcode+Interface builder.

I think, the time when HTML5+JS+CSS will become everyday for small apps is the day when there are some robust UI frameworks. We are moving in that direction with the different frameworks, e.g. Cappucino [http://cappuccino.org/].

In the meantime you can take a look at Qt Quick [http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2010/02/15/meet-qt-quick/]. It uses a declarative language, called QML, for defining UI and the app logic can be either JS or hooked into Qt objects written in C++. I've only played with it a couple of days, and already I am sold on the possibilities for rich animated fast UIs.
Can you be more explicit about what you're asking? I'm sure it makes sense to you, but I don't know what you're trying to say, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

For reference, I have a PhD in pure math, and I've done research in sorting algorithms and their performance, so I might be able to answer your question, if only I knew what it was ...
He's not "the Mixergy guy", he's the one the Mixergy guy, Andrew Warner, was interviewing that day.

And Andrew mentioned that in passing. I think right at the beginning.
Brief nitpicking: "persistent" and "purely functional" are not really the same thing.

On the "purely functional" end, any stochastic algorithm is by definition not pure in the "referentially transparent" sense, so that's right out, and building a PRNG into the data structure is probably suboptimal.

As far as persistence/immutability go, the skip list doesn't seem well suited to that, either--any time you change an element, you'd have to replace all the elements with pointers to it, and elements with pointers to those, and so on recursively. There are standard solutions to this, but all would entail nontrivial changes to the structure.

In the end, it would be easy to make something not obviously broken that looked like a skip list, but I don't know whether it would have the same performance characteristics, or even worthwhile performance at all.

Given that skip lists are, in essence, a way of retrofitting some of the benefits of a tree structure onto a linked list, I suspect it would be more worthwhile to find an existing immutable, functional tree structure and retrofit some of the benefits of a linked list onto it.
The Cold War definitions of First, Second, and Third "worlds" are obsolete. Updated for 2010:

First World: politically liberal, transparent government, rich countries with universal healthcare and mandated vacation floors. Moderate to high economic growth. Poverty is virtually nonexistent; it's not tolerant. The major flaw of these countries comes from their strength-- although completely nonmilitant, they can be a bit insular and closed to outsiders.

Second World: politically conservative, high degree of corruption, overt elitism and stark class (and often race) discrepancies. Low degree of political freedom. Lots of poverty and economically-motivated crime. Usually, high economic growth. These are countries that are sacrificing freedom and quality of life in order to increase or maintain relative status.

Third World: persistently underdeveloped and poor countries-- often too corrupt and wartorn even to get off the ground-- that, absent substantial change, have grim economic futures.

This article is about the Second World mentality. First World includes most of the EU countries and Canada. Second World includes the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries as well as the Arab oil states, most of Latin America, Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai, and (to a large degree) the United States post-Reagan.

In fact, I'd argue that the main political tension in the US is between a First World (Blue States) and Second World (Red States) subnation that are emerging, and diverging, within one country. The post-2001 militancy is our Second World component expressing a willingness to sacrifice prosperity, lives, and political freedom for national dominance.
Thank You For Not Expressing Yourself
1. Do highly-paid consulting work for 1-2 months.

2. Move to your cheap country and take the rest of the year off.

I hear Richard Stallman can actually pull this off in a not-so-cheap country, too.
Do you have an accountant? More than likely, they would point you towards QuickBooks, as it's pretty much the standard.

And if you don't have an accountant, you should probably start talking to one.
I was thinking along similar lines -- that somehow, somebody, somewhere had flagged the article because of the subject matter.

I'm a hacker. I like knowing how things work. If I have a little up and down arrow, I want to click it and watch the little number get bigger or smaller. It's not too much to ask, is it?

It's already impossible to determine how the system sorts -- but I think that bit of obscurity works for everybody. Having buttons appear or disappear randomly sounds like a way to annoy people.

There's also the issue of the buttons not actually changing the score -- another pain for some users.
I don't buy it. France's middle class already think and behave very differently from America's. The fact is though that in any society, people don't like corruption or being told what to think and the ones with a bit of money will vote with their wallets. That might not look the same as western democracy but I'm confident it will trend towards the rule of law and individual freedoms.
If I said "I want the Wordpress theme from http://www.christmasbingocards.com done similarly except for St. Patrick's Day" and you were able to accomplish that without needing too much handholding, I'd be able to give you one project a month for $400 until you either got sick of doing them or decided to move upmarket. If this interests you, email me a link to your portfolio.
Where's Japan in your categorization?
I know, I can read :)

I just wanted to suggest that there are ways for IE to “succeed” that have nothing to do with convincing the Hacker News demographic of its superiority.
Red Bull, Verizon Tweets Run Afoul of Olympics Rules - Digits - WSJ
I'm looking for a part-time front-end UI/design person with RoR skills to help out our bootstrapped nights/weekends genealogy startup. I could meet your income needs (paying by the task) and still leave you time for the other suggestions you've gotten here. My e-mail's dean (at) genlighten.com.
What are my responsibilities as a domain holder?
That's the key, thanks. If you don't understand the original question well enough to give a succinct answer, ask clarifying questions until you can.
if you stopped worrying about exactly how and why these features get enabled / disabled and accept that pg will and can experiment with features and isnt particularly worried about documenting them, then you will no longer be pissed off.

the way hn is developed is very open, and I dont imagine becoming the most easily understandable news site on the web is a particular goal for this place, so speaking in truisms like "dont modify users behaviour" doesnt mean much.
Oh please! Name me a first world country (by your standards) with three hundred million or more people. The sheer size of countries like: China, India, U.S., and Russia, makes them totally different than Finland or The Netherlands.
I was looking at Redis yesterday and noticed this. Is there any particular reason you chose skip list instead of btrees except for simplicity? Skip lists consume more memory in pointers and are generally slower than btrees because of poor memory locality so traversing them means lots of cache misses.

I also suggested a way to improve throughput when you guarantee each command's durability (at the end of the wiki page): http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/AppendOnlyFileHowto

Also, have you thought about accommodating read-only traffic in an additional thread as a way to utilize at least two cores efficiently while sharing the same memory?
http://www.jokesunlimited.com/jokes/if_microsoft_made_cars.h...
Simple Messaging System Using Rails and Cassandra DB
Universities sell credentials, not information.

To prove this, go to your local university and ask how much it costs to take a class by examination (no classtime, simply take the final exam).
Well, they also sell the class itself... go to your local university and ask how much it costs to sit in on a class for no credit. It's not going to be free, if there is even such an option.
I'd like to hear more about your experience at Yahoo with him and how that led to you thinking he is a tool, rather than some shirtless pictures.
Once again, you're taking this conversation somewhere that I'm not going.

Nobody is saying pg can't experiment. Nobody is saying that the site isn't great, open, wonderful, etc.

Just pointing out that inconsistencies in experience -- even to people who like the app and enjoy the benefits -- piss off the users.

You can care about that or not. Fair game. You can "worry" about how the system works or not. Still ticks people off, and people are still going to point it out.

Telling the user that their feedback isn't as important as the overall purpose of the site may also be true, but that's also not the point.
Write exploit code for vulnerabilities :)

Look at http://oss-security.openwall.org for some -- You could probably make around $500 to $5000 depending on your exploit / vulnerability.

Just thought you'd check that out if interested.
If you want to "come and go at a whim", you are not a part of the HN community.......simply a surfer. In that case, why does upvote/downvote/karma matter? I believe HN functionality currently disables the "hit and run" attitude.
the ones with a bit of money will vote with their wallets

The problem with this (regarding China in particular) is that the "ones with a bit money" and the "people" sometimes intersect at very few points.