skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would imagine that the argument of GP is roughly: Suppose in a population at a certain time, 2 simple genetics based traits suddenly become available (visible/detectable) during mate selection.

Trait A has the property that whether you have or don't have a particular expresion of it, you seek mates in the same condition.

Trait B has the property that you randomly select mates without regard to their trait B status matching yours.

Trait A would tend to persist or even be amplified throughout generations, while trait B would be dispersed and become less obvious over generations.

Given the obviousness of race during mate selection, and the fact that the human race as a whole has not homogenized in that dimension, I would say that there is some non-trivial natural preference among humans to pick "like" when seeking mates.

(There are of course obvious flaws in the above thinking, the most obvious I can think of being that societal mobility has only in the last few hundred years made it reasonably practical to date outside the local area in which you were born. I do however think that there's a genetic basis for "birds of a feather" in mate selection, and that that doesn't imply the root cause is an undesirable form of racism.)
1. People are forced to use javascript.

2. There are a lot of people who use erlang.
>> Client : “Will this USB drive be compatible with my 4 year old Dell computer?”

I worked years ago, with a company providing IT services. I have learnt after months of dealing with the client, that "Yes" and "No" are the best answers.

If the drive didn't work, you can simply justify it that something went missing on Windows, or the drive didn't install correctly. It's easy for the non-tech savvy users to understand "Yes", "No", "Windows badly installed", rather than to open long discussion where the client comes up to me with all his hardware and start asking if this work and this doesn't.

Telling the client "It should" is not professional; tell them "Yes" and if it doesn't work and you fail to solve the problem, you can simply say that the operating system is badly installed (None can prove it's well installed). However, when you say "it should", the non-tech savvy client will become savvy and will try to use his 3 words knowledge to install the device and will give propositions, ideas... that are generally stupid and useless. This will make him feel that he's as tech-savvy as you.
Is this the week of posting Wikipedia links to HN then?

Interesting, though.
Moreover, if you don't feel like you understand what the other person is asking, don't be afraid of asking a question in return. Ensure that you're clear on what's being asked of you before giving either a rambling answer that covers all the basis, or a focused response to a question that wasn't asked.
While you're harnessing the power of simple and direct communication, it'll help to not present your bad/good examples as fancily formatted "X" and "O", so as to hopelessly confuse your readers into trying to parse what seems to be an exchange between two fictitious persons named "X" and "O", yet makes no sense at all.
This is great advice. One thing that I find that helps a lot is not to be afraid to have a bit of metaconversation. Things like "Are you asking because you're worried about X?", or after you've gotten to the point, asking "Do you want to know more detail?". They can take a lot of the guesswork out of communicating clearly, and don't have to be awkward.
I think what he's asking for (if I understand correctly) is a way for the plugin to check the page I'm currently on, say it's a mixergy blog post or something, and determine if that blog post has already been submitted to HN and if there are any comments about it. That would be sweet, that way I'd know right away without having to google search (site:news.ycombinator.com) for the url, and if there' already a thread I can join in the discussion quickly.
Apathetic Visitors are Death to Early Stage Startups
The first step is admitting you have a problem :)
System 9
MSFT tries to introduce kids to programming, not any programming, but Dot Net programming.

TextWindow.WriteLine("Hello World")

Obj.method(arg) is the Dot Net model.

Write Hello World is easier, but is not the Dot Net model.

Learning the first, you'll be more inclined to continue in the Microsoft track ;)
Apples vs Kettles.

What about this:

You have an agreement with a shop owner, that you can buy stuff from him wholesale at a discount.

You then hang around in the shop (Maybe in disguise) waiting for customers who are about to buy stuff.

Instead of letting them get on and buy stuff, you accost them, and suggest they let you act as a middle man, and you'll buy it wholesale from the shop keeper, and donate the difference to charity, after you take your cut.

Sounds shady doesn't it. And the shopkeeper is being forced to do it until he finds out about the scam.
Could the Mono Lake arsenic prove there is a shadow biosphere?
How legit does the money have to be? An easy way of making money is following on trends and outbuilding products.

You can basically shadow interesting/scalable projects for sale on sites like Flippa. Occasionally, something good will popup, for example, a twitter spamming system that autotweets and adds followers.

Then you simply clone what works, add better features, do better SEO or whatever, and VOILA!
When I look at that a story forms in my mind...

-=-=-=-

[Doug's Bedroom]

Doug, Ikea Product Development: "Ugh... What time is it? Oh, God 4:45am? I have to get ready for work in an hour. Why did I drink so much last night? It's Steve's fault. "What's one more round of shots gonna hurt" he says. OW! OW! OW! I definitely need some aspir--OH SHIT! I'm supposed to present new product ideas at 9am. Come on Doug! Think quick!"

...

[Product Development Meeting, 9:45am]

Generic Middle-Management Boss-Guy: "Hmm... an internets-inspired shelving unit. Sounds good. Let's get our tech guys on it."

Doug [Inner-monologue]: "Heh, heh, heh. You've done it again, Dougy-boy. Sly like a fox--NO! Sly like a Doug!"

-=-=-=-

(I know it's a joke product, but sometimes you can't contain your imagination. And sometimes you just aren't getting enough sleep.)
It depends on the promise library implementation - most will let you specify an "errback" (like a callback, but called if there is an error) and will trigger that if any of their children fail. Alternatively, some may let you specify a timeout and call your errback if that time elapses without all of the children finishing.
Two half-decent reasons come to mind.

One is teacher familiarity. Many people have used a variant of BASIC before, whether in 80s home computers, via Qbasic or VB on PCs in the 90s, or via VBScript in Office. This may make potential teachers less intimidated, more confident, and more willing to teach it to kids.

Secondly, I can imagine that some schools use VB.NET for later courses, and this could provide a simple introduction to move towards using the full-blown VB.NET, and being able to easily transfer what they already know.

That said, I don't really see why it needs to have a pedagogical advantage. My initial feeling was that it was just someone looking to scratch an itch for nostalgia's sake, missing the days when every computer came with a BASIC, and a quick look through the blog pretty much confirms that (http://blogs.msdn.com/smallbasic/archive/2008/10/23/hello-wo...).
Most cars here in Europe are stick shift though. A stick shift car can't go berserk on you, you simply press the clutch pedal, as you do anyway when braking, and the acceleration is gone.
Simultaneous left+right click counts as middle click for me on Ubuntu, I'm not sure if it's like that everywhere. So maybe you don't even need a scroll wheel.
I was a volunteer last summer at place which arranged a number of festivals, and together with a professional sysadmin I helped maintain their booking system, internet cafe, random stuff etc.

The atmosphere was pretty relaxed to start off with, but the sysadmin I worked with suggested that we would take it to the next level: Every morning we would walk around the office and give everyone sitting by a computer a five minute massage. During this time we bonded with them physically, asked them about their day and if there was anything we could help them with. The "results" were amazing. I have never become friends with so many people so quickly, and have never had customers so polite. Like the time when I accidentally erased all emails from the IMAP server, they just smiled and said: Don't worry, they'll just have to mail us again.

I guess my point is that I agree with the OP, but if you have made a strong emotional connection, the words you chose are less important. They will love you anyway.
> If your building isn't supposed to have advertising on it in the first place, why wouldn't the municipality have the right to remove the advertising?

That's a dangerous argument for any political party in the UK to make, given that they run huge campaigns before every election to get supporters to put up posters advertising their party in home windows or on boards outside supporters' private property. Hypocrisy, much?
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229668

First things first, read Pugh's original paper (ftp://ftp.cs.umd.edu/pub/skipLists/skiplists.pdf). That would be the better link, but HN doesn't let you submit links to FTP sites.

Also: A lecture I watched compared skip lists to subway routes with multiple (randomly routed) express lines. That's one of the best metaphors for a data structure I've ever heard.
Microsoft claims to respect intellectual property, but they're blatantly infringing on the Tetris trademark in their game example.

Certainly they'd send a cease and desist if someone made a "Linux Halo" so why do they think it's ok to make a "Small Basic Tetris"?

The company that owns Tetris hasn't exactly been shy about enforcing their rights, either: http://mashable.com/2008/08/26/iphone-tris-app/
Given that to many locals, the entire Olympics is causing vast amounts of disruption, inconvenience, eyesores and so on, I have absolutely no sympathy if the organisers of the Olympics don't like people putting up whatever the hell they want on their own property for the duration of the games. If you don't like it, go hold your Games somewhere where the people do not have such freedoms, and see how much advertising revenue you can bring in there.
So is the idea that I clone it and then sell in on Flippa? Or make money from the built product itself?
The first mention of iPad on twitter
since I really can't avoid school... I was planning on making some software to help me choose classes.
Never give someone a quote
Mastering Tools and Improving Process
The Scary New Rich
What is the mathematical expression of ascending sort?
If it is longer than f.sort(), then I'm not interested :)
Ask HN: If you could choose 1 thing u knew u couldn't fail at, what would it be?
Looking forward to hear some really exciting options.
RubyGems.org February Changelog
The article talks about people who weren't simply artists but were "greats". I think one thing that causes someone like that to be so questioning is that they lack a good basis of comparison -- especially pre-internet era. These days, I think it is easier to connect to those rare few individuals "like" you in some way if you are at odds with most of the folks around you IRL. But, even so, if you are doing something way out front, to whom do you realistically compare yourself and to what do you realistically compare your work?
Well obviously if the product has recurring income, keep it. Or flip and sell it early, depending on the space/risk for long term viability.
This is a Japanese convention (O == correct, X == incorrect). The article is on a Japanese domain, so I assume the original intended audience was people at least somewhat familiar with Japanese culture.
Paying for code doesn’t mean owning it
special training always says, if you can flee do it.
The Myth Of Originality...
HN Rant: Come and Go Voting
So I log into HN and read the wonderful essay about healthcare and end-of-life costs. I was going to comment and vote on some of the comments, but I can't downvote.

Must have ticked somebody off, I guess.

I upvote a few of the better comments and move on.

Then I go and read about the new Chrome HN extensions. Nice job!

Now I can upvote and downvote.

I go back to the healthcare essay. Still no ability to downvote.

Does anybody here besides the coders of HN want to support the idea that the user can have abilities come and go on a whim and this is going to make for a enjoyable user experience? HN keeps getting more and more nuanced about who can do what when, and, quite frankly, all it seems to do is intermittently piss me off. If it's making things better I can't see it. And even if it is, you don't screw around with system behavior without notifying your user of what's going on.

I'm sure somebody will point me to some thread somewhere or another where pg explains that for condition X we're not allowing users to downvote. And also frankly, that's part of the problem. Understanding the system shouldn't require extreme devotion to every little thing said about it over a period of years on every thread related to HN. A system should be simple to use and understand. HN is still simple to use, but beats me if I can understand it any more.

So am I out here all alone in this feeling, or is it bothering other HNer's as well?
"There is no forking or IPC - it's just synchronous events and callbacks. In Erlang you have to think about about IPC on the first connection. The Erlang-model might turn out to be the wrong level of process granularity. Maybe the right level of process granularity is how computers are already designed: 10,000-1,000,000 connections per process, use one per core."

Also false. An Erlang "process" is not an OS process. It already works the way you say, except it can use multiple cores simultaneously. Automatically. Node.js has nothing on Erlang except a familiar syntax. Nor does IPC come up like some kind of blocker; it's baked into the core and quite natural, often all wrapped up behind a simple function call.

And let's not even talk about the baked-in clusterable Mnesia database or the OTP library, which Node.js can only dream about. (Erlang isn't just multicore, it's pretty easy to make it multi-system.) Or how Erlang has code replacement (the Node.js complaint of the day) built right in to the core, where it really has to be for it to work. And Erlang laughs at your "non-blocking purity"; in Erlang, you can call sleep and it won't block anything! No special support needed, no magic from the user, no arranging things in callbacks manually (how 1980s). Try that in Node.js.

It's actually impossible for Node.js to do some of these things because you have to start with them.

You don't understand how Erlang works. That's fine, except you started to criticize it. I refer back to my previous comment that the people hyping Node.js don't seem to have used the competition. Maybe my problem is that I have used the competition, quite extensively. Come to think of it, I've yet to hear anyone say "Gosh, I was using Erlang but Node.js is just so awesome I had to switch!:" That probably says something important.
...It might be awkward to ask someone to have a DNA screening at the point when dating got serious, but it might also be worth your time.
I'd choose being able to present clear and concise ideas and questions.
To achieve a product/market flow state, that is product/market fit, a balance must be struck between customer development and product development. If a startup’s focus is too problem-oriented or to solution-oriented – drifting too far along one of the axis without iterating – flow cannot occur
...Who says he isn't worth $100,000,000 ?
Build a comparison site or two: look for a market where affiliate programs are ubiquitous, structure the data and write a small application that helps customers decide. Get traffic using some basic SEO. Then pocket the commission from sales.

I did this for the personal savings market and "sim-only" mobile telephony subscriptions market in the Netherlands. It brings in a couple of hundred euros a month with only 1-2 hours of maintenance.
Highlight content with jQuery
Sorry to interrupt, but can you give me the link to the healthcare essay? I can't seem to find it.

Thanks in advance (and please don't shoot me -- I tried to find it, really).
You need software for that?
"What's so special about Javascript's closure support vs Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Lua, C#, Lisp, Erlang, or ${all other functional languages}?"

Javascript has java-like syntax. Heck, it even bears half the name even if the language has almost nothing to do with Java. Did you know that the first version of Javascript was actually a scheme variant but they decided to conceal its identity so it would appeal to the masses?

It's stupid that a familiar syntax is one of the foremost considerations in the mass adoption of a language, but that's reality for you.

(PS: I'm a Common Lisp fanatic so I'm acutely aware of this syntax problem.)
It does the exact same thing as the bookmarklet, as far as I can tell.
Welcome to the interwebs. Leave your grammar and vocabulary at the door.
downvoting is disabled for users comments after a while so people cant go and downvote all of a users old comments, as comment threads get deeper it takes longer for replies to be enabled to disuade arguments.

Since hacker news has managed to keep a relatively similiar experience despite a large increase in users, its pretty clear(subjectively) that some of these measures are working.

You should probably worry about it less.
Seems like it was on page 3 or 4.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1168065

or the direct link:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=avRF...
> I don't see the advice in this article. Surely, for any project, you either finish it, or you don't. There is no other choice.

Outsource? Delegation? Give away to community?
Alternately: Spend some time wondering what you are "missing" and try to find a means to get that. For me, my health issues are a major obstacle. So getting well is my first priority. I have some secondary issues I am also working on, but I am clear that nothing will work as long as that personal issue remains a show-stopper.
Leah Culver - Three weeks of iPhone development
That is something I never understood about the AppStore: there's no way to set up a decent sales funnel. Once you redirect the user to iTunes you lose all tracking capabilities. If they can't provide basics like that, I think PPC ads are a long way off.
Mathematically you could express the concept of a (partially ordered) set by something like <S,P(x1,x2)> (where P is some comparison function), so, for example, the sorted natural numbers would be <N,<>.
I have no idea, though, if that's even remotely close to what you're asking.
Came here to post that very question. US currency can stand a great number of washings, even with bleach, before becoming unusable.
people who have to work pretty hard for everything they have tend to be conservative in the literal sense of the term. middle class in china have a 50% of income savings rate or so I've heard.
What is "flicking bills"? Never heard the expression (nor presumably, usage), before.
Programming has low ROI(Return Of Investment) very often. Try to improve your ROI, i.e. code small, reusable parts, then assemble big projects from these small parts.

For example:

* you can write code generator instead of code;
* you can write (small) library first, then use it in your programs;
* you can prepare templates and wizard program, which automates creation of typical code;
* (for Linux) you can prepare package, which is easy to install.

General rule: try to save your future time, even when you need to sacrifice some today time for that.

Just for example, every command line program needs option parsing. Write template for typical option parsing routine, keep it in separate directory, improve it over time, write generator, which will just substitute program name. Even if your project will fail, you will still have this small piece done, and it will save some of your time at every new project.

(Sorry for my English).
I never understood the desire to get rid of pennies; there's ALWAYS going to be a smallest sub-denomination to which every price is rounded, no?

Now, from a practical point of view, it could be argued that there should be a limit of the NUMBER of types of coins that a currency has, and perhaps the penny is 'n+1' and should be removed due to that?
Here's the thing: Publicly racist white-supremacists are almost always poor, ignorant, and ugly.* Any video you see of the KKK will have some yokel standing in front of a trailer (hilarious amount of garbage strewn across the yard included), overdue for a shave and a shower, proclaiming the greatness of a race he barely belongs to.

I know more than a few racist doctors, lawyers, and architects, but they wouldn't go within miles of a racist organization. Those people just aren't of the same class. It's also an enormous waste of time.

So is your issue the fact that they're racist, or the fact that they're underclass racists? There is a distinction to be made.

Does exclusively dating white people make you racist if you are in no other way racist? I know a girl from New Zealand who is greatly offended by racist remarks and attitudes, but who would never actually date someone outside her race. I suppose that no more makes you racist than not dating men makes you a homophobe (if you're a man, obviously).

*Go read stormfront sometime, it'll disturb you, regardless of how racist you may or may not be, and you'll discover the underclass that I speak of. Erudition & social refinement do not exist there.
The emerging bourgeoisie is a patchwork of contradictions: clamorous but rarely confrontational politically, supporters of globalization yet highly nationalistic, proud of their nations' upward mobility yet insecure and fearful they will fall back, fiercely individualistic but reliant on government subsidies, and often socially conservative.

This is pretty much verbatim what folks said about the rise of the United States. And, for that matter, the British before us. And, for that matter, Japan.

(Though foreign observers haven't frequently described Japanese as fiercely individualistic since, oh, the 1920s or so. Fun fact about changing perceptions of culture: Japanese people also used to be well-known as poorly educated slackers.)
Though it is tangential at best to this discussion, let me say that I find it absolutely hilarious that in this thread and the one above it, I have written provably true statements and have been down-modded, whereas the people who I have been responding to have written provably false statements (outright contradictions!) and have been up-modded.

If the point-system rewards shallow group-think, and punishes truth - 'What is the point of it?', I must ask.

Heck, this has now become my new standard for judging content quality - let me see how many provably true, on-topic things one says in a thread, so that their score drops below unity.
Wait, what? What 10c and $1 pieces are similar in size in the US? Or did I misread?
Thanks for this! The last thing you point out is a really good catch.
> also good for things that go up your nose.

Although I don't partake (and never have), from what I've seen in popular culture the paper/cotton version of bills works nicely too.
Lame in what sense; visually?