skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heh. You didn't "fall into the 'loyal customer' category", you were firmly pushed into it by that Commerce branch employee, who obviously had enough authority to Do The Right Thing. The latter alone is a very good sign.
I often get too wrapped up in the idea of A/B testing as a digital concept. After reading I'm starting to think of all the "everyday" items that can be optimized with a little testing.

That said, I am now researching a way to add hand sanitizer to my website.
If they really wanted to do that, they'd have done it by now - the cops have the power to move them on or bring them in (though not in all jurisdictions). From second hand experience (talking to these guys) there are areas of LA where the homeless are constantly chased away from and not allowed to settle.
Idea:  Chat Roulette for user testing of web sites.
Web frameworks/libraries/apps that make correct HTML encoding possible without much fuss are a pleasant surprise on those rare occasions when I encounter them. Web frameworks/libraries/apps that actually do it right knock me over. I don't know of very many examples that even come close.

(This isn't my only metric, but it's a good start: Set a variable to ampersand, then do the basic string output that your template library or whatever has, feeding it that variable. If you get &amp; automatically and have to ask extra hard for a bare ampersand, you've officially gotten me up to "Hey, wow!" That's just one metric I use of many, but making the safe thing easy and the dangerous thing harder is a good start! This knocks out almost every web framework/library/web templating system I've tried.)
Freakonomics.
Corporate doublespeak is a revolution in communication. It means that anyone with even a weak command of the language can make it in corporate America.

I think it is inspiring.
I work as a sysadmin at one of the orgs that does the outreach (Common Ground). So we follow the supportive housing model as opposed to housing people in shelters since the shelter system often prolongs the homelessness. Common Ground's goal is to end homelessness by permanently housing the homeless in a clean, healthy and supportive environment. So in addition to housing, Common Ground partners with others to provide health, job, psychological and rehab services. The supportive housing model has been very successful.

One of our strategies is outreach, the kind described in this article. The reason we do aggressive outreach is because many of the homeless have been burnt by their past shelter experience so they are resistant to any offers of housing. Obviously, we cant force them to accept housing. But we go to the homeless, day in and day out, and offer them help and its done in the most benign way.

We do target other areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn. There are teams dedicated to each neighborhood and one by one, we hope to house the homeless.

If you are curious, you can learn more at http://www.commonground.org
There must be better pro-atheism books out there.

Perhaps the newer

The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591027519/
As far as I'm aware, MetaFilter users are pretty much ok with this way of supporting the site (they were actually asked before implementing this [1]).

In fact, it was frowned upon posting affiliate links with users' codes.

[1] http://metatalk.metafilter.com/11174/Im-proposing-a-small-ch...
You will love this video about a businessman helping a homeless man by changing his sign. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNLmrv7-6OY

On another note: Hilarious idea to try and A/B test on a sign of a homeless man ;-).
I had the same feeling. I think it's because, as a reader, I am unconvinced that the guy is deserving of more money. He might be, or he might be one of the many homeless that have basically chosen to be homeless. My default is to suspect the latter, so his statement comes across to me as better enabling this guy to milk money out of people. Mind you, he might truly be in need, but the article does not demonstrate that. It merely assumes that giving money to the homeless is good, which I disagree with.

Note: Helping those who wish to not be homeless I support; but I don't think that simply giving them money will achieve that.
I'd appreciate you emailing me your thoughts.
utm_* link garbage strikes again.
Yup, site: should work.
It seems like it should set off alarm bells, but I actually like the idea. I'm not sure how well it'd work in practice, but it might work very well. Kind of the way Metafilter's $5 signup fee works.
Do you remember experiences or digital photos of those experiences
Is this why HN has been sluggish the past week or so?
> They've got a bunch of people "studying his habits and movements", figuring out where he eats and sleeps, and telling the population not to feed him because it's actually bad for him.

> People, even other homeless people, are not usually treated this way, but wild animals are.

Actually, it sounds to me like scholars doing social science. They gathering facts and analyzing behavior.

> At the root of the similarity, I think, is an assumption that Heavy is not capable of deciding what is in his best interest

Is this an assumption? Or is it a conclusion, based on evidence:

> “I just have this dream that all of a sudden something will snap, and he’ll say, I’d love to have housing,” said Amie Pospisil

> Heavy was far from alone on the streets of Times Square in the 1990s, when he began sleeping there frequently in the midst of a roiling mess of drug dealing, prostitution and crime.

> The social workers at Common Ground said they have no intention of pressuring Heavy to leave the streets.

It sounds like you are saying Heavy is capable of deciding what is in his best interest. If that is the case, then it follows that living on the streets of Times Square is in his best interest, since that is what he decided. Are you really comfortable with this conclusion?

The social workers, on the other hand, seem genuinely concerned for him, but they are hesitant to overstep the bounds of human dignity and 'pressure' him, physically or otherwise, to make more prudent decisions.

I see little justification for a critique of the social workers, here.
A fascinating article and on the money IMO. I definitely see this outsourcing of capacity to anonymised servers in the cloud, with tools like map/reduce and memcached becoming cloud-equivalents of single-OS concepts.

Interesting how social is just one aspect, though; and the logical integration of social into this model is as a platform or API. Just as in the 'perfect' OS you would have a centralised address book, in the Internet OS you have a platform-neutral, universally-accessible social graph. Is social just a part of the picture? The way I see it, social's the centre of the picture, lately.

There's also a fight between local-resource apps and this thin-client approach, mainly for functionality that can't be outsourced to the cloud - gaming, Excel, even some kinds of hacking. Google Docs, games-in-the-browser technologies are working to fight this, but it's not going to be an overnight battle.
"The archaic C language". Alrighty.
Finally something to the point.
Awesome excuse to get a good chair

EDIT: One of these http://www.sedus.de/se/en/products/officeseating/index.php
Clojure Web Development with Ring
not sure if it would be popular enough to be worthwhile, but I do like the idea

http://ratemysite.chatroulette.com/ ?
You're right, and I've known a lot of volunteers who were, to a person, in it for the right reasons.

I guess it was just the tone of the article, how they were focusing so much on Times Square, with nary a mention of homelessness in other parts of the city. One contented homeless guy isn't a bad thing - good job. Check on him every few weeks, and move on to people who really do need help. And who might not be in such a prominent location.
I bought an aeron recently and I have to justify the cost!
Yes, still at a loss from the what I last read over at gamasutra and game developer. SONY anticipated turning a profit with the release of the PS3 slim but that apparently did not pan out.
An ORM is an abstraction layer. Abstraction layers leak. Fancy abstraction layers like Hibernate add at least as much complexity themselves as learning raw SQL afresh.

I've learned my lesson - if I'm working over SQL, I'll use SQL. Either via the direct record oriented API of the language, or using a thin abstraction like iBATIS that wraps the inputs and outputs into convenient data-carriers.

MongoDB is different. The "document" is real to the database. When you're saying something like "add a foo to the list of foos of record X", that is pretty close to the low level action that actually gets performed on disk. There is no abstraction-translation step to get out of whack.
Sure, and a dolphin isn't a tiger. But if I can increase the revenues of a site that I'm getting free access to without any real hassle, I'm happy to. I'd like people who are benefiting my life to get compensated. Two reasons - first, it's a good thing in a general sense for people to get compensated for their efforts and value they deliver. Second, generally having people get paid for delivering a good product makes them more likely to deliver it. Who knows how much the most HN Amazon commissions could be - a couple hundred bucks a month? But that's a couple grand a year, which would be enough to build and sustain a pretty good YCombinator library of technical and business books. And again, it's no skin off my back, so why not?
> why does metafilter think they're in the right to change those affiliate links and steal those rewards?

Because that is the policy that the moderators and community arrived at. Some people think that allowing affiliate links incentivizes behavior detrimental to the site. You are free to disagree, but calling it "stealing" is begging the question.
I only poll it every 5 minutes. I didn't want to over do it, and the frequency didn't matter that much to me. I just like to see the change over time.
I'm sitting in an Aeron right now and I'm just not that impressed. I'm just glad I didn't pay for it.
Shareaholic - For Google, Facebook, Twitter and more: Add-ons for Firefox
i'm trying to come up with the right analogy to explain why it isn't and coming up short. if you can imagine a book, work of art, whatever, that explains something other than its obvious subject matter obliquely yet simply & elegantly, this is that sort of book. perhaps analogous to reading some lisp or haskell code that solves a problem you don't care about at all...but realizing that the algorithms were beautiful, appropriate, concise, and powerful despite that? motorcycle maintenance is just a path, metaphor, example used in exploring different outlooks on life (i'd say, the hacker ethic versus the walmart ethic; DIY versus throwaway one-size fits all.)

i am also uninterested in motorized transport in general, but have read that book three times and it is the only book i've ever read twice in a row.
I think it depends what you were sitting on before. If you go from wooden chair to aeron, you feel the difference.
If you suffer from it I can strongly recommend: "Rubber band ligation, sometimes called Baron ligation. Elastic bands are applied onto an internal hemorrhoid to cut off its blood supply. Within several days, the withered hemorrhoid, is sloughed off during normal bowel movement."

Only somewhat uncomfortable for a day or three. No side effects. Fixed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemorrhoid#Surgical_and_non-med...
A fair question. All things being equal primary source is far better. I felt more comfortable linking to something that was already accumulating discussion, versus linking directly to a company blog (which is more of a walled garden).
You should consider contacting "head hunters" / employment agencies. They will match your skill set with client's budgets. If you have two years experience, you should be able to find something that way, even though I agree that senior level developers are the going thing right now.
Idiomatic Ring URL Routing with Moustache (Clojure)
Great read, but I'm not sure I can honestly put an entertaining read above everything else.

If you are reading Hitchhiker's, the "best books" of the "trilogy" are the 1st, 5th, and 4th. The 2nd and 3rd are relatively weak, but the 4th and 5th will make substantially less sense without them. The readers can decide what to do with this knowledge.
"poor black people"

Why must some people make everything about race?
Or you can use a modchip (not so easy with the PS3 though). At the last studio I worked at, rather than purchasing new dev kits, I/we figured that using modded PS2's for the QA team was a lot more cost effective. My contact at SONY did not think it was such a bad idea either :)
Would A/B testing encompass changes as large as what happened here? Having never done A/B testing, it sounds like an iterative process. Would continuous A/B testing ever converge on a solution like the one arrived here?

I guess what I'm asking is this: Is A/B testing an evolutionary approach to developing a product? Are "revolutionary" leaps possible if you strictly follow the A/B testing methodology? (My guess: probably not, which implies that most people don't follow A/B exclusively, which sounds like common sense).
My stepmother is working on a Housing First initiative in North Carolina, in addition to her other work with homelessness. I know that programs like yours in NYC and those in San Fransisco have been an enormous help, both as models as well as tools for convincing people that these programs work.

Myself and many others like me are thankful for the work you are doing. Keep it up!
an impressive number of programs work correctly the first time they [compile].

Everybody says this about Haskell, and it's probably true.

But really, isn't it about as true of Lisp, Scheme, or Clojure? Once you can call your program in a repl, it's probably mostly right. Maybe it's just my inexperience with Haskell showing, but ISTM that the square-peg-round-hole errors catchable by type checking are pretty rare.

Am I missing something?
Yeah, let me know about this too if you don't mind...
Opening lines of Musashi:

Takezo lay among the corpses. There were thousands of them. "The whole world's gone crazy," he thought dimly. "A man might as well be a dead leaf, floating in the autumn breeze."
Interesting discussion to have. I think it is a little bit like Esperanto, the makeup language that IF the whole world was to learn and use that uniform language, it would be so beneficial. Internet users probably don't need another place to sign up with a new set of username and password, so the concept of Open ID is really great. There is also some incentive for website owners (less friction), but if it ultimately means that only a few Google, Yahoo,... own all user identities, will that be the right solution?
That requires the infrastructure, storage and carbon to transport the bottles somewhere else to be refilled. In the end you still end up storing filled bottles on site.
You probably won’t find it under that name though. The title in Spanish is La Verdadera Historia de la Conquista de la Nueva España, or in English, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain.

It’s especially fun to compare it to the accounts written by historians in Spain who had never been to New Spain, and didn’t know anything about anything.
Would you mind giving an example of the right kind of game?
when did max change his domain name?
The test of whether static typing is useful is pretty simple: Do you ever get type errors when you write code with static types?

If you do (and the errors are not spurious), then the static type system is catching real bugs that would have survived for some length of time in a dynamically typed language.
Great post and the quote perfectly sums it up.
Rumors of a Verizon-compatible CDMA Apple iPad persist
Can't we just wait until 4/1? Do they expect a few days for this to trickle through the blogsphere?
>> We have six weeks to shipping...

That tells me that they are dealing with release cycles measured in months. No wonder the pressure to add features at the last minute. Those of us in the web world are used to releases every week or even every couple of days. Then the releases are run like subways. The train pulls into the station and you board the features. No one worries about a four week project because another train will be there when it is done. If another project gets bumped, no big deal, another train will pick it up.

This can even work with customer hosted servers. I worked on a project where a couple thousand customers received a new server every week or two, including database updates. The customer's server called home every night and asked if its replacement was ready. If it was it downloaded it.

If you have agile, automatic delivery, you dont need a lot of heavyweight process. Some process, yes, but not the kind that makes millionaires out of consultants.
When I recommend books I make a coffee shop recommendation and an airport recommendation. Both books are excellent, but the coffee shop book requires slower reader and more mental effort to get the benefit.

Coffee shop:

Plowing the Dark by Richard Powers. The book follows to parallel stories: one of a company that invents virtual reality and another of a teacher that gets taken hostage by terrorists. It's an incredible book and the reason why I decided to study computer science.

http://www.amazon.com/Plowing-Dark-Novel-Richard-Powers/dp/B...

Airport:

Moving Mars by Greg Bear. Mars is a colony of Earth and the book follows a struggle for Martian independence. Also an incredible book.

http://www.amazon.com/Moving-Mars-Novel-Greg-Bear/dp/0812524...
I feel like he did more harm than good. Panhandling, unless extraordinarily effective and coupled with a lack of substance abuse problems (all too common with the homeless) will not pull this man out of poverty for good, or even in the medium-term.

Giving this man more money, but without coupling that with professional assistance, may do him a lot more harm than good.

There's a reason why real academic studies have to pass through an ethics review, and I take issue with how cavalier this guy is about his study.

If the author of the blog has experience working with the homeless, then ignore all I've said above. But otherwise, he's operating way outside his field of expertise involving people and situations he doesn't understand, and complexities he does not seem to be aware of. This is dangerous.
Apparently, things have improved a lot in Linux AMD-land the last 2 years, whereas the nvidia drivers have stagnated.
no actually the conversation is going like this:

A: Don't jump!! Come down! We want to help you!
B: No thanks I actually live up here, and wasn't planning on jumping...
A: ....Don't jump!! Come down! We want to help you!

At one point does it become clear the guy isn't actually going to jump? 10 years? 15? 50?

my jab at christian missionaries was a metaphor that i guess just makes sense to me, but basically was trying to illustrate that often those who look like they need help dont, and often to the response to "no thanks i dont need help" is (especially from missionaries) "oh, you just dont get what im offering, here let me explain."
I'm a former Freelancers Union member and though the plans are quite good in NY, they're not so hot outside of that area. The fact is they aren't a union and they aren't an insurance provider either. They're a membership organization that negotiates group eligibility and rates. There are other types of groups that do this as well, perhaps one where you live that has better relationships with your state's dominant HMOs.

I have private coverage purchased directly from my local Blue Cross/Blue Shield. I don't recommend this route, it's low-cost, but the coverage is full of loopholes. The advantage of a group like Freelancers Union is that the plans are vetted for "gotchas" and providers don't want to piss off thousands of customers who are semi-organized.

If you do go the retail route, be very careful. I'd liken the experience to buying electronics out of the back of a truck.
I know what you're saying, but its important not to discount the mental illness usually associated with chronic homelessness.

Housing certainly should not be forced upon him, but when someone is hurting themselves sometimes you have to push them to stop. Its never so black and white.
same here watched 3 or 4 and had to close it or nothing will get done. Some very talented people on there.
I've been knee deep in the source of Rails 3 since I'm developing against it and the available document outside the source itself is ported from Rails 2 and often incorrect.

The source for Rails 3 is refreshingly clean and free of alias chains. ActiveRecord is the exception, it still has quite a few of them in there.
Do most fluid dynamics simulations use Euler integration like this?
WSJ: Apple 'developing new iPhone,' plus another for Verizon
Which Regulations Should Companies Follow? Obamacare vs. The SEC
On a related note, there was recently a documentary-ish show on (History Channel|Discovery|other similar channel) about Musashi Miyamoto, titled "Samurai."

I'm definitely picking up the Yoshikawa book though. Thanks for the recommendation.
this domain remind me of the bill o riley outrage
EntityFramework in Action: Great book, but the concerns remain
I can fully recommend this book to developers and architects that want to use the EF in a project or just want to learn more about the EF in order to be able to evaluate it. But in the big picture I still suggest to everybody to evaluate other ORMs before deciding for the EF.
I have a philosophical question or two I'd like to ask you, but this would be a poor venue for it. I'd love to email; if you have time to chat, then drop me your address here or at mquander@gmail.com.
I'll be forwarding this to my boss along with my request for permission to work from a hammock on the beach.
Is this also what URL shorteners do?
I had surgery because of this last year. You can read some of what happened on my mostly abandoned blog. There's 10 or more posts about that. Read on, then try to do something about it if you've got them.

http://fateff.com/blog/2009/04/20/im-in-the-hospital/
Our first conference room was the War Room (gentlemen, you can't fight in here...) so naturally the second was called the Peace Room.
These rules are largely the low hanging fruit for aspiring writers. If an expert in a craft is asked to give advice to an audience of beginners, I'm guessing they'll pick the problems they see the most common, plus perhaps a few salient lessons they've learned recently and make a list.

Also, regarding theory of fiction / narration -- that is a mixed blessing. You see writing software like Dramatica push a particular theory (based on the hero's journey) -- and only if you find the high level of that theory compelling will you find the software to be maximally useful.

Also, I bet the authors managed to avoid a lot of low-tech author / writing community flame wars by avoiding fiction and narration theory ;-)