skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just adding my own experience to this: Until the age of 15, maths was considered a real "problem subject" for me. At every parent-teacher conference it was generally accepted that I would never be good at it (and I had no problem with that at all - I found the whole subject very boring and difficult).

Then one day, at age 15, a classmate showed me how to do quadratic equations. I have no idea why, but that day a really bright light suddenly switched on for me. I quickly caught up to, and then passed the abilities of everyone else in the class, and then started teaching myself calculus in my spare time. I went on to get a PhD in Pure Mathematics.

I do think I just wasn't ready for a long time.
What is the hacker start-up scene like in Norway?
Earth Hour 2010 has arrived at 8:30pm
Just watched the entire thing and I have to say that I found it to be very powerful. Thanks for the link!
Unless you convert 100% of your clicks, you probably want to pay attention to CPA rather than just CPC.
Mercurial actually has lightweight branches like Git; they're just anonymous, as in Monotone, not named like Git. There's an extension for Mercurial, called bookmarks, that allows you to name your anonymous heads, giving you Git-equivalent functionality.

You're correct that Mercurial's (IMHO badly-named "branch" command) is much heavier-weight than Git branching. I consider them closer to changeset labels than branches.
How to Writing an APA Style Essay
The APA style of documentation refers to the rules and requirements described by the American Psychological Association while documenting research papers or dissertations in subjects such as social sciences and arts.
Git's branches aren't _branches_ per se. They're movable references to heads, and there's no indication of a commit having been done on a branch once it's merged and the ref deleted.

If you want that workflow in Mercurial, use bookmarks. Some work is left to make bookmarks pushable, but it's going to be done, as many people want that feature.
I've been using Linux on my desktop and servers for 10 years now too. I got my mom to use Ubuntu and and my wife. They both like. My mom likes the user interface, my wife likes that she can do online banking knowing that there is almost no malware, adware and other crap that sites can easily install in Linux.

So that adds 3 more people to HIS alternative universe. I say, let's have another HN OS poll to see how many alternate universes there are, and which one is bigger.
In my experience it doesn't take too long to find a pair of patches that commute which actually let you checkout a broken tree state. It's nice in theory, but in practice the DAG properties of the "mainline" DVCSes are very useful so that you can have guarantees about the non-brokenness of every point in the tree.

I think there's a lot of good to be had for commuting patches during code review, before they're final, but once finalized, they make the most sense in a DAG.
If you know your LTV is $50, you can afford $50/click.

Only if your conversion rate is 100% - which it never will be :-) You need to go a bit further and multiply by your conversion rate. So 10% conversion rate == $5/click. (Not accounting for making a profit, of course.)
Login on Bordom.net
Your local conditions do not necessarily justify the blanket statement that we all were better off under colonial rule. This is what you said:

Say what you like about colonialism, but this kind of shit never happened under the British Empire. They'd come in, kill the local armies and resistance, then they'd start building roads, hospitals, and schools and generally managing their territories fairly well.

You then linked to a map of the British colonies and few short comments about a few countries .. which I am happy to quote and refute:

Burma was literally the wealthiest country in Asia under British rule

For the ruling white minority.

The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand obviously turned out quite well largely modeling British systems of common law, trade, treaty, military organization, and government.

Britishness as a metric of success .. wasn't half of Canada French? did they fare worse?

Egypt? Incredibly wealthy under the British, not so much under self-governance.

The crooked King Farouk was a womenizing gambler and European puppet. It took Gammal Abdelnasser to take back the Suez Canal, bring education and health-care to the masses, and it took the socialists to reclaim Egypt for Egyptians. If you think English colonization is the true recipe for success, look at Turkey :-) Never been colonized, and fares better than all the colonies in its neighborhood.

Ireland's a mixed bag, the British did some good and bad things there.

Very safe to say that in the internet. After a thousand years, English occupation loses its novelty. I wonder how happy are the Irish with it?

The African countries were much better under British Rule than non-British rule.

Is that why France has better presence there today?

And then there's Hong Kong, which is where I am right now. Any doubts there?

Being China's gateway to the world surely helped. It was a lab for China before China opened up and built its economic "Zones". As far back as 1970, Hong Kong was a port to ship smuggled Chinese goods. After '80 it was China's proxy PR agency / Accountant / Mailbox Etc.
There's some gross oversimplification in your reasoning. Just to cite a few.

Egypt? Incredibly wealthy under the British, not so much under self-governance.

You seem to forget that Egypt has a history of more than thousands
years and was a superpower long before the British empire even
existed. And after that, there was Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab and
Ottoman occupation. Thus comparing the country's wealth during and
just after the British colonialism is reductive. How about trying to
do the same comparison throughout these periods and see under which
one Egypt was at its peak?
There's no plan (international or domestic) to rebuild politically bankrupt states. The idea that a mission to the Congo or the Sudan would be "simple" or "far simpler than Iraq" is patently false. The actual invasion is a trivial and essentially irrelevant part. In fact, based on the political climate in Africa (or lack thereof), I'm willing to assert strongly that a mission to an African nation would be far harder. We can build a million schools in Africa tomorrow and they'll all be gone in a few years.

There are states and leaders that the entire world wants gone. Saddam was one of them. Kim Jong Il is another. The problem is that the world fails to realize solving political bankruptcy is just as important as solving financial bankruptcy.

Thomas Barnett is the man to listen to on this stuff: http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_barnett_draws_a_new_map_for_.... Your view is a common misconception that should be corrected.
There is not a single answer in my opinion. I like to focus on cost per conversion since I know what a conversion is worth to me. Another metric I like to watch is total conversions.

It's a balance between optimizing for ROI and optimizing for total revenue. If I can get 50 signups/month at $3.50/conv and can get 75 signups a month for $3.85/conv, I'll increase my bid so long as it increases my total revenue.

CPC on the content network is useful for branding as you receive exposure every time your ad is displayed, even though you only pay when someone clicks.

Are your keywords highly searched according to the https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox? If so, you may have to increase your bid until you build an account history and quality score.
The author later wrote a piece on how this guide allowed him to begin making money as an open source contractor: http://www.evanmiller.org/contracting-advice.html
This is usually a matter of your employment contract, the laws on this vary from place to place and at least one person has been successfully sued for having an idea on company time.

My thoughts on this boil down to two simple rules:

1. don't work for assholes

2. Don't do something you would object to if done to you.
Ditto for my mom. She would not trade her Ubuntu OS for anything else. I showed her Mac OS X and Windows Vista and she said they are both hard to use and confusing for her.

She has been using Ubuntu for 4 years now. Granted, I administer it for her remotely. But she goes online, reads email, chats, uses Skype, and so on.
Currently going through this one. Seems pretty solid for people that already know their way around UI. Haven't found anything obviously wrong like in some other iPhone books I looked through.

http://www.amazon.com/iPhone-SDK-Development-Pragmatic-Progr...

Will def check out Cocoa Design Patterns when I get a chance.
Offer a few helpful points with that and I wounld't have voted you down.

You could have said: TRY IT should open a help bubble. Add a GET IT button to get the code.
Yeah, damn that really screwed the place up when they did that. There's two solutions: either the continent is managed by first world countries, or it should be completely left alone. The second option is of course no longer possible.

The hand-in-hand combination of help and exploitation that the rest of the world provides to Africa may stroke our conscience a bit, but it does nothing but exacerbate the situation.
This is a great example of unbiased writing. I didn't think I was going to read the whole thing, but I did just to see how the author would handle such a taboo subject.
Specialist or Generalist?
"I know many of you think JavaScript is a toy language..."

hmm, I thought the dev community got over the javascript-is-a-toy-language mentality 3 or 4 years ago?
Where do I send the check?
"If you know your LTV is $50, you can afford $50/click."

This doesn't seem right. A click != a conversion

If my LTV is $50 and my landing page gets a 10% conversion rate, then I can afford $5/click.
So can a non- US citizen / non-Green card holder start a company in US? Or are you only referring to opening a branch / US office of a foreign company?
First, that's a lot of up-votes (+25) for a completely subjective, "personal experience" response (call that my critique to the community).

As for your comment itself, you've been using Linux since 1999, of course the current state of affairs is going to seem fantastic to you. In 1999 installing linux was a big console-based adventure full of unknowns and question marks... things today are obviously much, much simpler.

Point being, your perspective on "Linux for the Consumer Desktop" is highly skewed.

I mean, if asked a year ago, or two years ago, would you have said much differently?
We've been using bazaar at Fluther for a while and I have to agree with the author's sentiment for the most part.

The whole "Git is better" thing annoys me. Dvcs _are_ better, but I think it's mostly a wash between bzr, hg, and git. Yes, bzr is slower here and there (used to be annoying, now it's fast enough that it's a basically a non-issue). The parts I like more than git (though I'm no git pro) is the very flexible work-flow options (we use multiple, and they're awesome), the excellent merge algorithm, and the directory/branch structure, to name a few.

Git is great. So it bazaar. It's all this machismo that bugs me. We should really be on the same side trumpeting why dvcs are better.
On small projects like many of the ones on Github, the difference in speed doesn't really make a difference. But when you get to really large projects, like the ones git was originally made for, it really does. Not everyone works on huge projects, but some of us do. The question you need to ask yourself is: "Is this project going to be large enough for it to matter?" That's hard to say.
As posted above:

("Alert the media" or "leak this to wikileaks" is, generally, a very-very-very last resort.)
He's not using either one.
X is a windowing system. It makes no sense to compare Git to X.
Why do cheaters marry?
Collaborative Creations & the Legacy of Patterns
> The idea that a mission to the Congo or the Sudan would be "simple" or "far simpler than Iraq" is patently false.

How so? You state this concretely as though it's a fact, but you don't go on to support it with any evidence at all. I asserted that it would be simpler due to the relative resources of the hostile forces in the countries, and I still stand by that assertion.

I would also cite the article that started this thread; as it said, murdering a single violent leader in these areas of Africa seems to do a pretty good job of taking the wind out of the "rebels'" sails. (I'm using the term "rebel" there somewhat loosely; they really aren't rebelling against anything other than peace.)

Whereas in Iraq, the murder of a single violent leader has caused a bloody and violent civil war and furthered racial tensions. Also, this was predictable: I researched the situation in Iraq before our tanks even rolled into the country, years ago, and came to the conclusion that our usual tactics there would cause this sort of conflict. It's hard for me to imagine that actual scholars wouldn't have been able to do a better job of predicting the outcome there.

And, the whole point of an armed incursion would be to dispel the current political climate (or lack thereof) and create a new, more peaceful, social climate.

> I'm willing to assert strongly that a mission to an African nation would be far harder.

Then do so! :-)

> There are states and leaders that the entire world wants gone. Saddam was one of them.

I question your sense of "the entire world" then. As I recall, there was quite a lot of protest around the world over the U.S. actions in Iraq.
My point still stands. Though it is gradually getting there.
To elaborate on what you said about South Africa being in a critical phase for those who are otherwise uninformed: South Africa has a president who was elected by corrupt interests, and even more disturbing, Julius Malema, leader of the youth wing of the ruling party, who has been anointed the future leader of South Africa.

Given the tenders worth millions for roads that get washed away, Malema's calls for mines to be nationalised (revenge for being excluded from a deal in which other poltically connected parties benefited), and attempts by his organisation to intimidate journalists who report on him, his brazen abuse of power is shocking.Coupled with his open calls for white people to be murdered, which are defended by the ruling party, Malema seems to be the sort of African leader described by the article, right down to his lack of educational sophistication and his exploitation of young people. South Africa is not a failed state (yet), so Malema's methods are not as as violent, but, there is no doubt that his intent is.

Malema is a symptom of a deeper problem: South Africa's emergent kleptocracy, in which the ruling party patronage and corruption are expanding, and the deep seated ignorance of the masses (a direct legacy of apartheid policy) are a dangerous combination. With a black township erupting in flames every other week over the lack of service delivery, and the xenophobic attacks of 2008 (largely directed against African immigrants), I am quite pessimistic, however, if opposition parties strengthen their support bases, and the ruling party can disentangle itself from the state, South Africa may be able to save itself.
:) thanks.

I worked with the HackU event, and those were the first place prized for 2009. One group was only 3 instead of 4, so I stole the last one.

When I'm doing the event, I wear it everywhere. Going through airport security with it on, is very fun ;)
Very long, little code, and the code that is shown is disappointing. He mostly harps on things that JavaScript "lacks" even though the features in question are present in the engines he promotes.
Good stuff. He shouldn't feel too bad though, because he is giving them feedback on what at least one customer wants, which could easily be what many customers want, and help them succeed in the long run.
There are many legalized substances which have more negative health benefits than positive. In fact, there are government subsidized substances that fit that description. Thinking about articles from yesterday, sugar and HFCS come to mind.

Whether something is good for you or not doesn't qualify as a reason to make it illegal. Adults should still be able to choose for themselves what they wish to consume. Though I do agree, once common perception has revealed knowledge of ill effects, suing the government because something is legal should not be an option.
I wish I could just skip through the slides and look at the code samples. The talk is completely video based.
Awesome hackers in Jaipur or Ajmer in India
If you can code and write (content), I have a dream project for you. You have to be at either of the 2 locations above, or will to re-locate there (room, board, everything can be taken care off) Contact me at udai00 <at> gmail.com.

About me: Spent 23 yrs in the US -- Stanford undergrad, built a software start-up from zero, through dot com bust, raised over 25M dollars, acquired F500 customers, built revenue and profits and sold it 9 years later to a public company ; moved to India about 12 months back to build businesses here.
Just to clarify, I don't commit the reformatted code. It's just a temporary change to make it easier for me to read. :)
Horror for the iPAD
I asserted that it would be simpler due to the relative resources of the hostile forces in the countries, and I still stand by that assertion.

As I said, the invasion is the trivial part, but you keep focusing on it. I did provide proof by the way. My proof is in the video. Please watch it. Thomas Barnett's whole point is that your way of thinking is outdated. The invasion doesn't matter. There isn't any country the US can't invade. Barnett knows a helluva lot more than you or I and I think you should listen and consider what he's saying.

I question your sense of "the entire world" then. As I recall, there was quite a lot of protest around the world over the U.S. actions in Iraq.

That has nothing to do whether the world wanted Saddam gone or not. In general, it's safe to assume that (if given the option) the world would like to take mass murders out of power. Disagreeing with the means does not imply disagreeing with the ends in any logic system I know of.

EDIT:

And, the whole point of an armed incursion would be to dispel the current political climate (or lack thereof) and create a new, more peaceful, social climate.

This is exactly right, but Barnett's point is that we don't know how to do that. That's why a mission to Africa is harder; there's less of a foundation to build on in Africa than in Iraq. The fact that we're able to build an Iraqi army and police force of any size is impressive. At the moment such a task would be impossible in Africa. Think about Iraq pre-invasion. They had a uniformed army, police, and some semblance of government. These things do not exist in many African nations.
What I always find to be so frustrating is that I see co-workers doing non-work related things with the company's resources all the time: long personal telephone conversations, online shopping, reading sports or politics-related content on the internet (especially fantasy sport pools).

Oftentimes, the boss is aware of this and doesn't seem to mind. The people who do this are not the most skilled employees either. Yet, if I want to spend my "downtime" learning new technologies (which could actually help me do my work better), I feel like I have to hide it.

It would be nice if you could work on your own projects at work in the open as long as you weren't accessing internal company servers. I'd even be willing to bring my laptop in and connect it to the external-only wireless network if the company required that. When I can't improve my skills while at work, I feel that I'm wasting my time.
The final version of the guide is here: http://www.evanmiller.org/nginx-modules-guide.html
New icon for behavior targeted ads part of industry attempt at self-regulation.
I chose Steve because he spent his time doing something that affects people other than himself. Most people I know have some aversion to changing the status quo. David has impressive accomplishments are of no importance to anyone but himself, so the state of things before and after David's accomplishments are more or less the same.

In other words, I'm impressed with Steve, not because I'm comparing the amount of work and effort they each put forth, but because Steve chooses to spend his time and efforts changing things.
Is this first code snippet, where the HTTP parser checks for "POST" or "COPY" real? It certainly reads like a joke on how not to optimize your code.

Also, wouldn't it be faster to check all four characters at once with a 32bit compare? And what about branch prediction of the CPU?
Eight reasons for reinvinting the wheel
I have as well, though in my experience a lot of those issues have been fixed. Especially with sound, I haven't seen much in the way of problems since 9.10 shipped with a kernel that ran pulseAudio acceptably.
The test data is 1M CONSECUTIVE integers? Really?

I don't know for a fact that that leads to some weird optimizations for certain algorithms, but I would have at least picked some data sets that seemed more realistic.
What a waste of time.
-/etc/fstab --> needed to get secondary hard drives to automount during boot

-/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist --> needed to install my wireless card
I have done several campaigns on Facebook and found the CTR to be higher than Adwords, and CPC was lower. Unfortunately I found that traffic from Facebook didn't stick very well, so it was a wash.
`Smart' meters have security holes
You don't need any geometry to understand algebra. Though graphs (and therefore cartesian co-ordinates) certainly help).
I got disappointed at the beginning. Not only folding string checking into a tree of letter by letter checks doesn't buy you performance with 4 letters, but also if you bring that as an example of performance improvement in a server you're just showing your ignorance.

Great speed improvement:

switch (*((uint32*)m)) {
case 0x54534f50: r->method = NGX_HTTP_POST;

Does it matter now if I spend `O(no_reqests^2)` time looking for the next connection to serve?
I came out of Algebra I with a C or a D and didn't feel like I understood any of it. Geometry came next and it was fun, I really liked proofs and somehow by the time I got to Algebra II, everything made sense.

From that point forward, however, math just seemed like rote memorization without any meaning or elegance. I shied away from it for years, only just returning to school to learn more math recently, in my 30s. I still feel like there's something fundamentally lacking in the way the whole math curriculum is set up, as I didn't see much that I really enjoyed in the period between 9th grade Geometry and Calculus II. I understand the need to build a solid foundation before learning more advanced material, but it seems very one-sided when there is such a breadth of interesting material out there.
> This article didn't point out any reason I would trade git for the much slower Bazaar, just said that Bazaar is not as bad as it looks on the Git is Better Than X website. That's not really a very convincing argument if I'm already using git.

I'm guessing that's why the article is titled "Why Git Ain't Better Than X" and not "Why Bazaar is Better Than Git"...
Kudos, Scientific American!
Personally, I am a big fan of Git's staging feature. I think Git takes the right approach here. I Love having the ability to commit only certain things, and yes, (in cases) only certain changes in a file. This allows for very granular commits if you are trying to keep good history/notes in your commit messages. This also allows you to easily commit changes specific to what you are trying to accomplish with the commit. I prefer small commits with comments specific to the changes rather than "well its working, time to commit everything". I'm not saying you can't do this with other dvcs, but I like Git's default workflow for this.