skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wasn't going to post as I struggle to justify the relevance of the parent and my response to the community, but think it's ultimately of little consequence and the words themselves are important to me, so...

~OT: I once worked as a charity fundraiser and had more than a few encounters with homelessness, one of which (a few years after leaving the job) left me quite stunned. The company was a bit of a stop-gap for those that could and would handle it, with accommodation, food, and a pretty interesting lifestyle all thrown in.

I once found myself in a pub, however, and a homeless guy came up and asked me for a bit of spare change. Having built up a healthy respect for people and torn down my impulse to judge on the basis of only a very small amount of information (from my exp. in said job), I gave the guy what I could when, looking in his eyes, I saw my friend. A guy I had worked with as a fundraiser, who, after a brief spell of bad luck had fallen through the gaps of society and ended up having to constantly climb. I did what I could for the guy, but more importantly he did so much for me - I had never realised destitution was so close (or that the climb back up was so high).

Another time I met something I can only describe as otherworldly.... it was almost sacred. Take what you will from it. I was approached (this was while fundraising) by a small, fat, black guy in comfortable, though slightly disheveled clothes in his late 50s or thereabouts. As he came close it occured to me that he didn't exist... I honestly cannot understand the instantaneous clarity of that thought... maybe he was just too much of a cliche for my mind to deal with, but there was something more, an aura that came from somewhere deep within him, from somewhere I don't think I have. He took my hand and started talking to me as though it was the most ordinary things in the world, and he proceeded to tell me about his pebble. He'd been fondling it in his other hand and as I noticed it he started telling me about where he'd found it and all the things that could have been while that pebble had remained hidden. And that, he said, was his point. My pebble was currently hidden, and I was close to finding it. It could be a stone, a coin, a woman or even the world! The point was that it was mine and that it had been sitting, passive, until the day I, and I alone, would come across it and bind myself to it...

I don't even know why that's worth sharing with you. Most people I tell, I'm sure, just think I was seduced by the romantic ramblings of a mad old man... maybe so, but I think that moment, myself, the old man and what he said deserve a great deal more dignity, even divinity, than that. I choose to make that moment spiritual (and I'm not by any means "religious")....
Because statistically, the homeless are most likely to be African America.

Source: www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL30442.pdf
("By race, the homeless population was estimated to be, on average, 49% African-American, 35% white, 13% Hispanic, 2% Native American and 1% Asian.")
Bad idea. Design focuses on particular user groups and testing should focus on the same groups.
I agree that the blog post could have contained more information, perhaps some pretty graphs on the conversions per hour with sign 1 vs sign 2. Maybe taking 2 different signs, one with a red cup, one with a blue cup and A/B testing.

But the underlying thesis is still valid. Testing multiple scenarios returns positive changes, and further showing an interesting application that I have never thought about -- helping the homeless with it.
I have a PhD in computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and have written several CFD codes in Fortran, C, Matlab and Python. I'm also a programming language geek, and have been interested in functional programming languages for quite some time. When I see something like this, however, I loose some of my faith. It just seems like too much effort to get decent speed, and even when not considering speed it doesn't seem to give much benefit. For instance, this is how the diffusion function would look in Fortran (skipping some details):

pure function diffusion(x0) result(x)

real, intent(in), dimension(:,:) :: x0
real, intent(out),dimension(:,:) :: x

x = x0(2:n+1,1:n ) &
+ x0(0:n-1,1:n ) &
+ x0(1:n ,2:n+1) &
+ x0(1:n ,0:n-1) &
-a*x0(1:n ,1:n )

end function

Some things to note:

- The "pure" keyword guarantees that this function has no side effects.

- No do loops are needed! Fortran array slicing is very handy.

- The compiler will convert this to use SIMD instructions

- Adding some OpenMP hints to make it run on all cores is also very easy.

So this type of code in Fortran is short, very easy to understand and you are guaranteed extreme performance. Maybe functional programming has some benefits when you're dealing with more complex datastructures (for instance I'm working on a code right now which uses parallel octrees, kind off a pain in Fortran), but for simple things like this, I fail to see the point.

I want to believe, so perhaps someone here can enlighten me?
Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds - I like the process and form
These were a lot of fun to watch. I have no stake in this scene but enjoyed clicking through and seeing what folks came up with. I get a similar feeling watching http://www.demoscene.tv/
Always when this story comes up, I reference this: http://www.dreamsongs.com/LessonsFromNothing.html - a Lisp guru talking about this story.
http://fivesecondtest.com/
Upvoted...and here's my summary, since it's not on the OP:

The adventures of a two-dimensional creature into the lands of the single-dimension and the three-dimension (and more). Also, on his efforts to evangelize his visions.

When I first read this over ten years ago, I was surprised to learn that the book itself had been published in the 19th century. It was my first true realization that people just as "smart" as us modern folk have existed for quite a while.
Overlaying the company logo on a different place on the homeless dude's coat in every picture is creepy. That's a person, not a billboard or a wall in the subway.
I've found my Haskell code much more likely to do what I want the first time it is accepted by the compiler than Clojure, CL or Scheme. On the other hand, I find it easier to play around with things in a Lisp REPL than GHCi. Maybe that's because I have more experience with Lisp than Haskell, but I suspect there's something inherent. I don't think one approach is better than the other, but each has strengths that help with certain kinds of development.
For the first time, I'd suspect so. It shouldn't have cost more than a dollar or two, which should be easy to recover.

However, I suspect the novelty will wear off. I'd like to know what happens a week in. (Or for practical purposes, if this leads to a different path in life.)
I don't know why we have to rehash this argument all the time. There are certain problems where the current state of typing technology gets in the way. These usually involve the UI and testing layers where, for example, you may want to mix together different types that have a common protocol or trait (the Java people call them interfaces). This is much easier to deal with in languages that let you (or force you to) dynamically bind methods at runtime, like Objective-C and Javascript.

Then there's the data-processing-heavy backends where you need to do a lot of parsing, a lot of analytics, a lot of processing, etc... static typing helps a lot here. You do not want to make silly stupid mistakes when you're parsing one value to another, and types help make sure you're getting the right inputs and outputs. When you're doing your metrics, you often don't even want to be accidentally mixing your floats and ints. If you want to get real fancy about it, monads and functors can help immensely for managing state and joining data for a lot of these backend problems.

The folks who don't see this generally haven't had the good luck to work on big problems throughout the stack to see where the strengths of each paradigm come into play. There's plenty of functional programmers who don't know how to exploit a dynamic language (stop trying to impose types on the system dammit!) and vice versa.
Bollywood celeberties: Esha Deol becomes the Blushing Bride
Does anyone know if getting hemorrhoids would classify as a work-related injury? Furthermore, since my job is required to provide me with a safe working environment, shouldn't they also be required to provide me with a fancy chair?
that's because, there no real difference (experience wise) and in the end it's decided on stupid things like this. There isn't much competition in the console space so they all pretty much do the same thing.

The only real advantage sony has is the nice bluray player but with the price of bluray players right now, it's a very moot point now.

I like the talk about the (now defunct :() Linux feature just cause it lets me call my xbox owning friends Microsoft groupies ;p
An enemy? Sure. The greatest enemy? I don't know about that.

I'd say carpal tunnel and other hand/wrist related injuries would be the greatest enemy. After all, you can always program standing up or sitting on one of those donut devices if you have hemorrhoids.
After reading this: http://fateff.com/blog/2009/04/22/bad-afternoon/ I think I'll be ordering a banana tree or something.
I'm still buying the cheeseburger...
No, as the paper says, explicit Euler integration is extremely unstable. Implicit Euler, as the paper uses, is stable but only first order accurate.

If you're dealing with fluids with low diffusion compared to advection, some higher order Runge-Kutta scheme is typically used. For fluids with high diffusion, however, this will give you very high restrictions on the time step. For this cases, a hybrid scheme is often used, where the advection term is integrated explicitly using an Adam-Basforth scheme and the diffusion term is treated semi-implicitly with a Crank-Nicholson scheme. This means you have to solve additional linear equation systems for the velocities for each time step (Helmholtz type equations), but this is still faster since you can use longer time steps.

All of this may sound very complicated, but it all follows the same patterns, so it's really fairly straight forward.
When you drive into Brooklyn from pretty much any major entrance point, you are greeted with this billboard:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/fort-greene/posts/...

I especially like how they spelled "proctology"
let us not overlook those who stand while at the keyboard. you don't have to do it all the time, either -- get an adjustable keyboard thingermajig and push your chair out of the way for a few hours a day.
Working a job years ago, I worked at a standing desk which was surprisingly awesome. It allowed me to keep my legs active, and pace around whenever I needed to mull something over. I may invest in one for home use.
Two New iPhones Coming; One May Be Aimed at Verizon
This is from last year.
The greatest ally of the programmer: getting off your ass.

After a little back pain, I made a few changes which make me feel a whole lot better generally, and make it much easier to get and stay in 'the zone':

- take breaks regularly

- stand up when not operating the computer

- stretch whenever you remember

- walk about

- exercise daily (as much or as little as you feel like)

These simple measures quickly become more of a joy than a chore, and will protect from back pain, RSI, hemorrhoids, fatigue, and probably a bunch of other nasty things that creep up on you.
Along these lines, Herodotus is a blast, and Polybius very much worth reading.
Giving poor people more money might hurt them? You're an asshole. I'm sure if someone gives YOU more money it'll be put to excellent use, right?
"How to Read a Book", by Mortimer J. Adler.

This book was very important for me, as it gave me a new way of approaching both books and almost everything in life. It also gives a rather thorough collection of the most important books of western culture, ordered by authors then dates.

If you ever wanted to know how to read more effectively, this book is it. It teaches you how to mark up a book in such a way that you'll be able to remember what you need from it after a few minutes of review. I highly recommend it. My life would have been much poorer without having read it.
Small is beautiful: The design of Lua [video]
I thought the guy was disfigured until I read this comment and realized the blog author had watermarked over the guy's face.
Formulas are not a substitute for thinking. - A Smart Bear
I think that as far as quality of life goes, I'd rather have my hands hurt than my ass hurt.
Not really. There are just a handful of parameters that should be set based mostly around the amount of RAM you would like to dedicate to the database. The last 10% of performance can be squeezed out by setting another half dozen or so parameters related to disk I/O and CPU capabilities. If you are really, REALLY worried about it, for about $500-$1000, I'm sure you could get any one of the qualified independent PostgreSQL consultants to take a look at your specs, tune your configuration, and help you benchmark the setup.
Why do you need to upload a screenshot? Why don't people just visit your site?
Forget the whole a/b testing thing. The real value of this blog post is that it shows a great way to utilize personal skills to help someone else. That's the real genius, out of the box thinking here.
Raganwald's latest project.
Allowing affiliate links gives people an incentive to push products which they wouldn't necessarily recommend otherwise.

Stripping affiliate links is kind of like nofollow for search engines.
Ceci n'est pas un pipe. It's a watermark on a photograph, not a brand on a person.
Bono named worst investor in America.
Distinguishing Column-Stores (Cassandra vs. Vertica)
Reading about Heavy reminded me of Austin's Leslie Cochrane (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Cochran). He stood for mayor. After reading his manifesto I would vote for him. Too bad I don't get a vote.
It doesn't look good when they place the most important changes all the way down, IMHO.

*) Extensive audit of libcrypto with DEBUG_UNUSED. Fix many cases where
return value is ignored. NB. The functions RAND_add(), RAND_seed(),
BIO_set_cipher() and some obscure PEM functions were changed so they
can now return an error. The RAND changes required a change to the
RAND_METHOD structure.
[Steve Henson]

*) New macro __owur for "OpenSSL Warn Unused Result". This makes use of
a gcc attribute to warn if the result of a function is ignored. This
is enable if DEBUG_UNUSED is set. Add to several functions in evp.h
whose return value is often ignored.
[Steve Henson]
Pay no mind, it's just another A/B test :-)
AppHash tries to address this by having something called a "hostile block" in a page. The hash is checked for everything BUT the hostile block, and the hostile block itself is checked to make sure it only contains static variable assignments. Yes, this is a fiddly bit of code - I'd love for people to see if they could break it.
I would offer that compared with Clojure, Fortran is like a DSL for numbers crunching. Does it make sense?
Duck Duck Go must have a pretty good ROI per user if it is worthwhile to pay people to come to the site.
Thanks to rbranson and dialtone. Very useful comments.
You've refuted a strawman, but you haven't given an actual justification for the original wording.

Using the phrase "poor people" instead of "poor black people" is equally effective -- more, actually, because "poor black people" makes you wonder why the hell it matters that they're black -- and has the virtue of not perpetuating (many) people's unconscious associations of "black" with "poor".
The Complete Stories (of) Franz Kafka, The Corrections by Jonathen Franzen
Ask HN: I break the chain every day starting form 3rd day what to do?
I cant help, i keep breaking it already for months, I could hold the chain for only 3 days long. What to do?
Agree completely. The God Delusion suffers from sloppy reasoning, and intellectually dishonest arguments. I'm an Atheist, and I found myself disagreeing over and over with arguments Dawkins made despite the fact that his conclusions align with my view of the world.
Dynamic_cast(C)++
Strong agree. Everyone seems to excuse their lack of charity by assuming the person who needs help will waste the money on hookers and blow. Maybe there is a significant contingent that does, statistically, but there's no way to know if the particular bum right in front of you right now is going to do that or not.

Is it really so preposterous to assume that this guy's medical expenses caused his financial difficulties instead of assuming that he wasted everything he had on drugs? Sounds believable to me.
Two very different lessons here.

First the value of NOT having url shorteners. Wikipedia is much different than youtube in this situation.

Second...the value of a long term partner. Preferably with a steady hand.
leaving aside the issues of 'privilege' for a moment, I think you might have something of a point; I'm watching one of my friends start a startup that will almost certainly crash and burn because he's writing all his business plans to say what he thinks the investors want to hear, rather than coming up with a workable plan.

It'd be quite difficult to answer this question in a scientific manner, but I bet that large investments kill more businesses than they help (vs. bootstrapping)
Great stuff! congratulations! I just tried it on my blog.
While those are fun, IIRC (and I've spent some time with both) neither of them do large multiplication, and I'm quite confident neither of them try to teach this technique to you; they just present math problems with no technique. (Memorization is appropriate for anything up to 12x12 or 15x15 anyhow, and if they exceed that it's not by much.)
Article summary:

Apple has released a new iPhone every June or July since 2007. “People” have been “briefed with the matter” and they say it will be available on Verizon’s network. Apple has had an exclusive relationship with AT&T giving them a competitive edge. This article from the WSJ reaffirms previous reports that the new iPhone would be available this summer, but doesn’t provide any new information.

http://hnsummary.com/2010/03/29/new-iphones-this-summer-mayb...
Filmspiration – A Single Man
Just so that we’re all on the same page – a Single Man is a masterpiece. It has everything a film needs to be good. The acting is sublime, the writing superb, everything comes together beautifully. What catapults it into the realm of greatness, however, is the ease with which Tom Ford embraces the visual possibilities of cinema.
I'm sorry but this has absolutely no content. The title of the article tells you everything in it's content and all of that information is stuff we already knew.

We know Apple is going to release a new iPhone because they do so every summer. We know there MAY be a CDMA version because that's been a possibility for years.

But there are no specs here, no product details, no specific launch dates and no confirmations. They give the name of supposed Taiwanese manufacturers but that's about it (and really, who cares which Taiwanese manufacturer is doing the work anyhow?)
$100k Raised in Three Days—Way to Go, Ruby
One of the Wii hackers who gave a presentation at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin said that the only reason the PS3 hadn't been completely hacked yet is that you could already do most of what the hackers and homebrewers wanted, without modchips or removing the hypervisor. http://www.flickr.com/photos/55502932@N00/4314288066/sizes/o... Now that you can't boot other OS's, the PS3 hacks are only going to get more intense.
These things are entirely orthogonal. The "host-proof" paradigm is specifically a web application design paradigm -
the question we're asking is "how can we do web apps better". Unless you're able to convince your mom to interact with Facebook using PGP, it's just not relevant to this discussion.

As an aside, I would _love_ for browsers to expose a good, standardized set of crypto routines. They don't, so we do the only thing we can - implement them in Javascript. This makes me as queasy as anyone, but it's the best we can do at the moment.
So basically:

A) Homeless man begging

B) Useful service with a variable price
Iterative funding of startups- an entrepreneur's perspective
Who does that server really serve?
Adjustable keyboard or desk? Any tips as far some affordable adjustable desks? Thanks.
it seems the new tagline dejour for side projects is: chat roulette for "x" with no pensises.
My problem with PostgreSQL is that you're half expected to tweak it to your needs.

That's a myth. Postgres runs out of the box just as well as MySQL, with no more configuration effort.

A good starting point could be:
http://www.revsys.com/writings/postgresql-performance.html

As you can see there is only a very small number of settings that you really should set consciously, just as you have to choose consciously between InnoDB/MyISAM and various baseline settings on MySQL.

Beyond these eight parameters (most of them relate to the amount of RAM you want it to use) postgres ships with reasonable defaults. All the other options may become interesting to tune it later for special workloads (something that you can hardly do with MySQL) but are usually safe to ignore.
YouTube's original sin
My idea is based on the following: If the reader was amazed with the review you wrote and convinced with the book and he "Really" wants to thank you, so he should go more steps to do that.

Put your referral tag in your profile, he add it to the link and give you back commission.

If he liked your review and he doesn't want to kickback even a cent, he won't bother. Like that, only people who were both amazed and convinced of the writer-commission idea will give the commission. People who really don't care about whom was the writer and don't want to support him for writing the review, won't pay. Neither they won't write review , since they'll think people will never bother to help them.

The reason for this non-easy-reward system is to stop the flow of spammers that may result if affiliate links were permitted here. HN has got a potential buyer base (imo), so marketers will come here and write their reviews, even if they don't induce the HN community, they'll still think of the organic traffic that will drive by time. Such a system will kill the odds that organic traffic can make sale, people who find HN through Google don't know that the Tag is in the profile, even if they bother to kickback!
I think it'd be okay to be paid a pittance. In fact, I would hope the auction lets people send emails for free. For people that don't get much email, then, it's just like normal, no problems. If you get a lot, people will notice you have 500 emails left unread and go "hm, maybe I should jump the queue". So they pay a dollar. The biggest concern is that if you get a huge number of emails a day, it's kind of sad that people that don't want to pay are pushed down so far. I'm not sure how the service works, but maybe the queue could be designed to balance money with time spent waiting?

I feel like I should dislike this idea, but I think I like it.