skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to agree that the post wasn't written very sensitively.

Here are the following red flag passages, for me, at least:

"From what I can tell, the 23rd chromosome has a pretty amazing impact on the way people use computers."
-Drawing a conclusion from data you admit has large sampling issues.

"Women spend more time socializing and shopping"
- You did not mention any comparative "frivolous" activities that men might take part in more than women; say, gaming.

"Evidently, there’s a reason they are called “man” hours." - Using a limited data set to large conclusions about female working habits in all contexts

Generally, the whole thing was both hyperbolic and quite inflammatory.
Just like you, many things that are keeping me from switching to Chrome from FF but the biggest one for me, and perhaps lots of FF users out there, is faithfulness. We have known it's a pain (since Chrome’s appearance) but we can bear with it because at least, FF doesn't leave their users behind.

They are working on new Javascript engine which targets to a significant improvement in speed:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/mozilla-jagermonkey-method-based...

They are also working on stability and I would bet it will be much better than Chrome (my friend is using Chrome and he reported lots of crashes even though it is designed for "crash free" at beginning).
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/firefox_implement_outo...

FF is playing catch up on these issues but hopefully, with all other stuffs (Weave, Contact, Account Manager...) that Mozilla is investing in, FF will be the world champion in browser competition market!
Really nice paper.

In the 1980s at SAIC, we spent a small fortune designing custom (Harvard memory architecture) hardware to do back-prop neural networks relatively fast, but fast back then was about 23m/sec FP operations. My droid phone could probably do more than that now :-)
And they are not even remotely close to a simulation of real life, in the same way that reality TV is not remotely close to reality.
And what about the idea that once you display something publicly, it's no longer really yours?
I think I have that beta. It hasn't changed that for me.
Perhaps I misread the dialectic somehow. I was taking the point back to the thesis of the article (that Jobs was quite wrong in his characterization of best browsing ever), a thesis which g0atbutt was supplying support for. Support which you seemed to be trying to counter or undermine in you comment with things like "Just because it doesn't do exactly what you want doesn't mean it's handled badly - it still does what it does gracefully and without errors or slowdowns" and "It does after all not claim to be able to hold pages open indefinitely...".

As you were countering the support being given for the thesis, I took it that you were attacking the article's thesis (thus defending Jobs' characterization). But then your comment moved the goal for what constituted "best" so far that it functionally proved the thesis of the article. I apologize that I was overly eager to point this oddness out and did so badly.
Why Microsoft's Internet Explorer Dominance is Ending
The copy:

Well, here's something of a surprise. In addition to demonstrating Flash running on phones like the Nexus One and Palm Pre at the now-happening Web 2.0 Expo, Adobe also has a prototype Android tablet of some sort on hand that, according to Zedomax, runs Flash and Air apps "flawlessly." Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any details at all on the tablet itself, and judging from the looks of things, it is a prototype in the truest sense of the word (check out the other shot after the break). It does seem to deliver the goods when it comes to Air and Flash, however, with it able to run Wired's Air-based magazine app and play YouTube videos without so much as a hiccup, although we'd definitely like to see it in a few more taxing situations. See for yourself in a pair of all too brief videos after the break.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttn1G0Kw62o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4s4MyX8vqo

cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Why do Harvard kids head to Wall Street?
Won't be surprised when these guys get bought out. Fantastic product, implemented way better than anything any of the major players have.
I tricked Facebook. When they agreed to give me a profile they implicitly agreed to my own ToS. One of the many many intentionally exotic and arcane terms in my own is that they must give me a new pony every Tuesday. Since it is Tuesday, and I have no new pony, they are in violation. Next comes escalation into full-blown criminal code violation, woohoo!
I guess the author has never heard of fanfic.

The highest form of praise your work can receive is for someone to take the time to contribute to it.
Let's call it, oh I dunno, "MySpace.com".
Oops, just tried it and some squatter has it. Drat!
Another SA story on high-speed trains in America. I've been reading these stories for 30 years.

I finally took the Osaka to Tokyo bullet train last weekend. It was very cool. The more interesting thing was they print your arrival time on the ticket, for whatever stop (eg Kyoto), and that's the exact time you arrive. With Amtrak, you can easily expect a 10 minute delay.

Two weeks ago I waited 15 minutes for my girlfriend to arrive from her "45 minute" trip. She was just sitting on A train outside the station waiting for a track to open.

So, we really have 2 problems. Slow trains and getting them to arrive on time.
Clojure for Dummies
Notes on the Clojure programming language for absolute beginners in Clojure (with a background in programming). Knowledge of Java would be helpful.
I suspect Adobe's definition of "flawlessly" is approximately equal to, "hey, it boots! hasn't crashed yet!"
HubbleSite -- Out of the ordinary...out of this world.
"Grades may coincide with good skills but they are _COMPLETELY_ orthogonal."

No, they are not orthogonal. A moron cannot get good grades, at least not when competing in the same classes.
Schneier for President.
Laser 'tractor beams' to tidy up space junk
You have big friends with the Xiph codecs. Almost all the big game publishers ship Speex, Vorbis, FLAC, and Theora. Epic, EA, Microsoft, etc. The adoption in that market is ridiculously high.

That's a lot of cash on the table for patent trolls to attack, but you don't have to stop there. Google and Mozilla both ship Theora and Vorbis.

Vorbis ships in silicon in lots of the non-Apple music devices.

Sure, the market of people using MPEG technologies is larger, but the market of people using Xiph codecs is by no means small.

Also, MPEG-LA does not indemnify from other patents. This is a common misconception. A patent owner is not going to sue MPEG-LA. They are going to sue Microsoft, Google, Apple, and other people with big bank accounts. Those companies may in turn sue MPEG-LA, but there is no incentive to sue MPEG-LA directly, just as their is no incentive to sue the Xiph.org Foundation directly.

EDIT: I didn't mean to say that all of them ship every codec. But all those listed do ship (or have in the recent past) one or more of the Xiph set.
iPad App works great and integrated extraordinarily well with the service. No limitations as far as I can see.
Yeah these guys are top notch. Excellent product, and now this smart move to further fill the storage void for mobile. Good work DropBox!
Right you are, thanks. I'll fix that. I'll probably leave the email code as-is and add a random salt for each account, run crypt and just save the salt and hash for each user.
Specifically, I think it's the use of the words "tool", "resource", "solution", "service", etc, as a synonym for "thing". Above the urinal where I work, there's a flyer for VPP. The first sentence is "What is VPP? It's a tool for improving lab safety". From this you might think VPP is a physical thing you hold in your hand, but no. By "tool" they really mean a managerial protocol/technique.

By the way, programmers, you aren't much better. Think how frickin' generic the word "developer" is.
Apple made "the dominant smartphone platform that everyone must support" through its own extraordinary and dilligent efforts, and they deserve every bit of their success. I disagree completely with these attempts (both in the media and through legal means such as antitrust law) to cut down tall poppies like Apple - they've achieved their position fairly, and this antitrust talk is just about bringing down a company that is good at its job.
I don't code for my boss. I code for myself.
It's interesting that you mention fan-fiction. I imagine the reason people overlook forking" fiction stems from the fact you're consuming the story, remixing it and spitting out something new. On the other hand, forking code is more like tacking on a paragraph here or there.

Also, while you did touch on the hacker culture I think that's the most important factor. As hackers we're practically born to tinker. When we tinker with hardware ,say a remote controlled car, no one confronts us and asks "Hey, man, why are you tinkering with that car?" More often than not you'll get people saying "Hey, that's really cool!"

Furthmore, it's easier to take a get tangible changes from tinkering with a program than with a piece of literature. You can't miss the impact of gravity on gameplay in a game like HATETRIS but very few people will pick up on the significance of a new piece of text in the middle of a novel.

I really like how jsankey put it when he said "If you put something out there, you should be flattered that people take enough interest to tinker with it."
It seems to me that the author may be interested in the license Donald Knuth used for the Stanford GraphBase, which looks like this:

The Stanford GraphBase is copyright 1993 by Stanford University

These files may be freely copied and distributed, provided that
no changes whatsoever are made. All users are asked to help keep
the Stanford GraphBase sources consistent and "uncorrupted,"
identical everywhere in the world. Changes are permissible only
if the changed file is given a new name, different from the names of
existing files listed below, and only if the changed file is
clearly identified as not being part of the Stanford GraphBase.
The author has tried his best to produce correct and useful programs,
in order to help promote computer science research, but no warranty
of any kind should be assumed.
What would be useful, not that I have looked into this to much to know that it isn't possible. Would be to group the time spent on HN with the time spent on anything linked from HN.

It's hard to know how much time I spend on HN/HN articles.

Great tool though, RescueTime and DropBox are the two ycombinator companies which I could instantly see a use for in my everyday work.
Try submitting $0. Hilariousness ensues.

edit: Yes, I would have bought it for $0 if they let me.
Repeating himself is probably not enough, however.

What we really need, is for a terrorist to attempt to hijack a plane, only to be thwarted by the guy who snuck a knife onboard. With any luck, he would be a national hero and the news networks would be crying out for every passenger to be handed a stainless steal fork and knife upon boarding.
These stories are always turning up. If this isn't an excellent argument for requiring physics be taught in high school I don't know what is.
This will be an interesting test of Steve Jobs' reasoning on why Flash should be kept off the iPad.

My predictions of Jobs' accuracy:

-I think battery life will indeed be an issue. 10 hours has certainly set the bar high. I think people are going to expect significantly better battery life on a tablet than on a laptop now.

-I think he'll be right about made-for-PC flash interfaces being awkward on a tablet, (e.g. problems with hover states).

-I think performance will be acceptable for video but poor on most non-tablet optimized games.

-I think he will be mostly wrong about Flash holding the platform back, because I think most devs who are making content for the tablet will use native code or web apps.

Overall, I think people will be pretty disillusioned with the idea of Flash on a touchscreen once they use it and its limitations become evident, but I do think that it will still be seen as an advantage over the iPad among tech-savvy people, if just for the ability to use flash-reliant websites and to play non-youtube videos.
Anyone know what the API looks like? The documentation for it is behind the invite-wall, I'm guessing.
your model:
productivity ~ gender

probably a better model:
productivity ~ gender + occupation + gender:occupation
Great product and at the moment all the rage with the lecturers at my university (small university in Germany). I guess it’s the file format agnosticism, the flexibility and the ease of use. Also a good way for them to exploit students and get their 250MB :)

(You would really think university IT could provide their own solutions but they just can’t compete. We use Dropbox, Google Docs, Wave and Doodle all the time. And Gmail, so as to not be limited to 200MB.)
One thing I'm pretty sure; good academic results don't mean you can code, but poor results mean you can't code.

That's what happens here in Malaysia.
I think you are missing krschultz's point. There is probably an interaction effect between occupation and gender. Sampling equally from each gender doesn't necessarily remove gender bias.
I was looking into Cloud servers recently. I think I will be going going with 1and1 Dynamic Cloud Server. 1and1 seem to have a better price than Rackspace, and you can change the Ram, CPU, and storage all independently. At Rackspace you had to scale both the Ram and your Disk space. How is your experience with Rackspace? Has any one else tried 1and1's Dynamic Cloud server?
Being a long time SliceHost user, when I finally decided to signup Linode two days ago despite its lacking of (official) backup capability, I wasn't expecting such a nice gift, which almost feels exclusive.

BTW, a quick hard disk benchmark test shows that my Linode is almost twice as fast as my SliceHost.
I think there's an 'AND' piece missing from the headline (and maybe Paul's thinking, though from what I've heard about him I doubt it).

Just as "the best companies" have a big vision from the founders down AND are implementing lightweight, rapid iteration, so too people are looking for a number of lightweight conversations AND a depth of meaningful relationships online and offline.

5,000 Facebook friends doesn't replace socialising with your three best mates.
Google Adds App Store for Analytics
This is really, really, really cool. I love dropbox, but I use Linux and I'm tired of the Dropbox client's Nautilus dependency.

Besides that, imagine the apps you could create with an API. Dropbox is already one of my favorite things ever, and it looks to be getting better now.

So excited!
His papers were confiscated.
Miguel de Icaza disagrees:

"Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot because of the constant threat of patent infringement that they have cast on the ecosystem."

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:O6bmbLp...
I have a feeling Wallace is comparing the entirety of the American academic corpus—around 250 years of research—with the entirety of Europe's ~1500 years, and drawing a conclusion based on random sampling without weighting for time. He might call modern European academia "Americanized" (or, more gently, "Westernized.")
Okay, but if Apple is competing with other mobile platforms, how does reducing the number of developers able to write for the Apple platform (by cutting out Flash-only developers) make Apple relatively stronger? Seems to me that 3.3.1 makes Apple less competitive by restricting its developer pool.

Is it true that developers must support iPhone OS and therefore must learn C, C++, or Obj-C?

Second, why does Adobe have grounds to complain on behalf of "other mobile platforms" when they are not offering a mobile platform? Apple and Adobe are only competing over choice of original coding language as far as I can tell, but it's not clear to me that language is something that would be subject to federal intervention. Is language a market?
I just got started with Rackspace, but they seem to be built on solid technology acquired from Slicehost.

I like the fact I can add new servers quickly and it has infrastructure support for failover and load balancing through shared IP.
Microsoft Kin One and Two review
Absolutely gorgeous. I want more.

God, but it makes me feel bad. My attempts as design are pitiful compared to some of those (most of those... all of those?) examples. Gives me a lot to look up to, and much to aspire to.
A Powerful Twitter Client in less than 50 lines using Ruby Metaprogramming
Any plans for Asia?
Apple MacBook Pro MB985LL/A 15.4-Inch Laptop
Slides: I made a map of the internet
I think I misunderstood your original point. Thanks for the clarification.
The Life of a Forgotten employee
1. flash != video

2. Android does do h.264 and most Android devices have hardware decoders.

3. It doesn't seem you understand the concept of an open platform. Google doesn't need to "be careful" about anything, the market will decide.
I love that particular subset of his blog. My favorite is still the entry on chlorine triflouride ( http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa... ) This stuff is so nasty, it'll burn stuff that's already burnt. Oh, and there's no real way to put it out, so you just have to wait for it to finish eating through whatever was unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity when the spill happened.
“The tragedy of a team of perfect people is that they will all be so desperate to maintain their sense of perfection, their 4.0 in life, that when faced with the pressure of an important project their selfish drives will tear the team apart”

I've seen this happen in real life ... very relevant ...
Tachikomas!
Honestly, I've seen more the former, not what you've described.
Dave Arnold at www.cookingissues.com posted about this recently. Their protocol for transferring the dewars includes letting the tank take the elevator alone. One particular time a student had set the dewar down a little hard, and the pressure had caused the tank to vent a minute later in the elevator, and blow a hole in the ceiling of the elevator. Had anyone ridden with it, they likely would have asphyxiated

edit:
Link: http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/03/12/ka-boom-liquid-nitro...
In Malaysia, good academic results don't mean anything because the education system is built on rout memorization, not creative thinking.
Thanks for correcting me. NO offence taken :-D

err umm ... actually I was speaking about a race on Arcturus, that is composed of light. "Light Beings" they call themselves. Never at rest. No concept of speed of light. (j/k).
A Dating Site For Apple Fans
Are you older than your boss?
First you need to distinguish between the ones that just give you some kind of blob api (HDFS, mogilefs, whatever sector/sphere's FS component is), and mostly-posix-compliant ones (glusterfs, ceph, etc).

http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/?p=2662 gives some details on the 2nd category, so that's probably more useful in a discussion about ceph.
Um, what? I've seen research. I've done research. And this is not research. Research implies some knowledge of statistics and familiarity with the relevant science. Just because a three year old child likes to play with toy planes does not mean they're a pilot. And just because some software geeks like to play with numbers does not mean they have any clue what they're doing.

This is not the boy scouts. You don't get a research merit badge just for showing up and crunching some numbers.
One thing to consider is there is a danger of bootstrapping your way out of the nice little pigeon holes that VCs build to make decisions. They don't know what to do with you if you haven't been through the "normal" steps they are use to. Not only that but they can't get the kind of slice of the pie they normally get on the terms they have boilerplates for and get frustrated.

Not that it should discourage you from bootstrapping as it is still a valid way of doing things. I am sure there is ludacris amounts of investment out there that doesn't worry about the norm.
Random rails and jquery plugins tend to be terribly documented and frequently make easy to fix design errors. I read code all the time -- if I am committing it to the repo, I want to be sure I know how it works. For "black box" things I usually won't delve that deep, but if it really needs to integrate, I usually end up reading it sooner or later.

My only regret is not pushing more changes back upstream
A (deceptively tricky?) Python question
I am writing a Scrabble AI, and I want to handle blank tiles. Right now, I want to expand a string containing blank tiles into a list of strings composed of words created by all possible interpretations of the blanks.

So, "H_LLO" ==> ["HALLO", "HBLLO", ... "HZLLO"] (length is 26)

However, Scrabble has 2 blank tiles, so I can't just do a simple for loop and replace.

For example, "H_LL_" ==> ["HALLA", "HALLB", ... "HBLLA", ... "HZLLZ"] (length is 26x26 = 676)

What is the cleanest way to do this? The best I could come up with is the following, but I don't much like it:

import re
from itertools import product

w = "H_LL_"
expanded = []
product_args = list()
for _ in xrange(w.count("_")):
product_args.append( map(chr, range(65, 91)) )
for repl_str in product(*tuple(product_args)):
wtemp = w
for c in repl_str:
wtemp = re.sub('_', c, wtemp)
expanded.append(wtemp)
Maybe women have to settle for less because employers consistently underrate their competence. Since most employers want competent people, if they irrationally believe that women are less competent, they will be less likely to hire women, even at a discount.

In general, statements of the form "but that's impossible since all people act as rational utility maximizing agents" demonstrate an ignorance of the many many studies showing that people do not act completely rationally pretty much all the time.
Improve Your Presentations In Under $50
Or what? You'll stop using it? Other people?

http://welcome-to-croatia.com/holida...tia-apartments
Thank you very much fname. You just ended 3 days of banging my head against the table. Cheers,
Getting good at reading code helps with debugging. I like teams where every commit is reviewed by somebody else -- keeps you honest, you learn new tricks and you reduce bus factor
Thanks a million Jacquesm. Fname found the song. You rock, man :). I am going over to listen to Tony Banks. If it lasted two decades, it must something. Cheers,
This can also be done in Chrome, see other responses here. What Chrome also does is that it discovers searches by itself, so that when I type "im" and the autocomplete brings up imbd.com I can press tab, my search word and enter. There is no need to manually add the keywords.
The Bootstrap
Webby Awards winners announced
Huh, when I write "hac" the top suggestion in Chrome (well, Chromium daily) is HN.
Speaking as one of their investors, I'm not pissed at all. In fact I've found political correctness is if anything inversely correlated with success in startups. It seems to derive from a combination of cowardice and conventional mindedness, which are the last two qualities you'd want in a startup founder.
Dropbox Android App & Mobile API; The Cloud Sync Apple Should Have Built
The point of antitrust talk is to prevent a company that has achieved dominance fairly, through extraordinary and diligent effort, from maintaining that position in other ways.

Bringing down companies that once were, but no longer are good at their jobs is the whole point.
I feel a lot better about the big liquid nitrogen tank I had to sit next to while at a internship last summer. That thing was hissing all the time.
Looking at the W-9 form now, it says that I need a TIN (or SSN).

Won't they ask me for a SSN over the phone? I don't have one that allows me to work in the US.