skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
EDIT: Just confirm, I think I was incorrect in the message below.

I'm not completely sure I'm correct (please correct me if I'm not!) here but as I understand it the article does not support the claim in the headline. The headline claims that signups increases by 28% in the changed version and that this was all attributable to the change.

It's the second bit that isn't supported, they say that the result was statistical significant but what I understand them as saying was that it was statistically significant that the new variation was better than the control. But it could be better by an amount more or less than 28%, all we know from that is it's almost certainly (95%) at least a little better. We would need to know the number of trails to be able to get a certainty for the amount of improvement.

Could someone with a slightly better understanding of statistics chip in maybe? I could use some more information in my own A/B tests, sometimes I know a change is going to be a pain to maintain so I want to know not just if it is better, but by how much.
IdeaTin Podcast Episode 1 - HN-Related Podcast
After much work, and haggling with video compression tools and the like...I finally got it up.

Look forward to all the feedback that you guys can give me to make the entire show better.

Also looking for co-hosts for the upcoming weeks (especially this week coming up). You can either email me directly: marc {at} ideatin, or use the contact form on the site.

Thanks.
Seeing how the wearer reads is really-- staccato. It also makes me want to see what people look at when they play video games. Do game designers use eye tracking software? I can't really tell what my eyes focus on versus my brain.
Time Commoditizes Every Advantage
Ongoing by Tim Bray · I/O 2010 Words and Faces
I've done a search for pgp in the Android Market and found 2 applications: PGP Manager and APG. The first one costs 1,90€ although there is a free demo, and the second one is free.
5 Absurdly Dangerous Toys
These toys are very dangerous for the kids.
He's called 'Buck Rogers', Buck Rodgers is a fictional character.
As it was said above, it's not the distribution that is the problem, it is the addition of license terms which the GPL forbids.
Ah, like the rules of international conflicts / Geneva conventions? You can kill each other, but there needs to be order. Napalm - nay, bullets - yay, landmines - gray area. Civilians out of bounds, unless they try to help the wounded who carried weapons.

We've got to be civilised after all... Yup - we should definitely make people sign stuff like that.

Seriously though - since they've got the nets installed, soon we may have an extensive list of ways to kill yourself in the factory (without jumping out).
"Both Apple and Google are probably going to be fine" doesn't make for a good headline though, does it?
This *could be true, but it could well not be true.

In any system with a powerful network effect, such as: a platform with more users will get more apps, and the platform with more apps will get more users, there definitely could be a winner or loser!

If one platform has too much momentum, displacing it might become next to impossible. Think x86, or the telephone platform by American Telephone & Telegraph.
Yeah, I've been using one of these too, and agree it's great.
Well, the EFF has a long list of the things they hate about Apple's licenses. The FSF pretty much sees eye-to-eye with them, so that seems like a good starting place. Here's the link:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/iphone-developer-progra...

After reading that, my best guess for the GPL violation would be Section 7.2, which "makes it clear that any applications developed using Apple's SDK may only be publicly distributed through the App Store."

But the worst part for Apple, I would think, is the review. Even though it's not their fault that some developer submitted an infringing application, they approved it. IANAL, though, so I don't know exactly what Apple is on the hook for. My guess would be that Apple will pull the application and blame the developer, but I don't know where it'll go from there. It really seems like they're more interested in Apple than the developer, after all.
You can choose how exactly you put the shelves, I have my monitor right on the top shelf, but I'm quite tall. I have the main 'desk' part in the middle with the final shelf underneath.
The full J Allard leaving email (Microsoft)
WordPress Completes 7 Year
Australian Critical Illness insurance
Total Permanent Disability insurance is usually taken out in conjunction with Life Insurance and is usually paid out as lump sum to cover medical expenses, rehabilitation costs and home alteration costs if needed.
And That, Young Cloudwalker, is Why You Fail
According to, IIRC, either Randy Russell or Alan Cox a decade ago, /opt was added to the FHS at the request of the proprietary Unix vendors. The idea of 'optional' 'third party' software is ridiculous in an Open Source OS. Throwing binaries, libraries, config etc. outside standard folders means long library paths, long binary paths, config that can't be backed up from a central location, etc.

Eg, say Debian include Chrome (as Chrome, not Chromium) in their next release. It will move from where it is now to the normal locations for unimportant software beneath /usr.

That said, I don't really care that much anymore. There's very little expectation for quality finished software on Linux in general:

* Most apps aren't packaged, even for the two major distros people use

* half of GUI apps still don't install with shortcuts

* WMs still invent their own .desktop replacements

* package descriptions for 'foobar' are 'the foobar package' or 'libtoolkit GUI for libfoobar'

* service descriptions are 'starts the foobar service'

* man pages either don't exist, point elsewhere or consist of 'debian says we have to have a man page, this is a man page, alas it has no content'.
I agree on the last point overall, but you still have to make some subjective judgment of the absolute rate. Foxconn appears to have had 9 suicide outs of 480,000 workers. Is that high, in an absolute sense? It doesn't actually seem that high to me: 1 out of every 50,000. Unless I have some sort of relative sense that that's abnormally high, it seems "really low" to me.
It comes preinstalled though.
> That sucks. So basically, Gnu is saying that nobody is allowed to develop for Apples platform with any GPLed code?

They're saying that no one is allowed to sign away the user's rights by agreeing to something like the Apple Developer License, which allows the application to be distributed only through the App Store.

How can someone who doesn't own the code ever agree to that?

And if you're taking your own code, which you want to GPL, how can you GPL it while still agreeing to the Apple Developer License which says in Section 7.2 that you can't distribute the code, except via the App Store? What good would GPLing such an application do, when you wouldn't be allowed to give anyone the source or let them modify it?

You can still use it on Apple devices where Apple does not restrict the use and development of code, of course, such as their general purpose computers. But yeah, you're not free to develop for the iPad or iPhone without following Apple's rules. And Apple's rules appear to be in conflict with the GPL.

You can find further discussion of the incompatibilities here:

http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/131752
Would it really make that much of a difference in this case? I think Apple is getting more pressure than most because they essentially are selling a luxury good, where the cost spent on the Chinese manufacturing is not that high a percentage of the total retail sales cost, so they could afford to spend more and still turn a profit.
I can give you a personal recommendation for a very good iPhone dev team/Mac OSX team who are currently looking for work (and can supply an independent reference customer).
Okay, so is anyone else bothered by this statement:

> Apple manufacturer Foxconn was today taking extraordinary measures [...]

Foxconn or Hon Hai makes products for many different companies and their parts end up in thousands of different products all over the world, yes they are one of the primary manufacturers for Apple products but Apple is not the only one that is having products manufactured there. I find that it is very disproportionate for a news article not to mention that other companies also do business with them thereby putting the spotlight just on Apple.
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Take a look here

http://bertmcdowell.com/

(lovely chap too)
Not how. Who: competitors. And yes, this sort of stuff is enforced in practice. Initially you might only get a cease & desist notice, but you'll probably be reported to the authorities if you keep doing it, or you're doing it especially egregiously.
9 suicides in five months, and two more attempts.

Not overall.

So that's roughly 25 people annually, I'm still not sure if that's high or not but it certainly seems worth looking in to and taking it serious. China is about 14 per 100,000 average, so you'd expect about 70 per year, if foxconn overall is 25 and there are no 'non-work related suicides' then they're better, if those 25/year are over and beyond the 'normal' suicides that's a bit more serious.
Anybody knows which traditional database did they compare VoltDB against?
Filipino-American Nicole Scherzinger wins the Dancing With The Stars finals
Sony’s new, super-thin OLED display wraps around a pencil
Since I am the one who wrote the case study, perhaps I can explain. Loosely saying, what the article actually means is that the observed difference of 28% or more may actually be true in 95% of cases. However, there is a 5% chance that that difference is a lesser than 28%.

If you have any specific question, please feel free to ask.
Top 10 lists.
Now that is amazing. What a neat development, this will enable a whole slew of new applications.
> Either way, this number of suicides in a single company in an absolute sense is bad regardless, whatever the relationship to other companies or regions.

Hmm, I'm not sure I follow the logic. Clearly any suicide rate is bad; and things should be done to combat it. But the fact is they employ 480,000 people and, so, you are going to see a larger number of suicides compared to someone who employs 48,000!

> you probably should compare it with the other factories in the same town to get a baseline.

Absolutely; can't find any information though. Which sucks.
> if those 25/year are over and beyond the 'normal' suicides that's a bit more serious. if those 25/year are over and beyond the 'normal' suicides that's a bit more serious.

Some of the previous articles have been more explicit - this does refer to all suicides amongst the employee pool (i.e. not just those occurring actually at work).
The logic is that it is 25 work related suicides per that number of employees, I'm assuming that it is not exactly the total number of suicides for the whole company, just the ones that are directly related to the work conditions.

If someone jumps off a bridge because they got dumped by their significant other I highly doubt it would be tallied amongst these.
Ah ok, that changes matters considerably, then I'll try to dig up a reference to that. It really needs that context.
Dedicated servers
Gogax offers dedicated server packages with FREE kvm over IP. Great prices on dedicated servers.
> just the ones that are directly related to the work conditions.

Yeh, I now see what you mean. As I said lower down - previous articles have explicitly said this is an overall figure.
Interesting. Mine (Barclay's) is overly aggressive: it calls me every two weeks, and blocks my cards about 4 times a year.

I have pre-paid phone, buy small items from Google checkout, and travel frequently. Barclay's knows this, but still keeps calling to confirm my (quite regular, very normal) transactions and blocking my cards.
Geo location might start a new wave of creative webapps
It's the other way around. Buck Rogers is the fictional character, and Buck Rodgers is the IBM manager.
Getting reported to an authority isn't the same thing as actually getting investigated by the authority. I don't know about Norway's data protection folks, but a lot of European data protection authorities are under-resourced for the fairly broad mandate they have.
I occasionally use a standing desk of sorts -- I put my laptop on the kitchen counter. It's great for standing and working for short periods.
Hello laktek, I really agree about the fact that node.js being from the ground up an evented environment got most libraries written in the same paradigm.

On the other side I fail seeing how Javascript is a more event driven language compared to Ruby. In the context it's often used (the web browser) it supports callbacks, but not with some special semantic. Just callbacks, anonymous functions.

For this point of view I think that languages with coroutines are probably more powerful as event-driven programming languages, because it's possible to save the state across calls in a much more high level way, leading to code resembling a lot erlang code for instance.

Thanks!
this is a good point. But I see node.js is often used in contexts where there is no real sharing of code between the web part and the server part.
Hmm, the articles today now seem to suggest that it is at the factory. Which does, possibly, cause a different slant - I'm not sure if it is just the wording or...

I can't find the article previously that indicated this was an overall rate. So you might be right.

Although it's worth considering that this "25" could be 25 of the 70 average and so the actual rate is no higher - the major problem, I guess, is that we only have the stats people want us to know...
A few years ago I wanted to write a similar chat bot, which would answer questions of my mom in a IM conversation. It wouldn't be difficult at all, since she was asking always the same: did you eat something today? Do you feel good? How was your day? Etc.

But then I couldn't reconcile such solution with my conscience.
No, because the end user can't modify and run the software, even with the source code, because Apple's locked-in hardware won't let him.
People who commit suicide are generally irrational, therefore this is absolutely stupid. How about improving conditions for workers and making them feel like if something goes wrong that their life is not over.
Home Appliance Energy Use Visualization
Theory of the Second Best
I must be have been wrong then, my apologies.

How are you using to arrive at that conclusion though? When I do a A/B testing I (or rather, the software I use) use the chi-squared test to give a confidence value expressed as a percentage. When I get over 95% I know I have statistical significance and I end the test. At that point I also have an "improved by" number but I would have to collect much more data for that to be statistically significant as far as I understand.
IMHO #11 could be added as "unindented code". I was going to a guy's code yesterday and I felt very _irritated_ to read it, that i ended up spending 15min indenting it myself. I'm sure a lot of people don't like unindented code.

and I totally agree with #1, it's very true for me. And especially when I've used some framework and the framework has been updated to a newer version with lots of goodies, i feel lazy to maintain code that been written in older version of the framework. (and even more lazier to update it to the new framework if it requires lots of changes). I just leave it working fine in it's current state. Seems like thats what results in legacy software. So I now follow my new rule-- working on beta versions of frameworks so that i can leave it unmaintained for longer time and spend the time on new ideas.
Off-topic: I was intrigued by the 'ATS' in the shootout (don't remember it being there a couple of years ago).

I had followed the link posted by rodion_89 (2008 blog), into http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/#acceptable (nice opening and closing) and http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/performance.php?test=b... - where 'ATS' sits at #3 (behind C and C++, edging out Java6).

The code (e.g. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test=binar... ) does not look too ugly, but apparently it may be twice as verbose as C++ ( http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/ats.php ).

So, on to http://www.ats-lang.org/ :

ATS is a programming language with a highly expressive type system rooted in the framework Applied Type System. In particular, both dependent types and linear types are available in ATS. The current implementation of ATS (ATS/Anairiats) is written in ATS itself. It can be as efficient as C/C++ (see The Computer Language Benchmarks Game for concrete evidence) and supports a variety of programming paradigms that include:

- Functional programming. [...]

- Imperative programming. [...]

- Concurrent programming. [...]

- Modular programming. [...]
How I was finally convinced to quit Facebook
Continuous Development as a reality: Q&A with kaChing
Mixture of "stats people want us to know" and "stats you can get" I think-- in China, as in lots of countries, getting accurate statistics on home suicides is tough, because of the stigma attached to it and relative ease of reporting it as something else.
Providing the source code is one requirement of the GPL. Section 6 forbids imposing other restrictions, which the App Store license does.
Funny that #10, 'Comments that explain the “how” but not the “why”', quotes from an article by Jeff Atwood to show how the comment should have been written. But in the original article, Jeff actually says that that commenting style is also not as good as refactoring the code:

"That must be what I was getting at, right? Some sort of pleasant, middle-of-the-road compromise between the two polar extremes of no comments whatsoever and carefully formatted epic poems every second line of code?

Not exactly. Rather than add a comment, I'd refactor to this:

private double SquareRootApproximation(n) {
r = n / 2;
while ( abs( r - (n/r) ) > t ) {
r = 0.5 * ( r + (n/r) );
}
return r;
}
System.out.println( "r = " + SquareRootApproximation(r) ); "
Here's another link with some more info(in English) and the complaint as a pdf(in Norwegian)

http://forbrukerportalen.no/Artikler/2010/Facebook_and_Zynga...
I'm honestly thinking of starting to use it as Richard Stallman would. Voted for HNsite, which I also check on my phone.
Well if a similar complaint and/or resulting investigation brought Apple to back down, there must be some resources behind it.
I think that the gain in productivity from the search service already has a higher economic impact than advertising.
Two reasons why I think e-mail sucks at group conversation --- not just web-based e-mail, not just live group conversation:

1. You can't edit past e-mails. This means that if you change the date or venue of your party, I have to discard the original e-mail and preserve the new one instead.

Whereas if it's a Facebook event, you update the details, I get notified about the change automatically, and the original, now incorrect details don't exist anywhere any more; I can't refer to them by mistake.

2. Most e-mail clients suck. Most of my friends are not IT geeks, so most of my friends use an e-mail client that sucks. Which means many of my friends use an e-mail client that doesn't have decent threading support, or makes it too easy to reply-to-sender when they meant reply-to-all, or doesn't properly elide quoted text, or etc.

Which means most of my friends suck at group e-mail conversation. And therefore it sucks for them and me.

I realise that group social e-mail conversations work for you, but they don't work for me.
They did mention other clients:

The Taiwanese technology giant, which also boasts Dell and Hewlett-Packard among its clients...

But I agree with you. They're using Apple's high profile to make the news here, it seems. So much more than iPhones (or even Dell's) are made by Foxconn.

Still, it's hard to fault them for trying to bring attention to the situation in any way possible.
I did not sign up to a cult

If you apply for, and receive, Timbuktan citizenship and the next year they pass a law you don't like, you, as one of their citizens, are subject to that law. You signed up for it.

If you released code under the GPL: yes you did sign up for this 'cult'.
who could I distribute the app to?

Anyone with a jailbroken phone, right?
Abraham Lincoln said... "That some achieve great success (...)"
Ugh. Pass. We use it at work. It's a very frustrating piece of software. I'd actually prefer to use Bugzilla, for all its warts. Jira's interface is a pain to use. Changing anything about the bug involves loading a new page, and then saving to get back to the original page. Even worse, the edit page has a completely different layout from the view page, so you have to figure out where everything is twice.

Conflict resolution is nonexistent:

1. Users A and B click to edit a bug at the same time.
2. User A changes the assignee and clicks save.
3. User B changes the priority and clicks save.
4. User A refreshes the bug page to find that his assignee change has been reverted.

This is pretty basic, people.

The regular search page is a little odd. If you have multiple 'projects', and click on one to filter by project, a little DHTML bit pops out that asks you to reload the page to make sure all the other fields are up to date. Ajax, anyone?

The hierarchy is a bit overdone: Projects, then Components, then Component Modules, then Component Sub Modules. And you can't set default assignees for CMs or CSMs, so they're really pretty useless, aside from wasting people's time trying to figure out another level of granularity as to where to file the bug. To be fair, they're optional, but...

On the plus side, I really like the advanced search query language: basically just a bunch of boolean and comparison operators, with decent autocomplete functionality. Quite powerful, and not at all hard to use.
How about this logic: Consenting adults should be free to offer and enter into any contract that does violate anyone's freedom's, rights etc.
I've found "get started now" to be quite effective. One small test showed an increase of conversions from 12/126 to 29/127, so up 140% (the loser there was "Create your free account now", the winner was "get started now").

I'm running a test right now, with "try it for free" currently at 262 out of 792 clicking through, and "get started now" at 269/778 (so up 4.5%). It's not yet conclusive, but at no point in the test has "try it for free" outpaced "get started now".

If my results ever show themselves to be "conclusive", I'll post about them at abtests.com. I'd encourage you to try "get started now", though, to see what you find.
I'm not an expert in statistics, but I'm careful about what I do, and I know the limitations of my knowledge.

However ...

I believe it is flawed methodolgy to run a test until you get a significant result. I'm pretty sure I read something lunk to from HN that discussed this at some length. It's possible - if you simply run your test until you get significance and then stop early - that you will get significance because of random fluctuations in the middle of your trial and stop early when you shouldn't.

As I recall, you should decide on the length of your trial at the beginning, then run your stats at the end.

I'll try to find the article in question, but my Google-Fu is pretty poor today for some reason.

EDIT: It's here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277004
Unfortunately, they've been the "next big thing" for a number of years now. Apparently there are yield and longevity issues to be solved before mass production of large OLED displays. But yes, extremely cool.
Does anyone know where to find tutorials like these, but for drawing less complex objects in 3-D like the ones that we can see in MIT multi-variable calculus courses?