skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Affirmative action and the problems discovered by this study don't matter much for MIT. MIT almost certainly wasn't part of the study, doesn't discriminate against Asians, recruits white working class men from the Midwest when they're underrepresented (and takes into account people's lack of opportunities in general). It probably doesn't discriminate against Christians, those who were in JROTC or farming organizations (I may have too little data to be sure about these categories).

MIT's big advantages have to stem from it being a less intense version of CalTech WRT math and physics. It simply can't afford to admit anyone who can't do the work (and there's a lot of self-selection in the applicant pool), doesn't do much with legacies (once again, they have to be able to do the work) and doesn't take many students from "fancy prep schools". So it's got lots of room for these students who are heavily discriminated against by the other elite schools in the nation.

And for science, at least, CalTech and MIT really have to make a big difference for those students. Everything in those fields depends on professor recommendations (getting into a good grad school and what you do after getting your Ph.D. and postdoc(s)). No matter how good you are, if your recommendations are from professors the targets have never heard of, you're ... not in a good posture.
He's clearly way out of his league, but then, has managed to pull it off... so maybe not.

I see him as extremely sleazy - just the type of person who I hate to see become successful.

Facebook is the prime example of a company that needs a real CEO, with actual business experience and ethics. Not one of those MBA types who is actually a complete idiot, though. I guess it would be very hard to find the right person.
I don't find it strange. $10 accounts won't have 1/10th the support burden as $149 accounts. Setting a high minimum pricing bar for customers vastly improves the support a company can provide.

$150/mo isn't that much, really, I doubt many of their customers require a face to face meeting. I suspect many never even call. I wouldn't.
It can be slow on FF3.6, fairly fast on Chrome.
I agree with all your points but this one:

The memory management model for the iOS platform is not GC, and it's not manual management. Frankly I found manual management of memory simpler than retain/release. And the autorelease pool? That's just wrong.

retain/release + autorelease pools solve the ownership problem inherent in manual memory management system. You can return a heap allocated object from your function/method and neither you nor the caller have to be concerned about how it will be cleaned up.

Not sure what's wrong with that solution -- I've even implemented/used an equivalent implementation for pure C code.
> little literary, musical, or otherwise artistic culture

I think one of the problems is that you've forsaken the people who like to "run around naked and high in the desert"; all the creative types I know love Burning Man. Sure, you're not going to find the tea & crumpets type of art scene in SF, but there's definitely plenty of passionately creative people. There's also a tendency amongst tech people to just socialize with tech people, but I don't really get a kick out of it. You should definitely branch out to non-tech social circles and get out of the Rails/Django/Clojure echo chamber.

From your description of the playa it sounds like you've never been out there... you should really try it. No, it's not all "naked and high" people, btw.
"Metaphorically, foursquare rose from the ashes of Dodgeball."

I'm not reading your point, do you consider foursquare a success for Google?
Cindy here - if you were a beta user or ever asked a KISSmetrics question, you probably talked to me.

We at KISSmetrics did not come to our pricing decision lightly. After over 6 months in beta, we looked at the data and identified our happiest, most engaged customers - the people who were asking questions, making suggestions, and generally getting the most value out of the product, and priced it in accordance with the amount of value they were getting.

We did have some very dedicated early-stage startup customers in our beta, and we have worked with them to make sure they can continue to use us. (It's amazing what asking nicely will get you!) We will be publicly announcing startup programs in the future, but we wanted to focus on our existing beta customers first - the product wouldn't be here without them.

(We also have no problem with it if several startups want to split a KISSmetrics account - 1MM events could easily support a dozen early-stage startups.)

Feel free to email, ask questions, rant - calvarez at kissmetrics.com
Plus the irony that Copyleft relies on strong copyright to protect the freedoms they argue for. It is about as anti-pirate as you can get.
hah http://jelly.jonathan-geiger.com/docs/api/Jelly_Field_Behavi... - I wanted to see what his approach was in regards to defining custom types etc.
Does anyone know how much the first electric car GM put out cost to build?
Whoa, this article is some biased shit. I thought the washington times was a serious newspaper (european here).
This is a very strange article. First, I'm not sure why the author keeps talking about whether (or not) "Christian women" (sic) are immune. Second, it's filled with passages like this:

"If a man or woman ejaculates to pornography on a regular basis they will actually attach to sex as object relationships as opposed to intimate relationships," Mr. Weiss said. "So they will actually hunger for object relationships, creating over time what we call intimacy anorexia."

Sex, in its ideal sense, is relational, and object sex does not fulfill the relational aspect of that, said Mr. Weiss. A person doesn't get that full satiation, but gets a different kind of buzz with object sex because it's a different kind of sex.

It reads like someone trying to sound scientific while making up whatever he or she likes.
It is through Counterclockwise: http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/clojure/Getting_Started_wi...
As someone who does a ton of Objective-C, I challenge the notion that namespaces are even remotely necessary. I've also done development in nearly everything under the sun, in nearly every "popular" language under the sun, which challenges your other assumption that anyone who thinks Objective-C is good hasn't spent time outside of C/C++/Objective-C.

I'm guessing you've never written a Windows app with C++ and MFC. Or have done any hardcore UI development in C# or Java - both languages that are easily way more verbose - and require way more boilerplate - than Obj-C.

My assumption is that you simply don't grok it, that you haven't learned how to utilize dynamic dispatch, KVO, etc. to greatly simplify and streamline your application designs. Or you are one of those script kids that takes all the low level shit for granted. This isn't python. This isn't ruby. This isn't even smalltalk. It's a high level layer on top of a low level language. You don't get that kind of performance without some sacrifice, but rest assured that sacrifice is significantly less than C/C++ while maintaining similar or the same performance.
The Java problem is not that JVM is itself slow, but that Java is so inconvenient to use, that people use tons of stacks of libraries to accomplish even simplest things (think dependency injection) that JVM becomes bloated by loading and calling all these libraries, and in effect is slow.

I've seen most ridiculous stacktraces only in Java.
> Is there a system in the US for looking after mentally unstable people? eg would they be put into care if they don't have medical insurance?

SF, like most large US cities, has lots of unused shelter and facilities. However, they're voluntary and many people won't volunteer.
Wow, if you visit the gallery without Javascript enabled of Flash enabled you get a simple single page with all the content. Time to thank the webmasters.
Let's say we are bound by I/O, wouldn't we reap more benefits by using lower level languages in the event that I/O boundaries improve?

There are unlimited number of potential future requirements that a program might have to meet. You should only code for these if you have a concrete basis for believing these will become real at some point.

If there's a serious chance your sedan will do stock car racing, then you outfit it accordingly. Otherwise, that super-muffler's just an unnecessary expense and something more to break.

Edit: You'll notice that in average car, every part has about the same quality, power and durability. In a sense, engineering is actually about achieving the least cost and the largest number of bottle necks, since any unneeded quality is wasted time and money.
The worst part is Apple forces you to use Objective-C on the iPhone even if better options exist. I created a Lua/Cocoa bridge http://probablyinteractive.com/2009/10/18/Setting-up-iPhone-... that works wonderfully. It considerably cuts down the amount of code I need to write, but Apple forbids me from using it on the iPhone.
That's exactly what I did. The question is, how do I prevent people who have no more valid tasks available from seeing or accepting HITs? I can lock them out in my own logic, but their Amazon records will show that they abandoned a task — and it wasn't actually their fault.
Ask HN: Would you accept to work with a lower salary in a startup?
If you had to choose between working in a startup with a lower salary (but better condition such as flexibility, challenges, etc.) or in a huge company, what would you choose?

In this post, I kind of act like working in a big company wasn't challenging or flexible. It might not be true for all cases, but it is for the decision I need to take.

Let's say it's about 15k-20k lower.
How to Cluster PPC Phrases Into Related AdGroups (Perl)
I think the price seems high. It is about 5 times the MPEG-LA fees to license the patents they have implemented.

Still, it is only a dollar, so for expensive software it isn't a big deal.
Objective-C's retain/releasing is only trivial if you're doing fairly simple stuff. Ever create a circular reference with objects? Ugh...
The discussion for another article on the front page discusses why, even today, many developers prefer C-family languages over Java for developing user interfaces, because of unpredictable delays in responsiveness with garbage controlled languages.

In that context, Objective C is the closest you will find to a best of both worlds language for responsive user interfaces. Being a strict superset of C, you can control the performance characteristics of your application to your hearts content. With SmallTalk style message passing, you can implement highly dynamic object oriented designs.

The warts that come along with this are the places where C still pokes through when you just want to work in a high level object oriented context and things like header files and static variables rear their ugly heads.
Ask HN: Which CRM are you using?
We're growing our customer base and are increasing the amount of incoming leads that we can't deal with it by ourselves without the help of some technology.
So we're hoping you can provide us with some info:

1) Which CRM are you using?
2) Why did you choose it?
3) Any problems you are having with it?

We are a SaaS company that sells one product in a 3-tiered pricing strategy. We don't have a sales team at the moment, but will be building one out. Thanks!
http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/qa/qa2005/qa1405.html
ksplice.com are hardcore low-level hackers.
I assume they had all those (all really common) and the $200 was for the stuff like balloon and gas that aren't common and/or reusable.
He means that the hardware has changed. Micro-optimization these days mostly has to do with optimizing cache and memory I/O performance rather than reducing clock cycles as it was in the 90s.
Sorry for the late reply. Yeah, this is for a more classic auction house.

It's called "open outcry", I think. The kind with an auctioneer, a room full of people with paddles and the object (or a photo of it) up front.

It's an English auction with a pre-defined bid ladder, and people can also pre-register with a maximum (hidden) bid, according to which the clerk will bid for them.

We are streaming their auctions online, and now they want people to be able to bid at home as well. Christie's (in England) already does this.

We think it might become a big deal when smaller auction houses in small towns can have this - today, the prices are not as high as they "should", since the market is local. If we can open it up, more people, and more knowledgeable people, will bid and more of the money will flow to the original seller (or so I think).

It's a fairly simple server on Tornado, which receives the bids etc and passes messages with long-polling, with a memcache backend for scaling.
Uh, there is no class Jelly_Field_Behaviour, instead you need to look at the various classes in Jelly_Field_Behaviour_* - I don't know where it linked you to that but it was obviously in error.

Here are the behaviours: http://github.com/jonathangeiger/kohana-jelly/tree/master/cl...
Cheering about doing better than malloc in 2010 is like being happy that you can outrace a Model T in the Indy 500.
C world has near-zero amount of mediocre and copy/paste programmers, so coders just know what they're doing.

[Citation needed]
can you post the code in a pastebin or is it proprietary/too involved w/ rest of the system to make sense in isolation?
You're probably thinking of the Washington Post. The Washington Times is run by the Unification Church.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times
This is exactly why I haven't taken a serious look at cappucino. Why impose that cruft on javascript?
you do realize that the majority of affiliate marketing isn't associated with spam, right?
"Your THAC0 for getting a raise is 13!"
Bearhug launches a warm, fuzzy approach to customer service
Like any other vararg function:

+ (NSString) stringWithFormat: (NSString *) format, ... {
NSString *string;
va_list ap;

/* Fetch the arguments */
va_start(ap, format);
// Could iterate over the arguments yourself here, or just use:
CFStringRef cfString = CFStringCreateWithFormatAndArguments(NULL, NULL, (CFStringRef)format, args);
string = [NSMakeCollectable(cfString) autorelease];
va_end(ap);

return string;
}
It's the same as in C. va_list, va_start, va_arg, va_end, etc.
Health Term Paper about Diabetes 
Prevalence of diabetes has increased due to the changes of lifestyles and there are many false beliefs on the disease and the treatment. This article briefly discusses the essential facts to be included in a term paper and how to write a term paper on diabetes.
If that's the case, it should be fixed by tweak in the ranking algorithm (rank informative sites higher than junk filled with hate), not by filtering out query suggestions.
"With this arguing, isn't it reasonable to assume that a project Foo written in C or C++ is faster than an equivalent written in Java simply because the author writing project Foo in C/C++ likely understands performance by choosing C/C++ in the first place? (I am not saying anything about the performance of a certain language implementation)"

The point is that if someone is able to choose C/C++ means that he's much more smarter than many existing Java programmers.

Sad but true.
No, the Washington Post is the sane DC newspaper. The Washington Times is owned by prophet/messiah Sun Myung Moon.
You may be thinking of the Washington Post or the New York Times. The Washington Times is well known for its right leaning coverage as well as its ownership (former?) by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
Obj-C does not have a similar performance profile to C/C++. Method dispatch is far slower than vtables. I've personally witnessed a huge Obj-C dev project fall apart when the team couldn't get performance up to snuff, even with dedicated help from Apple's UI team. The rewrite in C++ is progressing nicely.
> All government school teachers now have to "teach" to the test and can't waste time on projects like this.

Those tests are a fairly low bar, so competent teachers have no problem making sure that their kids pass and doing things like high altitude balloon flying.

The problem is the teachers who don't manage to get their kids over that low bar. They don't do high altitude balloon flying, but they will do pointless field trips and never get around to teaching kids to read.

Feel free to argue that high altitude balloon flying is more important than reading.
Apparently he talked about this just now at TED. http://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/18446826048
You can easily get unpredictable delays in responsiveness with reference counting too. How can you be sure releasing that reference isn't going to unleash the teardown of some huge data structure?
So I would say your point hinges on the difference between access (information) and understanding (knowledge). Both can be true that the access is available to all, but the ability to understand and use something depends on a non-trivial amount of time that noteveryone invests.
It's really not worse at all, both are just people doing what they evolved to do. Society frowns upon it more so many of them feel they have to be coy about it.
Haha, what did she say to kick you out?
I think we should probably all abstain from pretending that "dating" in entire cities or states can be summed up so easily, or that it's even a topic that can be distilled into such a short description of general traits. One bad experience certainly doesn't label them all.
This sounds like a terrible idea. I don't know why people decided to start deploying "PDF Applications" but it's a terrible idea. Go look at UPS's api documentation. It's a pdf "app" that requires you to install the most recent version of adobe reader to "run," and then it is slow and much harder to use than just a regular pdf or heaven forbid, html.

If anyone can tell me why anyone would ever use this technology over html, please, I'd love to hear it.
Is it? It's hugely unsupported by data. For instance, we've seen several articles over the last year telling us that new start-ups had reached an all-time high in the United States. That would seem to run counter to his point that the economy is faltering for 'the grinds'.

In addition we've also seen articles talking about increased MAA activity over the last several months. The same goes for general investment.

I'm not sure he knows what he's talking about. He certainly seemed to pluck a lot of assertions seemingly out of thin air.
Most studies indicate between 2 and 3 bird strikes per wind turbine, with far more birds being killed by cats, buildings, glass, cars, etc. Turbines are also below 500m, which typically is the floor for the path of migratory birds.

The noise for the wind turbine comes from mostly the gearbox, though there are efforts under way to reduce that, including completely eliminating the gearbox from the design.

But at this point, I think debating with you on point to point is a little... pointless, so I'll just leave this:

On earth, there are 5 sources of energy. Unlike in 1900, we now have a pretty damn good understanding of physics to know that this is all we get.

- We have energy coming from the Sun. There's a fair bit of it, and there might be enough to sustainably allow us to live. This gives us Wind / Solar power.
- We have energy coming from the moon. Tidal power does work in some places, but it's magnitudes smaller than the energy from the Sun.
- We have carbon fuels
- We have nuclear fuels
- We have geothermal energy... though efforts to tap that has produced only earthquakes so far.

That's all we get, unless someone goes out and develops cheap fusion power (highly unlikely situation - fusion reactions produce a lot of neutrons which are very difficult to deal with). I don't think there is any other "alternative energy sources".
The story is based on a 2003 Today's Christian Woman survey and a 2006 Internet Filter Review survey. Both of these have a somewhat vested interest in the result and I find it hard to believe the survey is not skewed!

I'm sure 9/10 women are exposed to some levels of pornography at times, newspapers in Britain have topless women on Page 3, adult(ish) humour websites sometimes have fairly risque ads, but personally I would find it very hard to believe that 1 out of every 6 women has a pornography addiction - I can't even believe men's addiction level is that high.
you should know that we added that this morning, it was built by the the guys at idiomag.com, as is the javascript. Once we realised that it could potentially confuse or "trick" people we removed it.
Why do we regulate driving more than some medical procedures?
Startup, assuming there were equity share and I believed in the team and product/service.
Standard constructor boilerplate is simpler:

if (self = [super init]) {
/* do the init */
}
return self;

Huge advantage of this is that you can implement object pools, singletons, etc. transparently.
and its also worth noting that scribd links are now html5! (yay!)
brew install clojure
What part of the country? (Did the locale have rent control?) In any of the cases, were you an overseas immigrant without a rental history?

What sort of references did they ask for, and did they verify income in any way?

Are you sure they didn't run a credit report anyway (even if there was no history of borrowing on it)?

In SF, they tend to ask for a copy of your credit report or enough info (social security number) to run one themselves.

And they ask more aggressively when the market is tight -- for example, in 2000, it was wise to bring a printed credit report to the first showing of a vacancy, so your application could be considered in the batch of 10+ people that were applying on the spot. It's not nearly so tight right now.
I was a bit shocked when he finally turns it sideways. In my mind, I was expecting something comparable to the iPad, but this is closer to laptop thickness.
Do you keep a master reference of topics and links? Or are you getting this list by searching. One of the above links has references by you to the bottom two as well...
Am I the only person in the world who happened to like header files? It's a nice tool (for me) to separate interface declaration from modules/classes, so it's much easier to navigate massive codebases without the help from IDE.

Seriously, how would you get a list of all functions in a module without an IDE? Besides, I put all my documentation into h-files as well, so other devs can pretty much see what I am doing without ever glancing at c-files.

With Ruby or Java you need some advanced folding support in your editor or a full-fledged IDE.
In all of the performance sensitive systems I've worked on, "flipping logging on" in production is simply not an option for, well, performance reasons (i.e. the reason that it wasn't turned on in the first place). If you're then going to test in a non-production environment, why not just run it through a profiler rather than trying to divine performance problems from log statements?
Konrad Hinsen is one of the main Clojure hackers. I wonder how he splits his affections between the two languages.
You should give it another look. It's come a long way-- for companies that have new/changing funnels (a LOT of web companies), this is a GREAT freakin' product.
I'm not entirely sure how they would avoid some of those words though. They are basically providing a way for every blogger to become an affiliate marketer without having to join the networks directly and they offer their own affiliate program. They could maybe come up with some generic descriptive terms, but enough people know what affiliate marketing is these days that it's probably fine given the target audience.