skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
culturally speaking, are you primarily a business person or primarily an Engineer?

In Engineering that sort of self-deprecation is considered polite. False humility is /essential/ for Engineering types to get along without our massive egos causing unproductive fights. You quite often see "But I might be wrong" at the end or "Perhaps" at the beginning of very detailed, very correct mailing lists... it's just there to soften the "You are wrong" blow.

Of course, this is quite different from the business world, where people seem to select for massive egos.

It's interesting, really, how my world has changed as I've learned to fake confidence as well as I can fake humility.

(of course, in both cases, I think everyone knows you are faking it, and nobody cares. It's sort of like wearing culturally appropriate clothing. investment bankers don't show up in T shirts, and coders don't show up in suits.)

Really, this is one of the things I find most interesting about the hacker news crowd... so many are halfway between the worlds of Engineering and Business that you see these two diametrically opposed cultures mixing, sometimes producing something that is more useful than either one by itself.
Bloated? No.

Needs some optimizations? Sure.
Correct, you can measure heritability without any genetic information whatsoever. Because of this we can know that, say, 60% of Vit D variability is heritable.

I hadn't seen a GWAS on Vitamin D levels before you asked your question, but I pubmedded it and it turns out that a small one came out this month: http://hmg.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/19/13/2739?vi...

In short, 4 base pairs (out of 3 billion) account for 2.8% of the population variance of circulating Vitamin D. With such a small # of people, it's not surprising that few independent SNPs hit the genome-wide significance level, but it's still pretty impressive that the 4 SNPs that they found can account for so much of the variance. (In other words, it looks like they identified the source of ~5% of the genetic variance, or 2.8% of the total variance.)

This looks much like the lipids story: early GWASs give you a handful of loci with influence, and later GWASs with may more participants will give you a much richer set of loci that collectively explain 20-30% of the variance. And keep in mind that these are just the common SNPs.
effectively stakes your claim to a large majority of the repercussions

So what are you saying, that if Wikileaks got access to the data of the Witness Protection Programme in the US it should publicize that too? Because all government coverups are bad?
Kier Darby (ex-vB developer) and co release XenForo forum software
Usually multitasking 2-3 major development items at work in a given week. 2 personal projects.
Finding friends on the internet is going to become socially acceptable very soon. NicoNaco.com - list your values and get match-ups (e.g, startups, drinking, bowling, politics, dubstep...) I have found that my only true friendships are based around shared values.
User review:

I've used PulseApp now since maybe shortly after it ended beta and went public and it's been a TREMENDOUS help. It's less of an accounting tool per se and more of a forecasting tool. It's helped me greatly when I wanted to save money for vacations and needed a very quick way to plug in all of my income and expenses and see where I would be in three months.

And it's just good for general budgeting, especially since they recently added a feature to add recurring items, and set their frequency rates. Before you had to enter each income and expense manually as they happened.

I refer it to everyone.
The time is ripe for the next "big" language + framework to come on the scene. I predict it will be a compiled language with rapid compilation and advanced debugging/runtime monkeypatching, such that most of the advantages of dynamic languages will be subsumed. It will also support some advanced way to handle concurrency.
I disagree on that prediction.

There were a load of online auction sites, then eBay won. You could wrongly say that people moved from auction site to auction site, but that wasn't the case.

Maybe there will be the next facebook, the next ebay, the next amazon, but I'm skeptical.
Dave McClure's Investment Thesis
Actually, from the two people I know who actually owned a Zune (and from Jerry Holkins: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/5/15/), Microsoft did in fact 'get' the iPod, and outdid it in a lot of ways.

Microsoft just has shitty marketing. But maybe that's what you meant.
This. I would add that meetup.com is a fairly decent avenue for making friends. At a minimum, folks you meet will have a common interest, and you'll be less likely to face the problem above (though let's face it, any social activity can manifest this problem.) There are also generalized meetup groups more oriented towards networking or simply making friends, which adequately fill this niche, IMHO.
I will never tire of hearing pg's analogies and metaphors. I'm considering compiling them for a website.
You're not by any chance employed by KPN are you ?
How to raise money with no lead
Is Facebook Currency in Apps Just the First Step?
Yes the OP comments throughout contain a lot of historical inaccuracies about Parrot & Rakudo.

The ParrotVM team did publish a precise roadmap a few years back and I believe the optimization wasn't due to circa version 3 or 4? (ParrotVM is currently at 2.6).

NB. Unfortunately I can't find the original roadmap I'm referring to at moment because it may not have made the Rakudo move from svn to git?
Add inferred typing and you've got F# :-)
The iPad IS a computer.

It is at the time when the definition of a word changes that the greatest oppertunities present themselves.

There is no iPad market, there is no tablet market - there is a computer market. This is what MS is up against...

[Sent from my iPod touch]
To add to the list, Notepad++ (hold down alt and click+drag, I believe) does this, as does Eclipse (although it's annoying to enable in Eclipse (shift+alt+a to toggle it on, then block select, then toggle it off). It also only seems to work on some file types (e.g. .java, but not .xml) in Eclipse.
First of all, lol at the drum visual.

It's amazing how much I can learn about my own craft by critiquing others. I feel like you have wayyyy too much text on your site

That being said, I think your section headings captured the information I needed anyway, so I signed up. Your distance filtering doesn't work. It's sorted alphabetically, not numerically.
ActiveX! (If it can hijack a computer, it can surely take a screenshot)
“You Should Be Urinating Right Now” (A Real-Time Web Server)
How copyright protects fictional characters in new media (legal technical)
I was under the impression that most of the 'me too' auction sites came /after/ ebay showed how it was done, then they died, because they were trying to beat ebay by being like ebay.
Except it does not handle graphics well.

While researching a subject, I take notes intertwined with graphs and diagrams. Can emacs handle that type of data?
This reminds me of a lot of the "discussion" surrounding the Mozilla project back in the pre 1.0 days.

Non Project Member makes a decent point about performance, but does so in an incredibly presumptuous, entitled, non-helpful way.

Project Members make a lot noise and had waves about pre-production, non-optimized versions, etc., but never come out and say "Yes, version n+1 of our project will most likely use more ram and run slower on the same hardware as version N of our project"
OkCupid gives 3 ratings: a Match percentage, a Friends percentage, and an Enemy percentage. Isn't the op's idea already rolled into this?
Why do you think "compiled" is the opposite of "dynamic"?
I've never been a real Perl hacker, more of an admirer from afar. I mention that because I'm pretty close to the ideal "objective observer" that chromatic mentions.

dskoll certainly has valid concerns, but he turns into a real asshole as the thread continues:

I believe the improvements in speed and memory required to make Perl 6 competitive with Perl 5 are unprecedented in the history of computer science.

This is a ridiculous statement, of course things have been optimized by 95% before. Given the specific explanations given by the devs about the wholly unoptimized state of the project along with planned optimizations, it seems well within the realm of possibility.

I'm not sure what the chip on this guys shoulder is, but it sounds like he just wants perl5. He gives no consideration for the innovation and creativity behind perl6. If he doesn't give a shit about all the advanced features then stick with perl5 for god's sake, it's well proven and it's not going anywhere. But to argue ad nauseam about the impossibility of an "adequate" optimization from a totally ignorant position is pretty offensive.
Yeah, I think this is a little too complicated. Only people who are looking for friends would be on the site and I think if you supplied them with a list of people who have similar interests, are around the same age and describe themselves similarly, then people should be able to find friends. Of course, you would need to have a huge userbase.
yes, unfortunately the university of bayreuth has some connection troubles right now.

it work from time to time
Yeah, we've heard this from day 1. What was interesting to me was to hear PG say that even they underestimated how important the people are compared to the initial idea. Compared to the first batches he said the application form now has a lot more questions about the people, and a lot fewer about what they plan to do.
>I think people just become friends who get along with each other and don't look for friendship actively

I think this is right. So the question is can you sift out attributes that identify compatible partners? Or is it more biochemical?
s/computer/desktop computer/g
1) I don't think that argument has much weight. Considering how little healthy people think about death, and how the incredible extension of the average lifespan didn't seem to have catastrophic effects like that, I doubt we'd turn into some kind of sci-fi distopia where everybody doesn't do anything. You live one day at a time, and if you are healthy and like your life today, you'll want to live tomorrow. And so on. Doesn't matter if it's for 40 years, 80 years, or 120 years. Most people who say they want to die are frail, sick and suffering, and what they want is not death per se, but for the pain to stop. You don't see many healthy 20-30 years old wish for death unless they suffer from severe depression. The cliché about "death gives meaning to life" is just rationalization, trying to convince ourselves that something we think is inevitable is actually a good thing. But if there was no death from the diseases of aging, we certainly wouldn't invent it or miss it, just like we wouldn't invent smallpox or malaria.

2) I'm calling it the engineering approach because that's what it is (http://sens.org/sens-research/what-is-sens/engineering-solut...) as opposed to the gerontology approach or the geriatry approach. It is about simply repairing damage, the same way you maintain a vintage car or an old house for 10x longer than it was designed to last without necessarily having to understand exactly how that damage is created (by metabolism or physical and chemical reactions, etc), and without having to know how to cure all diseases (you repair damage before it becomes a pathology).

If you want to learn more about the biology and details of the proposals I'm talking about, check out the links I posted in other comments here. They have detailed plans for the 7 types of damages that accumulate from the operation of metabolism. Otherwise, your criticisms aren't specific, you are just attacking a vague idea of what you think this is about.
One thing that surprised me after using an iPad for a while is that the web is starting to feel old. I now see bloated web pages everywhere. Unnecessary widgets, links, icons, useless side columns, actual content making up a quarter of the screen. Information overload. I am now regularly imagining how a site i visit would be better as an iPad app. Applications like Flipboard have created new expectations how content could be consumed.
That would be nice huh? I am still looking.
Yes I don't know if the OP is being deliberately unaware just to cause a fuss but he/she doesn't seem to understand the difference between Parrot (VM), Rakudo (Perl6 implementation on Parrot) & Perl6 (the spec).
100 million Facebook users (download torrent)
hah. I actually think Google is in a similar place. they aren't the first search engine, and I think their strongest claim on being the last isn't so much that they have some kind of moat, it's just that they've hired four out of five people who might compete with them.

I actually think the search engine market has the opposite of a network effect barrier to entry. If you made a search engine that was half of google's 'native effectiveness' (by which I mean googles effectiveness before the spammers start mucking it up) assuming your search algorithm is different enough that it's not gamed in the same way as google's, you will have a search engine that is more effective than google until it becomes worth the spammer's time to mess you up.

I think google's talent pool is interesting, though. they have a whole lot of really good people, and they are probably exploiting that talent better than any other company of similar size. It really seems like they should own more markets than they do.

I think Google's biggest weakness on that front is that they have nearly all their employees thinking that google is both competent and altruistic. I don't see the same internal dissent with my friends who work at google as I saw when I worked at Yahoo. At Yahoo, we'd point out what the company was doing wrong. At google, the employees seem to think their masters know best.

(this aside, the essential problem with search engines is that the advertising business model creates a conflict of interest; if the search results are that much better than the search ads, nobody will click on the ads. On the other hand, nobody has come up with another business model for 'generalized search')
What? Facebook isn't working for you?

All you can find are "friends" there.
Gamification for Maximizing Employee Engagement (video)
> Yes, a criticism of liberals, the media, and the NAACP, that hinges on doctoring a video to make an innocent woman look like a racist.

Criticism of the media hinges on the fact that they cover some things (e.g. white kids beating up a black kid) extremely intensely, but ignores cases where the reverse happens.
Meet Gatsby does this with foursquare (http://meetgatsby.com/)
Could you give examples of useful closures (actually multi-line lambda) ? I am relatively proeficient in python, and am learning javascript, and I really don't like how non trivial anonymous functions are pervasive in the later. I understand it may just be habit, though....

OTOH, one nice aspect in say ruby is the combo "real" anonymous functions + the syntax f a equivalent of f(a), which is what makes DSL possible in ruby (and impractical in python in general). I think it comes at a price in readability, though.
looking for other people to pursue shared interests would be one of the main purposes behind "a site for making friends" - at a glance Meetup looks very geared towards structured group activity and less towards "hey judging by your profile/blog we have very similar tastes; fancy a drink?" ad-hoc approaches.

The other completely "non-creepy" case where someone might want to use the site is when they've just arrived in a new city/country (though again there are plenty of expat-oriented forums and social networks) or people that were looking for transitory conversation with likeminded people whilst passing through (essentially couch-surfing without the couch).

yes, you're also going to get the "people who aren't very good at making friends" and the "people that like to exploit the vulnerable", but they haunt the dating sites too.
I have also feel that the web has become bloated and overloaded. I don't see what this has to do with the iPad. What I would like to see is a revival of the web with structural markup, fluid layouts and a minimum of distractions.

Is there anything about what you need to do which can only be done on an iPad? Such a revival is easier on a new platform where you don't know what to expect yet. However, I don't see anything which would prevent someone bold enough from cleaning up their part of the web.
How do I pass urine drug test?
chromatic says a factor of 2.0 is a worthwhile target (http://lwn.net/Articles/398051/). I think that's the best you'll get since good developers—especially perl6 developers—generally are copiously optimistic.
Brain On a Chip
You're kidding, right? The designs are both similarly generic (not a bad thing). How could you possibly attribute a design like this to any one site?
I've actually moved away from using electronic transations exclusively to using them only for receiving my pay, paying bills, and online shopping. Every pay, I withdraw the cash I've allocated for various things (food, fun, photography, gas, etc.) and put it in labeled envelopes. It keeps me much more honest. When the envelope is empty, I just don't do that thing anymore.
Doesn't Loopt do this?
Rather, premature optimization is the root of nearly all evil. Without it, you apparently get trolled.
How is this company offering free shipping(US) on purchases 
I have been looking into making something for teens. Mostly novelty products that satisfy a niche, and though it is not really tech related, I was wondering whether anyone could provide insights into this ? Are they just mailing these out with normal postage stamps?
Proposed email features: snooze, re-ping, auto-expire
> Microsoft did in fact 'get' the iPod, and outdid it in a lot of ways.

Microsoft was over 5 years (1848 days) later than Apple to "get" what an MP3 player was. During that five years, Microsoft had a total R&D budget of over $25 billion, or $13,698,630/calendar day.

Of course we don't know how much of that budget was allocated for the Zune, but one could easily imagine it being in the hundreds of millions.

You say they got the MP3 player, I say if you throw enough money at a problem, eventually, no matter how hard you try to ignore it, the solution will present itself. And in this case, it was simply to copy their competitors.

edit: typo
And that's just the simple stuff. Now imagine that you will silence a lot of the binary code, only running small parts of it. But you may not know which parts. I think this is one of the big things to come out of the human genome project: exactly how little is there. And since there is so little code to work with, there is a bigger need for epigenetic regulation and alternative splicing.
This is much more useful and less frivolous than you'd probably think at first glance. Think about it, emotion underlies almost every other medium that we use to communicate, emotions are the most primitive indicators of how a person feels and each and every other medium that we've used to express ourselves in has a way of 'pushing' those emotional buttons somehow.

To know which emotional buttons are attached to which part of a piece of writing, a movie, a piece of music and so on can help a lot in both selecting things to fit or counter a mood and it can help in analysing content in an automated way (even if the annotation has to be done by hand).
I'd love to get any thoughts from you all before publishing this.
No, but the recent spate of apps that take user experience when accessing third party content very seriously shows how utterly painful most of the normal web is. I think with first-party content providers it's also that if they're getting paid, they at the very least cut the ads down from eye-gouge to simply irritating, which helps as well.

I think maybe the point is that while there's nothing technically special about the platform, at the high end its developers are in a league of their own when it comes to UI. This is of course a distilled version of the entire Apple developer culture, which has always taken this stuff more seriously than Windows and certainly *nix.
Is the culture that could produce those precious things long gone?
Facebook Said to Put Off IPO Until 2012 to Get Growth
This is crazy talk. Microsoft needs a Windows compatible OS so they can leverage the millions of windows applications already written. To start from scratch would give up one of their main advantages. Best to stick with Windows, and focus on optimizing Windows 8 and Office 2012 for the tablet form factor. I love my iPad but I'd be willing to take a half-step back to a Windows tablet if it meant I could run Microsoft Office and other applications I need for my workflow.

I think MS Office is much better positioned for tablets than most people realize. Ribbon strips provide friendly finger-sized buttons that are perfectly sized for tablets. If they can add media center and some sort of X-Box gaming they'll have a killer device. Granted, Apple will still own the "consumption device" market but there is a big need for "business tablets".
It'd just mean using the matcher on people you wouldn't romantically pursue. I think there's too much of a stigma of okc being a dating site, so that people think using it as a friend finder would be weird.
Yep, entirely made up by designers, except for the bit about it already existing: "In 2009 the first pilot units have been installed, while BBVA prepares
to roll out the ATM across its Spanish branches."
I found this article devoid of content - there is nothing to support the headline, beyond hand-waving.
Calacanis wants to hire a top 25 writer in the techbusiness world
Features of Writing a Sociology Term Paper
There is a difference between a general term paper and a sociology term paper. Research involves data collection, analysis of data and finding significance of statistical values of the parameters. In this article you can learn how to write the sociology term paper.
I'm the cofounder of SubMate ( http://Www.submate.com ) and we want to introduce you cool new people in your areas based on your commute. For the moment , the website is pretty new but we plan to improve that algorithm quickly to allow you to make new friends !
> Shuttleworth comes from South Africa, so he lived in a place where nationalism/tribalism is rampant.

Especially black nationalism (such as is practiced by the next president [Malema](http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?art_id=vn20100310041938251C30...) ) is extremely rampant.

The problem in South Africa is that it is a very diverse country with people of differing economic development, languages and cultures.

The idea of apartheid was that each ethnic/cultural group could have their own state (let’s not talk about the implementation but the ideology). That way each group can have self-determination.

Unfortunately this did not work. One reason for this was the industrialisation of South Africa in 60ies and 70ies. Many black people moved out of their traditional places of birth to major cities, etc...

The other idea is a very powerful central government based on majority vote. This is what is implemented now. This system (like Apartheid) doesn’t work. Each election is a census and the main aim of government is to disadvantage one group of people to benefit its majority support (while making white people universal scape goats for all ills).

None of these systems are working. The new system is just as broken as the Apartheid system that liberals in the west complained about.

---

A system that could have worked was a third system: A co-social society. Each group can have their own areas in a society where they can express themselves (e.g. own sports, universities & schools in their language, etc…). There can be constitutional guarantees that a groups rights would not be infringed upon, etc…

Unfortunately this did not happen.
Protecting Your Ownership of Employee-Generated Intellectual Property