skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There wasn't no real conspiracy by men to dominate.

"There was no conspiracy" theory seems to have become as problematic today as all-embracing-conspiracy-theories.

In any social species, subgroups with common interests has colluded to different degrees. The collusion has been more effective when the group had dominant social power. Many societies have strictures which aim to keep women in-line and faithful to their husbands. It rather clear this is organized in the interests of the husbands (and not in the interests of the handsome vagabonds passing through...).

One can be certain there have been many overt and implicit conspiracies among groups of men as well as among groups of women, now and through-out history. Just not a single one since men and women are each members of other groups as well.
What does the importance of rounded rectangles have to do with how satisfying or well-told a story is?
This was inevitable. The Supreme Court held a long time ago that the government can surreptitiously put a transmitter on a car and track it. (Think 1970s cop movie.) GPS is a clear extension of that rule. The 9th Circuit was just following the precedent it is bound to.

I kinda think the Supreme Court got it wrong years ago and the 9th got it wrong today. But in the long run that won't matter. The erosion of privacy is inevitable. Technology is advancing too fast. The solution is not to put the government in the akward position of self-imposing constraints that regular people do not observe. (E.g. the government can't track you on Foursquare but your friends can.)

No, the solution isn't in access, it's in use. The Supreme Court needs to use the Fourth Amendment to limit the actual, in-court use of "private" information. It needs to ensure that that use is open to the press and the public. And most importantly, Congress needs to relax those laws that until now we have only accepted because they were difficult to track and so difficult to enforce broadly. (Read: traffic and drug laws.)
Real admins use the best tool for the job, anyway. "Polyglot persistence" is where it's at: You keep your sessions in Redis, you keep your news feed in MongoDB, and you keep your credit card details in Postgres.

This is a false dichotomy.
> All [s/]he said was "No"

Which I think is all that is warranted when you declare your opinion that the difference is due to XX vs. XY without backing that up. If you had phrased it differently, like "Hm, I wonder if this has something to do with XX vs. XY?", that would actually sound like a conversation-starter.
> Want a society with 20-hour work weeks? Cool. Go build one. Nobody is stopping you, and if it's wildly successful then others will very quickly copy it. This is a very easy thing. Actually from this angle I don't even see the point of the article.

In reality, there have been many societies with 20-hour workweeks (many hunter-gatherer societies) and many of them were wildly successful, as measured by the health and self-reported happiness of their members. But someone did in fact stop them.

If you try to set up a hunter-gatherer society with 20-hour workweeks in, say, Iowa, I guarantee you that someone will be stopping you in short order. There's plenty of grass seeds to gather and a certain amount of game to hunt, but you will inevitably come into land-use conflict with the other people nearby. Even if you are one of the tiny minority of people so rich as to be able to buy up a large chunk of central Iowa as a reserve for this purpose, you're likely to be prosecuted for permitting noxious weeds on your property, sued for allowing Roundup Ready soy to cross-pollinate onto your property, quite likely arrested for marrying your daughter off at 12, and perhaps committed to a mental institution.

(And then there's the difficulty of changing the culture of a group of people. Most utopian communities fail, because inventing a culture is difficult. People start with an existing culture and judge everything according to it. We don't even know what beliefs you'd need to adopt to live successfully as a hunter-gatherer, to say nothing of the knowledge.)

Wherever you go, you have to contend with the existing norms, laws, and resource allocations. You need a certain amount of natural resources to survive. The areas most richly endowed with natural resources are also richly endowed with groups of people who value their exclusive access to those resources and are willing to fight, or request others to fight, to preserve that exclusive access.

So, you know, it only takes a few hectares of most islands in Micronesia to support a human life, and collecting the coconuts, breadfruit, papaya, and so on is really pretty easy; you don't even need 20 hours a week. As a result, there are already people living off those hectares. If you try to "go build one" there, they will fight you, and the US government will ultimately back them up.
Mesmerising Animation of Asteroid Discovery From 1980 - 2010
Can't help but feel this is directed at the post. While I can definitely agree doing it for every single ORM call for maintenance purposes is sometimes overkill (some calls just are easy to refactor, or following a rule similar to "3-strikes you're out" keeps it sane), I find it hard to imagine another way to get code that is as easy to test and to mock. Any suggestion?

Then I think Groxx hit the nail on the head with his comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636322). The advice is mostly valid for large-scale projects, things you expect to stay forever, which is what I'm maintaining at the moment; Not for experimental or short-lived code (or whatever is logical on that spectrum).
Cold turkey is a damned hard way to give up caffeine. I find slowly dolling out powdered caffeinated drink mix to myself in water at smaller and smaller doses to work better.
And yet, there it is: http://www.facebookofsex.com/
Hey Facebook, Here Are Some Other Companies You Can Bully Or Sue
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_scene
Both of which are actually parts of Denmark, having some level of autonomy.
Anyone can go from nothing to prototype for a simple idea in 3 weeks. The trick is to have something worthwhile.

Is this worthwhile? We don't know because we only have the designer saying, "Everyone I showed it to was underwhelmed, but I'm sure businesses will want it."
The William is a new concept for an electric, touch screen stove-top
I couldn't agree more -- especially when the job is a more researchy role. Right now, I'm at my first "real job", a research internship during my PhD program, and the contrast between my productivity at school and here is shocking. The need to clock in and out and the desire to "look busy" all the time actually end up hurting my productivity, I think, much more than helping it. When my responsibility is creative thinking and new research, much of my productive time is spend doodling in a notebook or staring into space. While sitting and coding is important too, I don't feel like the normal metrics for the appearance of productivity apply.

So, paradoxically, I get paid for the time I sit in my office and begrudgingly hammer out code; the time I spend at home coming up with the important ideas to drive the research goes pro bono.

Maybe I'm just lazy, but I really think that sitting in a windowless office for eight or nine hours a day is not the way to encourage maximum output. Personally, I find myself thinking I'd be much more productive if I just "worked" a little less.
I hate rails. But one thing I like is that activerecord will build functions for you. e.g.:

User.find_by_email(email)

I've started writing these types of functions manually now and it makes EVERYTHING so much simpler.

I never thought I'd say it...but...thank you rails.
Ask HN: What do you use for Javascript, CSS, and image dependency management?
Past a certain point of complexity, it becomes desirable to have a framework to manage all the various JS, CSS and image files that one uses into "modules" of functionality, some of which might even be loaded on-demand from the client.

If you have this problem, how do you solve it? Do you use a framework like YUI? Something else?

What in your opinion is a must-have for such a framework?
This isn't unheard of - emacs is at version 22, but it is really only because they grew tired of adding 1. in front.

Software versioning never made much sense in the first place.
Ask HN: Why are startup events/conferences in Bay Area held on weekdays?
I recently moved to the Bay area to work for a startup. I subscribed to startupdigest in hopes of attending startup & networking events in the bay area. However, I find that many of these events are held on weekdays which makes it very difficult to attend. Attending these events means taking a day off or leaving really early from work.

I'm not saying that there aren't events over the weekend, but more often i find them scheduled during a weekday.

Does anyone else feel the same way ? Or is it just me ?

edit: changed title per suggestion below
Plus conversion rate from blog -> homepage / product page is awfully small. Typical is 2-5%.
Looking at my list of domains there are:

* 118152 com domains ending in "book"
* 14450 net domains ending in "book"
* 8666 org domains ending in "book"

which is going to require a lot of litigation.

Even narrowing it down to domains ending in "book" with "face" somewhere in the domain, there are:

* 6175 com domains
* 691 net domains
* 389 org comains

Where to draw the line?
I'm not saying that there isn't precedent for it, but I do think this is a slippery slope to take. What's next?
Sulfur dioxide rapidly leaves the atmosphere. That's how we undo it.
PG's Wealth statement really stood out among the others who spoke more to being 'rich'.
Creating value is the best way to become wealthy. Being wealthy is much better than being rich.
Production possibilities frontier... If I recall correctly, we learned this is my MacroEcon class in undergrad.
I'd be very interested in hearing about what you turn up. I've been playing around with this idea as part of a prolonged debate I've had with a friend of mine over the purported benefits of inequality. His claim was essentially that it takes an obscenely wealthy patron to create a Mozart and outsized rewards to provide sufficient motivation.

Presumably the first thing to figure out is what affects an individual economic agent's long-term output. There are definitely a lot of factors. Here are some off the top of my head, fwtw:

- capital available
- education level
- area of interest
- availability of good mentorship
- intrinsic emotional/psychological motivating force of income inequality (this is what you referred to earlier)
- individual's exposure to "culture" of innovation/productivity
Because everyone understands Assembly?
A City in the Cloud: Living PlanIT Redefines Cities as Software
Yes, you'd better go rewrite all your existing code by 2012, when the Mayan gods will unleash their fury on those who dare to continue using relational databases.

If you go beyond the crappy linkbait title, his conclusion is 'clearly not'.
The routers worked fine on Cox in Virginia and Louisiana. Wired and wireless are essentially the same.
Thank you for your help and for your contact information. I will get in touch when I move to London.
I understand what you suggest, however it is hard to attend events/meeting in London still having a job here. If I cannot find anything first, I am considering taking the risk of moving without a job and try to find one onsite. But that is something I really need to give a thought. On the other hand, joining another open source project with folks from London would imply perhaps another year before I could move... To be honest, I am not sure I could maintain my professionalism for such a long time and continue doing my job.
Sadly, in my experience, teachers in Computer Science degrees rarely help one through this process.
In java("an enterpise level language") we never call orm directly from a controller Typically we do 3 or more layers.

controller->facade-layer(can handle transactions via annotations)->business objects->dao OR
controller->business objects->dao
The U.S. itself. Indirectly, Texas and California. Rhodesia.

Any others?
I believe the paper is this one, published in PNAS (one of the top scientific journals):

Matthews, H.D., and K. Caldeira, Transient climate-carbon simulations of planetary geoengineering, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104 (24): 9949-9954, 2007.

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/24/9949.abstract

It's no more speculative than any other climate modelling paper. The methodology is to run a climate model with and without a forcing and compared the differences between runs. That methodology should sound familiar - it's the methodology used to show that global warming is anthropogenic in origin.
In my very humble opinion, what I just read was a lengthy and macchiavellan explanation of a simple concept: if your co-workers are happy with their job and you don't, and you all get paid the same, you might want to consider looking for another job that better fill your expectations.

There's no need for EMH theories and graphs to get that.
I keep finding these types of articles stupid as can be.

No, Relational databases aren't doomed, very few of the NoSQL crowd actually thinks that's a good idea.

This sentiment was stupid back when people portrayed this fact like a bad thing, and its stupid now. Tons of things are done very very well with a relational database. Non-Relational has very good uses now too, but neither type of db does EVERYTHING well.

NoSQL is an addition to the field, not a replacement.
So I was hoping you will accept one of my other examples of companies with large numbers of bad employees that show no intention of going out of business any time soon.

The cellphone market is highly regulated, but the large computer and software manufactures don't seem to depend on government manipulations.
There are many examples of fantastic hackers with no paper to back it up. There are also many examples of awful hackers with good marks to back it up. The truth is in the code.
Not sure if you mean to be pointlessly snarky or not, but hearing about his thought process and how he got a quick algorithm for a harder problem to work would have been much more interesting - and from a storytelling POV, would have been much better - than an abrupt "and then he came up with the solution", especially after the long bit on how he generated ovals.
MIT's Top 35 Innovators Under 35
Interesting read.
Here is the original article: http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35/index.aspx
This doesn't jibe with my experience as a Canadian H1B visa holder who's flown into the US over a dozen times over the past 6 years. I've never found US customs agents to be rude; they are always courteous and often friendly. FWIW I usually fly into LAX so I wonder if your experience differs depending on where you enter.
7 Types of Beach Personalities
You have to read this article. He is very interesting.
Hmm,

Seems a bit behind the times...

Efficient market hypothesis (EMH) is a powerful idea. It started as a way to explain how prices of tradeable securities will reflect their real value.

Objectively, the efficient market hypothesis was handed it's head in the last crash. The only "power" in the hypothesis is the "powerful" ability it gives stock brokers to talk people into putting their 401Ks into some big gambles.

If it doesn't work for a relatively straight-forward market like securities, it seems doubtful it would for the very opaque and complex labor market.
Don't worry, 68k assembly is easier to read than x86 assembly. This code is nicely structured and heavily commented. Don Knuth called Atkinson's QuickDraw and MacPaint code some of the best ever written.

Of course, if I'd actually read the code before linking to it, I'd have realized that this file doesn't really answer avgarrison's question because the algorithm is in DrawArc.a (see Luc's post earlier in this thread for an archive with the rest of the files).
I said "I guess" quit trolling and find something worthwhile to nitpick. I never ever presented my original comment as fact. So you're wrong.
Databases are protected under copyright law.

Also, most databases that you can scrape will contain sentinels to tip off the database owner that you've scraped their content. The sentinels are typically bogus records that are hard to spot, including them in your output will do a good job of proving that you ripped the data.

If you're just going to regurgitate the data you would have to have a better excuse than 'making it more accessible and useable', you could offer your services to the current owner of the data. If they abandon the data that's a different story, but it sounds to me like they are not.

Another option is to license the data, simply contact them to ask if they have licensing options, this is the usual way to go about this.

Scraping is also a heavy drain on the resources of the company whose data you intend to harvest, this means that if they sue you successfully for breach of copyright that they have a fairly clear path to claiming damages.

good luck!

ps: if you have a corporate lawyer that would be a good spot to ask for advice.
> So if you’re traveling to Los Angeles this summer, you can check out tweets from Angelenos...

> Often a single tweet sparks a larger conversation of re-tweets...

> Now you can create an alert specifically for “updates” to get an email the moment your topic appears on Twitter...

Ok, so basically Google is setting itself to be an interface to Twitter?
yeah for a cs degree equivalent CLRS >> TAOCP as TAOCP is more of a reference manual on algorithms whereas CLRS is a new way to think about writing programs. Both have their place in your bookshelf though.
I got off coffee for two weeks to as an experiment. Note I currently drink about 2 cups a day.

My energy was much more balanced - could wake up fully alert. However, I felt depressed the entire two weeks. Generally just very SAD.

So I got back on the drug after two weeks and with the first cup of coffee I just burst out into laughter. I literally could not stop laughing for about a minture (huge smile on the face).

Now that I'm back on the drug my energy levels are up and down but I'm not in my depression hole.

Anyone else experience depression when going off coffee?
At Urban Airship we use Postgres, Mongo and Cassandra. Just because people say x > y doesn't mean you have to pick x, or even just x. Pick what works for your setup.
> I'd wager their free healthcare doesn't contribute as much as their free education, ext.

Germany's healthcare system is universal, but not free.

Standard insurance is funded by a combination of employee contributions, employer contributions and government subsidies on a scale determined by income level. Higher income workers sometimes choose to pay a tax and opt out of the standard plan, in favor of 'private' insurance. The latter's premiums are not linked to income level but instead to health status.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care#Germany
Chrome also uses the pepper plugin API.
At that price it will probably remain a concept.
I totally agree and I would prefer a job in a startup because of the high exposure to recent technologies and the focus in the final product. I tried to search for startups in London, however I didn't find much until now. Do you know any site (if it exists) where I could search for startup companies in London?
Cost disease.
This depends a lot on the person, the school and the actual teacher. While I believe that a high quality school like Stanford, MIT, etc will have excellent teachers and will teach you a fair amount, I have yet to encounter such people. I also believe some people are just better at figuring stuff out on their own than others, which is fine.

The places I went to didn't really have the passionate and good people you need for teaching imo. Sure many of these people can teach the basics, but once you get to a certain point a fair part of the students is actually a lot better than these teachers. You need more hackers, more highly skilled people.

I actually remember watching some of the Stanford video seminars and those courses seemed more appealing than the stuff I was being tought.
SPIRAL_WALL: PROCESSING+ARDUINO+SERVO
Well in the case of commercial software it made a lot of money by changing the UI a bit, adding a few bullet points to the comparison matrix and incrementing the version by one.
Why do you imagine that versioning should be used for anything other than milestones the development team believe are important enough to warrant bumping the major version number?

Also, do you imagine that Chrome 7 is not as advanced and has not seen as much improvement as IE 7? If you look at the advancements made with each Chrome revision, they are as significant as, if not sometimes more than, the differences between major versions of Firefox or IE.
How We Doubled Our Conversion Rate In Two Days
WTF? Why did this get banned?
How We Doubled Our Conversion Rate In Two Days
Google Realtime: The Good News & the Bad News
Yes. I never encountered someone who actually could have (a) sold me a CS degree, then (b) coached me properly, until after the Web was invented.

The other point I'd make is that I went to grad school, and frankly in the technical subjects the professors are rarely the best coaches. Most of them have not been beginners for a long time, and their primary focus is not on how to relate to beginners. (Primary focus: How to relate to funding agencies. Secondary and tertiary focuses: How to relate to the rest of the department, and how to relate to grad students. Somewhere down near the bottom of the priority queue: Relating to undergraduates. Those profs who are primarily focused on teaching are absolute godsends, but are probably also having trouble getting tenure; such is the nature of undergraduate technical education at elite universities.)

The best coaches tend to be slightly-older fellow students. Ironically, the social structure of undergraduate classes is designed to segregate students at different levels of experience; the moral of that is: You must take steps to seek out older students who are willing to offer advice.
My point was that:

You don't need a visa, a visa is a form you have to fill in before they allow you in the country.

Instead you just have to fill in these other bunch of forms before they allow you in without a visa.
Actually, this is a fine lesson in persuasion, something that Chip and Dan Heath point out in Switch and Made to Stick; that is, reasoning that is highly concrete and visual is far more convincing and impactful than appeal to models, forecasts, spreadsheets, and schematics. I think Jobs here could have simply demanded rounded rectangles or appealed to some vague need for geometric completeness in the product, but imagine how powerful it must have been to take a walk outside and actually see how reality presented rounded rectangles at every turn, and how truly crippling the program would feel with this observation in mind if it didn't ship with the feature. The lesson is to reach beyond the world of formal logic and into the visceral world of sight and touch, where the real "aha" and gut judgments reside.

Here's another example, cited in the design and creation of the Palm Pilot:

"Jeff Hawkins, the team leader, wanted the Palm Pilot to be simple. It would handle only four things: calendars, contacts, memos, and task lists, but it would do them well. Hawkins fought feature creep by carrying around a wooden block the size of the Palm. Hawkins would pull out the wooden block to "take notes" during a meeting or "check his calendar" in the hallway. When someone would suggest another feature, Hawkins would pull out the wooden block and ask them where it would fit. Hawkins knew that the core idea of his project needed to be elegance and simplicity. In sharing this core idea, Hawkins and his team used what was, in essence, a visual proverb. The block of wood became a visual reminder to do a few things and do them well."

taken from http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/bmag/sbsm0702/feature_ideas...