skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The big takeaway here is that if it's really "versus", i.e. the programmers and sysadmins are having a power struggle, you're screwed. If one side or the other "wins" you're even more screwed.

If your programmers and syadmins are working at cross-purposes, then you have a serious problem that needs to be corrected immediately.
You seem to be talking about smoothing: how many non-human four-legged animals and non-four-legged humans have you got to see before you can estimate that humans are not likely to have four legs? This is reasonably well-solved; and you either use dirichlet (laplace, add-one) smoothing or something more closely corresponding to your domain, like good-turing smoothing. This reweights the probabilities in your classifier to make sure that (by analogy) if you see a talking, thinking, four-legged banker, you will probably classify him as a human (since the other features overwhelmingly point in that direction). They all assume some measure of confidence in the features, and make sure that a feature that has been observed once or twice will not move the class boundaries too much.
This is misleading:
"It is not too much to talk about a miracle, and one that has been achieved without the huge state subsidies that prop up farmers in Europe and America. "

In the linked article:
http://www.economist.com/node/16886442
"According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), state support accounted for 5.7% of total farm income in Brazil during 2005-07. That compares with 12% in America,"
How can Firefox using the "known malware vectors" make things any worse if they're already installed on the user's system?
No, these are not just different ways of skinning the same cat, the meaning is quite different.

The word "good" is a noun, indicating what will be done. The word "well" is an adverb, and describes how something will be done.

In a contrived example, a sentence like "the raping and pillaging invaders did well" is grammatically and semantically correct (they achieved their goal by getting lots of gold, etc.). A similar sentence "the raping and pillaging invaders did good" is grammatically correct, but the semantics are probably not what you want (they didn't do good, they did evil).
If you have any personal information that you're uncomfortable with the outside world knowing, don't put it on Facebook.
Agreed, I wonder what the beef with appsumo.com is.

In case anybody wonders what this is about: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636861
Not quite a trackball, but apple released a separate track pad not that long ago. There are two input devices that Apple does way better than most - keyboards and trackpads. Magic mouse was a complete disaster, unfortunately.
I would like to hear from other HN participants if they know of examples of that.

/me raises hand

It helps to be in a small department. A friend of mine at another (larger) school once asked me for advice on how to seek out letters of recommendation. The problem was that none of the professors knew who he was, since he'd only been in large lectures and never had the same professor twice. On the other hand, there were a few professors (2 in math, 2 in CS) who had taught multiple smaller classes I was in. When I was looking for recommendations, I had a lot less trouble finding professors who knew my background (including both other classes I'd taken and areas where I'd gone wandering beyond the scope of the courses they'd taught) well enough to write them.

Most of the complaints I hear about professors/instructors being unreachable come from people who never make any serious attempt to reach them (i.e. so few try and so many complain that those who don't try must be a majority of those who complain). Beyond that, those who do contact the professor/instructor for additional mentoring typically aren't the ones who need it most.
Here's what Paul said:
"
Voting anomalies on your submissions.

BTW, the site guidelines explicitly ask you not to
post questions about moderation that you could
instead ask in an email."
---------------------------------------

Which is weird since I didn't even know our original post made it to the homepage since I didn't submit it.

Anyways, I am just trying to post content I think people will like.

It goes out in my RSS feed and I show it to a few friends whom I think will like it. I'm finding it hard to believe that is an anomaly.
Sadly, a startup is at least two of these and still doesn't qualify :/
Schwarzenegger: Public Pensions and Our Fiscal Future
Arnold Schwarzenegger: "Few Californians in the private sector have $1 million in savings, but that’s effectively the retirement account they guarantee to many government employees."
The movie would probably be a good laugh for the people close to Facebooks creation given how overdone it seems to be in comparison to the responses the people involved have given.
> Voting anomalies on your submissions.

You're asking for trouble then, this one looked like another 'voting anomaly' to me. Even PGs posts don't get that many upvotes in the first few minutes.
I often think that most of the benefit you get for making changes to production systems is from getting someone else involved when you make that change - whether it's an incredibly formal process (which can be justified for some systems) or "want to sanity check me making this change" it all comes down to getting other people involved so they will say things like "You do have a backout plan in case this screws things up, don't you?".
Err, I fail to see any bug in the in the Windows 'shell:' protocol handler. But other parts of the article indicate that the bug was in Firefox and was fixed in there.

>Current versions of Mozilla and Firefox pass unknown protocol handlers to the operating system shell to handle. In this case, the location passed to the shell is a program name that the shell executes.

>Internet Explorer is reported as being less vulnerable. When the user clicks on the link, it opens an "open/save" dialog box in which the user is allowed either to run the program, save it to disk or cancel. Mozilla and Firefox simply run the program without any further user action.
Which again confirms my suspicion that Economy as a science at least on that level doesn't hold much water. The predictions might as well be random.

This is not said enough. We are wrong again and again, yet we keep coming back for more.
I'm not a linguist but it does seem like they would have taken this into account. Maybe they haven't thought about this but I find that rather unlikely. Perhaps the New York Times isn't the place to delve into the finer details and thus they don't explain the reasoning in its entirety.

I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to people who spend their lives studying an issue. They've probably thought of the obvious possible counterexamples and have a valid reason for discounting them. That doesn't make their theory correct but surely their reasoning isn't so easily foiled. Well, one hopes.

Do you know whether or not they've accounted for this possibility? The topic interests me and I really would like to know if their reasoning is so shallow.
I don't think that's the complete picture with programming languages. People already bring biases with them when they start using a programming language. They're more likely to become an expert in a language that agrees with the way they already think.

So just because c++ developers think alike, it's not necessarily because the language influenced them to think that way.

That doesn't really happen with spoken languages. You're born and have to learn the one (or maybe two) languages your parents speak. So the language influences you at a much earlier age.
Redirects & Performance
I'd add two points to the excellent comments above. My RSI was aggravated by use of the mouse. I found that using a trackpad with tap-to-click enabled helped significantly. But even more important was moving all of my informational surfing, twittering, emailing, etc. to the iPad. That probably accounted for a couple hours of computer use a day. Perhaps I'll come down with "iPad wrist" in the future, but for now the different gesture patterns don't trigger the RSI pain.
TCP on LAN
Why so? This article doesn't reveal anything new... I think the poster was asking whether Chatroulette is abandoned, since the new version was announced to be running "tomorrow", then "today", and then "shortly"...while it is already several day in this state.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a hundred years old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Among Whorf's well known examples of linguistic relativity are examples of instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in English and other European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of the less-studied languages). One of Whorf's examples of this was the supposedly many words for 'snow' in the Inuit language, which has later been shown to be a misrepresentation[13] but also for example how the Hopi language describes water with two different words for drinking water in a container versus a natural body of water. These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine grained semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts like snow or water, is not always possible.

Another example in which Whorf attempted to show that language use affects behavior came from his experience in his day job as a chemical engineer working for an insurance company as a fire inspector[13]. On inspecting a chemical plant he once observed that the plant had two storage rooms for gasoline barrels, one for the full barrels and one for the empty ones. He further noticed that while no employees smoked cigarettes in the room for full barrels no-one minded smoking in the room with empty barrels, although this was potentially much more dangerous due to the highly flammable vapors that still existed in the barrels. He concluded that the use of the word 'empty' in connection to the barrels had led the workers to unconsciously regarding them as harmless, although consciously they were probably aware of the risk of explosion from the vapors. This example was later criticized by Lenneberg[14] as not actually demonstrating the causality between the use of the word empty and the action of smoking, but instead being an example of circular reasoning. Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct ridiculed this example, claiming that this was a failing of human sight rather than language.

Whorf's most elaborate argument for the existence of linguistic relativity regarded what he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding of time as a conceptual category among the Hopi.[15] He argued that in contrast to English and other SAE languages, the Hopi language does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct, countable instances, like "three days" or "five years" but rather as a single process and consequentially it does not have nouns referring to units of time. He proposed that this view of time was fundamental in all aspects of Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi behavioral patterns.
Android’s New Licensing Service Cracked
No, it depends on how USCIS and DoL define work.
I was always intrigued by the fact that some languages (especially ancient ones) appear to miss the word for "yes" and "no".

I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar.

Many argue that latin did indeed have the word for yes, namely "ita", but all the dictionaries I looked at translate it as "so; thus; indeed; ..."

Other languages like japanese rely much on repetition of the verb but do have words for yes and no (hai to iie).

I wonder if it really makes a difference to think in a language which doesn't have a word for yes and no (for whatever reasons is not present in the language, historical stigma etc).

I see how it can change your way to discuss with people: "don't be tricky! answer simply, ehm uhm" but I feel this doesn't count as a major mind shaping issue.

Don't get me wrong, I was intrigued as anyone with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I'm aware that sometimes some intriguing memes get more resonance than they deserve.
It's a caveat for both - the brazilian model, and technological transfer to other climates. However, what I was really thinking of was the idea that Brazil's model represents a resounding answer to malthusian objections. This may be true if a lot of other things pan out, but assuming that climate remains the same is a pretty big assumption.
It should work like for example location: with a popup asking me if it is OK to share my FB data with the given site.
We agree on that you don't have to be jerk to be successful.

I disagree when you say they haven't been nice with Andy. They've been "hard", but not mean (to me) and certainly not jerks. Steve used a fallacy to move his agenda but that's typical haggling (What! This used car is mint! And you want me to sell it for that price? You want me to close my business?!!).

Let's not forget the story is told from Andy's point of view. Bill and Jobs were probably very assertive and Andy might be sensitive to the point he perceived that negatively.
I'm only about halfway through it, but it does seem like a decent intro to the math and CS concepts that will be needed for more advanced material. A CS degree program isn't all senior-level coursework.
Video Messages from Trapped Chilean Miners
The problem is that Firefox will not and won't load Flash for the HTML 5 <video> tag which references a H.264 video.
That's a straw man argument.

If you tax 1 million people for $1K each and gave Bill Gates $1.5 billion or a $1 Billion -> $1.5K per person then both of those increase efficiency.

But you say "how can taxes do that?" And the answer is normally taxes don't result in wealth creation, however policy's can both create wealth and destroy it. Breaking up AT&T dramatically lowered most people’s phone bills in the US. For a direct contrast you can look at Mexico where high phone bills directly resulted in one of the largest fortunes in the world and a huge loss to the Mexican economy at the same time.
For a lot of countries, the green card backlog is > 7 years. YMMV
Ask HN (Canada): New startup in Vancouver or Halifax?
Hey all: I'm moving from southern Ontario to either the east or west coast in a few months, just haven't decided which yet. My g/f is in tourism & travel so we'll need to be near a port city, and it'll have to be one or the other. I'm planning to start a small software company (5-10 people) to create facebook apps, web apps, iphone & android apps, as well as contract work on desktop apps.

I've heard a lot of reports of rampant layoffs in B.C. (since November 2009), and was thinking that it might be easier to find qualified individuals on the west coast from this perspective. However, rent costs will be higher, and there will be much greater competition from other small shops out west. It'd be easier to freelance in my space time (lol?) if I get desperate for cash, and I'm thinking my g/f would probably make more out west (jobs tend to adjust salaries in relation to cost of living- although this may be offset by the unemployment numbers out of vancouver recently).

The east coast (Halifax) is a much smaller city, and offers significantly cheaper office space and rent for housing / apartments. Plus, the tech scene out there seems to be growing rather than contracting (no big layoffs so far, some game studios, and more people are moving there from Ontario and Quebec to take advantage of the changes out that way). However, there will be less companies offering work, and it will be harder to attract talent, (but easier to retain talent).

Does anyone have any ideas I haven't thought of yet? What would you do if you were in my shoes? I'm thoroughly excited about moving, I just don't want to make a bad choice as I only have enough savings to bootstrap the business and rent a home for awhile. Business loans not out of the question, would rather just play it by ear than jumping into debt right away.
speeeling error fixed
There really is no difference except that len() will raise an error if no __len__ method is found on the object.
I can understand lack of "yes", but lack of "no" seems pretty strange. What do babies in these cultures shout when they don't want something? The idea of "do not want" seems to be one of the most basic things a human will want to express, starting from a very early age.
The Seven Secrets of Successful Data Scientists
interesting critiques:

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/njp0001.html
http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm

and probably tons of other references

nice book: The language instinct by Steven Pinker
I'd like to add that you can control the Dock with the keyboard as well. You need to enable it in System Preferences, and by default the keycomby is really stupid, but I mapped it to ctrl+cmd+space. You can even navigate stacks with it. For me works better than Spotlight.

Also, you probably wouldn't use the Dashboard, which _can_ be disabled.
This is a post from earlier in the year on this subject: http://smartic.us/2010/02/04/using-your-mac-without-the-mous...
I agree completely. I tend to dislike the phrase "enterprise development" anyway, because it implies that somehow our programming is suddenly different just because a company uses it. But, I try to write for my audience.
Iranian Government Runs Public Warez Server
Judging by the amount of open source PHP code out there, some of it powering major websites, I'm not sure at all it's "a language many hackers dislike".
You need a Facebook account to even view that page.
You are comparing one country with 300 million people with one with 25 million. Of course the numbers are going to reflect better on Australia.
Great article about the whole acquisition process. I can't recall a more detailed account.
I stopped reading right at that section.
1 isn't a matrix

A Fixnum could be interpreted as a 1x1 matrix. For some recursive solutions, it would probably be nice of MatrixMath.inverse accepted it as such, as well as [[1]].
You can double your conversion rate in two days trivially by changing the mix of traffic. For pete's sake, do A/B testing! Otherwise you will never know whether your changes are doing it or not.

I would explain the offer, in bullet points, above the fold.

1) List-of-the companies offer services to help bold save the money you are losing on your website bold.

2) These services normally cost $X, but if you buy now, you can use special, limited editions for a one-time payment of $25.

Big Freaking Buy Now Button
You know....I don't know how I didn't think of that.
Google has a new launcher that I think is developed by the dude who made quicksilver (who now works at google afaik)

http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/
yup, republican and java are in the same camp ;)

On a serious note, I've been doing ruby as my job for about 5 years and I work at a giant corporation with a few hundred programmers. In those 5 years I've never been bitten by someone changing a core class that breaks my code. Maybe 3 times I've been bitten by someone changing a non core class, and it usually takes me about an hour or two to resolve it.

So that's maybe 6 hours in 5 years where I've lost time due to this, but the amount of time it has saved me is far larger than this.
Apple's the only manufacturer that seems to make a selling point out of not shipping tools that users can shoot themselves in the foot with.

A perfect example is mobile Flash, which is (or soon will be) a major selling point of basically all non-Apple mobile devices and runs lots of legacy VP6 video without hardware acceleration. And Adobe has committed to supporting VP8/WebM in future Flash versions.
tl;dr

A lot of noise to say "programmers and system administrators have a different job and they need to learn their differences to work together".
There will be great talent in all age brackets, but, of course, younger founders will generally network with younger people. If a founder finds a great employee 20 years his or her senior, then age should hardly matter. I do understand being nervous about hiring someone who is old enough to be your parent, but maybe more columns like this will help ease that anxiety & enable founders to build better companies.
Relevant: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2368384,00.asp
I am an Indian on H1B Visa, possibly the worst country to be from relative to the US Immigration System.

An immigration lawyer told me that I can register a company but I cannot work for it. But later when I find U.S investors who will own equity in my company I can ask them to sponsor the transfer of my H1B Visa to my own company.

This doesn't make me thrilled, but hey - it is something. Sitting on my hands is killing me, so I am moonlighting in the hopes that the lawyer is right, and that I can find investment using only my moonlighting efforts.

If anyone knows better please let me know.
This is lousy advice. It's not as if just anyone can "apply for a green card". You need to have a sponsor who is either a relative and US citizen, or you are already employed by a US company on a work visa and they are willing to sponsor your green card application. (I am in the second category.)

Even if you have an employer willing to sponsor your green card application, the preliminary paperwork can take over a year before you're officially in the green card pipeline. How long you have to wait depends on your country of origin. Canadians can expect to wait at least two years, Indians and Chinese five years or more. But the kicker is that if you lose your job or change companies while you're in the pipeline, the whole process restarts! (Unless you're in the final stage, but that's comparatively short compared to the whole process.) That is, if you can find a new job. If you can't, you have to leave the US.

The US is unique among western countries in not have a way for skilled immigrants to get into the country unless they first have a sponsor. The US work visa program effectively creates a class of indentured laborers as their continued residency in the US is entirely dependent on their employers.
I avoid this by keeping my core apps in Chrome/Chromium and by browsing everything else with Firefox+NoScript+ABP.
Why was a seven year old post resurrected for discussion here? Does anyone still believe that Ruby, even with its unbridled dynamicity, is just for tinkerers and won't work for large teams or production quality applications?