skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't take people seriously who continue the "Macs are better than PC's/PC's are better than Macs" debate after the age of 13, but I do take people seriously when they put together a case about why Macs are better suited for Ruby on Rails development, or why Windows is better for gaming, or why Linux is better for running webservers.

Likewise, you're trivializing the serious cultural debates about, for instance, whether it's wise to send women into armed combat, or whether or not it's a problem for 90% of software developers to be men. It doesn't mean anyone is better than another, just that as a society maybe we should be comfortable with having more men than women in prison, in the Forbes 500, or in combat. Or maybe we shouldn't. Point is, that's a debate worth having.
I agree. This is too much of a "political" issue. In addition, there are a lot of suppositions thrown about but not a lot of data.
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There's pulp political pieces and then there's intellectual insight about politics. This piece strikes me as having intellectual insight.
Well, no, but some people continue (begin?) to question whether women are treated fairly after that age. It's useful and interesting to know how and why things turned out the way they did.
The point is that you will also very often see your drawing getting roundedly ass-kicked without being able to do anything about it. In the demo movie you showed I was deeply rooting for the gullible girl with huge arms but had to see her getting beaten over and over. After putting that much time into your first character, only to see her not being fit for fight, I don't think anyone will be coming back.

Providing a quality product means meeting people's expectations. You say that many people expect to control their character, so let them. You're in awe of your excellent algorithm, but people are not going to be so happy when they don't get your algorithm on the first try.

You could still map different moves to different keystrokes depending on the output from your algorithm and make the result depend on the characteristics .

Last but not least, don't look down on "every other fighting game out there". The only users that will be interested in your game will be people that are deeply in love with every other fighting game. They will expect to be able to use their honed fighting game skills in your game as well, but with the awesome addition of bringing their dream character to life.

Above all, they will not get back to the drawing board when their awesome character is shredded to pieces by a simulation over and over.
Musopen Wants to Give Classical Music to the Public Domain
About the menu closing: I think the behavior comes from an older design. On older OS versions (I don't know if this changed with OS X or if it was earlier) you had to hold down the mouse button the whole time you traversed the menu. Letting go of the mouse button over anything but a menu item resulted in closing the menu. You can still do it this way. And now, even though the menus are 'sticky', they close when you click on anything that isn't a menu item. I'm so used to this behavior now that I use it to close menus. Still though, it would be interesting to try it both ways for a while.
Not that I know of, but anecdotal evidence about satisfaction aside, think of the economic incentives.

If I write a patch that improves an open-source product to better serve the needs of my employers, and I don't release it, the only benefit I receive is praise and/or bonuses (yeah, right) from that employer. It really isn't much of a big deal, I'm just doing my job. As the business folk would say it doesn't really "move the needle" of my personal career. If, on the other hand, I do the same work and I release it back into the wild, assuming my patch isn't stupid, I gain some respect from people who are likely to help me in the future, and more importantly, I gain a way to prove that I know how to use and modify open source software at my next interview. I raise my market value.

Now, I can see why an employer might object to an employee releasing those changes... but for the employee, getting to publicly release code has some rather large economic advantages vs. just writing and using the same code internally.
Wow, this looks very awesome. You guys are doing something very interesting.
Yeah, this is that "anchoring effect." If you tell someone that you think a pair of jeans costs $400 and ask them to guess a price, chances are they'll quote one around $400 even when the actual price is something like $40.
Seems like a good idea to me.
Absolutely fascinating. I guess mostly it comes down to XY and XX chromosomes. XY leaves more room for random chance. XX would be more moderate because it would presumably have more genetics to balance out its extremes.
If a group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full-sized. But if it loses half its women, the size of the next generation will be severely curtailed.

Given that we have something like 7 billion people, the odds of losing half of either gender are fairly low. If it's because of something nuclear -- you will probably want to be on the casualty list, not the survivor's.

I wish I could downvote this post. It's flamebait, and it's irrelevant. Agree with the commenter who wondered why "debates" like this go on amongst people > age 13.
I think you're right. They're selling features rather than benefits.
"Men go to extremes more than women, and this fits in well with culture using them to try out lots of different things, rewarding the winners and crushing the losers."

Is there anything more fitting to the audience of this site? Does this fit in with the sex distribution here? (surely)
Check out the Art of Problem Solving

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/
The main point as I understood it was to illustrate, more or less, why a 100% increase in conversions to the purchasing page does not equal a 100% increase in conversions from the purchasing page to actual purchase.

Yes, it offered a theory about why this was so. Yet my experience is that a 100% increase in initial conversions typically results in approximately a 100% increase in sales.

My further experience from doing A/B testing for many years is that lots of people are eager to grab any numbers you give them, then run with them and form grand theories that aren't backed up by the actual statistics. Those theories have a remarkably low success rate in explaining the results of the next A/B test you run. (Or, frequently, the current test once we let it run longer.)

They are saying that once you start attracting traffic beyond the early adopters, your additional traffic is now comprised of a different group of people who exhibit fundamentally different behavior in how likely they are to make a purchase even once they've hit the purchasing page.

It was an attractively presented theory. True, I've learned to be cautious of attractively presented theories which aren't actually backed by data. But it was definitely attractively presented.

However no evidence was offered that the people progressing in group A were actually significantly different than the people progressing in group B. And if the test truly was letting crappier traffic through, and the crappiness of that traffic was the primary cause of trends in subsequent behavior, then that traffic has to be REALLY crappy to explain the difference. Occam's razor says that random chance was the cause of the data, or at least a large enough contributor that there is no immediate need to think too hard about other possibilities. And so until better data becomes available, I'm going to suggest that "chance fluctuation" deserves a hearing.

Medicine sometimes calls these zebras. Why? Because it is like someone hearing something with 4 hooves run past an open window and immediately figuring out that it is a zebra. Sure, it _COULD_ be a zebra. _SOMETIMES_ it proves to be a zebra. But the odds are much better that it was a horse.

Guess the garden variety answer before guessing the exotic one.
Remember: the 10000 hour rule doesn't mean you can't be very good at something without putting in the hours. If you want to be the very best, then the rule applies.

Also: a very important point for entrepreneurs (imho) is to focus on what you're doing. This means shouldn't have to worry too much about choosing on which thing you'll spend the hours.
Given that we have something like 7 billion people, the odds of losing half of either gender are fairly low. If it's because of something nuclear -- you will probably want to be on the casualty list, not the survivor's.

You're taking that quote out of context. The point is not what could happen today, but what could happen prehistoric groups. If you have two prehistoric tribes in conflict with each other it's entirely reasonable that you'll lose half of your combatants over a period of years. If you're losing men then you can replenish your numbers just as effectively, if you're losing women your capacity will be compromised.
The topic is about companies doing OSS. These are the types of companies I see deriving value from OSS. Feel free to contribute more.
I see quite a few flaws in the article:

1. The author keeps flipping back and forth between defining the set of 'weird' people as all 'Westerners' and just 'rich, educated Westerners.'

[ edit: Further thought/reading brings up the references to 'privileged Westerners' as well. This whole aspect of the article seems to only be there to: a) inflame the reader or b) provoke feelings of guilt in the reader (since the audience here are the 'privileged Westerners that they are speaking of). ]

2. They state that Westerners are 'weird' because they are different from the rest of the world, but only present single anecdotes as evidence (i.e. "Westerners differ from Amazon Tribe X in test Y" then "Westerners differ from Chinese in test Z"). All this seems to say to me is that maybe it's impossible to generalize about the human condition because too many factors are dependent on culture.

> "We live in this world with police and institutions and pre-packaged food,
> TV, the Internet, watches and clocks and calendars. Our heads are loaded with
> all this information for navigating those environments. So we should expect
> our brains to be distorted," Dr. Henrich says.

3. Are our brains really 'distorted' or just different? Who is to say what is the better/natural/whatever way of thinking?

4. I found it extremely annoying that they capitalized the word 'weird' everywhere, even in quotes from experts.

> The UBC researchers acknowledge the limits of what is known about
> WEIRD versus non-WEIRD populations. Because data comparing how
> people from different populations think is relatively hard to come by, the
> authors write, "we cannot accurately evaluate the full extent of how unusual
> WEIRD people are."

> "This is, however, precisely the point. We hope research teams will be
> inspired to span the globe and prove our claims of non-representativeness
> wrong."

5. So you spent the entire article trying to highlight the significance of this finding and trying to backup their claims as being rock solid, only to say, "of course, this could be complete bunk," at the end?
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Americans having be flocking to international destinations since the late 1990s to find discounted medical procedures. With health care costs at an all time high in the USA, who can blame them.
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Relevant:

The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance

-Psychological Review

http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...
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This is most certainly a sidetrack, but a worthwhile one.
Maybe it depends on what relationship you have with your government. Americans like to see their presidents, in particular, as Bold Heroes Leading The Free World...to do something, at least, whether it's building the Panama Canal or winning a war or sending men to the moon. We carve their faces into fucking mountainsides over here. Americans really want inspirational leaders who can be larger-than-life figures boldly changing history by sheer force of will.

There's no tactful way to say this, but the last time Germany tried electing a bold, larger-than-life leader looking to change the course of history by sheer force of will, it didn't turn out too well. So I'm not surprised German culture has somewhat shied away from that tendency.

Frankly I'd be happy if Americans were satisfied with electing dull but competent administrators rather than trying to look for epic historical figures. It gets the expectations all out of whack, and leads people who aren't up to it into making poor judgments.
There can be strategic business reasons to open source, but don't forget that open source is a powerful recruitment tactic as well. Recruiting is the main reason we are permissive about open source at BackType. Programmers (esp. top ones) really want to be involved in open source.

I wrote more about this here:
http://nathanmarz.com/blog/why-your-company-should-have-a-ve...
I have previously addressed the issue of Feynman's IQ: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1251164
You amight be lucky enough to be near one of the public screenings of Objectified. A lot of them are free.

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I'm planning on heading to the one @ the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn on October 1.
It must not be a full fletched street fighter clone. But when possible customers say they want some interaction, why not give it to them? I mean, it can be something small, like clicking a lot ur left mouse button to heal ur creature (click faster, heal faster), or having 1 to 3 special moves that need a long time to reload, changing between different fighting styles like defensive (heal), balanced, aggressive (kill), or even some kind of stone-scissors-paper stuff. There are a lot possibilities, to give your users more interaction, that does not influence your automatic fight results much. Don't be smarter than your customers. You aren't!

btw: I bet people think of your game that way because you present it as a fighting game. If I see a fighting game, of course my first idea is, that I should interact with my character to win a fight. If I am not interested in that kind of stuff, I will probably go to look for another game. So maybe you can also get something out of positioning your product in another way.
"very often see your drawing getting roundedly ass-kicked without being able to do anything about it"

In reality you are able to do alot about it. Aside from the actual fight, everything you do controls what will happen. How your draw, who you choose to fight, what arena you fight in, what items or weapons you select etc etc. Simply because you are not pressing buttons at the time of action does not mean all hope is lost and everything will become a random simulation. A la the video, we are working on the balance of the game.

"The only users that will be interested in your game will be people that are deeply in love with every other fighting game"

Disagree, almost all of the people who have sent us sketches are not from the typical gamer crowd. They are drawn to the fact they don't have to control them, it takes the pressure off.

"You say that many people expect to control their character, so let them."

This is a really interesting argument that I go both ways on. History has shown both times where it pays to listen and times it pays to ignore your users requests and show them something new and better that they never even thought of. "Providing a quality product means meeting people's expectations" Or exceeding them :)

Thanks for your feedback though, you bring up some interesting points. We aren't ruling out controlling your characters forever, but for the initial launch we think it will ruin the purity of the game. We are exploring adding more decisive elements without adding live "control" if you know what I mean. Mini games etc.
I would say yes, based on wages differences (around 20% here).
It's a bit trite to compare Lisp to the free market: it's not particularly difficult for me to concoct the same metaphor for Java. ("The wealth of libraries and frameworks, each vying for maximum use, exhibits emergent patterns of creative destruction, similar to those prevalent in the free market". See? Not that hard.)

It may be well true that there are more competing implementations of Lisp. (Though that is also open to debate; after all, what is Android if not Java on a new VM? What of OpenJDK?) And in any case, the great majority of Lisp implementations are toy languages that lack the stability and features to be used in any serious environment.

Your other points:

* If armed bear isn't dead, it definitely smells funny -- at least the last time I checked (~1.5 years ago).

* Clojure is cool in large part because it has access to the thousands of Java libraries written by those shamen-like programmers you get such a kick out of mocking.

My point is that a programming language is just a tool to get something done. Those that mock supposedly inferior languages miss the point that there are aspects to those languages or environments that make them appealing for the job at hand. If I want to do a web site, I'd use PHP with WordPress, because I most likely won't have to write any code at all. If I want to write a web app, I might use Ruby or Python. If I'm a real-time market trading platform, I'll use Java because there's so much reliable, mature code out there and it's really fast. If I want to write a music application or plugin, then I'm going to need to use C++ to communicate with ASIO and VST.

And, finally, if I want to write a Lisp interpreter, I'll use Lisp ;)
The ultimatum game as described in the article does not make sense. It is important, and not explained, that the offer is made only once, and that the other party is aware of the game (eg: "here is X" -> "cool thanks" vs "here is 1/100 of what I get if you accept this" -> "screw you").
If desperation is the mother of innovation, then ignorance might be its father
Any of which should only reduce the magnitude of the ethnicities' outperformance. Not eliminate it entirely. You don't need to go to Harvard to start Apple or Dell or Google. (To give an analogy, Asians are heavily discriminated against in higher ed; but when I look around, it seems to me that unlike blacks, they outperform.)
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Sorry, I don't understand your comment. I'm speaking french. What is the difference between apes and monkeys ?
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For that matter, I think "A Letter to my students" is definitely a pulp political piece. And yet it is on the front page with 150+ points.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631682
The reasoning seems to go:

1) The stimulus was supposed to mitigate the effects of the recession, and

2) The recession was still very bad, therefore

=======================

3) The stimulus had no positive effect/was not worth the cost.

Now, who wants to play the game "find the fallacy"?
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Though on BBs, the blinking is a feature: it's your blackberry craving for your attention, like a cat pawing into your sides or your dealer calling your phone.

I hear most BB users like it a lot.
I think other companies just realize that Apple has already done the work of getting a feature (or style) well known to the public and that they don't need to solve the problem in a brand new way. That would require as much engineering and quality control work as Apple, plus you'd have to market the hell out of it so that people understood why it was cool, and then, after all that, still sell the product for way less than Apple's because no one is going to pay an Apple price for a Dell product. No, the way to make money is by paying a couple devs to hack up something that looks really wiz-bang cool in demos with very little regard to the problem it solves. Then you get people to think it's just like an Apple product, but cheaper. Until they use it for a week, but by then they've already bought it.

I think the best example of this is all the custom Android skins out there. Without exception they are all worse (at usability) than what they are trying to improve, but the first Droid was the last Android phone to ship stock. Just look cool in the ad and you're done.
You are absolutely and factually wrong. He absolutely calls them predictions when he is right. Here is a direct quote from Silver: "predicting 49 of 50 states correctly in the presidential election." http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/welcome-...
all [he] ever did was smash up things and creatures and then retreat back into their money or their vast carelessness.

—Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

I think I recently drove by a sign on the road that said this too. It was right next to another sign that read "Make Money Fast", and another sign that said "Get Rich Working from Home." However, a much wiser man than I once said: TANSTAAFL.

Now I know this is gonna get nuked, but I don't care because I can prove my point if you can understand me. Money is all you guys ever talk about here. Can we get more up votes on articles about oh say, extravagant assembly code or hardware hacks, instead of the daily echo chamber of TC driven $pablum?

IMHO everyone here, or at least the most vocal minority, is far, far too obsessed with making money. And the kind of money amount always being talked about is literally winning the lottery. Fools! You want to know why the American Empire has hollwed out and is about to fall? Everybody is a fucking true-blue believer that they deserve to be rich,at the expense of everything and everyone else! Why can't people just be happy with enough to get by? Spend time with your friends and family, stop chasing the bullshit ideology of conspicuous consumption which much richer and much more powerful individuals want you to believe in order to trap you into their completely distorted mentality, a simulacrum of un-reality! And those biggest fish only benefit themselves by getting everyone else to chase their white rabbit btw.

Here's my one "TED" wish: instead of the pursuit of money and winning the lottery, I want more of you super-smart, elite, "WEIRD", technophiles to spend the same amount of time & effort doing something intrinsically meaningful, creative, in the pursuit of knowledge for yourself or others, or sacrificing & helping those people in your communities who are disadvantaged, oppressed and less fortunate, or the noble purpose of doing something(anything!) because it is Right and nobody else seems to be doing that thing.

What kind of ignorant fuck truly wants to live the hollow lifestyle of a wealthy young aristocrat? You might think you're making sacrifices now for freedom from money later, but I, and every single philosopher going all the way back to Thales would warn the pursuit of wealth, for it's own sake, or for the sole sake of being "freed" from money, ends up becoming a tragic, inescapable anchor you will be permanently chained to in your life, and it will fully consume and ruin whatever goodness and potential you might have started with.

There is another way. Take only what you need, don't need much, give generously without regard, and redirect all your newly found free time & energy into efforts that truly matter.

Fuck you, Money!