skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tweet IDs About To Get Jumbled In A Blizzard As Snowflake Is Set To Roll Live
> Historical data may not be of much use given how much schools have changed in the last 20-30 years with mainlining, foreign-student integration, increases in poverty, ADA, etc.

The recent mainlining of the "challenged" is just reversing a fairly recent trend towards seggregating them.

Poverty hasn't increased, it has decreased - we've moved the line and we're providing much more assistance that we don't count.

> Heh. IME I've always seen the opposite - computers were supposed to reduce the number of people needed for a task but small business need to hire an IT guy to take care of the system, thereby increasing the payroll.

The NYC school district isn't a small biz.
Will patents help you against Microsoft? Does your four person startup really have the resources to take on a major legal team? From the patents question in the interview at http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101007/full/news.2010.525.ht..., it sounds like defending a patent isn't a pretty or an affordable business.
Why do you feel that our educational system achieved "great heights", and why do you believe these heights made the US a "20th century powerhouse"?
Ok, this isn't an answer to your points, but have you read Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis?http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646

"I explore physics implications of the External Reality Hypothesis (ERH) that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans. I argue that with a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, it implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) that our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure. I discuss various implications of the ERH and MUH, ranging from standard physics topics like symmetries, irreducible representations, units, free parameters, randomness and initial conditions to broader issues like consciousness, parallel universes and Godel incompleteness. I hypothesize that only computable and decidable (in Godel's sense) structures exist, which alleviates the cosmological measure problem and help explain why our physical laws appear so simple. I also comment on the intimate relation between mathematical structures, computations, simulations and physical systems."
>disabled worker in a wheelchair

it isn't a matter of personal choice. Brandishing off one's religion is a matter of the one's personal choice.

>Incidentally, the same law protects the atheist with a tattoo of His Noodliness* as a statement of non-belief

don't know about employment law. In the immigration law your religion needs to have a registered tax free church in the US , otherwise it isn't a religion
Good article overall, but I think I should make a comment:

> Many understand implication intuitively, yet find its symbolic formulation puzzling.

Yes, and for a reason: material implication (the kind of implication discussed in the article) cannot always explain our intuitive sense of implication. My favourite example, from Priest's Introduction to Non-Classical Logic: (A ⇒ B) ∧ (C ⇒ D) ⊦ (A ⇒ D) ∨ (C ⇒ B) is valid when ⇒ is material, yet the statement:

"If John is in Paris he is in France, and if John is in London he is in England. Hence, it is the case either that if John is in Paris he is in England, or that if he is in London he is in France."

makes no intuitive sense. It is very important to discard intuition when dealing with implication in mathematics -- this is why although I'm a big fan of using English connectives instead of symbolic ones, I try to not use the English "if" and "then" in proofs.
My understanding of DADT is that you cannot be openly gay. Not quite be all you can be.
However, if that idea is worth selling, you will be ahead in the market. Microsoft will need to catch up. They may buy you out. Software typically goes obsolete for reasons other than the "need" for protection.

Besides, by the time Microsoft does that, some other algorithm could quite possibly be created by somebody else.
I would have thought the main reason for changing dentist is when moving to another area.

Cognitive dissonance? Cognitive cacophony.
When WePay & PayPal touch they'll annihilate eachother with a huge burst of energy? :)

Too bad headlines need to be clickable rather than accurate.
By convincing the right people that it was relevant to my course :) Also, Glendix was the culmination of my Bachelor "major project".

Yes, it is sometimes possible to do useful work in academia. Gasp!
>Then again, if you know about such objects, you probably also know the earth is bigger than the sun.

Tongue-in-cheek?
Patents take 5-7 years to issue and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to litigate. They're more like claymores rigged to a dead man's switch than they are a real defense.

But that's orthogonal to the question that was just asked.
I know of a calling card website that asks the user to enter the last 8 digits of their pin to validate their account, then it asks the user to enter the last 4 digits of their pin to continue.
They probably have, I just hope the release the information at some point.
These commenters deserve many internet points:

Henry T. - so when does NELL become self aware? :-)
Jon M - As soon as it reads this page ;-)
Skin effect is not a factor in 12AWG wire at 60Hz. It takes much higher gauges and/or higher frequencies.
Tell HN: booking.com is looking for 40+ Perl programmers (in Amsterdam)
Note: I'm not affiliated with booking.com - they mentioned these offers at the open-source developer conference in paris/france this week-end, so I'm forwarding the information.

Booking.com is looking for more than 40 perl programmers (either seasoned or beginners willing to learn).

They are based in Amsterdam, provide a "competitive salary + relocation package".

They use Perl, Apache, mod_perl, MySql, Memcache, Mason, JavaScript, Git etc.

They are facing a huge growth, which definitely results in interesting scaling challenges :)

You can contact Sheila Sijtsema at sheila.sijtsema@booking.com or have a look at http://www.booking.com/jobs
Yes exactly. I'm sorry I was not more clear. The phrase "HTML Snippet" may turn some people away if they don't immediately understand it, and those that do understand it will often not be your target market.
Tips for Your Othello Coursework
Writing an Othello coursework is not an easy assignment. The coursework has to be solid and well based on personal readings. Understanding the plot of the play and the selection of a good topic will enable students to write an excellent Othello coursework.
Posterous introduced this with the blog post and two kinds of communications materials. Hope it helps!

Use Case - Developer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX-zLP4F020

Video Tour - Founder
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S-L_8K_zNc
IPhone 4 glass breaking 82% more than iPhone 3GS
Link: http://www.booking.com/jobs (although I believe email contact may be better).
California Prop 23 - Who's donating for/against suspending air pollution laws
Buying a car is a really unpleasant, multi-hour experience, but it's funny how often people go back to the same dealer.
You can probably do even better by including the HTTP referrer, the user agent string, etc. as well. Knowing the user's browser right away is huge. Cookies, could help, but if the user logs out and their session ID is gone, it kind of sucks. Providing a way to look up the user's ID if it's being used on a site where the user has logged in would be pretty awesome.
Also scroll down to see contributions by state.
Gay Men, Straight Women Have Similar Brains [2008]
I agree with you, but as the comment above pointed out for various reasons JVM updates lag in the enterprise. One of those screens had a table of JVM version numbers and a large slice were old installs.

It isn't really Sun/Oracle's fault, since they provide a decent updater.

OTOH, the number of these malware toolkits and the penetration rates they seem to achieve is just remarkable. I love the toolkit that had the 'now compatible with windows 7' logo in the admin screen.
It seems like this article is trying too hard to justify something that actually has a pretty easy explanation: if women are under-hired relative to their skill level, then a skilled woman is cheaper to hire than an equally skilled man.
i agree to some extent. our service is not directly competitive with paypal's core business. however - we consider ourselves very anti-paypal when it comes to our culture and the way we treat & market to customers
This suggests another reason why 5-10% of people got the question wrong - they weren't paying attention and clicked/typed the wrong choice.

(Ok, I admit it - I just don't know anything about astronomy. Also, elephants are bigger than the moon, right?)
The communication overhead for a team of x developers is on the order of x!.

Or something like that.

edit: (x-1)!

edit 2: of course there are other factors, that's just one piece of it.
My wife, who hires people, complains about this point all the time. Unless you've been a serial entrepreneur since age 10, keep your resume to one page. You're too young to have a resume longer than a page.
I think "sold out" is way too harsh. I suspect ' more like they got tired of waiting for something that went from "doesn't look like it's going to happen" (but probably realized only after they'd put a fair amount of work into it) into "it will be a cold day in hell...".

Sun demanded a mobile usage restriction. Oracle is suing a company that for technical and no doubt monetary reasons went around this restriction. Oracle now can't make up with Apache without undercutting their lawsuit, even if they were so inclined, which strikes me as unlikely.
Fiction: The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang
These days, to me "cover letter" means what's in the body of the email, and the resume is attached, ideally as a PDF. I prefer "cover letters" that are short (one paragraph) and don't read like it was copy-pasted. Honestly, I've grown tired of reading that a person is a "hard worker" or a "great problem solver", stuff like that... just tell me why you find the company interesting enough to ask for a job there, to put 40+ hours per week of your life into indefinitely. Perhaps this doesn't work for emails that are going to an HR person or destined for a database but I know this is what I look for personally, as a software engineer interested in hiring quality software engineers.

Also, the resume should be concrete about experience. I don't like reading about what your team did, instead talk about what you did. I don't like reading that a project that "made stuff better", I want to know by how much exactly. I don't like reading projects that sound like they were accomplished with magic fairy dust, I like to see specific tools, techniques, programming languages, and so on. My resume in fact used to be more generic, but the feedback I got on it from my friends made it a lot better (they were also former coworkers so they knew some of the stuff and even remembered some projects I'd worked on that I had forgotten). I said what I did, what tools I used, what goals I hit personally.
> They exist to foster innovation so that the public can reap the benefits.

Fair enough, but dislosure fosters innovation. Two companies making the same bicycle stand is no more innovative than just one.

> Can you invent, market and sell a new type of bicycle stand without patents? No. The concept will be copied as soon as it hits the market.

If a copier can market and sell a new type of bicycle stand, why can't the inventor do the same?

I note that many things, both physical and virtual, are sold without patent protection, so it's unclear why you think that patents are essential for physical things but not virtual.
I have long wondered why Facebook doesn't do this. Group birthday gifts, wedding registries, basically any social scenario where money needs to change hands, it seems like FB would be so well positioned to take an honest buck from.
MovieReshape: Tracking and Reshaping of Humans in Videos
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but I'm on the same page. I try to focus on clarity and elegance in my code, and only worry about speed if it turns out to be slow.

But I sure as heck grumble when my computer is slow. "You've got, like, 800 hojillion cycles a second!" I say to it. "How hard is opening a program?!"

Is that hypocritical?
I blame I/O. It's pretty fast warmed up.
Consumers Innovate More than Companies
Strange conclusion: teamwork doesn't work because your team doesn't work?

Did you even consider the second option: your team sucks.

Sorry to state that in such a plain way, but I've seen many teams doing great work. Matter of organisation and responsibility.
It's an interesting comparison, since Haskell is about 20 years old and D is about 10. I remember using Haskell about 10 years ago, and it was a rocky experience.
That's how I've always understood it. The examiner is supposed to check for prior art, but (1) it's hard and (2) that cuts into revenue. The fallback mechanism has always been the patent appeal - generally the appellant has an interest in voiding the patent or some of its claims for business reasons, but there's no reason you have to.

So yes, it's the expectation of the courts that people will continually monitor granted patents and appeal them as necessary. And I guess patent applications as well.
In my experience, web design is 5% drawing the design on a napkin (or mocking it up in Photoshop or whatever), and 95% trying to make CSS do what you want. :-(
Thanks for the advice. Luckily, mine is only one page.
With the JavaSE TCK for the Apache Harmony project.

There may be a legal structure to address that, but for anyone who depends on the good will of Sun, now Oracle, which probably includes IBM, it certainly wouldn't have been practical.
this is offensively not usable. just as an example, I can't grep the whole document now. I think this is the wrong target market for fake usability.
Sure there is. Your answer is still used to match with other people, even if they don't get to read it.
> Sockets do not exist in bathrooms.

Yes, they do. (The UK, or even Europe, is not the whole world.)

> Hairdryers are usually used in bedrooms.

Hairdryers are used in bathrooms if there's a plug in the bathroom.
If we're speaking about US residential wiring, current never flows thru the ground wire unless there's an electrical fault.

There are 3 electrodes -- hot, neutral, and ground. Current flows thru hot to neutral (both slotted openings). The ground is the round pin.

It's true that, back at the panel box, neutral and ground are connected together. But, current should never flow thru the ground wire to get there! That wire is strictly a safety mechanism.

The relevant terms in the US electrical code (the NEC) are "grounded conductor" (neutral) versus "grounding conductor" (ground).
This is well understood in the middle-east. Within a company or a government office, the bureaucratic wild goose-chase stops the moment you're sent to a woman's desk. They just get it done.

It's even a signal nowadays. Companies with women in mid to upper management positions are signaling they're not corrupt, and they're all about efficiency and quality of work.

At least in the Gulf, if you want it done, put an Arab woman in charge.
Everything there :) Let me quote from an e-mail I received earlier through one of the report a problem links on the front page:

Browser: Firefox/3.6.8
OS: Mac OS X 10.6
Language: English
URL: http://www.reportaproblem.at/
Or just crowdsource the reading! It would be really interesting to check out the aggregated quality of this kind of technique.
Hmm, so the news of Perl's deaths have been exaggerated then?
Can't you use their API/data dump for this?
I think this happens with surgeons as well. About two years ago my doctor found nodules on my thyroid... blood tests revealed Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. After a series of ultrasounds, radioactive iodine uptake tests, and needle biopsies, I was referred to an ENT who specialized in thyroid surgeries.

The pathology report revealed that there was about a 20% chance I had papillary thyroid cancer, which has the highest cure rate of any type of cancer (>95% are completely cured after a thyroidectomy). So he recommended we take it out.

And that's what I did... a partial thyroidectomy where one half was removed. Turned out there was no cancer.

It was weird, though. After all of the painful tests, the long weeks waiting for appointments, the waiting in doctor's offices, the uncertainty, I didn't really think to say "Well, this is pretty low-risk... why don't we just wait on it?"

Surgeons will operate if you let them. It's what they do.
Wow, this is really concise. I'll try adopting this somehow.
I have not. From a quick look this stuff feels like String theory, which we conveniently cannot prove. Once again, only a mathematical concept with no connection to the real world that we need to concern ourselves with. It's also a "theory of everything" which I have learned not to trust (these theories tend to overlook some big issues, like the fact that quantum effects only show themselves at roughly atomic scales and just assume that the cumulative effect at large scales does not cancel out).
Usually the fear is that people will find out that the homophobe really is gay, or that a gay man will try to have sex with the homophobe.
Escapism vs. Engagement: Building a Better Social Game
I have found my iPhone4 harder to maintain a grip on than my iPhone3x models.

Glass breakage may be a symptom not a problem
Perl is still very much alive and well.
An increase in claims from 2.8% to 4.7% sure sounds a lot higher when phrased as "iPhone 4 owners are reporting accidents 68% more frequently than iPhone 3gs owners". It's enough to make their following claim of "the iPhone 4 had 82% more broken screens than the iPhone 3gs" effectively meaningless without a quantifying hard number.
Rails tutorial screencasts
Question:

So my adult (beer league) hockey team is trying to start a slush fund so that we can pay for things like new jerseys, water bottles, shared resources type stuff. We are looking at trying to get a group account for this, and WePay looks like its exactly what we need.

But the accounts we talk to say that we would have to pay taxes on this account, if its in a bank account. Would WePay be a way to get around paying these taxes? Does anyone else have any insight to how we could set this up?

Is this question way to off topic for Hacker News?
I don't see that optimizing the V8 JIT for that purpose would be more difficult than creating an entirely new VM. Actually I think that V8 is used in Android anyway.

I don't have anything new to add to the age old debate about dynamic vs static typing in general. I'm not firmly in one or the other camp on this one. I just don't see the empirical evidence for the much touted greater reliability of statically typed languages (nor for the equally much touted greater productivity of dynamically typed languages)
The site seems to be down, or is it just me?
This is a great point.

For something that seems so "common sense," the meaning of implication is difficult to grasp.

I wondered whether I should spend some time discussing the differences between material and logical implication.

In the end, I decided that was just too much for a short overview on the basics.
Hackers on peering, streaming @ Mobile Social TV
I think it is hard to see from the demo what your product actually is and its ultimate purpose. To correct this I would add some product description details on the left or right of the video with a call to action, or noticeable link for more info.
To make it viral, find an individual who is hated and currently hot in the news, advertise "hit x in the face", paper mache individuals image over a round piñata.
I also would increase the sharing methods and make it so individuals encourage others to do the same, a twitter tool at minimum. Also allow voting on the next individual to be hit in the face.

Now if you do not agree with the violence, as some will, how about aligning you marketing with the product. For example: Offer to loan 20 free cameras to individuals living in a bad crime ridden area. Allow voting for the neighborhood and easy sharing tools so people can ask for votes. Next when a crime is recorded on the service, post images with a reward of a few hundred dollars or so for the first person to identify the suspect that leads to an arrest. You will need to do some PR work to get the word out for this to work but it should get some mainstream mentions. People may say it is against civil liberties, but this will work to your advantage with PR.
"They really want to be Gucci or Ralph Lauren"

Um, no. That's Banana Republic's job. Same company. Old Navy is the cheap stuff, BR is the high end, Gap is in the middle.
Ask HN: What would you do with a newspaper-dot-com's built-in audience?
I work dev for a newspaper-dot-com that gets ~5M monthly uniques. If you were at a (local) newspaper-dot-com, and you had that built-in audience, I'm curious: What would you do with it?
You can't trust Government Motors: the GM Volt is a hybrid, not a true EV
The Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial screencasts are out
Great idea. Weak implementation. Compared to even the TXT version that's my top Google hit for [rfc2616], this is harder to search and fits less text into the same sized viewport. (Devoting ~40% of the viewport to informationless deepCyan background isn't very helpful.)
The anti in anti-matter = of the same kind but situated opposite whereas anti-globalization = being against.
Thanks for the referral, but what I have in mind requires a lot more than pre-digested profiles. I need to talk to somebody.
> The salespeople just aren’t on my radar.

That is one reason why salesfolk typically make more than engineers....
The questions in my first (And even some second year) comp sci classes were so trivial, and java so verbose, that it would be impossible NOT to have the same code as someone else.

Granted, if those percentages are obtained by, say, diffing the files, I'd be more inclined to take this seriously. I'm so anal about my spacing and brace placement that when I google for a code snippet to do X or Y (at my job, not my school of course), I change the spacing and braces to suit my OCD.
I built my last startup (http://skribit.com) around this problem.. but I moved on as the market was very small. Still - a shame to see people give up on their blogs, corporate or personal.
If I wanted to be sexist, I would say: that should work here. If there's a glass ceiling, then corporations that don't have it should out-compete those that do, because they'll be drawing from a bigger talent pool.

So the conclusion would be that either 1) this isn't being tried, 2) it's still in the process of succeeding, such that discrimination hasn't been competed out of the market, or 3) there really is a gap in worker value, due to maternity or other gender-related issues, and the market recognizes it.

Rebuttals?
Well, the iPhone 4 has twice as much glass to break (back and front).
I'm on the other side of your situation. These days, nine out of ten times I'm looking at papers, algorithms, lots of paper with big-O and cache nitpicking, brainstorming with others trying to make those 20 Gbps turn to 60..

Speed is a direct product of simplicity, and for me simple is elegant. I also think speed is important enough for me to feel strongly about cutting down a "feature" or two, to just make the damned thing not take all night to solve your sudoku..