skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had been working face to face customer service for my mom's business since I could talk - it could never have prepared me for this situation, as I suspect is the case with your odd job experience, but that's not the point.

I didn't have a problem with saying I didn't handle the situation like an adult - at no point did I contend that I did. But we were taking as much responsibility as we could feasibly handle, this just went above and beyond what we were prepared for.

So I hope you understand when I take exception to you suggesting that we didn't take on enough responsibility. This organization was filled entirely with people who wanted only to help their community by taking on additional responsibilities.

You could argue that we were irresponsible to take on such roles if we were unprepared, but there was nobody else stepping up to help out. This was in a town of 40k college students, most opting to spend that saturday morning getting some extra sleep or nursing a hangover.

So when you say it's "funny to see people who have such a different idea of what they are responsible for," I say "Yes. Yes it is."
The game-maker's attitude really frustrates me. I understand that creating something in an existing universe that you enjoy is very gratifying and gives you instant exposure and fame in the fan community. But for chrissake people, just take 20 minutes and come up with your own intellectual property! If your game is really worth playing, it will stand on its own even if Samus and Raynor and Mario and Sonic are nowhere to be found.

Look at one of the most popular indy platformers ever created: Cave Story. I mean, it's called Cave Story! It's about a guy on a floating island, and his nemeses are a doctor in a funny hat and a bar of soap with eyes! The developer himself has explained that he came up with the entire plot during a commercial break of a Nip/Tuck re-run. It's not hard, and the game still contains dozens of homages to its predecessors like Metroid and Castlevania. In fact, if you Google "metroid castlevania indy game", Cave Story is on the first page. How's that for fan exposure? Not only has this guy created a game in the spirit of his favorites, and gained the respect and adoration of the existing fanbase, but he is also conveniently invulnerable to cease and desists.

Quit yer bitchin'!
Alternatively, by using either the libcaca or aalib mplayer drivers.
We are nowhere near billions of trillions of dollars spent on SETI (I'd venture to guess it's in 100s of millions for all these decadesat best), but.

Finding an ET would be event of scientific significance that can hardly be compared to anything else. Perhaps a manifestation of God's existence comes closest.
> It just does it in a way that makes us feel like we're receiving some sort of imparted scientific wisdom

If that is the way people choose to see it, that is not Drake's fault. It sounds like you and dantheman really only have a problem with the bullshit "religious" implications some poor souls wish to divine from a dry bit of math.

The Drake equation is not a religious statement until you fill in faith-based numbers.
This is a signal to the nitpickers to cut it out already. Now that the actual HTML5 spec is just called HTML, we're free to use the term HTML5 to describe the suite of new web standards.
Here's a slightly older article (1998) about localities granting cable companies monopolies: http://www.fff.org/freedom/0598d.asp

As for the public utilities I completely or agree, or perhaps do it one better. Set up a not for profit that's independent from the government that sole purpose is to provide bandwidth with no restrictions.
Draining voltages from your motherboard...or your air conditioner
But a year is not that long, either.
Comcast never raised this issue with Netflix specifically. They raised it with everyone using Level3 as a CDN, if ICanHasCheezburger is using Level3 as a CDN then it got raised. Netflix's volume of traffic over Level3 is likely what made it a pressing concern.

I'm well aware of Comcast's dislike of Netflix. Probably better then most. But a vast amount of data being thrown around on these networks is video, most of it by Netflix. While there are net neutrality concerns there, there are also legit network stability and infrastructure concerns.
How is this different than charging Akamai? I pay for my internet connection, why does comcast get to charge akamai for their data?
You don't need patents to protect a specific implementation - code is copyrightable, and stealing your particular code (or even creating a derivative work like your "semantic-preserving changes" comment suggests) is illegal even without patents.

I think the case you're interested in is this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates_Internation....

Based on trials that have used the filtration technique, if I know the issue ahead of time, I can workaround it.
It's really nothing to get excited about. There are so many important programmers in the world that noone will remember them all. Not everyone works in the area where those people will mean anything more than a credit line in some tool they use... and that's fine.

I work with VoIP daily and could name lots of people who you "really should" know - you're using a phone all the time after all. Or people who create amazing stuff right now. But no... actually I don't expect that. Everyone has their own area of interest. I appreciate that someone wrote `cat` or one hundreds of other nice utilities, but I'm not going to read their history unless I've got a lot of free time and want to do that.
Life in North Korea
Take a look the life in North Korea.
> Now, when I saw the statement I though "Aha, but zero is both even and odd." As usual, Wikipedia has corrected me (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_of_zero).

Where in the world do people get this idea? Every time that I teach a class where the number-theory content is elementary enough for this to come up, someone thinks either that it's both even and odd, or neither even nor odd.

It's hard for me as a mathematician: a number is even if it's divisible by 2; 0 is divisible by 2; so 0 is even.

(EDIT: Err, sorry, I was rebutting those who claim that it's neither. I should say instead: a number `n` is odd only if `n + 1` is even; 0 + 1 = 1 is not even; so 0 is not odd. Maybe this is a bit less convincing?)

I honestly can't see the confusion—except to attribute it to a memory of a flustered grade-school teacher who was unprepared for a question and so had to recall his or her own flustered grade-school teacher ad infinitum.

(Oh, or is it maybe a confusion with infinity, which, if we were to try to classify it, would have some claim to being both?)
As someone new to Python (at the time), I think he did aspiring programmers a great service by telling them to stay the hell away from DiP.

When you're new to something, and it seems insurmountably difficult, you are faced with the question of whether you are awful at something, or if the teacher - for the sake of politeness - didn't do a good job.

Feelings may have been hurt, but he's prevented some, if not a lot, of people from being scared away from Python and programming.

His style serves a purpose, and it lets him cut the bullshit and reach out to people.

The people who wanted to learn programming and Python were the recipients of Zed's soapbox speech, not Mark Pilgrim.

LPtHW was created in the context, and the story of that context was laid out.
For good Sproutcore documentation, I found these links helpful:

http://guides.sproutcore.com/

http://devmt.hku.nl/~sproutcore/doku.php
HA!!!! Read the fine print. Its a mostly worthless thing, its a great way for amazon to get people buying shit by giving them $5 off anything. Its just more effective.

1 per customer
No gifting

And vuala its not really 50% off free cash.
I don't really understand the crisis with which he opens this essay. It seems to me that the problem is trivial; when we use "A implies B" or "if A then B" in common conversation, we intend to mean that A causes B. Why? Because it's not usually very useful to bother saying it unless A causes B. Mystery solved, right?

It seems like Tim likes to further classify things into "reasonable-sounding" and "unreasonable-sounding" implication statements, but I just don't follow the lines of that distinction at all.
Sharply focusing on math and science, and then aiming to get into an "old" profession like being a doctor or lawyer, prevents the child from ever exploring or even considering other possibilities.

That's exactly the point. They fear that their children will pursue one of those other possibilities the way you or I would fear our children becoming drug addicts. I don't think it's restricted to East Asians; it seems consistent among recent immigrants. I mentioned to a friend from Iran that I had high LSAT scores and could have gone to law school -- I didn't even say a good law school -- and she was astonished. To her, the higher income and prestige of being a lawyer was decisive; it was bizarre that I chose a lower-paid path that resulted in me existing beneath lawyers in the social pecking order. How could I choose to make less money, live in a smaller house in a less posh neighborhood, drive a cheaper car, and go on less lavish vacations?

High-paid professions with stable demand and high, meritocratic barriers to entry are ideal vehicles for recent immigrants, whether they want to ensure their class (if they come from an upper class in a society where falling out of the upper class is catastrophic) or their financial security (if they come from a country where economic existence is precarious and subject to great disruptions.)

Upper-middle-class Americans are a little weird in that we are just as obsessed with class as anyone else, yet we often subordinate class to lifestyle factors when choosing a career. In fact, unlike upper-class, lower-class, or most other middle-class Americans, we are stuck in a kind of catch-22 where it is considered gauche to show concern for maintaining or improving our class status. We also sacrifice security, but I don't think it is conscious: we just can't viscerally comprehend economic insecurity. To my friend, I shrugged and said, "I wouldn't have enjoyed being a lawyer. I might as well choose a career I enjoy. After all, no one is starving." I never had any artistic or musical interests, so my blasé attitude toward class was never tested by the prospect of a sub-middle-class career, but I never questioned it when it came to opportunities to move up. Doctor, lawyer, meh, doesn't sound fun. That attitude horrifies many immigrant parents.
It seems to me that same argument would apply to my local telephone, power, and natural gas company. Are you saying that they should not be regulated either? Just trying to understand your position here.
Am I correct in that if you text some, but not a lot (>0, < 200/mo.) then your fees at least double? Obnoxious, for infrequent texters like myself. (Will certainly give more incentive to move to Verizon when my contract ends.)
The Facebook of China
Wow... neat list. FB is not more valuable than BMW, AIG or Nokia. There's just no way. And if it turns out that they are, then something is fundamentally wrong.
related but a little different (just FYI): some Intel nics can handle interrupt modulation. Decreased latency but wouldn't fix the open handle/scaling issues here.
Attacking HTTPS With Cache Injection
Comments NGINX and Unicorn
Just some initial observations. Looking for feedback before I jump on the bandwagon.

RB
What's this app about?
I am a Member of the WHATWG and one of the persons that pushed for this change. We try not to snipe at the W3C. What happened was that HTML5 was used to mean a lot more than HTML5-the-spec in practice. The W3C embraced this and designed a logo around this concept. Now that the W3C was on board with calling e.g. CSS HTML5 we thought we could safely carry out a move we had wanted to make at the end of 2009. Namely dropping the 5 from HTML5 since HTML has no versions. It is a continuously evolving language.
Re Courier... if MS read Gizmodo or Engadget or the web in general, they would have seen the excitement around the Courier. And it was cut after the iPad was released and selling well. They cut it not because of the concept,but for some other reasons that we may never know.

I would note that sales estimates and wanting the technology are two different things. I long wanted a larger screen on phones and a good web browser. iPhone delivered that. But they also delivered it on ATT with no 3G support. Sales estimates are trying to weigh demand against a various pros/cons and price points, but don't directly speak to if people wanted specific technologies.
BTW, you suggest pound for the slow client problem, but according to this email it doesn't help for that.

http://www.apsis.ch/pound/pound_list/archive/2010/2010-11/12...
Oh, the chances of such symbioses aren't too bad. They happened many times.

See Mitochondria, Chloroplasts, perhaps Cell nuclei, the retro virus that's incorporated in our genes that make mothers' immune system not reject the fetus. (See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Endosymbiosis and https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Endosymbiotic... for more.)

On a scale broader than single cells there are around 80% of vascular plants and their symbiosis with fungi, the bacteria in our guts, the worms close to black smokers, certain sea cucumbers that absorb algae and live off their photosynthesis, and much more.
The final word in the format wars.
Why? I barely use facebook and it's more important to me than BMW or Nokia, and AIG should be out of business (but that's another argument). I assume facebook is more important to most people than BMW or Nokia, and though the value may be less per person it could be easily be more in aggregate.
It's important to note that stock valuations are derived from the expected future profitability of a company. Stock is a claim on future profits. Compared to a company like Halliburton, who has to build billion-dollar oil rigs before they make any profit, a technology company like Facebook is a lot more lucrative and thus its stock can inflate quickly if the profits expand faster than costs. And generally technology costs go down over time while profits increase exponentially. So you have a powder-keg scenario in Facebook if, and only if, they find a profitable business model based on their enormous userbase. And they better find that business model or the stock will crash like it's the year 2000.
Ruby already works, actually: http://blog.headius.com/2011/01/jruby-on-rails-on-amazon-ela...
I'm really excited about this. We were burned bad by building on top of App Engine and then eventually had to switch to EC2. If they add native Python support this will give us the best of both worlds.
The basic idea is that the software (browsers, validators, editors), the specification, and common practice, all evolve together. This is how the web has evolved so far. We are simply acknowledging it.
Market cap / valuation comparison is only meaningful if you compare companies in the same industry.
For example, priceline.com has market cap of about $21B. In that respect, facebook valuation is not so high.
Able to do the same things as before, but in a week instead of a year.
Can't he just change the name and keep working on it? Surely the name isn't a big deal.
You're doing it wrong http://i.min.us/ibZWRM.png
This is an argument that is hard to convey convincingly in a comment, but for those who are curious (including those who call "BS"), I recommend reading:

_The Blank Slate_ by Steven Pinker
2011 March Madness Predictive Analytics Challenge Announcement
We will be running the second annual March Madness Predictive Analytics Challenge where we ask contestants to submit computer algorithms to pick the NCAA Men's basketball tournament winners. Sign-up to participate and receive announcements.
Most important change seems to be the switch from a canvas based renderer to a DOM based renderer.

From what I've seen ACE feels a lot faster than Bespin did.

I've been wondering if it would be possible to build a WYSIWYG HTML editor on top of their DOM based renderer ala Google Doc's editor. ContentEditable based editors are a real pain to work with due to all the quirky browser behavior that comes with contenteditable. Would be great to have an alternative...
Pound helped this problem for delicious in 2005, and by the time I wrote this article it was starting to not be the right answer. In 2011, it's definitely wrong :)
Feature branch code reviews
Apple's Embarrassing Predicament
I didn't know what to expect, which is why I was testing. All of the desktop browsers on my machine do resolve the protocol-less URL in the address field though (as HTTP).

I mentioned it because I can see how it would be easy to notice that behavior on the desktop, see the same thing fail on an iPhone, and then assume that mobile Safari doesn't support these URLs at all.
What Glee Means for Twitter & Television
Because given a sufficient timescale, WebM support in <video> might become ubiquitous. I've made it very clear I'm talking long-term, not tomorrow.

I feel like we're talking in circles here. How does dropping support for H.264 make WebM support in other browsers more likely to become ubiquitous? How would retaining H.264 support make WebM support in other browsers less likely to be so?
The polynomial algorithm for 3-SAT problem (or P=NP)
Implication is far less confusing if you are a constructivist.
The way I usually fix people who bizarrely think 0 is both even and goes like this:

Me: OK, let's get started. Is 5 even or odd?

Them: Odd.

Me: And 4?

Them: Even.

Me: How about 3?

Them: Odd

Me: And 2?

Them: OK, OK, I get it!
Jason GG? Yes. He did. When he agreed with me. He even confirmed my suspicion about 8x8[1].

[1] http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377
You say "there are also legit network stability and infrastructure concerns"

I would like to ask, "how do you know this"?

Also, would reference my original point - "Comcast has a residential cap of 250GB/month as being acceptable usage by a customer" - if a Netflix user is staying within that limit, and if Comcast is having problems - they deliberately under-engineered their network, yes?
Again, absolutely right. Remember, though, that we're not talking about the capability here: we're talking about the default. A (well-run) website can get all the caching benefits by including a HTTP header. The article is about a well-run website that does exactly this. The default only matters at all for poorly-run websites.

Given that poorly run websites are considerably less likely to be worried about scaling issues, the caching is mostly inconsequential. So, would we prefer to give the poorly-run website a mostly inconsequential security benefit or a mostly inconsequential scaling benefit?
Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose though? The point of using varnish is that it keeps you from having to access the backend altogether. This is getting into an area where something like memcache might be more appropriate.
As an exercise, you might want to try to think of why other Asian American stereotypes exist, and how they may/may not apply to 2 billion+ people in Asia.
I was gonna say, a smack in the face to html. Notice how SMOOTH that animation is, oh makes me wish HTML was dead, long live flash!
I would think that hundreds of years of engineering (mechanical and electrical) and solid products used all across the globe would be more valuable than a social website, but maybe I'm wrong.
Web-Scale Computer Vision using MapReduce for Multimedia Data Mining
> How does politics get more complicated as you drill down into it?

Speaking as a former student politician and candidate for Parliament: yes. Yes indeed.
Though to be fair, as long as he isn't discriminating among people as Governor, he is free to preach and display a sense of any community he wants at Church. What is more troubling is the sort of de-facto discrimination that Glenn Greenwald and Seymour Hersh, among others have been talking about.
Racism is not an issue here, since the last name is still Asian, I guess.

A friend of mine from China said the main reason is that some Chinese names are hard to pronounce for an English-speaker. Also other Asian nations (Indians, for examle) seem to leave their names as is, and also give Indian names to kids, I am just wondering, is it something Chinese specific?
Sales are the only way to truly prove if people actually want the technology. Everything else is hand waving. The people doing the estimating on Wall-Street are paid big bucks to forecast sales.

Gizmodo and Engadget appeal to a market segment, and not the one Courier was focused on. They are not accurate predictors of the consumer market as a whole.
Who says infinity is a number?

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/10/infinity_is_not_a_n...

http://nrich.maths.org/2756

http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.large.numbers.html

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/6/3/95744/71866

Once we are confident that infinity is not a number, why would we expect it to have parity?
Washington Post starts Facebook ad agency
For those who are interested, here's another copy of the removed video. Not sure how long it will stay up though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roIOpHq0vUc
Perhaps they learn that "even" is equivalent to "divisible by 2", and then they go on to conjecture that "odd" is equivalent to "divisible by 3", or maybe "divisible by 1" or "divisible by at least one odd prime"?
Emacs + Org-mode.
How not to use the word literally (video)
That would be here: https://github.com/jeromegn/backbone-mootools
Go on then: as a constructivist, does it follow from "n is even and n is odd" that "n = 17"? Show your work.

(Comment: I'm fairly sure I know the answer, but I don't think it's so trivial as to not make for an interesting discussion on HN. In particular, I'm not sure that it's really less or more confusing to the sufficiently uninitiated.)
If you can write is a 2n for some integer n, then it is even. If you can write it as 2n + 1 for some integer n, then it is odd. Therefore, zero is even and not odd.
Racism isn't the issue - discrimination is.

"Richard Kim" means I grew up in America and will have no problem talking to you.

"Han Yong Kim" means you're going to have trouble communicating with me in the workplace.
Company named is called "SocialCode," but spoiler: it doesn't do any social coding.
I am working on something to help developers sell their products. Feel free to email me (in profile).
yes. as a first gen azn who moved over at the age of 5 (read: 2nd gen), there are certainly a much more rounded pool of non academics in asia...
Getting well.
You are presuming the stock market is somehow fair.
My team (back at MSFT) did this on checkin. It'd look at the class you changed and what tests had code coverage that touched that class, and rerun just those tests before allowing the commit. Post-commit, the rolling builds would update the code coverage for all of the different build flavors (debug, release, etc).

One nice side-effect of this support is that it also gave us code coverage deltas from the last build, so the system would send out embarrassing numbers with your commit if you'd dropped the overall coverage of the module.
Why do we think this is worthy of voting up? Is there any reason to think it might be correct?
They are not common carriers, but, they are given protection similar to common carrier in both the DMCA and certain other laws/regs that cover similar ground.

The protection is similar but the concept is completely different. Common carrier is based on providing a public or general service and, in return, being indemnified from certain damages. ISPs have no such requirements or responsibilities, they just have complete indemnity. You seem to think they have a responsibility to not discriminate. They don't. They never have. That's what net neutrality is trying to do, but until then they're basically free and clear.