skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can see the advantages and disadvantages. I spent several years trying to force myself to use CSS for layout, because I thought that the abstract benefits of CSS were worth it. Abstract = "easier redesign" or "more accessible" type stuff. Things that had never affected me, yet.

And I spent so much time, so much frustration, trying to cram myself into the CSS semantic world. Then I realized, for my startup, that I needed to just BUILD things. I see CSS as providing generally abstract benefits, with very concrete disadvantages.

In short, CSS zealots sound to me a lot like this: "Well, if you could understand what you were doing, it would work right." That entire attitude puts me off.

Also, I believe it's a false dichotomy to say "no tables", or "only css". I put hacks in my code when it is beneficial for my situation. Tables are one of those hacks that I keep in my toolbox, right next to the duct tape.

Frankly, I find it obnoxious that you said, "People who do use tables should educate themselves - or pass the work onto a front-end developer." No. I understand my situation, my context, and my application. I made the decision to use tables, because it was more expedient, and I was insulated from the negative consequences. For you to imply that I'm doing something wrong on my code, well, that's just flat out obnoxious.
Relevantly, I have a friend who makes a living drinking Scotch.

Quite literally; his job title is "Master of Whiskey," and that's what he does.
Yah, though that just gets me back to the sky blue screen of nothingness.
Unnecessarily comprehensive look into an insignificant JS issue
Yahoo to Shut Down MyBlogLog - Miss it? http://Publishedin.com Might Be Of Help http://blog.publishedin.com/post/3519850188/yahoo-to-shut-do...
If he sold them and kept the money, then that isn't exactly rejecting the shares
I'd love to see merging of discussions. RiderOfGiraffe's bot was nice. But the hive mind didn't like it.
Front running would be tricky - even if you have Goldman's code, you'll still need to build an infrastructure faster than theirs. Good luck with that.

In contrast, if you can figure out how to implement layering in such a way that their system acts on it, or use price spikes, or something of that nature, you don't need to beat them on speed. You manipulate them, they trade against you as fast as they want to, and you win.
How is $80 10x cheaper than $400?

(Is anything X times cheaper than Y?
Cheaper = delta. Expense / cost is the base.
Seems like it's better to say 1/10 as expensive.)
Maybe some folks here with a better understanding of pipes than myself can help me figure out how to do the following using pipes and not a temporary file. I need a minimalist method to format a couple of email headers, append an email body, then send that email with `msmtp`. This is all running on a small embedded linux system with some additional packages bolted on. This will be mailing the status updates from my backup server to myself. Partly I'm doing this because I don't want to run a full-blown mail user agent, and partly I'm just curious how concise it can be :)

The requirement is that this be an executable script which can take any number of command-line arguments describing email headers, and which receives the body of an email on STDIN. I think this can all be done via pipes but I'm not entirely sure how - the trick is that the output of the program over STDOUT needs to be the concatenation of formatted command-line arguments plus the contents of STDIN. I had difficulty figuring out how to have two different commands both send output, in order, to the STDIN of `msmtp -t`. msmtp is configured to send email via a Google Apps account.

Here's what I'm using at the moment. It works but I think it could be more elegant and UNIXY without the temporary file.

#!/bin/sh
T=`/opt/bin/mktemp` # create a temporary file
echo -e "From:$1\nTo:$2\nSubject:$3\n" > $T # format command-line args into the file
cat <&0 >>$T # append STDIN to the file
msmtp -t <$T # mail the file (-t parses the smtp recipient from the email headers)
rm $T # delete the file

# used as follows:
#/usr/local/bin/minimail "sender@example.com" "recipient@example.com" "Subject of the Email" <body.txt

Any ideas?
Bachmann is straight up fucking crazy

Justify it. And don't use Media Matters as a source. They recently accused Huckabee of endorsing "ethnic cleansing" because he suggested that Arab states should offer land for a Palestinian state, and Jews have a right to settle the West Bank. Using "ethnic cleansing" in that way is crazy.

Own what? Which sane candidate were the Kochs supposed to support?

I assume you voted for Obama. Was that vote in favor of his open opposition to same-sex marriage? If you didn't vote for Obama, did 60 million other Americans cast an anti-same-sex ballot? No. They took the bad with the good.

In that same vein, why can't a libertarian vote for a candidate that shares 51% of his views versus one that supports 15% of his views????????
Nice article.

Two sentences jumped out at me.

First:

“There are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”

then:

If anything, stories like Ms. Portman’s show that great success, like DNA, is constructed of a few basic building blocks: tenacity, focus, and the old Woody Allen line about just showing up.

No question about the importance of things like hard work, tenacity, focus, not taking anything for granted, and just showing up. We all have to do these things.

The phrase that really got me thinking was "intellectual horsepower". What is that? And how important is that?

I used to be awfully hasty in judging others, "She is really smart," or "He is so stupid". Then I learned alot from my first mentor. He taught that there often isn't much difference between someone who appears smart and someone who doesn't. Perhaps no one spent enough time with them. Maybe they have other challenges, like family, health, or circumstances. Maybe they're just a fish out of water, spending too much time on things that don't interest him. Or maybe they appear dumb because they actually believe that they are. They've been told so many times that they now believe it.

At first, he sounded like some hippie idealist. But the more we worked together, the more his teachings manifested themselves in the people we worked with. People who appeared dumb blossomed under different circumstances all the time. The were smart deep down inside where no one ever explored. (These people were mostly hourly workers who knew way more than their bosses about running the business.)

To this day, when I see phrases like, "intellectual horsepower", I cringe. We "smarties" aren't that much smarter than most other people, if we are at all.

And just to stay humble, remember: we're all just one head injury from blissful ignorance.
The NOSQL Tapes, vol. 9: Benjamin Black on NOSQL, Cloud Computing & fast_ip
Wow - I actually added that entry about DTSS a few years after my father (Ken Lochner) died. It's kind of a trip to now read it on HN.
And let's not forget Tom Cruise. No, wait...
Have a look at Guy Steele's interview with Fran Allen in a recent CACM--John Cocke was fond of beer, and people used to covet his bar napkins, on which he would sketch out new ideas.
I think there is a greasemonkey script in the making to disable the defaulting of the post on facebook tickbox.

In the rare occasion my non-tech friends want to see comments I made on something, I think I can manage to tick the box.
I always cringe at shows like Big Bang Theory that portray smart folks as socially inept

Fringe makes science look pretty cool, IMHO.
Facebook Acquires Beluga
There's already a Google command for it: "redis manifesto". This also turns up some discussion threads, which is an added bonus.
I've also noticed a culture of doing the beautiful and elegant thing instead of duct taping a solution to get something working.
"But with frequentist methods it's not even clear what kind of assumptions you're making."

I don't understand what you mean by this.

For a simple, concrete example: take the problem of fitting a distribution to a sample of real random variables. It seems that a Frequentist would make the following assumptions:

1. The data comes iid from some unknown but fixed distribution.

2. This true distribution is included within some set of distributions: eg, the set of normal distributions with real mean and non-negative real variance.

They would then use some estimator to estimate the parameters. The choice of estimator is perhaps justified by some theoretical properties, eg, consistency etc. This gives another assumption.

3. The best estimator to use is the one which is optimal with regard to properties x,y,z.

If it is not clear what assumptions I am making and I have explicitly stated some, presumably there are others which I have left unstated. Could you explain why you think the above collection is insufficient?
Ask HN: What programming language should I learn for the web?
Mostly all of my experience is with Windows. I've configured a few Linux boxes before. I've recently started to script with PowerShell. Other than that, I've never programmed before. Also, I have a few sites running Wordpress so I've been playing with PHP.

I'm ready to dive in but there are so many choices. I don't know the pluses or minuses and I'd like to make an informed decision with an eye towards the future. I'd appreciate any help. TIA.
easy to click Greplin Programming Challenge: http://challenge.greplin.com/

Anyone managed to pass level 1? I am stuck at level 1. Please share the logic.
I'm not sure if Richard Branson is really a 'little guy' taking on an 800-lb gorilla, but the idea of taking on competition by actively inciting them has worked many times.

It would be especially effective when:

- you are able to gain significant attention (press, viral) over your comments/attack

- the 800 lb gorilla doesn't even know you are attacking it
Brian May's story is pretty impressive. He left school while pursuing his PhD when Queen became popular. Over 30 years later he finished his studies and obtained his degree.
If FB comments catch on, Facebook better expect a wave of non-real personas. It's not hard to make/maintain a fake persona. Most of my personal details on FB are not only hidden, but false.

Perhaps this is the strategy to boost their numbers? (Ill advised, I think, but whatever)
What Salary Buys Happiness in Your City
"It is a logical impossibility to make a language more powerful by omitting features" - false. Different designs have different limitations. C can't have precise garbage collection. Shared-memory threads can't be isolated and so can't be automatically migrated. Pure functional code can be rewritten by the compiler in a way that imperative code can not. A language that omitted any global construct would be intrinsically sandboxed against use of any functionality not injected. And so forth.
It's interesting how people divide themselves into two separate camps when it comes to landing page/direct marketing (which are brothers of the same mother). The fact is, both longform and shortform work. But why they work and which context depends on the type of product you are offering and your sales model.

Long form works best for:

* Simple to understand products which have difficult to achieve benefits (weight loss pills, real estate riches courses). The idea is that once you find an interested party, it is just a matter of convincing him that YOUR SOLUTION is THE SOLUTION.

* The purchase process is single stepped with low time and mental effort involved on the part of the purchaser. (e-download, shipped product).

* It is really hard to sell services with the long form, although its been done. I'd still like to see a good example of a successful longform that sells a service, and analyse it to death.

Short form works best for:

* Complex sales where a conversion means pre-qualification, a phone call, question answering, a customized result (think general contractor), identity check or some other gate to completing the sale. The idea is just to give them just enough benefits that they feel both enticed and think it is low risk to give you their contact information. Almost all B2B sales fit in this category.

* Monthly services with a freemium model, and any other low risk opportunity to kick the tires.

* Items with a low purchase point and low effort checkout (App Store game).

That said, there are always exceptions to the rule, and you should test both forms of communication if you are unsure.
I wonder if it would be considered bad to block ieee/acm using the google chrome blocker plugin (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218382). I geniunely don't want to see them in my results, but they're not quite a content farm.
Freelance pro for website revision
Hello - If you can revise information on a low security website, and perhaps advise as to how to eliminate its ref. on search engines, I would love to hear from you. Generous terms; PayPal payment. With thanks, n.
http://stackoverflow.com
And that none of the above information appears in the wikipedia page...

Edit: I just can't read... it's there as mentioned below.
Sure. Here's one example, "It looks at first like there’s a clear factoring 'Baltic Avenue has a method called isUpgradableToHotel,' but when you look more closely you realize that every object representing a property is burdened with knowing almost all of the rules of the game.

The concerns are not clearly separated: there’s no one place to look and understand the behaviour of the game."

The concerns are clearly separated, but they're separated along a different axis than what you're looking for. I'll argue that for any partitioning of concerns there will be a concern that is not adequately separated.

With that said, I must admit I'm unclear why each property object has to know all of the rules of the game. They don't have to know most of the rules AFAICT. This may seem like a small point, but I do think its important. I think the only thing they have to know if their cost to buy, upgrade, and rental price (I'm not a monopoly expert, so its possible I've missed something).

To buy there's a fixed price associated with the property-- you just need to not be owned by someone else. To upgrade I assume its a fixed price. I think the only requirement is you own all the colors. In which case you defer their ability to buy to another class -- the property group class. Baltic Ave doesn't need to know what the actual rule is -- it just asks "Light Blue Property Group Object -> Can I be upgraded?"

But the property object has no idea about passing Go, what Jail is, how many dice are used, what Chance cards are, who their neighbors are, how many other like-colored properties there are, what special powers railroads have, if there's a community pot, or how many players are even playing the game. The partition of concern has been made along some axis that this programmer thought useful.

Another is the telephone test and entangling what and how. I think what and how are the same thing. The for-loop example though is solving a different problem than the select example. It's solving a more constrained problem that you can't generally solve with the select syntax. It turns out though that what you are looking for happens to be provided by both solutions. As you move up the stack your problem requirement may be less constrained, in which case you don't need the rigor, but we should note that the rigor isn't simply the how, but just a degree of rigor (unfortunately standard languages with for-loops have to solve more constrained versions of the problem). What the telephone test is really about is that for anything you actually care to discuss on the phone will not be extremely rigorous.

But I feel like those are nits which I probably uniquely have, which is why I didn't actually mention them. But I wanted to point out that I disagreed, because I think it strengthens how much I enjoyed it. And while I disagree today, the fact that I read it and thought about it may mean that I disagree less tomorrow.
Addendum to Freelance pro for website revision..
Hello again. Kindly contact me at nor3en@me.com. Thank you. n.
That's really fabulous, thanks for taking the time to lay your thoughts out so clearly.
And it works because people are very reluctant to give up things they own, even if they don't find them useful.
On a newer computer (ie MBP 2010), Chrome and Firefox are pretty evenly matched in terms of usable speed in my experience.

However, on older machines (ie, my parent's 7 yo laptop), Chrome makes an otherwise unusable machine into a halfway decent browsing experience.

I'm not sure how this impacts future marketshare, but it probably explains why me and my wife both equally use Safari/FF, but my parents use Chrome (and only on the older machines).
It's in his profile. Visit http://reflect7.com/
Simulation of Ideal Gas Particles
India Insists on Blackberry Monitoring
Well, yes, intelligence needs to be trained, shaped, refined. But are you saying that there is no difference between humans when it comes to their maximum potential? I think everybody has an 'intelligence ceiling', and that ceiling can only be asymptotically approaches by study, hard work, circumstances etc. But that doesn't take away from the (imo) fact that there is a ceiling and that some people, no matter what they do, will never achieve the level some others do.
The author is some professor using Lisp and falls into some traps. The personality he describes is not a speciality for Lisp (he may simply not know other programming community) and some of the people he observes may not really be have this kind of personailty - he really can't see since something like a programming news group only exposes a tiny bit of a personality.

It is true that in the Lisp community there are and were some highly intelligent people and some of them are not your average guy (think Stallman, Gabriel, ...) - but those were extremely productive and creative. Gabriel was the CEO of a development took company which was quite successful for some time.

I think that people exist who march what he describes, but not exclusively in the Lisp community. I also think that many in the Lisp community have much complexer personalities than what he describes.

comp.lang.lisp has long been the target for weirdos and trolls. That's one part of the problem. There are reasons for that, but I fear there is not a single explanation for the behaviour of various widely different personailities.

I have seen a lot of weirdos in other communities. Mathematics attracts some of them for example. I remember that guy who proved that PI is finite. Physics is another. I remember that guy who put a lot of effort into a presentation about water and its memory effect. A special, not that cheap device, could take advantage of that effect. That device was for sale.
Python
* great community of really smart people
* cross-platform consistency
* great libraries and open-source
* has Django
* Google uses it
* ...
Authors either work for free or pay for the privilege of publishing.

I don't know where you get this. IEEE/ACM may not be paying them, but they are sure as hell getting paid to write the papers that go in those journals.

Does it cost more money to produce than Wikipedia?

The difference being that there are only 4 or 5 people in the world capable of producing or verifying the articles that appear in scientific journal.
ADD is very common among people with bipolar disorder. I have both myself, and they play off each other, so to speak.
The Trouble With Bright Girls
Please also notice that the economy was growing at a fantastic rate for most of the period that the top marginal tax rates were over 90%; and the last time they dropped as low as Reagan-to-now was the period directly leading to the Great Depression.

The slope may not tilt in the direction you think it does.
Man people like this make me feel so inadequate.
I like it! Went ahead and signed up. Will try and post some content.

I will say, I'm not quite sure about the whole "not giving beta folks any credits to start with" -- especially since it costs credits to create channels, and you NEED people right now to start creating channels and submitting content. Maybe give beta users 150 credits to start or something? (Enough to change your profile name and create a channel or two).

Also, I was able to create a custom profile name even though I had no credits (my account now has -30 credits). I guess that would be another way to do it (letting beta folks go into debt), although I think spreading some credits around to start is a better idea.

Finally, is there not a way to "filter" my home page? Right now it's not really an issue since there's not much activity on the site, but eventually if for example the Android channel starts blowing up and I don't care about Android -- how do I get activity from that channel not to show up on my home page?
I've had several peer-reviewed papers published. The reviewers (who are unpaid) often have excellent suggestions and often do the work of an editor.

However, I have NEVER had an editor or other paid staff of a journal offer ANY assistance on the manuscript whatsoever, to include stuff I'd ordinarily think an editor would do as part of the job: edit. In talking with my colleagues, their experience is the same.

I'm not personally aware of ANY scientific journals where authors or reviewers are paid by journals.

I'm not interested in getting paid for publishing. However, like most other scientists, I'm tired of having to jump through hoops to get access to research data and findings that we citizens collectively paid to produce.

This is all anecdotal of course. I'm not aware of any broader literature or even editorials describing what value, if any, is added by the current system.
To this day, when I see phrases like, "intellectual horsepower", I cringe. We "smarties" aren't that much smarter than most other people, if we are at all.

I don't think this is true at all. People who are average intelligence or below can be very successful but have no chance of succeeding in high level intellectual pursuits. People who are smart don't understand this, because to them learning anything is just a matter of effort.

I think there is truth in what you are saying, because at a certain level of intelligence, hard work and attitude become more of a bottleneck than ability. This is supported by facts as well, studies have found that success increases by IQ score, but levels off or drops at a certain point where brainpower is more of a handicap to mental health than a benefit.
Why Spec. Work is Okay
Gates. Because if you take Jobbs, then whatever you make will be painted white, made shiny, and the price doubled.
Brilliant marketing. Don't miss that if Facebook wins, all rides between Facebook and Google are FREE, and if Google wins, all rides between Google and Facebook are twice the price. ;)
So what happens how when someone makes this app, and doesn't involve the original guy?
I scrolled all the way to the bottom of the comments, getting more and more depressed thinking as I'm the only old codger who remembers this meme. I am happy to find out I'm not the only one!
Study: 70 percent of local-business owners market on Facebook
I'm kind of shocked that the eMate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300) wasn't mentioned. IMHO, it's somewhere between a laptop and a PDA/tablet.
Blue Gecko - Seattle, WA (remote from anywhere)

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Drop me a line if you're interested, my email address is in my profile.

Complete job description at: http://pastebin.com/YRYiZPqZ
What about basic IDE functionality such as folding, code/content assist, etc.?