skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, that's a bit depressing. :/ But half my family live in the north, and I don't think you give them enough credit :)

Also, you seem to be talking about the decision making process of assessing whether to vote for AV or FPTP, not the not the complexity of voting using an AV system.

I'm not convinced that the AV voting method is too difficult to understand, though. Ranking things in order of preference is not hard for anyone to do. The finer points of the difference in electoral outcomes given different voting statistics might be more sophisticated, but that could be applied to any of the voting systems.

Voting itself though is no more complicated saying "I'll have a pint of Stella. If they don't have Stella, I'll have Fosters."

The No campaign has made the AV system out to be more complicated than it is as a scare tactic to put people off voting for it. That seems to have worked, which is deeply unfortunate, but indicative of political campaigns across the world. Fear and doubt are excellent motivators, and seem to be far more effective than a clear, reasoned and 'intellectual' argument.

Call me an unrealistic idealist, but I would much rather people research and consider the options before making an informed choice. Making a case for FPTP because it encourages more people who are uninformed and unconsidered to vote isn't going to win me over, though :)

However, as I say, the AV voting mechanism really isn't complicated at all - my wife is an early years teacher. Voting under an AV system is so easy that - literally - a five-year-old can understand it. I don't see anyone being put off by it.

Moreover, I think more people will be enthused by i) their ability to vote for the candidate that they believe in, ii) the greater accountability of their elected MPs to engage with their constituents and more accurately reflect their views and iii) their ability to express their opinions in a more meaningful way through the ballot box, that turnouts would be greater, not smaller.
Low turnout and voter apathy has a multitude of causes, but the ones that I hear most often are "lack of accountability" and "my vote doesn't count anyway."
Having said this though, it sure seems that software is alot more unreliable than most bridges and buildings, so the question is, "Why?"

That's a good question. Off-hand, I would say that part of the reason has to do with experience. Humans have been constructing bridges and buildings for thousands of years. As such, engineering of this sort is generally well understood. Occasionally, when working with new materials or grander scales, past experience fails, e.g. Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

There is another important way that designing software differs from designing structures. Whether a building stands or collapses is governed by the laws of physics. On the other hand, software design takes place in an entirely abstract world, where the laws that govern it are sometimes subject to change. That combined with the sheer scale of much software makes it difficulty to thoroughly reason about it.
Is it just me or do companies always come out with a "vague numbers" post like this when everyone starts thinking their doomed? What I mean by that is a post that's designed to reassure people but quotes a bunch of numbers that we have no way of actually verifying.

(The first example that pops to my mind of a similar post: http://tinyurl.com/22qdow9)

I'm not taking a stance one way or the other on Facebook Comments vs Disqus or Disqus' chance of survival. I'm just saying these posts don't mean anything to me anymore because unverifiable numbers are easy to skew and the strategy of using them has been done too many times in the past.

So, at least on me, the post has the opposite effect. It makes me think the company is getting scared and that's why they felt the need to make such a post.
If he needed help, he could reasonable expect others to come to his aid. Seems characteristic of the profession. Especially for someone of his stature. People would hear of his situation and come forward with offers of aid and hospitality. "Yes, please come to IAS, here's a room, stay as long as you want." Now, he might not want to accept such offers, I don't know. He seems to dislike the academy. In which case he might prefer to suffer alone, than dirty himself w/ prizes and associations.

But the idea that he wouldn't have other resources to draw on, short of the $1M prize, seems wrong.
I agree. Here is the ballot: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7e/Bun...

Voters have two votes: one on the left and one on the right. "Hier 1 Stimme" means "Here 1 vote". It is still just an X in a circle but twice instead of once. Most people when shown this grasp it immediately.

A similar Scottish ballot is on the left here: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures...
Does anybody else think unmasking the password field is a terrible idea?
There is nothing wrong with a little healthy paranoia!
Mac OS X Lion, like iOS, flashes the scroll bars when the view loads, so you have that information from the beginning.
How do you use a scrollbar without a mouse?
Slashdot haters burn my karma.
There are lots of things going on for Perl right now on the deployment/cloud front. DotCloud, Phenona, now Stakato. This, coupled with web frameworks like Mojolicious and Dancer, make me very happy and optimistic that Perl is entering a new phase, fixing any publicity issues it had. A renaissance of sorts if you will.
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.6/changes.html
Android GCC now supports the Bionic C library and provides a convenient way of building native libraries and applications for the Android platform. Refer to the documentation of the -mandroid and -mbionic options for details on building native code. At the moment, Android support is enabled only for ARM.

I haven't tried it myself yet, know of a reason it wouldn't work?
When I read what you wrote about being "pressured by the tutorial", I had an "a-ha!" moment, I know what you mean.

The site's first users came from language classes who learn English as their second language (at beginner and pre-intermediate level) and teachers send new flashcards to them after every class -- that functionality of the site (teacher/student accounts, sending flashcards etc) is not shown to the public atm. These beginner English students had problems navigating the site and after introducing the "aggressive tutorial" student retention became a lot better. That's the story, this is a result of a pretty hectic development and there were just no time to really think about these issues.

I'm in the process of redesigning the site aesthetics (I'll try to do a better job this time), I will really rethink the tutorial too, thanks.

You said you were a little bit confused during practice because you thought you needed to type the answers, I see and I'm sure this will bite other users too so I will do something about it sometime next week. When you think about it you'll find that thinking about the answer is enough (and it is fast), typing is unnecessary most of the time.

There is no clear/professional business plan for this thing so it may be destined to fail from a business perspective, we will see. Don't worry the site will be up because some friends and I need it daily.:) I absolutely want the application to be a usable (non-crippled) tool for free users, also one will be able to increase their free limit even further by inviting friends. <salespitch>I want FaW to show people that flashcards aren't just crutches for cramming things anymore, computer assisted flashcards is by far the best lifelong learning method.</salespitch> I hope when people see that they will reach the free limit pretty fast. I plan adding some features to paying customers only, like images inside flashcards, but free users will always have every feature that is crucial for learning.

Thank you for trying out the site, I appreciate it!
For Dr. Everitt, who joined the Gravity Probe experiment in 1962 as a young postdoctoral fellow and has worked on nothing else since, the announcement on Wednesday capped a career-long journey.

There's something so profound about that.

To think of how many jobs I've held in my comparatively short life, how many minor career changes I've had here and there, how many massive shifts in interest and passion I've had over the years, and to hold these up beside someone who has been wholly dedicated to the same singular goal since before I was even born--that's just mind-boggling.

And it was selfless! This one singular goal to which he's dedicated himself, every one of the fifty years of work that went into it, ultimately ended up becoming--at least when boiled down to a headline--a footnote to someone else's greatness.

Five decades. I can't even begin to fathom what sort of drive and passion and commitment that must require.

Bravo.
Nothing against LikeALittle, but I really wish people with such kind of raw talent and dedication were doing something better than solving the problem of anonymous flirting.
Are term sheets binding?
Getting started with Cloud Foundry using a Node.js and MongoDB application
No. With the keyboard, use the End key. With the mouse or trackpad, flick up quickly. Exponentially more efficient than dragging a scrollbar or clicking at the end of the scroll gutter.
No, it's Delphi (of course).

Link: http://www.miniatur-wunderland.de/anlage/video/miwula-tv/fil... (1:50 h, german)
Assuming, as the lay scientific rhetoric often positions, that one of the two sides is full of shit!

In real scientific debate, the two sides are actually likely to be sharing an enormous amount of common ground and quibbling over extraordinarily specific details. The trick is that sometimes these specific details have an enormous impact (bistability). It doesn't suddenly mean that one side is full of shit just because the world might change dramatically depending on how that tiny detail changes.
Sass in Scheme, Take 2
Meanwhile, true low-latency audio is still not possible on Android. Anyone developing precisely-timed musical tools and games (like myself) will be forced to stick with iOS, and there still isn't a single decent synthesizer for my Droid.
How is this the case? How many 3rd-party mice don't have a scrollwheel? (Especially gaming mice!)

The other question is "What is the default behavior?". If I plug a mouse without a scrollwheel into my iMac, do scrollbars show up by default? It seems a sensible way for them to handle that case, but we'll see.
I use a trackpad and button to drag up and down on the scroll bar. I don't think the scroll on the trackpad is precise enough.
Mac OS X Lion also has the option to revert the scrolling direction to the old behavior.
In context, I was referring to "getting what you pay for" from free services, not so much the paid ones.

With paid services and products, you're aiming to get the best bang for your buck, so obviously you would evaluate cost vs. output or some other measure. As such, I would say "Hey, why is this HDMI cable from Radio Shack so expensive compared to Monoprice?"

And blam, I've made the best decision in terms of value.

I think.
Prince William & Catherine Are Coming to America | NEWS 365
I haven't used Go het, but try to keep up to date. One issue I have is that naming conventions seem all over the place. Is there a logic behind the naming of things?

For example, function names are sometimes CapitalizedLikeThis, but sometimesLikeThis. This kind of messy inattention to detail makes the language come across as sloppy and unfinished.
Quite true; what good are 100,000 choices if none of them solve my problem?

A second problem: 50 apps look like they might solve my problem, but how do I know which suits me the best?
This is actually the first proper stable release since the process was introduced, the first tagged release did not go through a similar release preparation.

I'm personally extremely happy with this development. We run Tinkercad on a moderately complex Go/C++ based server infrastructure (7 server types on tens of machines) and we have been lagging the Go tip given our need to avoid instability. The fact that we can now sync more often than 6 months and with less risk is great. It's a important step towards making Go a solid choice for distributed systems programming.
"If someone could find a British metastudy containing a nice graph indicating ~50% of current standard medical treatments has no evidence of effectiveness, I would appreciate it - have had much trouble locating it."

I haven't seen that study, but if you look up any given common medical condition, for many of them there are studies about what percentage of those diagnosed are being treated in accordance with best practices. And for most conditions it's usually not more than a third. Doctors usually just prescribe whatever is advertised the most regardless of whether or not it's even remotely effective or safe, e.g. http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/99/15/2055
It's not actually that there are more artists, it's that the Apple bazaar has attracted customers who are willing to pay money for the art.
Product Development for Multiple Markets - HackFwd Blog
OpenID is ridiculously complex for what it does (and in any case, complexity is the antithesis of security), and fortunately seems to have failed.

The abstract idea was good, the standard itself is awful.
I don't think scientists should be trusted. There is a lot of shoddy "science" being produced on a daily basis.
False dichotomy - the choice isn't between a completely unregulated financial system and Stalin.
Clever video. Artistic, compelling.

Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful presentation. Hated it with a passion. It wasted 3 minutes of my life reading the same text as was presented in a difficult to read font, with distracting effects, no doubt to make it difficult to read so I'd have to listen to the droning monologue.

I wish people would learn to present well and stop wasting the time of everyone who pays attention. They talk about tools holdingyou back and wasting your time. Ineffective presentations prevent your message from getting to the target, wasting their time and yours.

Even worse, I went to the lunk-to site - http://www.hackingwork.com/ - and my first click took me to a "not found here" page. More wasted time.
I'm honestly surprised it took this long. Considering anyone can submit "Hello World" to the Android store in 1 minute by getting a $25 dev account, and the Apple approval process is an exercise in bureaucracy....
There is the option to base scroll bar appearance on your input device.
Google Criticizes JavaScript Benchmarks, Modifies Sunspider
If overturning established ideas is as easy for you as you seem to portray it, you should enter into a career in science. Scientists who can prove that existing paradigms are wrong, or incomplete, are treated as rock-stars, not pariahs. Virtually every scientific figure you have ever read about overturned some old false knowledge.

However, the reason there aren't more rock-stars like that is because when you actually have to inject yourself into the debate and have your own ideas exposed to the same level of skepticism, you often find that your own conclusions are as flawed as the ones you are critiquing.

Not saying science has all the answers. Not saying currently held beliefs won't be overturned. Not even saying that you might not be right about some of the things you are skeptical about. But I have seen a lot of people believe they know better about things of a scientific nature who have absolutely no idea about which they speak. As an outsider to think that something is easier than it is, and that you know more than you really know. It is not unreasonable to let the people whose life is devoted to the work, do their work. When you question smart people's life work, it is incredibly reasonable to apply some of the same skepticism you are applying to them to yourself.
This is actually part of the language. Identifiers starting with a capital letter are exported outside the package, the ones with a lower case letter are not.
B-but it's so shiney and modern!
Condorcet just points out that group preferences are not necessarily consistent. This is a property of group preferences, not merely of some voting systems; the voting systems just allow the inconsistency to be noticed.
Facebook Takes 31.2% of the U.S. Ad Display Market
I agree but I think it's a little more complicated.

The problem is that we we loosing developers to high paying jobs in the banking industry. I.e. not your average netbank developer but the developer who can develop for those 1% you talk about.

So the problem is that the developers in talk here are the talented ones that goes for those jobs within certain parts of the banking industry that certainly don't provide anything close to the value they extract from the market.
Many have become skeptics after personally checking the data and protocol.

Often this is not provided in enough detail to replicate the study. All such studies should be discarded.

Those that provide their data and exact protocol can be reviewed.

Journal articles are not an assertion of truth. They are an alleged reporting of results, which should be provided in enough detail to get the same results. This is necessary because historically only a minority of peer reviewed journal published results have reported things that ended up being true.
Facebook, Google rumored to be vying for Skype deal
Entrepreneurs: The 'Business' Gene
Decompilation is undecidable?

"you cannot write an algorithm that would decompile every possible piece of code"

I'm not sure what claim is actually being made here, but decompilation of any particular compiler is trivially decidable: try every input program until you find the one that produces the observed output.
Money is not the only kind of economic asset. If Monsanto offered me $1,000,000 no strings attached money to invest in my startup, I would refuse them in a heartbeat. A single press release connecting their company to mine is worth -$1,000,000 to me.

Jason Fried and DHH talk extensively about the corrupting power of money. Needing to get paying customers in order to survive is a useful selective pressure. Jason Fried has a quote something like "Companies without funding get good at making money, companies with funding get good a spending it."

Both of these are economic reasons.

In addition, even if accepting the money would be a net gain for him, refusing it isn't the height of economic stupidity, as you suggest. Doing something that caused him to LOSE money is surely more stupid. Refusing the $1m is simply neutral. Not good, not bad. Medium stupid.

And lastly, likening him to people with Down Syndrome (and other disorders that fall under the umbrella of "retardation"), suggesting "well there's stupid, and then there's DOWN SYNDROME" is distasteful. If you think he's being epically stupid, that's fine. But likening him to an already maligned social class in order to make that point is not nice.
Well, OK. It's two 'X' ballots compared to one 1..n ballot. You could argue each way which is more complicated. And I agree that neither is sufficiently complicated to disqualify it.

What I would say is that the mechanics of AV are more (pseudo?)non-deterministic than the Scottish Parliament system of PR. With PR - seats mirror votes more or less. With AV, nobody really seems to know how things will turn out, and even less representative massive majorities can occur. So in a way AV is more complicated in that sense.

I'm still wondering why I voted for it to be honest.
8 reasons why the new Google Analytics interface sucks
I don't believe that's true in the US. Software works seems to be white collar.

But I still make a point of referring to my fellow software people as 'software engineers', since (1) it's how my company styles the titles[1], and (2), it reinforces the idea that we're not "code monkeys", grunting and beating on keyboards for bananas per day (not that I'd turn down fruit if offered :-) ).

[1] I work at a hardware/software company, we have an array of mechanical and electrical engineers as well.
Right, a seamless deploy to a 'production' site would be worth an added fee to a lot of people. From the blog post, it seems like they spent a lot of mental effort around the development direction and sidestepping a possible added revenue stream. The hosting doesn't have to be part of the core product - a 'publish site' button to a hosted solution would be great for the users who want it (and not horribly complex).
One that gets missed almost everywhere is: if I type the wrong username or password, keep my username in the field (so many erase the forms when returning the error). That way I can tell if the mistake was in my username or my password and if it was in my password I don't have to retype everything.
Local information......

Now that Verizon has the iPhone, the people I talk to locally (quite a lot actually) are only getting Android (which going with Verizon's ads they only know as Droid) if they cannot afford the iPhone, are not a Blackberry user, or don't want the free LG / Samsung feature phones. I suspect the last category would disappear if Verizon had the $49 iPhone 3GS.

The Blackberry people (sure are a lot here) seem to be going iPhone if work isn't buying at about 50% rate.
Sure. That's why it's dynamic knowledge. Scientific fact is, by design, wrong.

We have completely overturned the luminiferous aether. It is in hindsight a really, really stupid theory. It was, at the time, quite difficult to disprove, though. It is highly likely that our current situation is identical, if more sophisticated by a revolution or ten.

So we're not really talking about scientific knowledge. We're talking about recommendations based on scientific knowledge. As it turns out, small changes in our understanding can actually lead to massive changes in policy. This is a good part of why scientists hate to posture on policies — it's difficult to distinguish them from knowledge statements and scientists make their reputation on trying to only utter true knowledge statements.

---

In practice, this means that your best bet is still to trust scientists stating predictions 100% of the time unless you've got some significant understanding of the field they're talking about.

Autism and vaccination are uncorrelated is a fact about the world. Whether we should be afraid of vaccination is a normative policy. The first can (should) inform the second, but you can certainly argue about it.
Why shouldn't people express their opinion if they are uninformed?

Since the greatest experts in each field publish their best results with a less than 50% accuracy rate, it seems clear that uninformed people randomly guessing things can do better by flipping coins.

Feynman found it useful to go with his gut feeling about something before he had reviewed any previous research in a field, and found this worked well for him. His IQ was 125 so he's just an ordinary guy with common sense.
No. It is something of a sham. It protects you from one use case: people watching the screen over your shoulder. It does not guard against people watching your fingers on the keyboard. It does provide a sense of security. I have no problem shielding the password with a hand over the screen, clicking the box, checking, and unclicking.
I have never understood why I need to type my password twice. Inevitably I just copy what I wrote in the first box into the second.

I'm also interested in the elimination of the post sign-up confirmation email. I'd rather get a "Welcome! If you didn't sign up for this service, click here" email, but I can imagine that if I didn't actually sign up for the service, I'd never want to "click here" for fear of spam. There has to be another option, though. Anyone have any bright ideas?
I always thought "Visual C++" was a dumb name because there's nothing more or less "visual" about it than the other tools at the time.

C++ is a text-based language, by definition, and a chainsaw by metaphor. If you approach it like it's some kind of drag-and-drop finger paint set, you will surely encounter misery.

But don't listen to me. It's not like I've ever named a $B+ product line. :-)