skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would anyone want to hear what Rebecca Watson thinks about anything? She has a herd of rabid dogs on her heels but nothing else worthwhile, as exemplified by the elevator fiasco. Sure, if you looked at ten seconds of her video and nothing else it was pretty reasonable, but context matters and there was a lot of it that the femiskeptics like to ignore.
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Ratan Tata unveils the Rs 22-crore Nano
Tata Motors on Monday unveiled the Goldplus Nano - a one-off showpiece version that sees 'the People's Car' encased in 80 kg of 22 carat gold, 15 kg of sliver and 10,000 semi-precious and precious stones, including rubies and pearls.
Show HN: BluthQuotes
> Not necessarily this article, but generally, and especially listening to him talk live (radio, conferences etc) Richard Dawkins is arrogant and pig headed. It's kind of ironic that by dedicating his life to setting them straight, Dawkins has become as much of a fundamentalist evangelist as the religious fundamentalists he spends his time mocking.

Hardly. Dawkins can be very blunt, be he is hardly a fundamentalist. How do you think he should act?
I don't see how the concurrency claim makes any sense. Many concurrency primitives revolve around counts (for example, a semaphore).

Likewise, GC may be able to deal with messy situations (ones that I'd advise you avoid anyway), but brings problems too like non-deterministic lifetimes. ARC isn't a silver bullet but I think it gets pretty close to how people use GC in day to day software.
"Santa Clause analogy"

"It's just flat strange and saddening to me"

This is why the analogy is used.

Not this: "would have been devastating to St. Augustine or Tolstoy or Tolkien."

It's simplistic. And as an argument against specific dogma and teachings, it is quite effective. It's not meant to make a profound philosophical statement, it's meant to elicit exactly your response. Atheists are subjected to seemingly endless shitstorms (see: banana argument, peanut-butter argument, etc), it feels good to return the favor. Most of us know that we're never going to get through, so we might as well have fun.
That's a much better title for the post! And the developer-turned-patent-lawyer is Mason Boswell.
Our linode is currently in London (I didn't set it up...), but I'm probably going to request a move to the Tokyo datacenter in the next week. Ping times to Tokyo (136 ms) are literally half what they are to London (297 ms) and still better than Fremont (208 ms). Seems like a no-brainer to try moving it.
Topix: Gawker for Small-Town America
It doesn't matter if it's associated with the comic star, it only matters if it's in the same area as the trademark.
Richard Dawkins has done more for women that the femiskeptics have ever done. May I quote Abbie Smith:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After Shaftgate, many noticed that Dawkins quit speaking on the issue.

Many put up guesses as to why this happened, and I think the 'why?' is now clear. Dawkins has shown with his actions time, time, time and again, that he is supportive of everyone in science and skepticism. When it became clear that words, discussion, reasoning were useless against what he was up against, he stopped using words, discussion, and reasoning, and kept doing what he do, which is, to 'do':

>The dawkins foundation is going to pay for childcare so moms can attend future cons. Feminist cred reestablished, well played

More twetters:

>Childcare at future TAM to be sponsored by Dawkins Foundation

AWESOME!

ERV translation:

>You all keep throwing your bordello parties and pajama parties and getting drunk all the time and acting like overall jackasses in the name of 'supporting women in skepticism'. Im going to actually support everyone, including women, by providing childcare at future TAMs. flipseveryoneoff

The non-response this move has gotten, the stunned silence from the True Feminists mirrors that of the duped Evangelicals before. Stricken dumb by being too dumb to understand what just happened. Its hysterical.

I wish I could take an ounce of credit for any of this-- providing childcare at meetings is something I have been talking up and down since the Texas Freethought Convention last year. Camp Quest provided 'day camp' for the kids of attendees. That was such a weight off of so many parents, especially single parents, including single moms, shoulders. Furthermore, having low-stress, kid-friendly activities has helped the OKC Atheists grow exponentially-- picnics, trips to zoos and museums, meet-ups at a pizza place instead of a bar, etc. Weve gotten so big we actually had to make a break-off 'secular parenting' group (though all are still welcome if they are doing something cool and you want to tag along).

You want more members?

Have more low-intimidation, social meet-ups. Not every skeptic group has to meet in a pub. Not every meeting needs to be a lecture. Yes, karaoke nights at a bar are my favorite, but something as small as a few 'kid friendly' events, or day-care for day-long events goes a fuckovalong way to generating a warm, welcoming group.

Anyway, I rant all over the place about this, including to Dawkins very recently, but I cant take any credit. Apparently this move has been in the works for a long time, with Camp Quest. Apparently before Twatson fell down and threw a temper tantrum and demanded everyone kiss her invisible boo-boo.

She made her move. A rash decision.

Dawkins made his. Carefully planned for some time.

Check-mate.

-----------------------------------------------------

http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2011/07/dawkins_coup_de_grace_in...
The Twelve Attributes of a Truly Great Place to Work
Prehispanic Decapitated Ballgame Player Sculpture
This is an excellent talk -- highly recommended if you know (or want to know) anything about C++. But it leaves me with a big question.

For anyone who has done C++ over the years, and made an effort to be type- and exception-safe, and efficient, these new features are a breath of fresh air. But what about people who haven't?

C++ is a huge language. Sutter seems to be saying that there is a nice, relatively small subset that is usable, safe, and efficient -- if you understand the issues. But do you need to? For example, the discussion on raw pointers at 27:45. Raw pointers are perfectly fine if the ownership and lifetime issues are all aligned correctly, he says. Great. For those who have been writing C++ for a decade and know all about ownership and lifetime and new and delete and reference counting and the rules for calling destructors and exception safety, no problem. What about people who are new to C++?

As I say, C++ is huge. The original ANSI C++ was gigantic. C++11 is a behemoth whose totality is beyond the comprehension of any mere mortal not named "Herb Sutter". There is a small subset that is usable and cool and awesome, if you know about much of the rest. What if you don't? Is C++11 a language that non-experts can use? Is it a language I can effectively introduce to new computer science students?

I don't know. Does anyone?

P.S. I found it funny that, amid all this nifty, modern code, in the slide that appears at 52:38, he throws a char *. Does he really think that's a good idea?
Where are you located? Your ping times don't mean much without a reference point.
SSDs make a stunning difference in performance for large, complex joins that won't fit in RAM. However, I imagine that in 5-10 years time 'the cloud' will use them too; even if only as part of a larger storage pool.
Not sure you understood that his point was that an atheist using the Santa Claus argument sounds like a philosophical n00b...
Not sure I follow you. Are you saying its content is simplistic (meaning an argument that oversimplifies an issue by ignoring complexities) but rhetorically useful to get a rise out of your opponent? How is that productive? This was the point I was making: all too often the specific brand atheism that Dawkins' writing seems to inspire is more interested in tweaking fundamentalists than engaging faith as such. Hell, I love to tweak fundamentalists as much as the next guy, but where does that get us? Might as well go cow-tipping...
Where did the Tea Party come from? Committed Republicans with ... strong views on race:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/opinion/crashing-the-tea-p...

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/04/new-data-on-tea-party...
If a company is a software company isn't the goal of the software to create profits for the company? Even a company that provides free software needs to make money... One way or another.

I'm confused on how this couldn't be the case? Also I don't think I mentioned locked-up or proprietary. I was hinting more that software decisions often had to fall in line with business decisions.
> People who only chase today's dollars are suboptimizing.

This just about sums it up - well said!
I signed up. Really curious about the events.
Book flights to Bangkoks best markets
Thailand keeps surprising tourists with its unique and distinct attractions. It is one of the best places to learn culture, which is vivid and colorful. Similarly, the cuisine of Thailand also surprises tourists with a myriad variety and delectable taste. To experience all these visit this beautiful land soon.
Can a supercomputer predict a revolution?
For me personally:

1. MySQL's "feature set" is usually described as a union of storage engine features; whereas in fact you only ever get some of them at a time. I find that extremely annoying.

2. PostgreSQL has a decent, smart query planner. In cases where I have multiply-layered views, I've seen MySQL throw up its hands and manually churn through each view in turn, while PostgreSQL did the smart thing and combined all the views into a single execution plan.

3. It's much more featuresome for in-database programming. The web world tends to look on RDBMSes as flat files with a funny accent, so this doesn't matter for a lot of programmers. But sometimes you absolutely must either a) protect the data or b) place computation as close to the data as possible. Featuresome databases like PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2 etc let you do this. MySQL not as well.
This is a very real and serious attack. The IV weakness of SSL looks very scary.

This MitM attack very feasible over wifi/corporate networks. For example, (simplifying a lot):

* Initial shopping session example.com (HTTP)
* User proceeds to payment stage payment.com
* Browser with auth cookie for SSL payment.com
* payment.com redirects to success page at example.com HTTP
* Attacker MitM success page adding HTTP iframe to payment.com
* Attacker serves fake iframe with JS code
* The iframe has same-origin to payment.com
* iframe does thousands of carefully crafted ajax/form requests to SSL payment.com
* Optional 1: attacker snoops those requests/response to hint JS iframe
* Optional 2: attacker blocks those requests
* Since it's local MitM thousands of requests can be fired in seconds

The attacker could use specially crafted URLs at https://payment.com and headers using XMLHTTPRequest.setRequestHeader() for the known plaintext.
Private sector loans, not Fannie or Freddie, triggered crisis

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/10/12/53802/private-sector-l...
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/10/12/53802/private-sector-l...
How to make a guy fall in love with you
Set your eyes upon some gorgeous looking guy? How to make a guy fall in love with you? How to make that someone falls for you – hook, line and sinker? He certainly has lots of women vying for his attention so what should you do to stand out in some way to actually catch his attention?
Or a greedy search ;)
Clenbuterol- the anabolic compound
Clenbuterol is a drug of choice for most weight watchers. A symphatomimetic amine with a half life of 36 to 39 hours was chiefly used as a bronchodilator, for asthmatic patients.
"Are you saying its content is simplistic (meaning an argument that oversimplifies an issue by ignoring complexities) but rhetorically useful to get a rise out of your opponent?"

Yes. Exactly.

"How is that productive?"

It's not, nor is it meant to be. It's entertainment for atheists, nothing more. You should not attempt to determine the philosophical sophistication of anyone who uses it from the fact that they are using it.

There are tons of atheists who will be willing to have level headed and informed philosophical conversations with you. I however, and many others, are not interested in such things. Dawkin's is often appreciated by both groups.
I've heard of stand-up comedians, playwrights, and musicians testing new material on small audiences to gauge how well it works, but that's arguably closer to a private beta than an MVP.

I also know that artists will often do studies of their ideas before doing a full-scale piece, but that's more along the lines of a development spike than an MVP.

The closest thing to a true MVP that I've heard of in music would be a band that labors away in obscurity for a few years, has a hit, and then re-releases some of their old material but with better production values.

Thinking out loud, I think the difference between the sort of software where an MVP is important and both music and art is that the former is a tool and the latter is entertainment.

The entertainment industry is built on novelty, and the sheer amount of material out there is so vast that the media can really only cover what's new, what's especially good, and what has made important innovations in the past.

If what you're building has utility above and beyond its entertainment value, you have the freedom and in some sense the responsibility to release early and often.
"No way... I've never heard of a start up that had a product with a great potential but didn't manage to pull it of due to bad business strategy"

>> Seriously? Enter any space in web 2.0 and you'll see a bunch of very similar products. Ultimately only a few will succeed and yes, while product is extremely important, another key reason some will win and others will fail is because the business strategy sucked (and by business strategy I don't just mean marketing and BD. I mean product strategy and hiring and fundraising). Have you ever heard the term ideas are useless and execution is everything? Part of that execution is the business execution. Think about it this way -- not any one could have pulled off Twitter (identical product and everything.)

"No marketing/business mimics will do it if you don't have a proper product to offer."

>> Of course you need a proper product to succeed. But a proper product plus bad execution on the business side will more often then not result in failure. On the flip side, a bad product with amazing business execution will also more often then not fail. Business and product are not mutually exclusive.

"I hate to put it this way... but business intelligence is a field that engineers can grasp quite easily while technical knowledge is reserved to those who have the skills it takes. I actually know of companies that only hire engineers to their financial jobs."

>> Be careful using blanket statements like these; some engineers are just never going to be good business people, because they hate it and don't have the mindset for it. Others might be, but everyone is different. Also, because business is a cumulative skill and increases with experience, business is rarely something you can "easily" grasp, unless maybe if its something specific like creating financial models or reading financial statements (and even that is not easy for most. Engineers can pick it up financial knowledge by working at an investment bank, but it is by far easy for most people. Also, engineers are usually good at math, and think logically. I think this is why businesses occasionally hire engineers for finance positions. Other aspects of business such as BD and Marketing may be harder for an engineer to pick up easily.)

However, one of the best engineers I know is also the best business person I know. So yes, some engineers can pick up and do it very well. But just as with learning engineering... its a process, not an easy one, and one which will probably require you to fail many times before you become good.

By the way, this is just my humble opinion and I could very well be wrong.
Can't wait to get this. Got to see the startups at Lean Startup Machine London on Sunday and was interesting to see them follow the lean startup culture.
Ask HN: Designing a REST API
I am in the middle of building a REST api using Rails. Basically a client app can post to the api with a message and an author. The service then figures out what to reply and who to reply to in a background process.

My question should I design it so that the api posts back to the client's callback url when the reply message has been calculated (similar to Paypal IPN) or should the I design it so that the client must poll the server to see when the reply has been generated?

e.g.

Polling solution
Client app:
POST myapi.com/messages

then poll
GET myapi.com/messages/2324

Callback URL solution

Client app:
POST myapi.com/messages

server:
POST clientapp/messages

My initial thoughts are that a callback url is better because less requests have to be made from the client to the server. And the client app will also be simpler and more responsive since there is no polling required. But this doesn't seem very RESTful? Should I care? Are there any advantages of having polling solution that I'm overlooking?
Free ipods
Lobbying gets the laws passed for those that enjoy them. The players help create the game, so it is perfectly appropriate to hate them.
Test page load speed. Different browser and with screenshoots
Is not only use to check the speed from different locations and browser, also is handy to check how your site is displayed in other browsers.
Thought provoking http://goo.gl/QCmmW
Need HN: Any San Fran hackers need a roomy?
Getting ready to move to San Francisco. Anyone interested finding a place and creating a "hacker house"?
Richard Stallman: “Android Phones Do Not Respect Your Freedom”
Can you think of any APIs that use the pollback method?
No, I understand it completely. He's making the mistake however of assuming that anyone using the Santa Claus argument is attempting to make a philosophical point.
Google Releases Chrome 14 With Support For Native Client
> I believe, but haven't verified, that expected logarithmic height is achieved just by randomly permuting the input sequence and not doing any subsequent balancing - so the treap approach is simply deferring the permuting to insertion time.

That is false. (edit: What I mean is that your belief about the mechanism of randomization is false. If you look at the paper I linked to above, you will see that the authors explain that the randomness must be independent of the input key values.)

> I can't think of a search tree with worse finger search performance than the treap - can you expand on that?

I'm not sure anymore, but I stand by my "asymptotically worse performance on finger updates" claim.
Thanks for signing up, I appreciate it. The signup link is the correct way to get in at the moment; we're currently in closed beta, but once it opens up (soon) anyone can sign up and start using Convergence in minutes, without needing to involve IT (or anyone else).

We think individual teachers should be able to choose the best tools they use for their job, be it technological or otherwise. With this in mind individuals can signup and use Convergence without needing to wait for the institution.

Also worth noting the free plan isn't a trial - you could continue to use the free plan for ever. If you want to expand Convergence across your department or school, and bring in more teachers and courses then you need to upgrade to a paid plan, but for individuals you can use it for free without an expiry.

Thanks for the feedback on the page - we're definitely trying to attract individual educators, not their IT departments, so we'll take a look at how we're expressing that.
I'm afraid it didn't help.
Now the difficulty seems to be to explain that to investors...
No, the Tea Party is the loose aggregation of disaffected middle class types who are tired of excessive taxation, regulation, and governmental bureaucratic meddling; having finally acquired the impromptu organizational networking via the internet, they can discuss what they're tired of, and what they can do to change things.

We're not loony. We're not the creation of any group. Anyone claiming to be a Tea Party "leader" or "creator" isn't. We're your neighbors and friends who are "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore". We're dismayed that our kids are obligated to pay six digits in government debt before they can talk. We know what happens when anyone spends $2 of every $1 that comes in. We're outraged that the Republicans agreed to allow this administration another $2.4T in spending of money we don't have and our kids won't have. We're tired of having our money taken from us to spend on wasteful cronyism, meddling, and funding idleness, while told we can't be trusted to wisely spend our own money we earned. We're tired of being dismissed as looney by people who vote for confiscating our hard earned income under threat of fines, imprisonment or death.

The Tea Party is middle Americans who, on the whole, just want to be left alone. Yes we'll fund "safety nets", build infrastructure, etc. No, we don't want people to starve and die...we also want the able to take care of themselves, and for people to cope with the obvious consequences of their own actions.

Our protests are, on the whole, spontaneous. On boards like this we express concerns, discuss under-reported news, and decide "hey, let's call Senator X and let him know we exist" or "hey, let's rally at location Y at time T" and spontaneous groups gather and act. Oh, BTW, we clean up our own trash too.

We see $1.5T in deficit spending, and know that despite our objections we're the ones saddled with paying it off. We object to getting shafted, and you dismiss us as "looney".
Fighting: Knight Age - Free Online Games
I think this is something of a fallacy that we might tell ourselves (as developers). There's a friction quotient to mobile-text-entry. Let's just assume there's linear friction (for your argument to be benefited by non-linear friction typing on a mobile device would have to become more painful the longer we do it in a sitting, which I don't believe happens). So if the friction cost is say 30% for me to type on a mobile device compared to a traditional keyboard.. it's often worth the cost to me to achieve a given outcome. Especially if there's actually a net benefit to the mobile-ness.

Inviting a friend to a party. Keyboard cost: 30 seconds. Mobile cost: 40 seconds. But say I'm out and about or in the car? Suddenly the benefit swings big time.

In the same situation, say I need to write a long email. Keyboard cost: 30 minutes, Mobile cost: 40 minutes.. and suddenly the distance from my house may not be a factor. Now imagine I have about 20 of those emails to write today...

I'm worried that the way we use our mobile devices (facebook, etc) can warp our perceptions of just how significant the friction for data entry is, and promote this idea that little-text is easy, long-text is still hard. I think that's wrong, by a lot.

I think there's loads of innovation left to do in human-computer-interaction with touch screen and mobile devices and projects like Dr Chrono get me really excited because I think it plunges a team of smart devs headlong into a problem-space that in the long run, won't tolerate less than stellar friction quotients.