skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The past few weeks (since and including the plus launch) have been a disaster for their brand within the tech community.

Why exactly? I love google+ and tons of hackers are using it too.
I think it's more that machine learning builds off of earlier work in statistics. If I remember correctly, that class discusses lots of other things that are used in ML but were invented elsewhere (gradient descent, maximum likelihood, matrix methods, etc.)

Arguably this is all just semantics (nature knows no stats/ML divide), but as a ML person I know this drives statistics folks crazy.
Thanks! Would love to connect if you're interested in knowing more. Shoot us an email!
A couple of my friends went to a JC and went on to go to what I will define as "schools with recognizable names but not ivy league"-caliber 4 year schools and ended up getting less than half of their classes accepted as transferred largely due to technicalities.

They effectively had to go through 4 years of college anyway, they could have saved just as much by enrolling immediately and taking JC courses over the summers and graduated in 4 years instead of 5-6.
there's likely a deeply rooted social and demographical reason for the skewed ratio, which is probably impossible to change. in the western society women till age 30 are usually the ones who choose their partner and not men - hence there's less of a need to join a dating site. interestingly this switches somewhere around 35-40, after which men are in a better position (ironically in part because men have a shorter life expectancy).
We appreciate the feedback! Like every dating site we will have to address the chicken and egg problem of getting a solid user base (particularly women). However we are working on some clever ways to attract women to the site. More specifically we are developing a matchmaking component which will allow users to pick out dates for their friends and decide not only who their friend goes out with but also what they do.

Thanks for the comment!
You can use GNU screen to have more than one bash shell running, and you can use tabs and screen splits with Vim. I use to do this on my G2 phone; it's easier to play with Vim over ssh with a physical keyboard. Unfortunately, my phone lacks some critical characters like '|', '>' and '<', but it's really nice to be able to make edits wherever, whenever.
Yes, we've tested them out, this one converts the best.
PBS - One Last Thing. Steve Jobs Documentary
Just FYI, apache mod_proxy_balancer also supports HTTP 1.1 and you can configure it during run-time if you have mod_status enabled.
> which explains why its an iphone exclusive

No, that's because your average developer is not using the same platform as your average smartphone user.
He was clearly just picking one useful tool that stats provides, not stating that it was the entirety of statistics.

I'm not making any statement about whether I agree with him, but if you disagree you will have to claim that he is cherry picking one useful and one useless skill, not just say that there is more to stats than t-tests.
I absolutely hate iPads with a passion. So much so that I writhe around in agony thinking about the things usually.

However, that is actually a pretty neat idea. I'm not sure I'd swap it for my 1920x1080 terminal emulator (Sony VPCJ1+windows7+putty) though :)
wow, i got voted down by several people because I pointed out there's a racist in YC?
I do see what you mean. I was afraid that you were getting into the "academic" phrasing, but suspected that I only misunderstood. I too like case-studies and prefer a mix of them and the "theoretical" topics.[1] I would hate to see one excluded in favor of the other, so I am hopeful that Alex and team will put together a great mix.

[1]: Although I think the vast majority of topics that we as programmers talk about are theories.
As someone that puts on conferences (including this one), this is something I've spent unhealthy amounts of time thinking about and it's a question any sane person should ask.

There are really two (well 3) things you should hope to get out of a conference.

1) Information. The most visible reason to go to a conference is to extract information from speakers in a direct form. Whether this actually "works" depends largely on whether you (the attendee) have the right prior knowledge and expectations and whether the speaker has the ability to teach you something. If either of those is wildly off, the session will be a miss. My goal as an organizer is to find great speakers and make expectations as clear as possible to both attendees and speakers so that this connection is maximized.

That said, there are many books, videos, tutorials, blogs, etc on Clojure (or any other topic). Will you learn better from a teacher than a book? Maybe. Hard to say. Sometimes seeing a talk live forces a focus and clarity that you would not otherwise have. In short, I can't answer this for you. :) But I will work hard to create the environment for it.

2) Relationships. AKA the "hallway track". This is something that is much harder to get through online learning - meeting and creating relationships with the people creating and using the technology. For many people it is hard to quantify this value (unless you're trying to get a job or something very concrete). But I'd say this is every bit as important as #1.

3) Inspiration. This one is even more elusive, but a conference with the right speakers and audience can be electric and inspire you to learn and create. Clojure is a young and exciting community right now with a ton of crazy smart people. I find it quite energizing to be talking to people in the context of that.

You may find that taking a training course (which we will be offering prior to the conference), gets the really hard focus on #1 which is what you want. However, that training will certainly be more than $450. :)
Persistent misconceptions about Lisp
And while we're at it, may he forbid the co-existence of emacs, vim, and textmate; java, C++, C#; javascript and dart; KDE, gnome, enlightenment, fluxbox, fvwm, icewm, metacity, compiz, wmii, monad; ubuntu, debian, gentoo, redhat, and arch; bash, csh, and zsh ... nothing good ever comes out of approaching a problem from a new angle.
only wish it had some emacs key bindings
> The problem, as always, is there will always, always be more men seeking women.

i don't think this is the case, exactly. after talking to people about it, the issue seems to be that men are just more aggressive about it, which turns away a significant segment of women. the women are out there, some just don't like putting up with the crap they get on dating sites.
Developing this space as a college undergrad means you should be able to do some things really well. Event planning, for one, seems like something people in their mid or early-twenties could disrupt. It'll be interesting to see how your perspective translates to older users. Especially because you can't dogfood a dating site (even OkCupid's founders never used it).

Good luck!
If he doesn't leave, he risks quite a bit - he might be banned from visiting/working in the country and indeed even deported.
You could make the same arguement without any sci-fantasy. Why bother starting a new gold mine? If it doesn't have any gold then it's wasted effort, and if it has tons of gold then it will just depress prices. So why bother exploring for any resources anywhere?

Instead consider a big hunk of asteroid mined gold sitting in orbit. Free storage, and quick delivery to anywhere in the world. Park it up there and drop pieces of it when the prices are high enough.
Thanks. We really think that you have to be an unflinching optimist to be an entrepreneur!
As mentioned it is a problem Windows has rendering fonts. More accurately, it is a problem all non-IE Windows browsers have rendering fonts. Open the site in IE9 and you'll be able to enjoy it as intended.

I would also advise you not to fiddle with the ClearType tuner, in my experience it will not help you with this problem.
I'm looking for feedback on my new startup. After a year filled with so many trips and weddings, we realized there was no good way to plan, organize and capture an event. We built Capsule to track the before, during and after.

Use the invite code "hn" if you'd like to check it out. We're in private beta but really interested in feedback. I should only let so many in but if the code runs out, let me know and I can up it a bit.

Thanks!
Ryan
Welcome to the hacker news sub-reddit.
anyone else notice this site has a Poor rating on Senderbase?
Cough-Asthma and Allergy
I think the UIWebView component that you can embed in native apps has slower performance than Safari.

I don't know the current situation, but for example Nitro was not available on UIWebView in iOS 4.3 ; also UIWebView does not do any caching by itself and doing it yourself is tricky. So this may explain why the performance of this GMail app is worse than the web app.

I understand why one would release native apps with web UIs. It's totally fine if you're on a budget. But the iPhone already has a perfectly fine email app and it also syncs well with your Google Apps account through its Exchange integration.

If an official GMail app is not better than the built-in functionality, then it's not only useless, but also affects their credibility.
Candle Making with Pinecones
Willam Gibson interviewed in the Paris Review
You should look at liblinear and Vowpal Wabbit. The former gives you a super-fast regularized logistic regression (and many other things). The later gives you online classification, and you can fake a probabilistic model.

On a related note, you're wasting clicks using A/B testing. I emailed you guys about using a better online method (a bandit algorithm) but never heard back from anyone. If that's of interest, drop me a line (noel at untyped dot com).

Update It's occurred to me that you're using GAE, and so probably can't run C libraries like the above two projects. There is a Java library here: http://code.google.com/p/boxer-bayesian-regression/ If you're going to do per user and per exercise models you'll have many fewer data points to train your models on. You should consider sharing data between models or use a model that will give some measure of uncertainty in it's predictions. The Bayesian LR code I referenced above will give some measure of uncertainty. There is a stack of (really interesting) work on other methods that will also do this.
Things to do when the Internet is down
This sounds like a fun weekend project. Where is a good source of raw radar reflectivity data?
And emacs sits here, in its mid-30s, looking forward to the pictures of vim's 21st birthday involving it passed out drunk on the front lawn at sublimetext's place.

(seriously, happy birthday vim, it wouldn't be nearly as fun of a holy war without you :) )
I suspect this will be released, I doubt they'd get this far in announcing it to the public unless the remaining stuff was crossing Ts and dotting Is, but it is notable that there's a pretty big difference between this release and previous releases of their engine source.

Previously id was an independently owned company. Now they are owned by ZeniMax, a larger entity.
You really think we need intelligent people to explain addition to 6 year olds and tell them not to pick their noses?
I didn't know Apple's App Store sold apps with bugs in them. Don't they have some type of review process?
1. Keep your project in a Dropbox folder or sftp site.

2. Edit your code with one of the many Dropbox-enabled text editors. (Or use Textastic with its sftp support.)

3. Use Hudson's web interface to kick off an Xcode build. Configure Hudson to send built IPAs back to you via email or TestFlight.

4. Download and test your new build on the same device.

It sort of works, even! As long as you don't need to edit your XIB files, and you avoid typos. I'm not switching over to it, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.
We will brew up a tasty mix.
Free cupcakes for the fairer sex that sign up. Chicks love cupcakes.
Actually, that's not true. WebGL on Windows is implemented using D3D (ANGLE converts OGL ES calls to D3D9) in most cases, and WINE has done D3D on top of OGL for years. They're very different, but translating between the two really isn't as big a deal as you'd think. (Just keep in mind that XNA isn't D3D -- it may backend to it, but it's a very different API.)
guys - your "tweet this" link is broken. Once I sign up thro the pop up, it goes to a dead page. Look fw to it though.
I'm a designer learning to code, and I'm all for devs learning design principles—I just wish that all these design guides for programmers wouldn't offer themselves as a replacement for an actual designer, or downplay the value of a designer.
200 Days of Ubuntu Uptime
You're right about being able to improve your development skills by learning some design. I was a designer first, and I feel like I channel my inner designer a lot coding every day.

I do think this book will be a great tool, and many people will find value in it. I played out in my head biz guy gives developer your book, and saying "We don't need a designer I got you this!" Which you have corrected me on.

Your last statement is spot on, I was a bit off in my original comment.
Yeah, Yale makes this sort of thing a LOT easier than many schools thanks to how generous its leave policy is.

The math would be a lot different for a school where dropping out meant losing your seat entirely.
This is a joke right? Since a bug can be a infinite loop and proving that you have no infinite loops in your program is uncomputable this would be an impossible task.
The Smartphone Wars Are Over
Ideas like this make me wonder "who had the need to pay somebody via Twitter?"

I honestly can't think of an instance where that would come up in my daily life. How is this simpler than regular credit cards and Square?
Don't Send That Email. Pick up the Phone
Actually vi and emacs were both born around '76. It's vim that came out 20 years ago in '91 :)
months of hard work that should be spent hitting the books, learning something about the world and gaining the experience required in order to properly provide a solution for educated and experienced people over the age of thirty who can spot an immature product with their laptop closed.

I'm not saying there isn't a market for lbs dating sites, what I am saying that from what I'm reading it appears that a couple of intelligent people are dropping out of school at a young age to pursue what amounts to some low-hanging fruit.
Samsung's Meteoric Rise In The Smartphone Market
PETMAN robot from Boston Dynamics
info on boston dynamics' website http://bostondynamics.com/robot_petman.html
Nitro is available in iOS 5.
Thanks for helping. You obviously have more experience with this.
ANGLE[0] goes some way to solving that.

[0] http://code.google.com/p/angleproject/
It is a bit better than that though because you can have a complete server environment to yourself, and don't have to deal with timesharing.
Yes, Emacs vs. Notepad would be a little lopsided.
In Reversal, Honda, Toyota Now Face Big Hurdles
Sure, and hopefully a nice compliment to it.
I don't understand, the graph that you linked too appears to demonstrate exactly the same effect that the OP graph is. Could you explain what was cherry picked?
Winter trends for new york
Also reported in the NYT (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/02/asana-introduces-a-...).

I've heard the rumors and am excited to finally try this out, but I'm a bit disappointed that in won't run on IE without a browser plugin. If the intent is for this to be used by teams, I would assume that the folks at Asana would realize that a large number of organizations (mine included) still use IE, and often make it difficult for people to install plugins.
Not entirely trivial. Because it is chaotic, it's not terribly well behaved. People who try to integrate the solar system forward in time have to put some effort into accuracy, and ultimately accuracy is limited by our limited knowledge of the initial state of the system.
No. I remember reading a year or so ago about how tedious it was to submit an app to the Apple App Store, and how you also have to submit your source code or something.

I don't have an iPhone. I'm just going off what I've understood from iPhone users and developers over the years.
I haven't looked at the site, but that's one confusing headline.
We decided to take time off from school because we wanted to fully commit to whatever idea we pursued. We realized that we could not create something meaningful in our spare time. It has already been a tremendous learning experience and we don't regret our decision.
STEM education isn't for everyone. At my college, they've made it too easy- I know someone graduating with a CS degree who couldn't accurately state the purpose of a compiler. The people I know who actually dropped out were too discouraged by failing one class early on in college. We need a system where retaking a class is considered as normal rather than as a failure.

Failing a class you didn't understand so you retake it is infinitely better than passing a class without understanding core concepts. Physics is calculus-based, and to teach it otherwise is to provide a lacking education. GPA isn't important- the point of an education is to learn and develop skills.

What I find more problematic than STEM drop-out rates is the attitude of many liberal arts students that math is something you can either do or can't do. Math is something learned, studied, and often requires a bit of a struggle to understand. Saying "I'm incapable of math" without ever having tried is delusional.
"const" does not add anything new to a variable.
If you don't want to change the value of a variable ...
don't change the value of the variable.

I've got a better idea: how about we mark the variable in some way and get the compiler to remember this for us. Then, when we come back to the code in 6 months, we won't make mistakes.

I have a decade of experience in "dynamically" typed languages, and I prefer modern statically typed languages in almost all situations. Now it turns out you can have both: see Racket and Typed Racket for instance.
https://plus.google.com/100940716892313727285/posts/4aPVQTj9...
Any good resources you'd recommend for scripting tmux?
Signs of ageing halted in the lab
Only for case of instance variable. Python still has nested function, non-instance variable, and implicit declaration.

Only it is worse in Python because, lacking `var` keyword, you will shadow the variable in Python
Agreed. And it's not like developing for Windows or Android is exactly free either. Don't forgot you have to buy a PC first. Even if you already had that--a lot of iOS developers already owned Macs to begin with--there's the cost of the phones themselves plus the software if you're doing .NET stuff.
This luxury iPad 2 will set you back £5m
Extending Django Settings for the Real World
First post on how Yipit handles Django Settings is up: http://tech.yipit.com/2011/11/02/django-settings-what-to-do-...
You may be correct in that instance, then. The older USB apple keyboards likely use rubber membrane key switches rather than the scissor switch type. In which case, the feel of the keys would definitely be different. I personally was referring to the newer apple wireless keyboards.
Unfortunately for IE users the development costs of supporting IE with a rich web application are very high.
That sounds high. Most sites I've seen have been in the 30-50% range. I have a tech oriented site that has less than 5%.
The car keys are at least tangible and could be repurposed or recycled.

I suppose RH's 'asset' would include the right to appeal the decision of no-standing, but it seems only an even more determined copyright troll would give that a nonzero value. Given that trolls want easy targets that will quickly roll over for a few thousand, I'm guessing this more-determined troll doesn't exist.

If the contract between RH and LVRJ specifies that it is an exclusive right to sue, then the LVRJ just has to appease the holder of that 'asset' (most likely with a portion of the proceeds) in the event of wanting to pursue clear-cut infringement.
You're seriously asking people to put their passwords into a 3rd party website??

How many have done so, just out of interest?
We just posted on how Yipit handles settings: http://tech.yipit.com/2011/11/02/django-settings-what-to-do-...
If they are able to build something that people like, it's an easy app category to monetize.
Just wanted to know whether you sponsor H1B?
I think it's probably more that the Android apps team has a higher budget/headcount than the iPhone apps team (I have no idea, but just a guess).
I find myself using SSH on my Google CR-48 netbook to develop and do work much more than my shiny Dell XPS laptop. SSH+Linode+VIM+screen is such a great combination as you can literally pick up exactly where you left off from any machine with SSH access. Gotta love it.
Thanks for the feedback. Sincerely appreciate it. It's simpler for several reasons...
1. You don't need a credit card.
2. You don't need to be physically with the person or business you're paying.
4. In a store setting there would be no more waiting in a checkout line to pay.
5. Sending one Tweet is certainly simpler than pulling out a wallet, swiping a credit card, waiting for a response, then signing.
Taking C Seriously
Looks pretty cool. I've signed up and I'll give it a look.

For me, it's going to be tough for any tool to replace Wunderlist, which has native app support (Mac/iPad/iPhone) and is free and elegant.
Yahoo launches Livestand, a “living magazine” for the iPad
Edit -- link here: https://www.facebook.com/aaharoni/posts/10150442627214283
Speaking of line editors, anyone remember edlin for MS-DOS? Sometimes I think I hallucinated it.
Do you know about the Yale Entrepreneurship Institute's incubator program. Just do the summer incubation program, and see what happens. Dropping out is risky.
There's also :vimgrep

I believe it's more useful on Windows machines, which for some reason usually come without preinstalled grep.
I have nothing productive to add to the discussion, other than that I love VIM, I've been using it since 1998, and I've never found any editor that makes me anywhere as happy as VIM does. I once had a job that required I use Eclipse IDE. I almost quit that job, but last minute, I found a VIM key-bindings plugin. Okay, not really, but it was very frustrating until I found that.
Apple is not your personal QA department.
You can use a color wheel to come up with color schemes, and I'd try using ems instead of pxs to handle whitespace. Whitespace is negative space, used for contrast to draw attention to positive space, which could be your copy, let's say. Use a grid to make sure you keep everything aligned and to help you figure out where to put stuff in.

I really like Futura or Baskerville for headers, and I think you should pick a bright, contrasting color against the body copy.

Gradients and Box shadows do look really cheesy with just CSS. The trick is that you should always add a little noise, somewhere between 1 or 2 percent, to your gradients or shadows so you can make them look more textured instead of just flat colors. There's a filter called "Film Grain" which I think is much better than "noise", but it's usually an external plugin. You're gonna have to hit photoshop for that, because I don't know if there is a noise/grain css effect.
Ask HN: Some more love for my mad startup made for us all, please
Hi, just signed up to try your website.

2 comments:
1) the text box does not display underscore (_). A lot of emails contains _ character, so it could confuse ppl.

2) You should implement a 404 page. instead of the current error page when you go to thislooksgood.com/[xx]
Thanks for the comment/advice!
The Way Companies Are Getting Financed Is Completely Changing
I suspect that when it comes to Google, Apple's review process may be to approve anything broken and ugly and to find a reason to reject anything that works.