skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "network of queues" architecture reminds me of Prof. Matt Welsh's PhD thesis titled SEDA: Staged Event Driven Architecture. It has benefits of both the concurrency offered by event driven and parallelism offered by threaded architectures. http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/seda/

Of course, the network of queues isn't the only thing that makes the system possible, but it closely resembles processing in a distributed system; a system of workers.
Why some people hate cilantro (it tastes like soap?) [2010]
I disagree with you that the barometer of offensive is simply whether someone was offended. I think a good argument can be made that the sexist statement was objectively wrong. This argument has been made elsewhere much more eloquently than I can, so I won't try to repeat it.

But I think the fear behind "political correctness", which I used to share, is that whether one's behavior is rude is arbitrary and completely decided by other people.

I think "you've been educated to the fact that the joke was offensive" is misleadingly simple. What's true is that many people, including me, think such jokes are offensive. But more importantly, one can think about these issues from a neutral point of view. When I was prodded, as a teenager, to think deeply about such issues, consider other points of view, and talk to a lot of people about sexism -- I agreed with the conclusion that these jokes are indeed offensive. I believe that anyone who goes through the same process will inevitably reach the same conclusion.

That said, as with any contentious issue, in the end it's everyone's privilege to decide for themselves.
His joke compared communicating with an alien to communicating with a woman. And then according to her own comment she decided to take extreme offense and disrupt the entire conference.

>"I actually got up and made him apologize for his stupid and offensive joke. On the way out, one woman thanked me and one man told me I should "relax." (I told him he should shut up.)"

I would never, ever want this sort of person at a conference or a workplace. Equating the communication with opposite sex to an alien is a common, common theme. Reaching down, coming up with the worst possible way to take it and then cutting him off, disrupting the conference, gloating online is just bad behavior. She even recounts her belligerence to a fellow member of the audience who probably just wanted to hear the presentation.

Explaining to the speaker afterwards how his words could be taken would probably have had a genuinely beneficial effect. He might even feel some empathy for what she had to say and come up with a new joke. But he probably feels very little empathy for her at all after her attempt to turn a molehill into a shitstorm.

It's exactly this sort of PC-motivated antagonism that I miss least about America.
No Strings Attached
I'd rather have my browser know I change my password and save it for me. I think some websites already manage this.
Yes... it's not very hard to reverse engineer.

I'm not questioning the advantage (in my view it's a small roadblock if you're motivated enough to actually get the data) just stating an inane regulation...
Then we figured out that the simplest interpretation of QM
implies Many Worlds

Many physicists contend this point. They do not consider this interpretation as 'the simplest'. Things hinge on such contentious points as the physical reality of 'the collapse of the wavefunction'. Again, the major thing the Many World interpretation has going for it is that it easily appeals to our imagination -- even, or especially, to the imagination of non-physicists.

We know that the world is deterministic.

Philosophers disagree. It's even the question whether this issue can possibly be settled by any experimental evidence, because of the way we, and our math, are wired to consider everything in causal chains. The evidence isn't really very compelling if you consider the fundamental problems surrounding the question.

Now we know that non-reductionist or dualistic world views
make little sense

Descartes has been critiqued extensively long before science could say anything about mind-matter interactions, because the main shortcomings of the duality argument do not depend on any experimental facts at all.

Now neuroscience is starting to deliver concrete answers.

On the subject of morality, neuroscience cannot possibly deliver any concrete answers at all. You're engaging in the naturalistic fallacy if you think it does. What is the case in the world is not argument for what should be the case in the world. Neuroscience may explain why people hold certain ethical views. It can never explain what ethical view they should hold. What view is 'acceptable', 'the best', 'right'. The answer to that question cannot be reduced to physical facts about the universe.

Philosophy is about reasoning about topics we don't really
understand.

Then we don't really understand logic and math either, do we? The foundations of logic and math are still part of philosophy after all.

And, well, Hume didn't really understand causality, did he? But fortunately, thanks to modern physics, now we do?
There seem to be two kinds of sexism in IT: politically incorrect and insensitive jokes (basically frat boy culture), and a semi-underground culture of men who think it is ok to stalk women online and pass them over for promotions.

Both are bad but the second is far worse. "The JavaOne incident" is probably the wrong battle to fight. Regardless of whether Adam's joke was appropriate, attacking him for it provokes a defensive reaction from the frat boy culture (I'm going to keep calling it frat boy culture for lack of a better term). Some people won't see the big deal about how the joke was offensive and will instead be repulsed by the reaction to it. In fact, Adam's joke seems to be just the kind of push back you would expect from a frat boy tired of being told to be more sensitive to his female colleagues.

Most men are like this. We make inappropriate jokes to our friends and aren't afraid of offending them because they give as good as they get. When a woman complains about this the hypothetical frat boy gets defensive because now he can't "be himself". It creates a culture of us vs. them which is not at all healthy.

The real creeps thrive in an us vs. them environment. Now they feel justified to harras women. They go out of their way not to hire women, because "all women do is complain". They can get away with, because the average rank and file frat guy doesn't feel any need to stand up for the feminist who has aligned herself against him.
Currently, it's hard for people to get loans.

It's hard for people with bad credit to get loans, as it should be. People who are unlikely to pay the loans back should not be given them in the first place. In fact, many people who are in trouble now are blaming banks for giving them the money. So which is it? Should money be given freely to anyone or should creditors be selective with who they give loans?
Related to experience - http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/should-we-buy-expe...

The reason I harass my dinner guests is that our stories have consequences, that our beliefs often matter more than the grapes. The question is what those stories are. If the only story we can tell about wine is its price, then our pleasure will always linked to cost, even though this link doesn’t exist in most taste tests. A much better (and more cost-effective) idea is to find some other narrative, to focus on aspects of wine that don’t require a big expense account. Knowledge is free.

Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2488344
It is fairly safe to assume that a random person from the population is clueless about programming, regardless of his age. I think the correlation between your programming abilities and the programming abilities of your parents is low enough to assume them to be clueless.
Perhaps we can go back to roots of the word "terrorism", and remember it was about the government doing random raids and arbitrary, abusive punishments on civilians, and thus spreading terror to keep the people low profile.

Yes, terrorists have long won in USA.
It is a very good translation, but when a Japanese programmer begins a sentence with "I might not be as fast to pick up a new technology as the young'uns but..." he's just making polite noises.

There is a pecking order in every company and it is almost never "sort by age asc." The two engineers at my company commonly held to be better than me (either of whom I'd stack with any Googler you cared to mention, btw) were ten and twenty years older. Both would work something similar intoba description comparing their programming abilities with a high school sophomore's first Hello World app. Everyone knows not to read it literally.

Neither of them would have much luck on the employment market but there is a separate HR pathology at play there, namely that Japanese companies do not hire for talent, they hire for perceived flexibility to mold into their corporate culture (among other things), and someone with 20 years of experience has all sorts of weird non-company habits they might have become attached to where a 22 year old is incompetent but a blank slate. Who cares, you can train fir competence any time over the next 45 years, goes the thinking.
>Now please get back to China bashing and don't let the facts get in the way of your political/religious feelings. Remember to include lots anecdotal evidence and use the word red. And as always bring up other countries that seem scary on fox news.

I don't know if the author's analysis is accurate, but I'm pretty sure the author is Chinese. I doubt he is repeating what he hears on Fox News.
Camco 57351 Olympian RV Wave-8 8000 BTU LP Gas Catalytic Heater
Volatility 2.0 - Advanced Memory Forensics [With Video Demonstration]
I don't understand how your comment is even remotely related to this post.
Free the Network - IndieGoGo
Secrets of an 8-figure earner 2nite
I am not, I am just 22. And while my parents are professors (no CS), they are not so comfortable with computers as I am. Now, this is true for most parents - and when someone uses the phrase "Explain it to your mom/dad" it is not meant to be interpreted as "Explain it to dumb cavemen" and it is not, in most cases (if the content of the actual explanation is not dumb). If some one has Bill Gates, Dennis Ritchie or Steve Jobs, they are (1) Lucky (2) Minority. I am not sure whether the statement "Explain it to your mom/dad" would be offensive to them. Point I am making is this:

1. Explain it to X. Where X is known to be a minority should be an acceptable statement. If substituting X with "Black people", "women" etc are the only cases, where the statement becomes offensive - it is unnecessarily tabooed.

2. (Also in reply to the other sarcastic reply to my comment) The mom/dad example is not the one where you have choice. The context of the statement has little to do with the choice and more to do with numbers in the industry.
Yeah, I'm thinking about buying the book as soon as I have the spare cash.
Simple way to do this: make hiring easier.

Exactly. Right now hiring and firing is hard and expensive. One of the pieces of software I've written for my company attempts to put total costs on attrition and it's staggering from a resource perspective. One of the main drivers of outsourcing isn't the employee wage, but the cost of getting rid of a bad employee.
Unfortunately, all such efforts are limited by their central assumption - that skill is orderable.

This is demonstrably untrue - skill at chess (to use their example) occurs on several axes, the most obvious of which are opening theory, tactics, and positional play. Players may excel only in certain regions of that space, and it's quite easy to set up a player cycle A->B->C->A, in which each player is more likely to win against one player and lose against another. A players observed 'skill' therefore will depend on any biases in the population at large rather heavily (at the lower levels of chess, the population has overwhelmingly studied opening theory and some tactics)

Because of their non-dimensionality, skill ranking algorithms are universally limited to expressing how likely one is to win against an average person of a given skill ranking, rather than the likely outcome of the match about to be played. Sports match prediction techniques are all domain-specific, precisely for this reason (and because substantial sums of money are riding on their predictive effectiveness).
While I understand your cynicism, my experience in Shanghai and Beijing suggests that Google Maps are some way off between satellite and streetmap modes. I have not found the same problem (or at least to anywhere near the same level) in the UK, Chicago, Michigan, Korea, Japan, Germany, Slovakia and many other countries. There does seem to be an offset applied.

An example in Shanghai: http://g.co/maps/m34n8
An example in Seoul: http://g.co/maps/4gk3t

Note the near perfect alignment in the latter, and way-off alignment in the former.
I used to be an annoying customer. If I had an order of $2.56, I might hand them $3.06 cents, so they could give me two quarters. Eventually, it dawned on me that this is rude. Cashiers probably want to zone-out and think about other things. Just give them exact change or whole dollars, but not other amounts.

I'm still kinda an ass-hole. I pay in cash.

This is hard to remember -- whatever you do, don't change your mind in the middle of an order! That's the worst! ... as in, "Here's $10. No, wait, here's a $5." They will probably think you are trying to con them by confusing you and they might have already selected some bills.

God says...
C:\TEXT\2CITIES2.TXT

ow.
That perils had thickened about him fast, and might thicken faster
and faster yet, he of course knew now. He could not but admit to
himself that he might not have made this journey, if he could have
foreseen the events of a few days. And yet his misgivings were not
so dark as, imagined by the light of this later time, they would appear.
Troubled as the future was, it was the unknown future, and in its
obscurity there was ignorant hope. The horrible massacre, days and
nights long, which, with
I'm not sure it's cheaper.

I'm not sure how old you are, but gas stations used to have 2 prices. One price for self service and one for 'full' service. Over time I'm guessing more people used the self service to the point where even offering full service didn't make sense.
This is hacker news, so I would expect we would target technical arenas. I'm not going to argue the other stuff, because it is completely off-topic, derails the conversation, and is generally uninteresting to other readers. I have also found that internet arguments about men v. women get ugly and out of control very quickly.
Your grandfather was absolutely right... this post reminded me of something too in fact.

Every single time I go into a doctor's office or a waiting room I look for a Smithsonian Magazine, because of how well it's written and the random cross section of articles.

I literally just went and subscribed... personally I think I need to "get out of my comfort zone" more and stop reading just tech news and scifi.
This is pretty interesting, though there's a lot of introductory exposition for people already familiar with statistics and rating systems (no doubt a good thing for people who aren't, and it's well-written). The takeaway for "how is this different from Elo?" appears to be this part:

The TrueSkill algorithm generalizes Elo by keeping track of two variables: your average (mean) skill and the system’s uncertainty about that estimate (your standard deviation).

which in Elo terms translates to basically having a non-fixed K. Since that's also the goal of the Glicko rating system (an already-used extension to Elo), I was curious if this article would compare them. It doesn't, but their FAQ does (result: there are minor technical differences, but the big difference is that TrueSkill handles games other than 2-player games): http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/trueskill/faq.a...

Some additional Google-Scholaring turns up that there are some extensions to that as well, notably one that computes the Bayesian estimate using the whole history, instead of incremental updates: http://halofit.org/papers/WHR.pdf
> And if retrieveURL is nonblocking, then iteration is nonblocking.

Something I mention in the article/paper/whatever is using operations that are technically blocking to call functions that happen asynchronously. So there are certainly uses for sync iteration tools (like _.each())

I think it depends on where you put the async assumptions. Do you know/assume that the function itself takes care of the async aspects, or do you know/assume that the caller must take care to set up that structure?

If the answer is the former, then use whatever structure you want, because the async is taken care of for you. If the answer is the latter, perhaps you need a iteration function that works asynchronously.
On the other hand shadow work is exactly what empowers people:
1. Automation allows to DIY tasks that previously were too expensive to acquire in the market in exchange of a bit of your time.
2. People can spend their financial resources more wisely and achieve MORE. I think that the example of the gas station is striking, because people, given the choice might prefer a smaller and cheaper service.

I believe that those changes are the result of companies competing in a free market. They are the consequences of consumers choice and are beneficial.

Nonetheless, the article highlights a good point about one hidden cost of automation. A cost important to take into account in product/service design. If too high it would hinder market acceptance of a product.

Now I understand better why automation is less used by companies in their business. I would be interesting to understand what other subtleties and hidden cost should be taken into account.
Who Is Buying Silver?
I developed a project in China using OSM and it's certainly not blocked there (i. e.: The host is accessible).

The problem of OSM in China is its limited data-set. For example, in the city I developed the project OSM had only the major streets, and the map was quite old.
OSM is probably illegal in China, but it's not blocked: http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/index.php?siteurl=openst...
Dash - a node.js web application for big screen notifications
How To Web - The Eastern European way: From tech talents to web innovators
>>> Why? We have a whole solar system right on on our front porch <<<

This is an honest question, not a rebuttal. How would you get those resources here, or us over there?

>>> Water doesn't just get used once and then disappear forever. Now, one could certainly make an argument against (say) sucking water out of the Oglalla Aquifer faster than it gets replenished, but that's a localized problem. We aren't going to "run out of water". Really. <<<

Well it would have been labored to add that although it would take a large amount of energy to purify water, or perhaps desalinate our oceans, the loop can be closed. The problem really is that it takes resources to keep that loop closed.

I think that all of our issues today boil down to how we convert energy to extract work, if we do manage to make something like fusion work then all of these concerns could be undermined with technology, but how do we get from here to there?
(PND = Portable Navigation Device)
Great post .. quite a few new ones I haven't heard before. We were curating a similar list before a hackathon, and couldn't help wondering if there is a distro/vmware image that specifically targets web-dev - just ready to go with tools for @dot_cloud, appengine, heroku, all browser comparability testing - all rolled in. You know like backtrack, but for a web developer ... Anybody know if such a thing exists?
Chainvas: a tiny library that can add chaining to any API like Canvas and DOM
Many of the lessons he mentions here jibe with what I learned co-developing a system based on interacting single-threaded processes. I especially like the emphasis on how important and difficult it is to test and measure and the value of regular restarts for long-term reliability. The shout-out to CQRS is worth amplifying as well.
When you face real and significant discrimination you don't go and try to make a "stand" in a room full of perpetrators.
Calling out the speaker and making him apologize - Gutsy move, well done

Making an official compliant to the organizers for story about a mildly offensive joke that was never actually made at said conference - Bordering on overreaction but maybe ok

Writing a G+ post "...JavaOne Incident" publicly slamming said person repeatedly in spite of multiple apologies - Overreaction gone nuts (possibly hurting the original cause - leading to - "this woman can't take a harmless joke" in the minds of more than a few people)

Ageism/sexism/*ism needs to be certainly discouraged but proportional response has its own merits.
Well, that is odd, considering the fact that I think you are in complete agreement with the author :).

Oenologists would have you believe that there are such things as 'good wines' and 'bad wines'. Wines with all kinds of complexities and wines that are 'flat'. They, experts on consuming these specific works of art, are the ones suggesting there is an underlying objective version of reality.

The author, on the other hand, points out, with experimental evidence, that your expectations trip you up. You say:

How can anything experiential not involve expectations? It
can't. It's ludicrous to think otherwise.

but the point of the article is not "it involves expectations at all". The point is: the expectations can be decisive. That's a prime argument for the irrelevance of an underlying objective version of reality.

Perhaps that's the problem: I'm not a member of the target
audience.

I don't think you are, because what is 'ludicrous' to you, is something most people would deny being an important influence in some professional or hobbyist interest of theirs.

People are already commenting to explain they can taste the difference between X and Y. People don't understand, or can't imagine, that there are circumstances in which they can't distinguish between a glass of red wine and a glass of white wine. If you'd have asked these oenologists upfront, they would've been insulted you would even ask.