skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That comment taken out of context can be quite alarming, indeed. Firebug, until recently, had two developers who were paid to work full time on it (jjb from IBM and Honza from Mozilla) and a number of people who contributed in their spare time. Now it's down to one full-time developer paid to work on it (Honza) and a number of people who still contribute in their own time.
Apparently this needs addressing.

Up until 10-12 I was relatively religious I guess as that was how I'd been raised... sort of. Well, my mother and her side of the family were religious. My dad wasn't. When we drive 30+ miles on Sunday to go to church (before we moved when I was 9) my dad would sit in the car while the rest of us went in.

The first revelation (excuse the pun) I had was that these religious people around me (teachers, nuns, priests and so on) didn't had some direct line to God. They were flawed as any of the rest of us. This came at about age 10 largely due to being blamed for something I didn't do.

Of course the mantra is that "people are flawed", "God works in mysterious ways" and other such platitudes but in my case the foundations were already crumbling. I basically rejected organized religion by age 11-12 and never looked back.

At this time and for awhile afterwards I took the "sitting on the fence" approach and described myself as agnostic (as many do I think). Basically this is a cop out though. It's simply not taking a position. But I guess not everyone needs to take a position but agnostic is basically saying "I don't care (one way or the other)" (although some would phrase this more along the lines of simply not knowing).

But some time later I eventually gave this up and essentially became a hardline atheist. Personally, I find the notion of a divine being--any divine being--to be ridiculous and simply the byproduct of the human fallacy to see patterns in randomness ("I prayed for rain today and it rained therefore there is a God. Last month I prayed for rain and there was no rain so I guess God Has A Plan [tm].").

Not that I don't think religion is useful. It's really a form of community and moral enforcement. Some people need to be told what to do. Others simply need to fit in somewhere (we all do in different ways). Yet others find comfort in the idea that when you die you simply cease to exist (which is something we're not well-equipped to comprehend). I get all that.

Take that as you will.
It is indeed. The good thing is that MusicBrainz is an open database, everyone can contribute an update for their favourite artist.
Making advances in math indeed requires creativity. But actually creating something new and expanding mathematics is a Very Hard Problem. It doesn't lend itself to "instant creation" like programming does. Sure, you can apply formulas in many areas of business and life, and you can create simple formulas for these things-- doesn't take a math major.

As to your last sentence, I completely agree.
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Yes, it’s a shame it’s missed its chance now. HN can be such a lottery, especially at busy times.
There is some literature in other fields. Sjoberg, in "A Survey of Controlled Experiments in Software Engineering" did similar studies in software engineering to compare with other fields such as medicine and the social sciences. This survey showed that only 1.9% of Software Engineering studies were actually controlled experiments.

They examined 5453 scientific articles in 12 leading journals from 1993 to 2002. I like how the authors tactfully state that "the gathered data reflects the relevance of software engineering experiments to industrial practice and the scientific maturity of software engineering research."
Yes, the advice is outdated. One of the perils of no clear publishing date.

But the illustration of a hash function is still nice.
I see where you're coming from but when I put myself in that statement it just doesn't work.

My now self, with nearer to 10 years experience would tear my 5 year experienced self to pieces on all things technical. I'm doing things now with great efficiency whereas 5 years ago I would probably have made a bit of a mess of them.

Though obviously at year 5, if asked, I would have happily told you I knew it all already :)
Equations True Computer Science Geeks Should (at Least Pretend to) Know
There was no reason to bailout AIG, it merely was a way to pump cash into these banks. They should have been forced into bankruptcy and their assets sold of to more responsible banks.
Rather than an IV drop of LOLCats or other Internet stuff, I try to find the humor in every day life. It is one thing to make a co-worker laugh, a better thing if they can make you laugh. I think funny stories do not affect me as much as hearing about something that happened to someone I know. Going to a movie is an exception, but I really think we can entertain ourselves by tapping into the people we know. Sharing instead of just consuming.
I don't know if it's a sign of some neurotic behavior, but I hate it when people use the word bright. And, for whatever reason, they use it a lot. I find it patronizing if not placating--especially when my work isn't appreciated by people that rationally couldn't possibly appreciate it on a deep level without me interpreting it for them (i.e. not their fault).

It always feels like a qualifier or platitude. "I know you're bright, but". Everybody says you should sell yourself, but as a child I always tried to NOT sell myself. I just wanted to get by with minimal effort, because those endevours (e.g. school) were meaningless to me beyond a score that may aid in perusing things I care about. I always felt like the bar was set low because kids in general don't try. There was zero advantage to distinguishing one's self other than higher expectations for the same, hollow A.

There's one particular example that always sticks with me. I remember taking Spanish from a charming, eccentric Argentinian woman. The work was simple, so I began to embellish the little side projects and essays. Why not? I had nothing else to do with the remaining 30 minutes of class. I turned in work; I got good grades. No misunderstanding.

But, eventually, I got bored and just did enough to satisfy an A. My heart just wasn't into embellishing Juan's illustrious adventure at the hospital. It didn't garner anything more. There wasn't an A++ or Super A.

During the next PTA meeting, my adorable Spanish teacher burst into tears. Why? Because I wasn't trying anymore. My heart just wasn't in it. Despite the fact 95% of the class gave no fucks whatsoever, my decline crushed her.

This fortified the notion, in my mind, that it's not worth being seen as bright or exceptional insofar it gains you nothing. It only means you are expected to do more for an A or the same baseline salary as that jerk-off you tutored Business Calculus to. If you can't sell it, don't do it. Yet, somehow, people always end up using that word -- bright. Again, I wonder if it's simply a nice way of saying idiosyncratic, since I try my hardest to not act "bright" in anyway. I simply try to not be dim-witted and do good work.

(I also find it somewhat worthless coming from most people, since I've known genius-level, 160-170IQ types. I'm nowhere near that realm of existence. And, yes, those people do live in a different world than us albeit sometimes not good).
but... in this story Grandma's the hero and the one that gets it, right? So this Grandma doesn't "get thrown under the bus".
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New Jersey DMV workers accused of selling identities for $200 a pop
Reports of these kind give developers like us to continue working and at the same time analyze how in this very competitive market can sustain.
How many average human lifespans is 1.6 billion hours?
While I applaud their efforts, it's not like the BBC is unbiased. iPlayer benefits massively from 'net neutrality'. I recall speaking to an ISP who mentioned that 90% of their traffic during the olympics was iPlayer traffic.

I'm completely for net neutrality but I don't think it has addressed the potential for a tragedy of the commons.
The patent is expired.
Original Apple Computer Co. Contract Could Sell For $150,000
I only stated this because the comment was implying what seems to be that by eliminating a specific type of food they were able to lose 30 pounds and feel great. I was trying to point out that they could have not completely eliminated this food, but kept track of their calories consumed and caloric expenditure and not make it sound like they should be blaming this specific food for their weight gain (in this case sugar). Unless of course they have some sort of health issue related.
i think you should also add the point of working in open source projects. It'll give learners very concise and deep knowledge of their domain.
This is an important reminder that events do not progress in a straight line.
Those 'pseudo-games' keep my wheelchair bound grandmother occupied (and possibly even entertained) throughout her day.

First of all, let me agree with the general principle that in a free country with a free-enterprise economy, people ought to be able to spend their money (and time) in the way that they find most valuable, based on their personal circumstances. I was one customer among millions for what was then the best-selling phonograph album of all time (Michael Jackson's Thriller album, one of the first compact discs I bought). You can argue legitimately that listening to recorded music is a frivolous activity, and argue even more legitimately that Jackson, born the same year I was, was already rich enough in his twenties that he didn't need my money, but I was happy to spend money on something that added fun to my day while I was working hard to establish my career. There's no particular policy reason for any of us to oppose people spending time or money on what helps them get through the day.

With reference to your grandmother needing to be in a wheelchair at all times, you have my deepest sympathies. My late dad had a slip and fall on the ice from a late-season snowstorm (in APRIL!) and then was a quadriplegic from his spinal cord injury for the last six years of his life. Surgery attempting to treat his injury took him from being unable to use his limbs to being unable to swallow and having great difficulty even speaking, both things he could do just fine immediately after his injury. Once people lose mobility, they undergo a radical change in lifestyle, and no decent person will begrudge paraplegics or quadriplegics the opportunity to choose recreation that helps them cope with new circumstances. My dad never took up playing computer games--and of course had no mobility for operating a computer after his injury. I remember spending about a month, in a series of visits, reading aloud to him the book The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition,

http://www.amazon.com/Endurance-Shackletons-Legendary-Antarc...

which is an inspiring story of human beings facing other extremely tough challenges. I was glad I took the time to do that--reading the book was good for me. My best wishes go to anyone who has a relative not fully able to do the normal daily activities able-bodied people take for granted.
A data scientist is two things:

1. A business analyst who has traded Excel for a Unix command prompt and a scripting language, because (a) there's more data now than before, and (b) data is harder to clean because of (a).

2. A mythical unicorn creature that has spawned a conference, multiple books, and thousands of page views for O'Reilly, Business Insider, Forbes, etc. They're all "data-driven organizations" that double their page views any time the word "data" is whispered. As a result, they parse shitty articles into four ad-driven pages and publish books on "Data Mining Your Cat" or "Machine Learning Models for Organic Dietary Schedules."

Here are some better questions that will save you some time:

1. What is this article? Buzzword soup mixed with terrible journalism.

2. How do I become a data scientist? Don't--instead, build a good foundation in statistics and keep coding. You'll be happier and wealthier for it.

EDIT: removed a bunch of snark. Not all of it, obviously. ;)

EDIT 2: added some snark back. I really hate this "data scientist" meme.
> And what's stopping someone implementing this?

Most likely, not wanting to inflict such a syntax on git users, when the current approach works just fine.

But nothing stops someone from writing a patch with an off-by-default option for such a syntax, and proposing it for inclusion.
the windows heap manager can be configured to do this on a per-application basis using the 'gflags' utility.

it's a useful debugging tool. you're not assured that use-after-free is going to be tightly temporally coupled with the free (a lot of the time it is though) and as more time passes after free() the odds increase that the dangling virtual address is re-allocated.

it is also the enemy of performance. you should probably not run production things with the heap configured in this way.
Sites are frequently designed to detect the presence of Flash, and degrade gracefully if it is absent. Flash blockers create usability problems for most users by defeating those measures. Flash blockers are designed to create a placeholder for the Flash content. That is often defeated by Flash content that doesn't really correspond to any specific rectangle on the page. Together, these two situations mean that Flash blockers unceremoniously torpedo the principle of least surprise.

Don't get me wrong, I love my Flash blocker. But it's a gadget for geeks, not a solution for the Web at large.
The flight I was on last week mentioned they had some sort of sensor that picked up 8 devices that were still on, and they waited for everyone to turn them off before taking off, so I think they do know if people "forget" to turn them off.
Thank you! Good to know!
How is this different from efence on Linux?
Thanks, that's interesting, and seems more in line with what I figured: a lot easier to reason about, and a much cleverer coder than me to do it properly :)

(As an aside, one of the inventors listed on that patent happens to be the person who wrote this article.)
> The banking cartel gave itself more than half of the annual output of the world's largest economy.

The word "gave" is not really correct. The 7.77 trillion dollar figure is the total amount of loan guarantees and credit authorizations. The highest amount ever loaned out at one time was just over 1 trillion dollars, and that's all been paid back.
JFK/EWK and SFO.
Been there, done that. I have two other accounts that have been hellbanned for comments that moderators most likely disagreed with. I have learned to filter my posts through a "would this opinion be unpopular?" filter. It's unfortunate, but self-censorship of even slightly controversial ideas is the only way to maintain a viable account on HN.
I find I often spend a LOT of time researching products that are a) purchased as gifts or b) physical items.

I really hate when I buy a cheap item that breaks either as a gift or that's hard to get rid of... cash outlay isn't the only cost in purchases.
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A "data scientist" is a business analyst who has never worked in industry before and is unaware that there already is a job title for what they do.
Dijkstra's mother asked the very same question. The story can be found somewhere in the EWD archives[1].

[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/
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Makes some sense - highly visible, probably short and unmovable deadlines. Just a different meaning of "money".
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Ask HN: When to inform users that service isn't free
We're creating a service/market place which will involve companies quoting personalised offers for consumers. The product they are quoting for is a high ticket, low repeat custom item. We will require our users to pay a small token amount for the service as the companies need proof of a valid and interested lead (we're aware there are other ways to prove a lead, but for various reasons a token payment is best).

There are a number of competitors in our industry who provide a similar service, but the lack of any decent qualification means it doesn't work out for either parties.

We aren't sure whether to tell users it isn't a free service before they start giving their order details (which is a fairly lengthy process) or after they've filled in all the forms and shared their details/order.

Arguments we've thought of for telling users after they've filled in i.e. announcing it's a paid service and making payment the last step in the process):

+ Time invested in user filling out details may mean conversion rate is higher

+ Social proof contained at footer of each step in the process may create excitement/momentum

+ Trust/enjoyment of experience is built along the way

- Perceived negativity on brand/experience over hiding the cost

- Bait and switch style

Arguments for announcing it's a paid service on landing pages i.e Users aware immediately it's not free

+ More space to explain why it isn’t free

+ Upfront and transparent explanation of the process

- Exit rate will likely be higher as people immediately see it’s not free and leave

- If landing page bounce rate is higher then PPC quality score may be lower

I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on which is likely to convert better. Obviously we'll A/B test both, but are debating which to soft-launch with.
Thanks for the feedback. I have added it.
Sure. But that doesn't distinguish between the cases of "there is no God" and "there is a God, but He doesn't behave according to Catholic doctrine".
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Great resources to get started with iPhone app development. Also at the top are links to the fall 2010 slides and assignments by Paul Hegarty.
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Well, the author unknowingly does: his grandmother mistakes the assignment operator for the equivalence operator.
> But for other people's needs, Cmd-F using selected text may be quicker and easier.

I agree.

I don't think your analogy applies here: the parent doesn't ask if feature X exists, he complains about the fact that feature Y doesn't work like an hypothetical feature X and concludes that Mac text editors don't have feature X.

My answer is that feature X is in fact available but that you don't access it like you access feature Y.

Different features accessed by different means.

Here, the features are not "Cmd-F" or "Cmd-E - Cmd-F", these are only interfaces or triggers or proxys or whatever you want to call it.

The features are "searching for some arbitrary text" or "searching for the highlighted text". They are both different, present in the system without any hacks, accessible via shortcuts. If you want to use one you use it's shortcut, if you want to use the other you use its shortcut.

Easy.
It comes with the operating system, no need to re-link against a different library or a different LD_PRELOAD path.
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Contracts, for one.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts
Your problem is not your iq, it's that you're too worried. 120+ is considered very smart, even for engineers.
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Not to be inflammatory in anyway but how is this any better than some of the existing libraries, such as jGrowl etc?

I'm looking for some 'arguments' to seriously consider something like this - Thank you ;-)
Actually, that quotation is usually attributed to Ernest Rutherford. This is a common discussion among particle physicists, but of course Rutherford did his work before the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics became clear. For example, even measuring something like the mass of a particle is inherently probabilistic; for short-lived particles it's usually done by repeating an experiment many times, fitting a gaussian distribution to the decay times and backing the mass out from the time-energy uncertainty principle.

See http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~ckirby/brad/papers/2005NEWMode... for a really interesting discussion of the way things are headed from a statistician's perspective.
And that's the fundamental disconnect. The BBC is not getting a free ride. They are paying for the bandwidth they use - through their own ISP & CDN bills.

Granted, it's probably not the same provider, however why should that matter? They're paying to get that bandwidth somehow. They shouldn't have to pay even more to every little provider so their traffic is not deprioritized.

If the ISP needs more money, they should charge their users more. They're the ones using the bandwidth - not the BBC.
Interesting, but demonstrably false.

Take a look through Github or Sourceforge. Many, many of the projects are people scratching an itch or just building something for fun. We can argue about the exact percentage, but it's definitely more than "very few bits".
No fans of The Stand here? :)
Arrgh Facebook is lying about me
OK then, I'll just disagree with you.

People are surprisingly easy to offend over email. I know that I've offended some when sober. Sometimes it's because I'm too terse. Sometimes it's because they're reading something between the lines that I didn't mean to say. Sometimes I phrased things poorly. Sometimes I wrote it the email in anger.

Add 2-3 drinks in the mix and I'd probably double the number of offended customers.

Taking customers out for drinks is a completely different situation. It's a lot harder to be misunderstood in face-to-face conversations, not to mention that the customer is drinking along with you.
Good find, tl;dr is skip to page 4 for mini-tut on erlang/OTP and scala/akka.

Lightly mentioned in paper: clojure STM and var/ref/agent/atom mutable storage . Not mentioned or not covered in any depth (I only did quick scan): Google Go, haskell/GHC, F# MailboxProcessors, java.util.concurrent. On p. 5, i think couchDB counts as a killer app for erlang.
The Y Combinator and the pumping lemma seem a bit contrived on that list, especially the former. I would add the maximum margin separation equation, which underlies many modern machine learning methods like SVMs and MMMF, and the P=NP equality question.
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Think SOPA's a big deal? Try this on for size
Without having looked at OpenBSD's implementation, just unmapping free pages does not mean you catch all writes to free()d memory. If a block is smaller than the pagesize, which many times is the case, a page will likely still hold other objects so it wont be unmapped and therefor not trigger a segfault.

Valgrind is my tool of choice to find invalid reads or writes. It catches all of them plus it gives you nice information like a stacktrace.

What OpenBSD's implementation of malloc() does get you though is improved coping with memory fragmentation.
Allocating memory in a continously heap brings lots of pain - jemalloc (which is the default allocator in FreeBSD and NetBSD) solves this nicely by also only using mmap() instead of sbrk() on Linux.

Note: I should have said "resource reclamation" instead of "fragmentation". See discussion with ajross below for details.
On the other hand, I believe Emerson said something pithy about consistently minding your hobgoblins (or something like that). Or, as hackers are more likely to put it: "The 90% solution is usually your best bet."

That said, if you you really do want to have them take away books and magazines and force everyone to stay awake during takeoff and landing, feel free to write a letter to the FAA.