skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whereas it is correct that you COULD lose weight on White Castle alone, it definitely won't be healthy and it definitely won't build up the necessary habits.

The goal should never be the number on the scale. The goal should always be fitness. With good fitness you will see body composition changes and, likely, weight changes.
Imho this is better then

- Taking off shoes

- Going through scanner-of-the-day

- Can't take any liquids on the plane.

And same procedure applies also to Israelis as well not only to visitors.
I'm stuck in a place I don't want to be

I promise you these things pass. I felt this throughout school up until I left Senior School for College and started having more control over what I did in my life, looking back now I feel like a completely different person from the me 4 years ago.

Trust me it gets amazing once you get out of there, you just have to get through the endurance test first.

This year's going to decide my future

No it's not. It's going to change your available options, but look around for some people who are successful and happy, not one of them is going to say to you "I'm here now because High School put me here". What matters is the choices you make once you're out of there, and whether that takes you closer to the kind of life you'd like to have.

There's so little time to do anything

I'm going to guess you're talking about exams here, but I guess this applies whatever it is. Even with 5 minutes left using that 5 minutes effectively will help you. If you care about the outcome then make use of whatever seemingly-tiny amount of time you have left. If you don't care about the outcome then use that time somewhere else. You sound pretty smart, your blog is well written, I'm sure that you can make meaningful progress at what you want to make progress in.

1 Well, my experience is of Senior School in the UK, but from what you're saying the difference sounds negligible for this situation.
Twitter Aquires Whisper Systems
Edit: I began writing this before a different post appeared with the same point. Alas!

I'm sorry to be a jerk, but I found your code pretty tough to decipher. Here's my thought process:

NUMBER_OF_PLAYERS could be, say, 6.
the caller calls: throw(ball, 0);
0 < 6, so throw(ball+angle(), 0+dereference(ball));

So, what is ball? It's either an integer and you're just passing its address around for no particular reason, or it's an integer array and you're using angle() to move around inside the array somehow? Then what exactly is stored in that array, the positions of people? Let's imagine it's 1s and 0s to denote a person or not.

After making that leap of logic, your code starts to make sense. You're adding "some amount" to the address, and then whatever is at that address (1 for hit, 0 for nothing) to hits, and passing them into the next invocation, as long as it's less than the necessary number of hits. Could easily be a while loop, but I'll get to that in a minute. I have some other points:

- Ball isn't a great name for the list of the positions of the players.
- It isn't clear that ball is an array.
- There's a pointless 'else return'.
- You never address the "I don't have a ball" situation!

This code requires explanations of arrays, pointers, and addresses before you can talk about recursion. I'd express how to play dodgeball to a new programmer as follows:

throw(angle, enemy_positions):
# This function takes an angle and a list of
# the spots where other people are, removing
# them from their spot if it registers a hit.
# Returns true if it's a hit, false if a miss.

find_ball():
# Tries to find a ball; returns the number
# which you found -- 0, 1, or 2.

load_enemy_team():
# Returns a list of the spots where other players are

enemy_positions = load_enemy_team()
players_on_other_team = enemy_positions.length()
ball_count = 0 # all balls start in the middle!

while players_on_other_team > 0:
if ball_count > 0:
angle = get_throw_angle() # user inputs this
hit = throw(angle, team_positions)

if hit:
shout("Yahoo!")
players_on_other_team -= 1 # they're down a guy!
else:
ball_count += find_ball() # reload

That should cover it - though I'm sure there's problems with my code too. :)

The biggest point I want to make is that this example is trivially easy to represent without recursion. While recursion can be used in place of any loop, a non-programmer's mind will likely arrive at iteration first for tail-recursive examples. And once someone understands how to solve a problem one way, teaching them a totally different way can be tough.

I personally think people do pretty well at understanding how recursion applies with respect to exploring a maze, which is almost as universal an experience as dodgeball.
I'm genuinely very disappointed with Cloud9 IDE, and that so only because i can never get it to install. I've tried it in both Linux and Windows environments and for one reason or the other either the installation script fails or the server.js file does, and resolving the file path issues and dependency issues is a real nightmare.
This was already answered on quora by PJ Hyett, GitHub Co-Founder:

"IO performance is essential to our business (handling an enormous amount of disk operations) and EBS wasn't nearly as fast as bare metal when we ran benchmarks prior to moving to Rackspace."

(from http://www.quora.com/GitHub/Why-did-GitHub-use-Rackspace-ove...)

While price most probably played an important role too, as indicated by EngineYard, its former host:
http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/engine-yard-and-github-t...
Not only that, but no ISP customer can ever download more from iPlayer or any other service than they have already paid for with their ISP subscription, or use more bandwidth than they were promised when they signed up.

On the one hand, ISP's offer "50Mb broadband", on the other they get the vapours when people actually use it.
"Once the interference has been discovered ... the plane doesn't fly again until it can pass an EMC SOFT."

Yet, turning off consumer electronics is enforced by the honor system? Is there something else going on that makes consumer electronics unlikely sources of interference that would justify this lazy approach to safety? Why aren't all of these devices confiscated and locked in Faraday cages?

It just strikes me as odd that failure to pass an EMC SOFT grounds the plane until the issue is debugged, but then they just allow an random passenger to bring any random radio aboard just so long as they promise/remember to turn it off during critical phases of the flight.

That example may sound highly unlikely, but it does happen.

So highly unlikely that an honor system approach is justified?
> It contrasts this with the ease with which Samsung could put its phones in blockbusters like The Matrix.

> By Samsung I guess they meant Nokia.

No, they probably meant Samsung. Specifically they meant this phone, made for use in the later Matrix movies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SPH-N270

Quote: "The design crew of the Matrix worked closely with Samsung to develop a phone whose features and release date would coincide with the movie."

Now, granted, it was kind of a crappy phone, but at least it existed; the key feature of the Nokia used in the first movie was a spring-loaded mechanism which didn't actually exist at the time.
Another logical and sensible reason:

In the event of an emergency, that laptop or iPad is likely to stop being a productivity tool and start being a projectile. Just like the carry-on bags they also require you to stow.
The Computer-less Scanner: Doxie Go
Pragmatic Programmer as recommended by Jeff Atwood - a must read

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/10/a-pragmatic-quick-r...
Nobody does since we have this thing called the G-test. We can make other errors, but this specific one isn't possible.
What Agile can Learn from Open Source
I can understand the talent acquisition, but it's strange to see Whisper Systems products owned by Twitter, considering their purpose...

I could imagine Whisper Systems developing an app to encrypt tweets. I can't imagine Twitter doing that.
Check, Please. A Bad Economy is Good for Venture Capital
It'd be nice if the author actually stated why these algorithms are important to know. Give a use case, rather than "this comes up sometimes."
This.

You've nailed exactly what I was getting at. Thank you, sir.
For fun I messed around with Firefox 8 with Firebug. Crashed in less than 5 min. Lot of work is still ahead...

Chrome has Firefox beat
Out of curiosity, why is this your best day job? What things do you look for in a job? Do you enjoy the work, or is the goal to make a decent salary with as little work as possible?
Nice article but you have a typo: updrage instead of upgrade :)
This is excellent not only as a question about the intrinsic value of information, but this piece also implicitly, even involuntarily, makes a negative statement about the valuation of conceptual art, of which this piece is an example. I read in this something akin to Epimenides Paradox (i.e. the value of this work is in showing how works like this have no value.)

The question pertaining to whether or not this is really art isn't very interesting. It's an old argument. What I find fascinating are the very passionate arguments against things labeling things like this art, sometimes coming from people who might not even follow art.

The objection must stem from the fact that the term 'art' automatically connotes a cultural/economic value and a signifier of class. There is a legitimate worry that the message from the art world is that you just aren't very impressive if you aren't just infatuated with Kadinsky, De Kooning and, by some perverse extension, Jeff Koons.

Calling something an installation like this art has the value of framing a very, very specific statement: something would be lost by not calling this art. That said, I wouldn't buy this, nor make any effort to see it in person. That would hardly be necessary. Nor would I label someone who didn't 'get' this a 'prole' or 'not with it' (as if my opinion counted.)

Still, this would not be enough to sway one holding on to a conservative definition of art. His or her value as a human being is at stake. Who can blame them? It's a shame, because these political concerns limit art in many thousands of tiny ways with a net result of making a more boring world. I guess politics of status limits activities in many other ways. Nothing new here.
The piece could, in theory, be restored to its previous form. But the question comes down to: is the art the result or the process that creates it? If it's the latter, then it can never be properly restored.
Where is the study showing intelligence to be profoundly malleable?

IQ is one of the more heritable traits, from what I've heard.
The Cambrian Explosion in Startups
And they want your stock options back as soon as your not as valuable to them anymore so they can give them to the next guy.
I think they are students of the program who just got on Hacker News. They are baby programmers trying to get into the community, let them grow! They can also be a little feisty and protective.
Manage Contacts,Tasks and Finances, all in one solution
Ebuyer's buck-and-a-half 'clearance sale' backfires
While I agree with the major substance of your point (though i never liked that Yodowsky link), you are incorrect in your citation of the paper.

The actual paper is: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v14/n9/full/nn.2886.html

It appears to follow on from an extremely controversial paper in neuroscience: Voodoo neuroscience http://escholarship.org/uc/item/51d4r5tn;jsessionid=FB5843BB...

If you look at the cited by links in scholar, then you can get access to a raging debate across quite a number of journals (well worth popcorn if you're nerdy and not involved).

The crux of the matter for me is that the brain cannot be fruitfully modelled using statistics developed for independent samples. This is going to cause us massive problems unless we can develop better statistical tools (or at the very least use the ones we have more wisely).
Google Redefines Personalized Web-Searching
Rp 60.000 Untuk 3 Perawatan di Lvie Salon Senilai Rp 127.500
For me, if you can't do the intro to CS stuff and write simple programs in an interview, that serves as a proxy that you can't do the advanced CS stuff and write complex programs on the job.

There are many many candidates who make it to the phone screen who can't Fizzbuzz. Also it can be difficult to separate out people who actually did significant work on a product on their resume from people who were just "on the team" and didn't contribute effectively.

Time is limited and resumes are full of lies and BS. But you can't BS your way through a program and make it run.
The tragedy, of course, is that spread spectrum technology could allow these carriers to share bands, and actually operate over a wider band. IF the 700MHz-1GHz range was allocated to cellular and mobile voice and data services, and any player who used spread spectrum could use it... then AT&T, Verizon and Sprint would have all have:

1. Vastly more total bandwidth to use, allowing for faster bitrates.

2. More reliable services as the phones could adjust to the ranges within those bands that have the best signal.

3. A lot lower operating costs due to not having to tie up Billions upon Billions of dollars in spectrum (which means cheaper for everyone else also, due to competition).

4. Standardized equiptment across the carriers, which means cheaper cell towers, cheaper handset components, cheaper infrastructure in general.

5. Brain-dead simple roaming agreements since everyone would be using the same technology, or at least, would be pretty quickly if this scheme had been implemented form the beginning.

6. The opportunity to easily and cost effectively deploy secondary services that don't need the full cellular modem capabilities, like GPS loggers, kindle data feeds and even broadcast technologies we don't have now with the level of regulation they have to operate under.

And consumers would win too, because you'd have a lot more regional carriers like Cellular One and Cricket, etc. Companies like Virgin could build out their network by contracting with multiple carriers-- using verizon in new york and AT&T in SF, etc.

Apple and Google both could have built out their own networks and provided end to end services, like its clear they wanted to.

There'd be a lot more competition, the quality of everything would be cheaper and the prices would be a lot lower.

Everybody wins, right?

Well, no, the loser would be government. Government takes in Billions from these auctions and that's why they auction of spectrum as if people needed (or could) "own" it.

In a time when we're blowing billions a day on pointless wars that isn't really big money, but it is certainly big money for the people involved in the auctions who have favors they can call in industry after they leave government, and it helps the big three that the spectrums were allocated such that there could only be 3 national wireless networks (I remember this being the plan way back in the late 1980s, 1990s... they said "by having three there would be competition!" as if there couldn't be 30 competitors, and that wouldn't be better.)

If WiFi can share spectrum with microwave ovens, a lightly regulated cellular industry can share spectrum as well.

Spectrum scarcity is artificial, the result of a corrupt process, and keeps prices higher and quality lower for everyone. But it does ensure the dominance of verizon and at&t.
For me, Eddie Izzard always fits the bill. Search youtube and you will have a lot of stuff to watch.

Old stand up, even when I know the punch lines, I still laugh my ass off (I'm talking RIchard Pryor, Cosby, Woody Allen, etc).
Look up "positive reinforcement", it's a critical piece of context for the discussion at hand. The point is to make sure it's actually reinforcing the desired behavior without undesirable side effects.
The Cambrian Explosion In Startups
This one doesn't have a dependency on jQuery if that's a selling point for you. There is also an option to wait for mouse / keyboard input before dismissing, which is kind of nice as well.

Otherwise it seems similar to most of the others.
I think you mean Heisenberg. Schrodinger is the guy with the cats.
mike@Fuzzbutt:~$ curl -s http://www.scroogle.org/doctorow.html|cat -n|grep -i yahoo
231	Greg felt sick. "Why? Don't tell me Yahoo was doing it already..."
234	"No, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was doing it. But that wasn't the
331	"The government said they'd block us otherwise. And Yahoo was
333	Google had become obsessed with Yahoo, more concerned with what the
mike@Fuzzbutt:~$
It seems natural that we will progress towards a single written language now that the world is connected. If we take the US as a model, people used to have defined accents and as time has progressed those accents have fallen to the wayside and gave way to what we call TV English. Most of my generation (born 1974) speak TV English but the generations before that had heavier regional accents and colloquialisms.

Now granted this is spoken language but I would venture to guess that the same thing happens to written language as it disperses around the globe. The funny part is that the language is becoming a hybrid of these new internet words and our historical language.

Which makes one wonder will the written language as it evolves on the internet, replace our regional writings. Such as the case with China where all dialects are mutually intelligible when written but mutually unintelligible when spoken. As time passes it is bound to evolve as more people work and collaborate across the globe, new ideas will be expressed with new words that are created in different parts of the world and adopted as the word for the idea in others.
Or simply if the address in question has been remapped since the original free. For big 32 bit processes that's very likely. There's nothing wrong with the implementation really, it's just oversold.

Obviously the valgrind advice is great. But I don't follow your point about mmap vs. sbrk regarding fragmentation. Fragmentation is a property of memory addresses, not the syscall used to allocate them. A big linear heap allocated with sbrk will fragment just as badly as the same heap allocated in a single block, even if it's allowed to have "holes" in it.

Maybe you're claiming that jemalloc deliberatly leaves gaps between allocations? That can help a little in practice, though the real effect is just to change the size of the fragmented blocks.
I think everyone needs to be at least introduced to those fields so they have some shot of figuring out what they might like while learning something that might serve them. Also, if you replace "calculus" with "statistics" and "French" with "English," I would say yes.
Mmmm, and what if it's real? What if he earns even more that what he already has because people and companies alike think he's a fraud?

All I can say is good for Dell.
FWIW, I agree with you: There's no logical reason to believe that there is a god, and Occam's razor argues in favour of believing the contrary.

My point was just that in a strict logical sense you can't prove that this belief is correct -- or put another way, I'm more militantly logical than I am militantly atheist.
In Which I Bid Flash Adieu
pip is a neat system and all, but I still don't see why to use that versus a system package?
I actually thought the same before I took a long, hard look at Chrome's dev tools one day. If you're used to Firebug, everything should be nearly identical, however, the snappiness of Chrome is significantly different (at least as of 1.8.3 and 1.8.4). I remember, however, the UI feeling quite different a versions ago, but I don't use Firebug as regularly as the Chrome developer tools.

Also, this especially goes for frontend and javascript devs, having the Javascript console mapped to ESC on Chrome on every tool tab is a huge feature.

Aside from that, though, I feel that for most developers the differences are nearly negligible (though I obviously cannot really speak for "most developers"). I'm curious to see if I'm completely wrong on this.
A good paper on this error is from Andrew Gelman www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/signif3.pdf
So let me summarize: the guy says not all software should be free and that he wants to make money, you dismiss it with 'oh he's just stuck in old ways of thinking and he should find other ways to make money', I ask how, and then you say maybe he just shouldn't make money at all? That's just putting the cart before the horse - starting at a fundamentalist position and coming to conclusions that are completely out of whack with reality.

Nobody will pay the 15k or whatever it costs to have a custom app developed just for a weather app, even if people find it useful. So, the traditional (and common sense) model was to split the costs over all people who would be interested in such an app. The developer would take the risk, develop and market it, and people would pay for it; and once the development costs were covered, the profit was for the developer. Simple and, if I may say, quite reasonable.

But now you come and start with an assumption that the app should be free, then the business becomes untenable and the app won't be developed in the first place, and you say that maybe that's how it's supposed to be? How does that make sense?
Security flaw in Apache could allow attackers into internal networks
The problem here is in my opinion that statistics is taught in way to "isolated" fashion. I hated math related subjects all the way through highschool and undergraduate levels, but as soon as it went towards applying statistics even on simple survey studies it became interesting. Not the "math" but the "discovery" should be in the center. If you talk to social science people they often have a deep aversion against "numbers", so making it as accessible as possible early in the career might be essential.
اخبار الانتخابات
Since review-reading is usually a one-off thing—I've never found myself thinking, “I'm going to need to read lots of reviews this month”—it's hard to imagine much of a market for subscriptions; so I guess micropayments.
This is the shortest solution somebody has come up with, 79 characters.

function(a,b,c,d,e){for(e=0;d<c;)with(a[d][b[e]||"B"])b[e]=w,e+=m,d=n;return b}

Source: https://gist.github.com/1400509
Books by Paul Graham
The article seems to describe a person who does data mining for living. I guess "data scientist" sounds better than "data miner".
Exactly. Requiring content providers like the BBC to subsidise ISPs because of their popularity is like asking Robinsons to pay Yorkshire Water because people are making so much of their orange squash.
Bioware appears to be an example of that. They have changed a lot their business strategy (lots of DLC now) but their culture seems to remain the same.
Internet network marketing success
Do you apply that to other areas? Do you avoid saying that e.g. invisible pink unicorns do not exist?

I think it is reasonable to take everyday speech saying "does not exist" as meaning "appears not to exist, and if it does exist this is indistinguishable from not existing".
I enjoyed this article, but I think it could be titled "Making it in Silicon Valley when you have zero technical skills". Also not sure the blog is for Hustlers and Geeks, seems like it's more for hustlers.

Which is alright. I remember the huge parties in the first dot com boom, when I met a guy who answered the question "what do you do?" with "I work with startups". "What do you do for them?" "Everything". Interestingly, people at these parties weren't especially interested in meeting developers.

The culture seems very different now. For starters, people don't waste nearly as much money on big parties, and the value of technical skills seems to have risen dramatically... well, it was always useful, but now people actually understand that value.

I would figure step 1 of making it is to pursue an idea and create a minimum viable product. If you have programming ability, you (along with a couple of friends, I would hope) will have something to pitch. Otherwise, all you can do is say vague things like "I work with startups".