skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you read this recently?

It impressed me 4 years ago, now I honestly think it's a relic of a bygone era. Language advances, different API design and dynamic programming and anonymous functions have got rid of a lot of the problems that you actually had to do these shitty patterns for.

UML also sucks and is dead, again, not sure why anyone would bother with it.

When is the last time you saw a UML article or GoF article on HN?

Wake up, they're both dead concepts. I'm not even sure why patterns have died, they just have. Probably because people just program that way now anyway. Yes, they were useful, but they're not needed any more. People don't write code like that any more because they don't really have to.
I really fail to see how anyone can see racism in this. The current people trying to make it big in silicon valley now did not start the process now, they started 10 or 15 years ago when they started fiddling around with computers or learning to code or reading business books. And it's at that stage that the current audience was created, and not right now. The people applying and the selection is just a result of that process.

And clearly, many african-americans and many women were not doing the steps needed to be talented enough to be able to make it big now. The most likely reason they did not do that, is probably because it just did not occur to them.

And in any case, there is this theory: if you pick any group of people at all, there are going to be a few people who are simply more able to do many things. Let's say these people are more talented and more intelligent. These people tend to work on what is currently 'intellectually trendy'. For example, a while back they would have been painters, another while back, they would have been writers, another while they would have been physicists, now they are technologists. These people search out a trendy intellectual effort and then spend their time developing their abilities there. This 'trend' is different for different groups, depending on the media that they are exposed to, and what the people around them are talking about.

Groups in America are pretty segregated, and there is a form of intellectual segregation betwen men and women. It leads to gender specific roles. It also leads to the effect observed above: Smart black guys did not start fiddling with computers 15 years ago, so they are not currently active in the tech industry.
Ray Kurzweil: Making the World A Billion Times Better (2008)
Eric is not suggesting that the applicant pool is diverse and the selection process biased. Instead, I think he's suggesting that different selection processes can result in different applicant pools:

"Imagine that you were a professional musician thinking about which orchestra to audition for. You have a choice between an all-male orchestra that conducts interviews out in the open, and a mixed-gender orchestra that conducts auditions behind a screen. Which would you choose to apply to? Wouldn’t your answer be different if you were a man or a woman?

I think thought experiments like this are helpful for suggesting an alternate hypothesis to the pipeline problem: that there are qualified minority applicants who are choosing – rationally – to invest their time and energy elsewhere. I am not aware of any scientific study that proves this hypothesis is correct. But I have seen enough existence proofs to believe it is likely."
And clearly, many african-americans and many women were not doing the steps needed to be talented enough to be able to make it big now. The most likely reason they did not do that, is probably because it just did not occur to them.

You use words like "clearly" and "probably" but provide neither explanation nor evidence to back up your suppositions. Clearly, you expect your audience thinks exactly the way you do and will probably confirm your bias.
Post also shows a blatant lack of knowledge about what an event loop is. Node and Tornado (two event-loop based servers) are by design single-threaded. This is because for certain setups, having a separate thread for each connected client (the norm for something like Apache) can destroy your server.

IMO the main problem that event loop systems were designed to solve was the "I have a ton of people connected concurrently but the majority of the time these connections are idle". Think if you were building a chat application. Your users are connected to your service constantly (they want to get messages as soon as they arrive), but most of the time they AREN'T receiving or sending data. If you had a thread for every connected client your server would melt due to the ram overhead, even though most threads aren't doing any work 99% of the time. In an event-loop based system, you don't have this issue because everything gets handled by one thread.
2,262 called in tonight, live - (here's the replay)
An idea is only terrible if it has no chance of achieving it's goal.

Like any system, being only as accurate as the data provided to it, that's a given. All we can do is encourage users to input as accurately as possible and make it simple for them to do so.

I'm sure you're aware that not every app out there is 'serious'. Of course, we'll make users aware that this should be no substitute for common sense (i.e. not having any alcohol before driving).
Jaxtr introduces JaxtrSMS to send free text messages around the world
Job sites are basically designed to exploit clueless people (on both sides of the transaction). You're not clueless, or you are shortly to become less clueless, so you should never be involved with a job site.

Draw a rectangle, where one side is the number of people with hiring authority you've had coffee with recently and the other side is your attractiveness as a candidate. As the area of the rectangle gets bigger, the number of job offers you get will increase. (And, if you're savvy about it, the attractiveness of them will as well.)

If you already have Google on your resume, increasing your attractiveness as a candidate is probably not as good ROI as lining up more coffee dates. They are really easy to arrange: start by knowing at least one person in Silicon Valley who has hiring authority. (Your local Internet has a few hundred options.) Ask for introductions.

The custom is for a short two-line email: "Hey Bob, meet Dave. Dave is a smart chap, he previously worked at Google. You guys should get in touch." Dave then sends Bob an email inviting him to get coffee. (There are other options: lunch and dinner work, too, but asking someone to coffee is basically the smallest imposition you could possibly make which still gets you face time and you want face time.)

Or, if you're opposed to networking (which seems oddly common among engineers), put on a T-shirt which says "I am looking for an engineering job. Previous work experience: Google" and walk down Castro during lunch hour. You'll probably get three offers.
Isn't it possible that it has nothing to do with race, but with culture.

From my experience most people who end up working in technology are or were at one point part of the geek subculture.

You can't just look at Tech fields and say look it's all white and asian. It's not, it's predominantly a particular subset of white and asian men. That subset has it's own culture.

Maybe there is some cultural reason that white and and asian men are more drawn to this subculture than other demographics.
In my opinion, the real learning comes from doing the exercises. So if you are reading the material but not doing any quiz or exercise, you aren't learning as much. And if you aren't doing the exam, which has a time limit and you can't repeat until you get it perfect, you don't know how much you are or aren't learning.
Less than that if there's a major disruption that casts doubt on the legitimacy of more than 5% of the money supply.

The classic case was the huge Northern Bank robbery in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 2004 -- the thieves stole around 7% of all the Northern Bank banknotes in circulation (currency in NI and Scotland is issued by banks that possess a license to print money, not by a nationalized institution like the Federal Reserve). It was cheaper for the bank to reissue the entire currency and cancel the old banknotes than to trouser the loss, so within 4 months the stolen notes were worthless except as toilet paper:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Bank_robbery

Once there's a noticeable proportion of forged coinage or banknotes in circulation public confidence in the currency drops like a stone. At that point, the only option is to recall and replace.

The reason this hasn't happened in the USA is because there are so damn many dollar bills in circulation -- around $829Bn as of 2007. The cost of recalling and reissuing that little lot would be distinctly non-trivial ...

http://www.ny.frb.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html

For the classic currency-catastrophe-caused-by-forgery, you need to read up on the Portuguese banking crisis of 1925, one of the biggest currency frauds in history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alves_Reis
I visited that link just to see and found that it was posted as an HN article a while back. Your characterization is completely wrong. In that video, a lawyer explains how a person's words can be used against them by the police even if that person is innocent. In fact, innocent people have the most to lose if they come under police suspicion.

Please note that I do not hate cops by any means. In fact, all of the ones I have known have been great. But I've never taken a ride in the wrong side of a police car, either. Perhaps you should read this: http://www.innocenceproject.org/fix/Priority-Issues.php
Stanford already does this through their professional development program: http://scpd.stanford.edu/
Sure, not only the GOF, but 5 volumes of POSA, Martin Fowler's POEAA, and reams of digested pattern books like Head First Design Patterns, etc. There's dozens.
Diverse demographic =/= Diverse skills and expertise

I am disappointed by underlying presumption of the article that you must have diverse demographic correlates with diverse skill sets because it doesn't.

If we continue to think that superficial physical qualities such as skin color or having a certain genitalia defines who we are as individuals, then we do indeed live in a racist and sexist society where people are judged based on race and sex.
Google’s Nyan cat obsession spills onto Google+
Some years after I read about Gadsby I heard people talking about "The Great Gatsby." I was very confused about why there was an "e" in the title of the book which was supposed to contain no "e"s.
Deconstructing the "Occupy" Movement
Libev - the event loop behind node.js
The United States of Europe
Not sure if it is retroactive but the ACM has changed their access policy a little: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/10/131401-acms-copyright-....
"The problem I have is processing a lot of data quickly"

It seems that the author needs something like super performant Hadoop++. Node doesn't address these problems.

"Node enthusiasts are front-end coders not wanting to do server coding"

I think he missed the point there. Using Javascript as a server side language, node has bridged a gap so many web programmers have been crossing. With node and mongodb, JSON is a language native to the entire webstack -- which is a very powerful idea. We are able to sync datastructures across server and client now.

This rant sounds very similar to "NoSQL DBs will never reach the competence and performance of the RDBMS".
We tell all your friends about everything you do!

Which, given how much they will then know about you, will introduce social pressures. "You like X, Y, and Z, why haven't you bought widget A or seen movie B yet? I thought we were friendsters!"
Another surprising fact: most digital copiers have a hard drive and they usually aren't wiped when removed from service.

So everything you copied at the office or at FedEx Office is available even after you leave:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/19/eveningnews/main64...
Show HN: Good or Bad? for iPhone/iPad
Hi HackerNewsers,

I've built a few iPhone apps before. One of them was in a few TV commercials for Apple's 3GS campaign. Three apps I've worked on made top ten in their category.

I'm posting to show off my new app, Good or Bad?, which is built for everyone, but I think it's also good enough to be fun for hackers. I can also answer questions about iOS development and Objective-C.

http://goodorbadapp.com/

If you're really strapped for cash but still want to try the app out let me know your email address and I'll send you a promo code.
The best code is the code you don't need to write. Build only what you need (YAGNI) and introduce abstraction to avoid duplication (DRY). My rule is don't ever do the same thing three times (though I sometimes enforce it at two). Conversely, if you find you no longer need something (no matter how clever it was) delete it. It will only confuse you or whoever else is working on the system later.

If it truly is so clever it must be saved, throw it on your github account and reference it another day when you may need it again. Regardless, get everything that isn't needed out of the code base.
The number isn't to fill out your profile, and has nothing to do with privacy settings.

At least as far as users are concerned, right? I mean, it's not not being used to fill out your profile on the backend, either.
A local Fedex Office was completely unaware of this as of 5 weeks ago.
Mint.com for Networking
P(viewer loves Arrested Development) = P(viewer is white)
Clojure & Python, Side by Side
"You use words like 'clearly' and 'probably' but provide neither explanation nor evidence to back up your suppositions."

Maybe because it would take all of 12 seconds of Googling to confirm that this is probably (at least partially) correct? We all know what the statistics say and what they don't say, so asking other people to do your homework for you in place of actually contributing something is lame. I meant granted, the original comment was a bit simplistic, but the lack of statistics isn't the issue.
Speaktoit Assistant - Siri alternative for Android
I was going to agree with you before I actually clicked the link.

Any place where this is NSFW has some serious issues. Sure, I know such places exists, but you cannot expect submitters to constantly be aware of such outliers any time they submit a link. Otherwise we would constantly have to check a whole list of obscure cultural sensitivities around the planet.

You want an NSFW tag for this utterly harmless link, just ask politely. But don't accuse people for whom it's genuinely hard to imagine why this would be an issue of being impolite.
The problem is not in the admission process, but (amongst other things) in each individual's perception about it.
A mostly male club with only 4% women will naturally attract more male population, making the group even more unbalanced over time.
Graphing Calculator
Texas Instruments TI-83 Plus Graphing Calculator – TI-83 Plus The TI-83 Plus is an easy-to-use graphing calculator for math and science. Graphing Calculator
http://www.psdmate.com/2011/11/19/graphing-calculator/
What Is The Payday Project 2012
This Us The Angryest Writing | Socyberty
It's actually http://www.ml-class.org/
I was about to extract a few quotes showing a blatant lack of understanding whatsoever. In the end it got too lengthy. Looks like a Ninja stepped on the wrong land today.

All the references to threads are probably the most difficult to understand for me. Node is single threaded and one can't spawn a new one. The author seem to be using it as some sort of magical artefact.. it's beyond comprehension.
Works for me...thanks!!
Mm, fair point. Although, "geometric thinking" wasn't a hindrance; check this out, it's pretty interesting:

For example we can visualize "taking the derivative of the function f(x)" by "rolling a wheel over the top of its graph": http://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/derivative_wheel.png

The red circle is a "wheel" which happily rolls back and forth along our f(x) graph. The green line is the derivative of f(x). It's intuitively obvious what that green line is -- if you had to fit a flat piece of paper between the wheel and where it touches the graph, then you'd get that line. That's the derivative, also called the "tangent line" or "slope of the graph" at that point.

(The wheel will always touch the graph only once, because we can visualize it as small as we need it to be --- infinitely small, even.)

It's common knowledge that a curve's derivative is zero at its maximum / minimum. (In other words, "when the wheel reaches the top or bottom of a 'hill', then its derivative is zero, aka the tangent line is perfectly horizontal".) So right away, we immediately understand where the zeroes of the f'(x) graph must be located.

But the real power is, we also have a rough idea of how the f'(x) graph must look, by "watching the wheel's tangent line as we roll it along the graph", in our mind's eye.

So that's a neat trick, but why does it matter?

Well, here's one example: It's the most natural and obvious thing in the world that the derivative of cos(x) is -sin(x).

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/derivative_wheel_cos...

We start at x=0; we see that the wheel is "resting on the very top of the slope", meaning the tangent line is flat, so we know right off the bat that the derivative of cos(0) is 0.

From there, the wheel "rolls downhill"; therefore the derivative "goes negative"; and it goes back to zero when the wheel reaches the bottom of the hill (which we see is at x=pi).

The wheel then begins climbing uphill, so its derivative "goes positive"; and it goes back to zero when the wheel reaches the top of the slope (at x=2pi).

So we see that the graph of the derivative of cos(x) has zeroes at 0, pi, and 2pi; and we also intuitively understand that it's negative from 0 to pi; and we see that it's positive from pi to 2pi.

Now all that's left is to think about the graph of -sin(x). It's exactly what we just described: zero at x=0, x=pi, and x=2pi; negative from 0 to pi; and positive from pi to 2pi. So that's why "it's obvious to us that the derivative of cos(x) is -sin(x)", QED.

So if you've had to worry about rote memorizing those sorts of formulas, I'd urge you to give these visual techniques a shot. You'll never again need to memorize seemingly-arbitrary equations, which is pretty sweet IMO.

Sorry for rambling on; I just get so excited about presenting math "in a visual way". It's a lot of fun, and likely wouldn't hinder the ambitious mathematician at all --- just the opposite, in fact: Feynman, for example, had an arsenal of similar techniques, which probably contributed to his intuitive understanding of the physics behind the formulas and his ability to "see past" the raw equations.
Slide: How To Pitch a VC (or Angel)
what are the legal hurdles you envisage? A simple recommendation based on social sentiment is what I'm thinking about.
Maybe it's that patterns are so common place we take for granted that someone had to name them.

I guarantee you've used Proxy, Observer, Factory, Abstract Factory, Facade, Bridge or some approximation of one of these if you've coded more than 100 lines of Java in the last year.

If I say "ActiveRecord" or "DataMapper" you probably think Ruby on Rails, not Chapter 10 of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. If I say "Factory" you're probably not thinking Chapter 3 of GOF. When you think about node.js or EventMachine, do you think about the definition of the Reactor Pattern in POSA Volume 2?

Patterns aren't dead. They won.
His explanation sounds believable and unless you supply a believable one or maybe one backed by data and other empirical evidence, we'll going to use his.

That's how arguing works in real life when the object is vast and non-deterministic (like, population).
Even easier than coffee dates: email sdrost@gmail.com, and I'll sic three great recruiters on you. They've already had coffee with the people with hiring authority, they won't send you crappy jobs, and they get paid based on how much you get paid, so they'll make sure that amount is high. I just did this and finished a job search in 2 weeks, ending up working for my long-term heroes at a great salary.
Using Alexa ranking to generate a list like that is ridiculous. I used to work for one of the startups on that list and it's been basically shuttered for the last 2 years.
Liquid Robotics' Wave Gliders Begin Historic Swim Across Pacific
You can enable cookies to get the viewing experience that you prefer.

Or, you can download the content freely and see it any way you prefer.

Those seem like a couple reasonable options, to me.
> With node and mongodb, JSON is a language native to the entire webstack -- which is a very powerful idea. We are able to sync datastructures across server and client now.

Honest question here -- outside of not calling input and output transforms to or from JSON and native array/list/whatever, what is the new ability and the powerful idea? Aren't the two transforms pretty insignificant in practice?
I'm usually fairly permissive - but I've been really annoyed by the social reader stuff. I'd normally have no problem authing the Washington Post to allow login or whatever, but I do not want them broadcasting every time I read a story. Mostly because I want to personally curate my feed, and always have. Maybe I'll get over that, but I kinda doubt it. Spotify and all games have this problem too, and even though I know it will only be showing up in activity box (for the most part) I've still greatly curtailed my listening. The privacy thing is secondary, but still important, I'd just not read about X embarrassing thing on the WP (which I most likely already don't).
Where would you buy this wholesale?
I think the problem of mess is that, if you have a team and they think so differently that they all don't like how others code.

Not to say, there are more than OOP on the world for programming. e.g. Hacker news is not written in some OOP environment and it is a piece of good software (IMHO).

I always remember this saying:

// When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing
// Now, God only knows
My guess would be that's a hole that's been left for the carriers to insert their own branded app (and customized to the unique aspects of their particular voicemail platform).

Remember the 'base' Ice Cream Sandwich you see on the Google Nexus phones will be combined with carrier specific apps before Sprint, Verizon et al role out a build to their phones.
Will pay-per-mile be a buzzkill for American road trips?
That part of the technology is awesome, but I suppose you'd have bandwidth problems at a large enough scale.

What's going to be interesting is when both real-time rendering and motion capture get good enough to serve as a vehicle for live sports. Imagine being able to put the camera anywhere you want, or on anyone you want. That will kill TV sports if nothing else does in the meantime.
Basic Hacking Technique(Metasploit) Client Side Attack For NewBies
The Guardian link situation is scaring some of my non-tech friends who have no idea what is happening, and why their read links are showing up for the rest of the us to read. That and the fact that more spam is showing up (a male friend was embarrassed last week when it showed a pornographic link on his page, though perhaps his wife was more embarrassed and none of them knew how to make it go away so I flagged it for them). I feel I've become something of a watcher on my friend's pages lately and providing advice on how to protect them - I've even gone so far as to create a fake account so I can monitor for them what is public and what isn't (they take comfort in my screenshots that their posts are actually private). It really is getting to the point where facebook has to address this properly or many of us are going to bail.