skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've heard this often (a team is greater than the sum of its parts) but never bought into it. Can you justify why it is true?

I hold that a team is always strictly less than the sum of its parts. Productivity is lost in communication between team members.
If they controlled for it, the results from the mixed-gender groups should be more applicable assuming an normal distribution of attractiveness. That doesn't run contradictory to the hypothesis that a non-normal distribution (that is, skewed on the attractive side) can hurt said performance.
Your employees will never care about the company as much as you do and why should they.. obviously treating employees well goes a way towards getting them to care more, its a two way street, the more you care about an employee, and show it, the more likely they are going to care about the company. Also, larger companies that have high turnover, etc don't exactly inspire warm fuzzy feelings in employees, there isn't some magic formula, you have to realize that people probably aren't as stupid as you take them to be, on average, and you can't trick them into caring, you need to give them a reason to actually want to see the company do well. The more responsibility / talent an employee has the more they feel that they can get another job, if needed, and therefore their fate isn't tied to the fate of the company.
I know that this is slightly off topic, but can someone tell me what the site is built with? I looked at the source did not figure it out. Back on topic, I agree that no law should be passed in ignorance and with no intention of expert testimony. The way it is done now makes it seem as if they already made up their mind but they want and go through the motions to make it look like they are debating.
I noticed the same thing, though:
maps and local services, public affairs, and business
operations sound like departments best lead one on one.
I would assume the departments in the inner circle have more need for coordination and direct leadership.
Congrats on getting selected!

One tip: you may want to consider a tagline other than "discovery engine". It's already overloaded. For example, Microsoft originally marketed Bing as a 'discovery engine' and see also:

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/discovery-engine

http://www.intelligenx.com/local-search/discovery-engine
Mizuno Neogrado Wave III AG White Blue Yellow Mens Soccer Cleats on Sale
How are the first two generations doing?
I wish that person had been in charge of sending out college admissions letters when I was applying!
Dancer and Plack middleware:

http://advent.perldancer.org/2011/16
Cyber Soldiers: Hackers in Fatigues
This is complete FUD. My wife and I make ~100k, and live inside the beltway, quite comfortably, within a 30 minute drive to Capitol Hill.

Fairfax and Montgomery County have some of the highest rated public schools in the nation.
Tutorial: Metacompilers
From a sufficiently lucrative point of view, SOPA outlaws potential businesses. Of course, they're not interested in the entrepreneurs explaining technical details of more businesses. They know it when they see it.
100%, yes.
Start-Up Chile Selects 100 Startups For Its Third Class
Seth's Blog: Assorted tips, hope they help
2011 In Tech: A Year Of Great Losses
Man, with a boss funny as this one, I would have never left the job.
News needs to be decentralized
Wow, the US government is becoming frighteningly corrupt.
[ANN] Lua 5.2.0 (final) now available
Is this really categorically true for porn sites and only porn sites? Otherwise your comment seems rather weird.
I agree with your point - I feel that having too many engineers from the same school leads to a sort of echo chamber. Everyone takes the same classes, does the same projects, has the same professors. But even worse, I feel like alums all gravitate towards the same level of technical expertise - being Generic University Engineer #27 was good enough for the previous 26 hires so its good enough for me.
My product was just useful
The alpha version of my product just proved useful for the first time, and that was really sweet, and I had to write about it.
Exactly. They keep refusing to listen to the experts in the Internet infrastructure, and even though they say they don't believe them, I think they actually know they might be right, but they just don't care.
Here is another option http://www.excelsior-usa.com/xdsx86.html
I find this a bit unfair - taking two data points to make a statement about gender discrimination at Google.
Here's another datapoint - Google recently hired Margo Georgiadis, a female, to the 2nd highest position in Sales - a historically male function. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/24/margo-georgiadis-gr...)

The top position is taken by Nikesh who is the highest paid executive at Google. So Margo is definitely one of the highest paid VPs at Google.

How important is this position? Well, the last person, Dennis Woodside, now handles Motorola. And the guy before him became the CEO of AOL. Also, Margo is responsible for majority of revenue at Google.

This doesn't prove anything but I just wanted to add another data point to the discussion.
Good point. The sad thing is, we were pretty happy to stumble into that phrase. Didn't' realize Microsoft had used it. We don't want to use the term "search engine" because that implies textual queries and text matching. Whenever you're doing something new, you need a new way to describe it, and we're going to have to figure out the right positioning and right way of describing it. Hopefully without confusing people.
There is no such thing as general purpose VM.
Are Americans fearful of their government yet?
NDAA just passed, PIPA and SOPA will probably pass once opposition dies down a bit. Every authoritarian bill proposed in the past decade under the guise of anti-terrorism has passed and is strengthening the state's power to unprecedented levels. Each bill is a euphemism cleverly named to conceal the dystopian undertones of their purpose.

Do everyday Americans truly understand what is going on in their country right now?
Internet Explorer Must Die
http://octopress.org/

octopress is pretty sweet.

rake new_post["title"] and you have a new post.

easy to style as well.
This is a Constitutional matter.
And how are those farmworkers doing these days?
Quite frankly they don't even know how a normal economy works, how manufacturing works, what generates real middle class job growth, how wealth is created (hint: not from insider deals via political connections). They're like captains of a ship that know nothing about how a ship is built or what makes it float.
The next warning is stay off IRC or other places where "hackers" hang out. They think it's funny to hand you commands that can destroy your computer.

It would be simpler just to tell the student to not run any command unless he or she can explain exactly what the program and arguments mean.
A remarkable email exchange with a developer who cares
EDIT: I realise the below isn't exactly readable so I posted a formatted version here: http://andrewsplastic.tumblr.com/

I recently installed a Chrome extension that didn't do exactly what I wanted. I uninstalled it and promptly forgot about it until the following email exchange happened:

FROM BEN COE, THE CO-FOUNDER OF THE EXTENSION ATTACHMENTS.ME:

Hey Andrew, Ben here. I'm one of the cofounders of Attachments.me:

I've been reaching out to some of the people who signup for our
service, I'd love to know how things are going for you.

Any feedback you can provide about how the service is working for you
so far, would be awesome. Also, I'd love to hear any suggestions you
have for the product.

Thanks for taking the time to try us out :)

Cheers,
Ben Coe

MY REPLY:

Hey Ben,

Thanks for getting in touch.

I uninstalled it. All I really needed was my attachments to appear on the right of the email *and* be
downloadable from the right panel. My only option was to transfer to dropbox (I use cloud app) or open the
attachments.me window and browse for the relevant attachment.

If you guys enable the attachments on the right to be downloadable directly I'll re-install straight away.
CloudApp support would also be great.

Cheers,
Andrew

FROM BEN:

Hey, thanks for the quick response :)

I'm curious, what do you see as the advantage to being able to download the attachment on the right-hand side, as
oppose to being able to download it in the area provided below the email. Is it that we could consolidate all the
attachments in the thread into one area?

Would love to get you back on board,

-- Ben.

MY REPLY:

Hey Ben,

When receiving emails from some people, GMail doesn't recognize the thread. It incorrectly assumes the reply's
are part of the email. So some emails get ridiculously long, and I have to scroll forever downwards to get to the
download link. When I first installed attachments.me, I was stoked, as I could see all the attachments relevant
to the thread on the right...but they were static names, not links :(

Would it be hard to turn those static titles into attachment links?

Regards,
Andrew

FROM BEN:

That makes sense. I think you're right, it would be smart for the name of the attachment to allow you to
download it.

I've added this feature to the extension, if you install the newest version here:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gdgofjdapkmlgpgjfielacjckplcdjjk

it should do the trick.

Keep the feedback coming,

-- Ben.

In short Ben reached out to me, without being contacted and implemented the change I had been looking for, and he did it in minutes.
That's good, I never thought Stanford made sense as a choice for NYC. Don't get me wrong, Stanford is an exceptional school, with great tech credentials, and has spawned a unique startup environment.

But the thing that makes the SF area great for startups is the proximity (and thus density) of startups and tech in general. While long-distance networking has come a long way, it's still no replacement. If NYC's goal is to build a stronger tech community, I think they're better off building their own East Coast tech culture vs. trying to import a culture from SF.

Disclosure: as a Cornell grad, I'm definitely biased and psyched about it getting more involved in supporting a tech community (a $350M donation didn't hurt either)
You are right, except in cases where defecting on the boycott is more harmful to you than not defecting. For instance, if I am a scab and cross a picket line, I can put myself in danger or at least make myself unhireable in the future.

In this case, though, people can be hired without anyone knowing about it. If lots of money is offered, someone will take it, and if there is pressure not to do take such a job, they will simply keep it secret who takes the job.

I think what you are saying, which I absolutely agree with, is that any system that relies on people going against their own personal self-interest, in mass, is doomed to failure.
Sites like www.riaaradar.com have been around for years. No effect.

Edit: just checked, and riaaradar.com is, in fact, gone. And www.riaa.org is still up and running five-nines, thank you.
I've used Jekyll to build http://utilise.ca, a french clone of Daniel Bogan’s http://usesthis.com. I'm not a big fan of the Liquid template language either.

You can check out the entire source code here: https://github.com/remiprev/utilise.ca
I don't know about octopress - I don't get who the customer is. That rake script can be done in like 15 lines of any scripting language (I wrote my own in about 10 minutes). I don't have any issues styling my stock Jekyll blog.

If you are using a static blog site over something like WordPress you are probably technical in nature and can pretty easily setup your own Jekyll site. The only benefit I see personally are the plugins - which you can't even use on Github Pages as far as I know.

IMO octopress is a solution looking for a problem.
There are many more data points. I lived it.

These are just the ones which are (finally) getting out to the world.
I think I may be missing a reference here. Someone help?
A VM that provides a standardized bytecode and execution model capable of executing most modern dynamic and static turing complete languages with sufficient performance. This requires more general facilities for common functionality required; refer to tail call support, JVM's invokedynamic, etc.

Or, shorthand, a general purpose browser VM.

Unless, of course, you're arguing that the above is not truly possible, in which case I'd argue that's exactly what Google is exploring via PNaCL, and has (if not completely efficiently) been implemented across existing VMs. The PNaCL choice of LLVM bitcode was likely in error, but regardless, "no such thing" is a stretch.
Because they're already building a new campus in West Harlem. Bloomberg's competition would just add more goodies.
I've looked at it, and while nifty, makes me worry about leaky abstractions and future support.

Now that you mention it if I'm going to do that, why not use the python-to-javascript compiler from pyjamas? ... hmm.
I'm a bit doubtful about the statistics, and I think I know why. There's a circularity to your use of "deleterious mutations" and "bad mutation."

Is the mutation which causes sickle-cell anaemia a "good mutation" or a "bad mutation"? It increases reproductive fitness in places where malaria is or was common, so it must be good, in an evolutionary sense.

How many deaths has it caused once the population of people carrying the haemoglobin gene mutation migrated to a location without malaria? Is that mutation now "good" or "bad"? How do you incorporate those numbers into your statistics?

Is the loss of eyesight a deleterious mutation? Definitely for a bird of prey, but not so for cave-dwelling creatures living in absolute darkness. For that matter, some people are attracted to people who wear glasses (and wearing zero-prescription glasses is such a turn-off!), so it might increase reproductive fitness.

Evolution doesn't know the future. If a population loses genetic resistance to a disease that's seemingly extinct, is that a "good" or "bad" mutation? How long does it take to judge that? After 1,000 years, should some thawed carcass reintroduce it and the species become extinct, does that count finally as a bad mutation and a single death?

For a real world example, consider the birds of New Zealand. They filled ecological niches which elsewhere were filled by mammals. Were these good mutations or bad ones? And when rats and weasels and cats and more were introduced to New Zealand, helping make many of those species extinct, then did those mutations retrospectively become deleterious?

If a genetic madness affects the leader of the US Strategic Air Command to issue orders which end up nuking a dozen Soviet cities, then what are the other cases which make that average out to one? If the nuking didn't occur, then what would the average have been?

What of a mutation which causes a speciation event? Is that a good mutation or a bad one? It's better for one environment and worse for the other.

There's a 10^-9 chance (1-in-a-million) that a "bad" mutation will mutate again back to the "good" form. With nearly 7 billion people in the world, that almost certainly happens a few thousand times every generation. In a generation we may be able to cure some genetic diseases through genetic engineering, so a "bad" mutation can be fixed.

With all those in mind, I can't figure out a way to get the numbers to come out "1" unless the definition of deleterious is defined to make it come out that way.
We don't need a better bill. There's no reason to create any new internet piracy bill. We already have a copyright act, and the DMCA, and international treaties on intellectual property rights.

SOPA doesn't make anything that isn't already illegal illegal. It just creates new ways to shut down anyone the film and music industries want to shut down, without even having to prove infringement. It has no public support because it's a ridiculous, unneeded proposal.

SOPA should simply be voted down and the congress should move on to some real business, not creating new laws at the behest of their campaign contributors.
Day 3 of SOPA Hearing - Wednesday, Dec 21st
We're excited to announce our disappointment in you ! You're on tonight's local news. We've arranged interviews with 3 of your ex-girlfriends.
So does pretty much anyone who has taken a decent computer arch course :)
Y is an exception to that rule, it's a synonym for yy (like S for cc), but easily changed to match D and C.
Developing software isn't just a linear stream of ideas to lines of code. If a 5 minute discussion with another team member leads to a design that will save a week of refactoring later on, then the team with those 2 people is now MORE than those two people would have done if you cut off all communication between them. Or in other cases, another set of eye balls will find a bug in 1 minute instead of half a day.

Heterogeneity, even among very skilled software engineers, exists. Thus you want people whose skills and weaknesses blend, so that the weaknesses of team members can get helped out by others on the team, and thus increase productivity.
narly.us is officially back up running on new hardware.
I'll be monitoring the uptime on this from now on and rest assured I'm committed to narly's development so it's not going anywhere.

Small problem I have is getting my ducks in a row for a job search I'm embarking on ;).

Thanks for the heads up and I appreciate your post more than you know =)

- Jade
Sure, but that's not what this article is about ("5 min setup, for the masses").
Ah wow, you are correct. Any good reason that is the default behavior for Y?
Agreed. Most companies realise the disruption caused to a project when key staff leave and paying an extra 10K, 20K or even 60K passes a simple cost-benefit analysis - but only during that project.

Personal experience: I was one of about 5-6 people who actually knew what they were doing on a 50 person, 3 year project at a large company when I got a much better offer from a much better company. I called the HR manager in good faith to see if they would match it, but he didn't want a word of it (nearly hung up on me, in fact). That was until he was told by my boss that I'm needed on a critical project. Not only did he call me back and talk to me, the CTO of the company (who never spoke to me before) spent an entire hour with me, ignoring his constantly beeping phone, convincing me to stay. As flattering as that was, I knew by then that they only did this because of the critical project and took that into account in making my decision.

I still decided to quit. The "critical project" was cancelled two weeks later (for unrelated reasons).
Yes, this is exactly what I was thinking, too. Stopping SOPA will only be temporary. They will remake the bill and try again either by end of this Congress or with the next one. There need to be some definite laws that protect the Internet - without compromise. And these laws should stop any SOPA-like law dead in its tracks.
Nyet.
kinda neat, but the only use-case he can point out is home theater? you can already stream bluray video over 100mbit ethernet, and you can get cable and switches for that for free or trivial amounts of money. that said, the mere idea is rather tempting (though I think gigabit is good enough for my home network)
Yes. And now I understand how it could happen in Germany.
> organize a boycott of any person or company that works on it.

This is dangerously like a witch hunt. This tool is theirs, not ours.

But I agree we may need better tools to protect the things we hold dear.
Skipping the experiences that lead to this conclusion:

A _team_ from the same uni will be extremely productive if they focused on that type of project in their courses. If the team only has undergrad degrees, look at the undergrad projects, of course. But their strength will be in bootstrapping such a project, not maintaining it. (Work done for courses is perpetually being re-invented and never maintained, by its very nature.)

And the flip side of the coin is: break up that team and mix them up in your other teams, and they will learn a lot about the real world. As long as they're closeted together, they'll have that laser-focus and high productivity, but lack the real-world perspective.

If you only have one team of developers, you need the diversity! My small company really benefits from the variety of backgrounds we bring.

Then there are those 10x players who may have gone to the uni but worked outside the uni as well. They aren't vulnerable to this kind of thinking, but will work really well with other guys from their alma mater.
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=NAMAMU
I used it today like this -

On my way home I decided I wanted a baked potato with dinner.

I already had a baked potato tag, and it contained 3 things

Potato
Butter
Sour cream

I selected the potato and sour cream items, knowing I already had butter.

What happened far too frequently to me was that I'd forget to even remember sour cream and just get potatoes. That's what tags are for, a memory tool. Don't use them if you don't want. I find them extremely useful and are the main reason I created this app.

I also have baked potato tagged with dinner, so on my way home, I could have scanned through the "dinner" tag and decided what I felt like eating.

You see, I wasn't trying to mimic the shopping list, I was wanted a tool that helped me the way I grocery shop.
At the risk of sounding offtopic, I love the anecdote!

Birthdays and cookies are worth it!
There is always someone who will consider something like SOPA a shining beacon of progress compared to whatever lawless state they live in. At least SOPA does not propose stoning movie pirates to death... yet.
Definitely agree with this. Octopress definitely launched with momentum but it relies on a fork of Jekyll and custom plugins.

This necessarily means GitHub can never merge any developments upstream even if they wanted to since GitHub needs Jekyll for GitHub pages.

My main concern right now is moving Jekyll forward which is a lot more frustrating of a problem since I want to make improvements that will work natively on GitHub pages. My first solution to this will be the use of a lot of javascript =), with the requirement that it degrade gracefully.

Plugin development is still worthwhile since from the replies it seems a good amount of blogs are self-hosted. The trick is to properly separate and advocate the plugin self-hosted format from the deploy to gitHub super easy quickstart format.
What about all the social unrest currently going on in Chile?

I don't know a lot about the situation other than passing mentions in the news but the protests were a big enough deal to warrant a wiki page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Chilean_protests
I'm not saying that it is impossible as clearly there have been good efforts being made. However there is no such thing implemented.
Here's a list of past attempts to control the internet:

The Commercial Felony Streaming Act. Makes illegal streaming a felony recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_S.978

Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. It's an attempt to confiscate domain names legally. Now re-entered as PROTECT-IP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combating_Online_Infringement_...

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Not a bill but an international discussion behind closed doors rumoured to get foreign governments to adopt three strikes, etc. USA says details can't be released due to 'national security reasons': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agre...

DMCA. There's no protection for people who wish to share music freely as civil judges ask "How much damages did you suffer when <abusive company> took your free music down?" and many USA attorneys refuse to touch DMCA abuses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

There's still more.
You may benefit from reading the comments on this HN poll: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444661