skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm having trouble understanding the backlash against the new Lego for girls initiative. As the father of a couple of pre-school girls, I'm loving the new initiative.

It appears to consist of 3 things:

- realistic looking minifigs. Not square and not oversexed.

- additional brick colors, and not just pink.

- sets not based on movie tie-ins, but in real-world locations like an inventor's workshop, a café, an animal hospital and a beauty salon

These look like the perfect toys for young girls -- they encourage both creativity and role-playing. And as the latest science-based parenting books (Welcome to Your Child's Brain, etc) tell you, role-playing is the best way to develop self-control, which is the most valuable skill that can be imparted into a pre-schooler by a parent.

Sure, they're girly. So what? I want my girls to grow up proud to be girls, and aware that they can be whatever they want to be.

But to my mind, they seem better than most of the "boy" Lego sets out there, which appear to be much less repurposable, and are blatant commercial tie-ins or weapons of war.
I am supposed to start at Google on 1/3. Not 100% sure because I'm trying to extract more money (and don't really want to move to New York).

But the reality is: you can let your soul be crushed by evil, or you can like the likeable parts of your job and ignore the parts you don't like. It is sometimes fun to be smarter than everyone else, after all.
What? I'm calling you out. Sure, you can customize your OS if you run Linux. You can also customize your OS if you run Windows or Mac, and it's not more difficult. More to the point, you can install an alternate browser or even an alternate version of IE if you so choose.
Introduction to Synthetic Biology with Andrew Hessel
Before you complain, you can still get a big bag of Lego:

http://shop.lego.com/en-DK/LEGO-Basic-Bricks-Large-5623

I say still, because it is a family business and it seems those who would have gone on to run it have left the family tradition and are now much more interested in enjoying their wealth (which is considerable, in that they are one of the richest families in Denmark).

They would be the fourth generation, so I guess it was bound to happen. At least my children should be able to cut their teeth on Legos.
It has active Mono support as well (even from inside MS). The Monodevelop support is pretty good too. I code in F# on Ubuntu regularly.
"Top talent likes top talent." That I can agree with. I know people can't be fired from big companies, but I wish they could be indefinitely suspended with pay. ("We'll pay you to STOP CHECKING IN CODE.") Then the three people with a clue wouldn't have to waste their time reverting the mistakes of the people trying hard for a good performance review.

You hit the nail right on the head. I used to say this all the time when I was working for Oracle. There were plenty of people who weren't even contributing nothing - they were forcing the competent people to take time away from real work to fix the bugs these people caused. Negative value, indeed.
Whomever decided to kill Space Legos needs to be shot into orbit.

The model kits all suck. I went and bought $15 tubs of the wall of bricks recently and my kids get far more use from those random pieces than they do kits.
Yup (see my response)
Yeah, LEGO's CAD software lets you design models and then order all of the requisite parts[1]. I haven't used it yet, it's a really cool idea.

So there are unfortunate movie-themed prefab kits for the masses, and powerful design software for creative folks. LEGO still sells bulk quantities of classic bricks, you just have to look a bit.

1. http://ldd.lego.com/
You really need to look at your sources and see if there's something else that might have triggered it - maybe for a moment you were used on something very viral, now you're not and your traffic is receding?
Nice to see an old friend linked to again. For those who are interested, here are some of the previous occasions when it's been mentioned, giving links into articles discussing Bayes' Theorem. In particular, some of these discuss further explicit examples of real-world use.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=376631 - top-level submission from 3 years ago and with 26 comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833170

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1022745

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2090649

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270975

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2853474
No, I don't understand why my comment does nothing to advance the conversation.

The poster ericabiz says the US needs more women scientists and I asked her if she was a scientist. If not, I was going to ask her why she wasn't.

EDIT: I don't give a damn what ericabiz does. I wanted to know whether she really believed toys or suggestive advertising or whatever was really to blame for the lack of women in science. Because I think there are some other reasonable possibilities, for example, that science is a shitty career with huge uncertainty. A person with the skills and inclination to be a scientist can easily be a doctor/surgeon, vet, engineer, etc and have much better career potential.

BURGERBRAIN: LOL guess I wasn't thinking. Good thing you are here to spread sarcastic bullshit around.
Aparat foto Sony SLT-A77VQ, 24.3MP, Negru + obiectiv 16-50mm
Join the discussion on /r/SOPA
A bit OT, but a fun exercise: every time you see the word "millennium", count how many "n"s there are. The answer is "one" an astonishing amount of the time, even in professionally edited copy. In fact, as of this writing the Google search for "Millennium Falcon" brings up an Amazon ad for—you guessed it—a "Lego Millenium [sic] Falcon". (Full confession: Around 2000, I was mortified to discover that I, a card-carrying spelling Nazi, had been misspelling it for years.)

N.B. You can remember the right spelling by recalling that a millennium is a thousand (mille) years (anni).
I remember that guy! But I think he got assimilated into the large box of LEGO in my parents' basement.
This is a common response, attacking the people who write nice things about Apple as "evangelists" rather than refuting their specific arguments. Perhaps they write nice things about Apple because Apple have been making really great products for a few years now. And if you actually read them you'll know that they do criticise Apple when they don't perform or do bad things.
For that price the design should look more modern. With even a $2000 design budget you could create a 3 page site that looked 10x better than that.
You had me at "Yammer is no longer allowed to host events in certain SOMA drinking establishments."
I really hope you're being ironic.
So, they spoofed GPS and jammed the rest of the communications to make it land automatically. Given that there are test transmitters for GPS devices used when consumer devices are being created it's not a surprise that they managed to do this. Not very long ago there was a GPS jamming exercise in the UK done on a military range.

I realize that as a Westerner I shouldn't be rooting for the Iranians but if they did spoof GPS, jam the rest of the communications and get this thing to land thinking it was at its home base then it's at least a neat hack.

Also, in the article there's a quote from someone dissing the Iranians' technical ability. This seems like a mistake. Iran is not a 'stone age' country like Afghanistan.
Things that fail are things with movable parts. On the space station, things with movable parts are either a) require materials 3D printers don't work with, b) precision engineered and manufactured with exacting tolerance, or c) both.

Are you saying that we can build an air lock, a solar panel, an air filtration system, or a robotic arm with a 3D printer? Because those are the sorts of things that determine the lifetime of the ISS.
POS? You must be joking. Not looking to start a framework/platform war, but Grails is on par with or better than: Ruby on Rails, Django, <insert your favourite web platform here>
I was also dismayed by their focus on movie tie-ins and set-specific pieces, but I really like the LEGO landmark/architecture series:

http://architecture.lego.com/en-us/products/

They're built with pretty much all standard pieces (though not necessarily standard colors).
The War in Iraq is Over
I second this comment, I'm a biz / cs / math student interested in finding out about summer internships
s/LEGO/toy manufacturers/

(There, I fixed it for you!)

The trend towards highly gendered media-tie in toys that are designed to generate follow-on sales opportunities for accessories rather than to encourage kids to develop their imagination through semi-structured but open-ended play nauseates me. I am doubtless betraying my personal bias here, but the corporate discovery that the quickest way to a parent's wallet is through their offspring is a bleakly exploitative example of market amorality; it may be legal, but is it decent?
The First Annual Canadian Startup Awards presented by KPMG
"we need" does not imply "I personally have an obligation to provide with my own career decisions"
I'm not saying that some devices aren't interesting and competitive, just that The Verge would be incentivised to make them appear so even if they aren't.

I agree that the Galaxy Nexus is a very good phone. But there are a LOT of completely rubbish phones that also get too much attention.
"It gets under my skin because it is a pompous, privileged, insulting, and myopic viewpoint which reeks of class warfare — and it is indicative of a growing sentiment I see amongst people in the tech community."

You know what I've seen an upward trend of? People taking themselves and everything they see entirely too seriously. "Class warfare"? Seriously? This is a phone review.
Abstract Algebra for developers and people who hate math - part 2
The building sets also include an "inventor's workshop", which looks pretty cool, and seems to be exactly the right thing to encourage women scientists & girl geeks.
Here's a better article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/world/middleeast/panetta-i...
I hear ya. Space Legos were the first sets I really came to love. Although, I got pissed back then because of those odd specially-formed pieces like the engines. NOW, it seems 80% of a lego kit is special pieces.
Never heard of it, just tried it. I can see this ending up being my favorite browser, if I can peel off the time to figure out bookmarks. If I understand, the answer is "manage them yourself," which is mostly thrilling if slightly off-putting. I'll try to get to that soon.
I don't think the issue with the algorithm is people deliberately trying to cheat it. The problem is that files that are actually by any empirical measure more bug-free getting higher scores.

You could have two very similar pieces of code, one of which is in one larger file with 1000 lines. Imagine this code gets 1 bug per day.

Now imagine the other code that is functionally identical happens to be broken up into 10 files. Now imagine that 9 bugs per day are applied to this unit of code that is essentially identical to the 1000 line file; the broken up code is exactly the same and is 9x buggier, but it will be scored lower because each file is only getting 0.9 bugs on average per day.

Do you disagree that the code in the second example would actually be way "trickier" and deserves to have a flag on it much more than the first one? I understand that one requirement for this is clarity of the algorithm to developers, but it seems like you could easily take the ratio of bug fixes to total commits on a file or normalize by file length if you wanted to actually get a reasonable metric of how "tricky" or dangerous it is to edit a file.
On a related note, I was rather disappointed by the second episode of On The Verge. Bringing an Apple sycophant like Gruber on the show doesn't seem to have any practical value, as far as I can tell. From the production values, it's clear that they put a lot of effort into putting together a professional, cable-quality program. Kind of sad to see all that work go to waste.
You can also solve simple math problems with it!

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Perl_6
Ah, then I misunderstood JabavuAdams's post. That's a good point.
It's the hard gender division. Why are there "girl legos," and "boy legos"? And it also seems like they're offering the same "girl themed" play sets that all the other toys offer, except you have to put it together first. Who plays with lego that way?
The top items on my daughter's (she's 9) Christmas list this year are the LEGO Space Center and LEGO Space Shuttle, both from the City collection. Other items on the list included some of the Alien Conquest sets.

The kid's got a ton of LEGO. The last thing she needs is more LEGO, but it's hands-down her favorite toy. She builds the sets and will play with/admire them for a while, then eventually all of the pieces get dumped into the Giant Bucket of LEGO, which is a huge 30gal bucket overflowing with bricks from sets we've bought her, and from my childhood and my husband's childhood (though oddly lacking in wheels). That's the beauty of LEGO and that huge mish-mash of a dozen sets works for any gender.

Maybe it's the fact that I already have a geek child who's into geek things (She's also getting a D&D red box this Christmas, per her request), but the marketing doesn't seem to have any effect on her. She just sees sets that she thinks looks cool and wants to buy them. I don't think that list would include veterinary clinics and pet spas from this new pinkification effort, either.... but even if it does, so what? You still end up with a bucket of mixed pieces for hours of endless, free-form creativity and building.

I do think that there are more sets available these days that are targeted toward boys, but I don't know that it's come at the expense of other options. You can still buy basic brick sets. There are still several items in the City series that aren't "cops and robbers" and things like the Mars Mission and Pharaoh's sets, or even the Harry Potter sets are no more boy-centric than the old LEGO space stuff used to be.
Indie Games not on TIGS or Indiegames: Dry Voices: who are you? [Droqen]
No, you can literally just take 10 javascript functions and put them in 10 different files or one file with absolutely no modification at all. Why would one get flagged and the other one not?

The point is simply that if you have a unit of code that has X bugs per day this will give a lower score if code that is actually buggier is across multiple shorter files.
But why would you want two different products? It sounds like you like the "girl" lego much better than the "boy" version. Why not make it accessible to all kids?
There is an Australian company that made terrestrial GPS transmitters capable of very long ranges. They had been doing trials with the USAF. I wonder if that $47m contract referred to them.
I would certainly hope so! But why should your landlord shave off 3% of his ENTIRE revenue stream? I mean, that percent is almost Wal-Marts entire profit margin.

If he is processing 200 payments of $1000/mo, that's $6000/mo in fees that he loses, or the equivalent of six entire rents! Dwolla, on the other hand, would cost him $50, or a 20X reduction in costs.
A lot of people write nice things about Apple (I even think they've executed exceptionally well with great products). Walt Mossberg, for example (even Josh Topolsky is generally 90% positive on Apple -- but also likes Android). But there are many evangelists who write almost exclusively positive things about Apple and furthermore attack things that threaten Apple.

These evangelists maybe cordial to WP or WebOS, because they're no threat, but ICS -- they'll save their best faith-based sermons for it.
Get Your Censor On #SOPA
It's in the middle of the first page: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1995275/221786
Because the point is far more than just a credit line.

The name is "instant".

How exactly is everyone missing the entire "instant" part of the feature.

Instant costs $3/mo, and includes the credit line feature.

But the fronting of cash isn't the ONLY feature in 'instant', and thus not the only thing you're being charged for!

I like the idea of instant transactions -- a lot. If I could use Dwolla instead of a debit card, you better believe I'd pay $3/mo to have all of my transactions post immediately.
This is the entire point of branding.
They are, however, building some amazing bikesheds around those products
Too smart, doesn't get quite so many things done?
"Josh's problem is with the way MG put it. He framed it as "Mercedes vs Honda". There's a strong, implicit class implication there."

Except that you can get a cheap used Mercedes for less than a new Honda, if you can't afford a new Benz and value the workmanship (or brand) enough to take the risk. And Honda made the NSX. There are Acura models priced in the same ballpark as lower-end new Mercedes.

Honda had a Formula 1 racing team until 2008. It was sold off, and was eventually bought by Mercedes Benz.

So the 'class' question is muddled, to say the least. Unless you think the NSX is the car of the proletariat and a 1990 Mercedes with 100,000 miles is the vehicle of the 1%.
Using Redis SORT and GET to save on roundtrips
You can't argue that Josh is the more mature one here. MG lives to say controversial/sensational things and get 200+ comments on his posts. And I haven't been following him in a long time, but I know some of his posts on his personal blog, have been much more bitter against Google than his usual posts on TechCruch. He sounded very defensive about Apple, even though there wasn't a reason to do that in that specific case. It was just his latest general attitude towards Google.
Not anymore:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/lego-loses-t...

It used to be no one could manufacture bricks that were compatible with real legos, but now, apparently, you can.

So if Lego insists on creating only crap merchandise prefab kits (like they have for at least the last ten years or so), someone else can step up and produce something a little more, well, Lego-y.
It's true, one person's "half the fun" is another's "most of the suck"
Xphone: How Microsoft could have won in mobile in 2011
Nope, I'm not. I basically really suck at school, and am pretty awesome at computers and making money. That's why I started a startup at age 20 instead of finishing college, then sold it for a nice profit when I was 26. Now I'm on to another startup, and run a popular blog to boot.
I don't credit the creators of fire, and indoor heating, every time I turn the thermostat up. I similarly see no reason to try to credit the "original" speaker or author unless I'm using a sizable chunk of their work verbatim.

Especially as while Feynman said that I highly doubt he was the first to think it. He was, very likely, merely distilling things he'd heard before much as the current author was.
Lance at ASU, actually.
Whats most interesting is that this whole release is notable because hes treating his fans like humans.

Making content easily accessible, being very hesitant to be invasive with emailing, not pushy at all with marketing. Being honest about how much he made as well as the costs and process of creating it, etc.

This experiment is detached from all the bullshit about "social media marketing". It shows that effectively selling on the internet comes down to is a) be interesting b) have great content and c) be accessible in as many channels as possible as a human being not corporate PR speak.
The tears of the unglamourous non-coding geek
> I think they should simply partners with such sites and figure a way to make money with them.

Oh, is that all? Simply...
Except in their cases it's been shown time and time again that these evangelists constantly push a pro-Apple and anti-Google agenda. It's equivalent to the naysayers who fundamentally believe that Fox News is a fair and balanced network.

That's not to say that Apple never makes a good product or Google can do no wrong. They both have their fair share of successes and failures.
1) Don't prematurely optimize for salary, your market value increases vastly by having worked for Google. In addition, the bonus and RSUs have actual value, and you'll undoubtedly get raises if you think your initial offer was bad.

2) I'd hate New York also, but you're not moving there for the rest of your life. I know people who've moved from Mountain View or San Francisco offices to Seattle offices, and vice-versa while staying at Google. The Cambridge Office is quite nice as well.

I personally don't like Bay Area at all (San Francisco is disgusting, rest of Bay Area feels like you're stuck in a bad 70s movie), but there are only a few metropolitan area where software engineers are appreciated.

3) Just do it: I saw your comments on this site, I saw your Github repositories. You'll find actual culture fit at Google, something you won't be able to appreciate until you actually have it (or, on the flip side, as I found out myself -- until you've lost it and found it again).

Just don't use working at Google as an excuse to stop working on personal projects.
"The world is divided into two groups, those that think little details like freedom are supremely important and those who don't notice or don't care so much"

"The world is divided into two groups, those that think little details like enterprise integration are supremely import and those who don't notice or don't care so much"

The argument holds no water. I can draw a line in the sand however I'd like to make any product seem better, and anyone who disagrees is just in that other group.

This whole "argument" is inane. People have preferences, and the rational ones will act in accordance to those preferences if they have the means. Getting huffy because someone dares to disagree with your preferences is asinine.
As someone mentioned in a previous thread on dwolla (re your second point), you don't list two different prices. When the customer is checking out, you give a cash discount if you use dwolla (e.g. 3% off your purchase if you use dwolla to pay!).
For anyone else who thinks their english skills lacking, make sure you read the gp's post aloud
I agree it's important, but maybe for different reasons. I think the awe inspiring marketing and brand machine created by Jobs has many similarities and parallels in the "German Engineering" brand machine created by Mercedes and Porsche.
I like it (especially the download pop-up).

Few comments: links may be better discoverable if underscored, and the items of the "explore nodejs" nav. section would be easier to hit if the click-surface spanned the whole block.
I have flashblock turned on. vtunnel is full of flash, and does some sort of not-a-popup popup at the beginning, with nothing but flash in it.

They could be angels for all I know, but a site that promotes anonymity and loads up with flash makes me pass it by.
I'm pretty sure they have design patents that prevent other companies from building bricks that are an exact copy. But design patents, as shown from Apple vs. Samsung, are a positively grey area. It's not clear if "compatible" parts would be allowed, for example.
Awesome work! I've left a few little user flow issues in get satisfaction, but on the whole, it's really great. One thing I'm curious about- how can I update the version of a project once it's up?
Why Dating Websites Need to Change - Case Study of a Female User in NY
Show HN: Visualizing Postmates' first 1000 deliveries in San Francisco
While I vastly prefer the open-ended building blocks to the themed sets, I did like the semi-generic Lego space theme as a child. Also very cool were Tente, a Spanish space themed building kit series... they were very futurist and stylish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tente_(Toys)

The more open ended toys clearly have an advantage in terms of creativity, and most children have creativity to spare.
The Joy Of Programming
This new set does seem to be relatively accessible to all kids. Perhaps not on it's own, but certainly as a mix-in with other sets.

For instance, on it's own you'd probably guess that the power drill and robot came from a boy's set rather than a girl's set.