skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"MIR seemed to have broader coverage of evaluation metrics for IR systems"

Thanks, that's enough to make me want to read it :)
about any old sand box will also do (the real kind).
New "Deep Fried" Planets Found—Survivors of Star Death
Gabe outsources his full-web index to Yahoo BOSS/Bing.
If you spend $20 a DAY on food (which is exorbitant), and you have health insurance (in MA, about $400/mo for a single dude), you will have $13,000 for travel. If you can't afford to go to Killington, it's probably because you should not be renting the entire mountain. Of course, you may have chronic health issues which are expensive. That would make travel difficult in any case.

I sort of find the idea of living off 75k to understand "gritty reality," preposterous and moderately offensive. It's like giving up Dom Perignon for Veuve Clicquot in order to understand poverty.
Good start.

For maximum impact: Google should disable all of its public facing web servers for a week.

I think Congress would get its act together pretty darn quickly if there were no Google search or GMail.
How is this different than a technology company asking security researchers to not publish a 0 day exploit? Responsible disclosure makes sense in biology, too.
5 reasons why advertisers should harness the power of Stipple
Hiring Secret: Best Way to Vet a Candidate
Yes, yes, a hundred times yes. My first language was Apple BASIC. Looking back now it is a horrible language (no while loops, only 2 character variable names, line numbers with GOTO as the main way of controlling program flow), but it was easy enough to get my hands wet and get the feel for programming. And more importantly, I got stuff done.

I certainly didn't learn any best practices or good programming style from BASIC, but I learned something far more important: That I loved programming.
Should they cancel an acquisition because of a temporary manufacturing problem? IMO the flooding shouldn't affect our thinking about whether these deal are competitive or anticompetitive.
Ask HN: Most valuable use of time during an incubator/accelerator
HN, my startup Setkick is about to embark on a 3 month journey with Aussie incubator Startmate - which is similar to YC's model.

Understandably this question is quite general & product specific - but I was just wondering if anyone who has been through a similar program - had any general advice, on what they found valuable to focus on during this time.

Cheers,

./c
Right the technical stack has become daunting to the point that many cannot get the feedback so needed early on. Now days you either advanced with the technology, or you spent a significant investment of time to learn the trade with the intent of entering the field. The days of the hobbyist programmer have seen their peek until that changes.
Professors will do or become whatever is required of them to achieve tenure. The number on job of a professor is therefore to meet the tenure requirements of the institution - which at most places, means "do lots of research". Change the reward system and you can change how things work.
Shopify Theme Roundup
People in Glasshouses (With Windows) Shouldn't Throw Stones
"Video cassette recorders now provide the technical means of taking the works of creative people from them without compensation. If we allow a new technology, the VCR, to take property without paying for it, I believe the Nation will be jeopardizing one of its greatest assets, our film industry."
-Richard Orear, President of National Association of Theater Owners in front of Congress in a proceeding to block the sales of the VCR, 1982

The MPAA lost and the VCR stayed in the market; phenomenally increasing MPAA member revenue because apparently, potential is a two way street.

The IP-based industries see new potentials (eg, the internet), get FUD'd up by the potential abuse, refuse to be creative enough to see the potential revenue, and then go into Destroy-Everything mode.

The stupidity runs deep. They seek legislative blockage due to their thorough inability to be compatible with emerging patterns of consumption.
Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
A really interesting book which explains how companies can make money by offering stuff for free. Many examples from various internet-based companies. A must-read especially if you want to start your business online.
Am I the only one who thinks that lack of block scope is only confusing for people who are used to it?

I don't think it'll affect JS-as-a-first-language people.
Because generally people want to pass discrete messages rather than an undifferentiated stream of bytes. And APIs implement even streams as discrete chunks of data to process; you don't process a character at a time, or the whole stream at once, but are instead given a buffer of data to process. Now, if you do that, lazy programmers (and many JavaScript and web app programmers are lazy, or don't know any better) may just decide that one buffer is one message, an assumption which generally works. If the client sends a small chunk of data to the server, that will generally be received on the server and delivered to whatever is listening as that same chunk. But occasionally, that assumption can be broken; an IP packet can be fragmented, or a buffer may fill up and need to be dealt with immediately, or something of the sort. This will cause applications which make such assumptions to break.

If, instead, you just explicitly say that it's a message oriented protocol, then the software that implements it (both on the client and server side) can just provide an API that delivers a message at a time, and if anything happens to be fragmented, they deal with buffering and reassembling it, rather than depending on the application author to get that right.
After watching the first season of "Game of Thrones" I wanted to read the book and see how it compared. I was amazed and enthralled. Then I read the rest of them and couldn't really do anything else until I'd finished them.
Enjoyed how the HBO series was more or less true to the book: Rather than taking a 900+ pg book and trying to do it all in 2.5hrs they had about 11 hours for the whole season, and it was, in places, almost verbatim. Pumped for the next seasons (and the last two books).
Highly recommend "A Song of Ice and Fire" series by George RR Martin
iMAME Arcade Emulator on App Store (Will be removed soon)
Note: You can add ROMs to this using iExplorer (http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/).
I strongly disagree. Every juror should understand that they have a responsibility to consider the law, not just the facts. In most trials, that consideration will amount to "Yup, the law seems fine", with no further thought required. However, I believe that consideration ought to happen in every single trial, with every single juror. No reasonable doubt should exist that the law remains just and appropriate.

If that means we get a few more "not guilty" verdicts than we should, so be it. We make the same tradeoff with "innocent until proven guilty" and "beyond a reasonable doubt": better to let guilty people free than convict innocent people. The difference: we need "beyond a reasonable doubt" applied to laws, not just to people.
True enough - thanks :)

I would guess fifteen years to get tolerant. Of course I might just be mistaking medication effects for creeping age when it comes to lack of programming accomplishments.
I don't want to belabour this point too much, but yes.

The conversation does not look like this:

"Hey guys, I have 10 years of experience doing consulting, my rates are $3000 / hour, hire me for two weeks and to improve your conversion."

According to my consultant friend, it's a lot more like this (bad maths all mine, also note that I have no idea what real numbers here would look like, so I could be wildly off-base):

A: "So you currently do $20 million in revenue through your website. Based on initial analytics me and the tech team have put in place, we estimate that one out of a hundred visitors to your site become paying customers, in other words you have a 1% conversion rate. All things being the same, what would it mean to your annual revenue if I could increase that rate by 0.5 of a percent, to 1.5% over the course of a year?"

B: "Well, if you could do that it would mean an increase in revenue by $10 million."

A: "Right, so what I propose is that you bring me on board for a couple of weeks to put systems in place to monitor that conversion and test ideas for increasing it in a way that makes sense for your organisation. My fee for this would be $200,000."

To be perfectly honest I don't have any specifics or solid facts to back this up, just the single anecdote and even that is second hand. The point I was trying to press home is that patio11 is selling himself short.
New book Practical Unit Testing With TestNG And Mockito
The book is a very complete and detailed handbook on unit testing. It covers all the things you should know to write high quality unit tests. The book will be available in Q1 2012.
I hate behavior myself, though it's probably because I learned Perl first, where there's a separate string concatenation operator ("." in perl5, "_" in perl6). I do wish javascript had that same separation so that "+" was always addition and not sometimes string concatenation.
This is, in my opinion, entirely the government's fault.

The government decides how much to fund universities based on publication quality, which they rate based on the journals the papers are accepted into.

There is almost no benefit to teaching students better, and there are huge advantages to passing students who would otherwise fail. This is because universities have a strict limit on the number of students they can accept, and these are not replaced if students fail their first year.

So, to maximise income universities have to keep hold of students, while getting as many papers as possible into high quality journals.
Yes, I should define most. I should also define experiences.

By most, I mean something like what you suggest. What most people who live in G-7 countries experience.

By experiences, I am referring to economic experiences, although I understand that all facets of life, including romance, are influenced by money.
I think Python is actually a pretty bad choice for function programming. It does ostensibly support it, but in practice I don't think anybody uses anything resembling purely functional style. For example, I don't think I've seen a single fold in the wild in Python where I see them in Haskell and Scheme all the time.

Could you imagine only introducing mutation halfway through the semester of a Python course? That's what my intro CS course did with Scheme, and it was perfectly natural and effective. Scheme also makes it very easy to see mutation as something different from definition--it has both define and set! which do different things. Python doesn't even differentiate between the two because it has a weird scoping model.

Of course, Scheme itself isn't a perfect functional language either. I found that pattern matching is extremely important--Haskell, mostly thanks to pattern matching, helped me internalize recursion much more than Scheme when I was learning the two concurrently.

Scheme is also a good language to teach about OOP because it divorces the OO part from the language itself. When I had learned about it in Java, I had assumed that an object system was inherent in a language. Scheme showed me that a very expressive OO system could be written on top of a language without the language supporting it in syntax.

Finally, it is very easy to adapt Scheme syntax to other paradigms. Could you reasonably write a logic programming language that looked like Python? I honestly don't know. On the other hand, making one like Scheme is trivial. Not only did we use a language like that in the same intro course, but we actually went over how to implement it.

Ultimately, I think Python is too complicated. Not in terms of being difficult to use, but in terms of just being a ton of different features put together. They may look similar, but they are still discrete ideas that do not naturally come from each other. Scheme, on the other hand, has a few core ideas and everything else is built from those. Just compare the grammars of the two languages to see what I mean.
I believe this was the original discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 (2007-04-04) and the fixed video link is https://www.dropbox.com/screencast

Edit: and here's the digg link but I can't figure out how to get anything useful out of it. http://digg.com/news/story/Google_Drive_killer_coming_from_M... (2008-03-11)
The scariest bug is the bug you can't reproduce
Twitter mobile bothers me. I just want to see a few tweets, not wait 10 seconds for all the javascript to load and ajax calls to complete so I can see the content I want.
Sounds like we need more prosecutors, or fewer laws, or both.
Start-up report prompts calls for immigration overhaul in US
DesignCrowd acquires Brandstack,launches BrandCrowd
A completely obvious check on jury nullification that you've somehow overlooked is jury selection. Juries aren't chosen randomly.

Also, it seems like your argument can be logically extended to be an argument against trial by jury in general, or even against the whole idea of laws that carry punishment. People, especially civilian jurors, aren't predictable or controllable, so there's never any guarantee that some "objective morality" will be carried out by them. And you can't have laws without some person or group of people deciding what those laws are, which almost always will mean that there will be disagreement.
I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but Office - as bought by companies and governments - in quantity is a pretty attractive proposition. It costs a reasonable amount of money, has well defined deployment, and has training and certifications aplenty. None of the open source alternatives come close to the total package. I wish they did, but it just isn't so.
The problem is deeply technical people will put for the effort to learn deeper languages so that leaves a majority of the candidates as being people who want to learn programming because they want to scratch an itch. That being said, BASIC is usually not the language or platform they want to scratch that itch on, more and more the web and mobile are where they want to deliver to. That being said, JavaScript becomes the better investment of time, due to the fact that it directly parallels their goals in learning programming in the first place.

More and more I am starting to think Objective-C and IOS may be a contender, while, Objective-C is technically more difficultly to get started in, the technology stack is a lot simpler, to be effective on the web, one needs to know HTML, CSS and JavaScript and then really and truly they need to know a back end language or Node.js to deliver a back end. Whereas Objective-C and IOS is a visual editor and code. The feedback loop is faster for IOS development than JavaScript development and I believe the feedback loop is very important to a certain population of would be developers. I have never tried to teach a non-programmer Objective-C and IOS dev so the above statement is loaded with assumptions. Please read it as such, but I am leaning towards trying it next time someone approaches me and wants to learn.
Why do the rights holders need any more protection than they already have? Are you mad? Look at major league baseball and the NFL. They have currently managed to remove almost any shred of their product from the internet. Same goes for Disney. No, the content providers are doing just fine without SOPA. There will always be pirates, even with SOPA - so simply making it easier for these content providers to shutdown legitimate businesses will only hurt the innocent in the long run.
Open Source E-Commerce App Based on CodeIgniter : GoCart
If it was so easy, why didn't you get a First? Sounds like you chose low standards for yourself.
That already exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala I'm a little surprised the article didn't mention this.
OP was whining that he was turning 30 and hadn't had his great artistic breakthrough yet. I was trying to make the comparison that that isn't really a problem compared to mass starvation, refugee camps, etc. In other words, he sees a problem when the solution is, find what you love to do, etc. He's got the tools to do it but just hasn't found a goal yet. Not that there aren't problems discussed here (ycombinator news) that have good tech solutions, like mosquito netting, solar power, water filtration, etc... My point is, his problem is very specifically a 1st world problem.
Design the Paperless Office. HelloFax (YC W11) is hiring a designer 
HelloFax is building the paperless office. Don't be fooled by our name. Faxing was just first on our to do list. We're eliminating the need for printers, scanners, fax machines, PDF editors and complicated electronic signature technology.

About you:
- You love design
- You care about our users and take pride in your work.
- You think about an entire site, not just a single page
- You can design for the web, iPad and other mobile devices
- You don't think of design in isolation. It's part of an entire user experience

About us:
- Usability is core to everything.
- We're building an experience that can scale to millions of people; not just people who read a manual
- People love our product. Check us out on Twitter.

What we offer:
- A competitive salary
- Health and dental insurance
- An awesome work environment. We're based in Lower Haight, San Francisco.

Interested? Email us at jobs at hellofax dot com and we'll go from there.
Beware that you actually see the savings and someone else isn't getting the money for "consulting" or "premium training". I have seen a few budgets that saved money on the software only to get hammered on the back-end.

// this is really, really common with Point-of-Sale solutions
I'm curious: which of the languages you listed do you consider "functional"?
It's a neat idea, but it sounds like what you're proposing is a subset of marketing automation, which has not been mentioned almost at all in this post.

I would recommend doing a bit more research about what marketing people are already using, what other products your product may interact with yours, and how it would fit in the arsenal of marketing tools.
Get A Trip, Inc.
16 year old programmer develops Chile’s most downloaded iPad app
Beach Spa Resorts.com
Sure, as long as we get a pile of peremptory challenges. :)
Android is full of possibilities, but the carriers are often the ones doing something with this, making it worse for the majority of users. If every Android user got the next version as quickly as iOS users get their next version, and it was as clean as Google wanted, their phones would be massively improved.
I think Resig means to use JSLint throughout, which does something similar. Additionally, browsers already support "use strict" which is also a restricted mode. In short, plenty of people share your views on the matter (me included). The whole thesis of JavaScript: The Good Parts was basically that, and the book is one of the best on the language.
Best of 2012: Navneet Alang on Technology 
Here, our trusty tech critic gives us some predictions that are definitely going to come true for 2012.
that pic is also the default pic in Outlook 2010 if you have no pic set in Exchange.
I addressed that above:

"Of course, I should have worked harder, and I would have learned more if I had..."

My point (which I thought I'd made clearly) is that it was far, far too easy to do well, with little effort.
The Four Lenses of Game Making
> it's blatant encouragement of idiotic programming practices

PHP doesn't encourage bad programming practices. It simply doesn't encourage good ones. That isn't just semantics, either.

There are times when you need to break the rules. They're rare, but they're there. PHP is a language which leaves you that option. If choose to use that optional frequently, then you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737616
By travel I meant car payments, car insurance, airfare, etc. not vacation trips.

The $13K that you calculate includes this travel plus everything else. I don't think that I will be taking any trips to Killington when my discretionary income is significantly below $1K/month. And, if I do, it will only be because I've given something else up, like buying books, for an extended period of time.
iCloud is OS X and iOS only. Dropbox is OS X, iOS, Windows, Linux, Android AND BlackBerry.
I don't understand the (anti) hype about type coercion and the '==' operator. I get a faintly cargo-culty vibe from people when they talk about '===' vs '==', since the examples are usually very strange things that I never see in production. I'm not an expert in JavaScript but I've written a fair amount and a couple largish programs and I've never been bitten by a type-coercion bug involving '=='.

The weird subtle bugs I see are usually associated with me using "for (i in a)" for arrays instead of the more ugly C style for loop, which results in "i" being a string (which usually doesn't matter except when using "+" which is sometimes addition and sometime string concatenation).

So, is '==' really that bad? Has anyone seen (otherwise) well-written production code fail because of '==' vs '==='?
I would wager the bitcoin. I can't believe the euro will last that much longer. Bitcoin's downfall of not being tied to any other currency or institution is also a huge reason to adopt it for the same reason. Because code and ideas behind it are so solid, it won't ever completely lose value. It just needs to stabilize. I can't say the same for the Euro.
I just got the email today and while I'm not accusing Mixpanel or anything, it was amusing to me how similar the screenshot looks like that of KISSMetrics. I'm currently a KISSMetrics customer but Mixpanel always looked like a good alternative/addition. How does Mixpanel's cohort analysis compare to KISSMetrics' in practice?
The idea that you'd need to keep this information from terrorists is laughable. They want you to picture highly trained and organized militia type groups who are actually competent enough to pull off any sort of attack.

Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with terrorists. This is all about trying to keep this information under wraps so they can be the ones who make it a biological weapon that they can hold over the heads of any country who they perceive as threatening.

Terrorist organizations for the most part aren't half as fearsome as the US government want you to believe. Their more akin to street gangs than the organized, resourceful group they want you to imagine. And in the rare case that a terrorist group is capable of weaponizing the flu, some law enforcement agency will most likely have the jump on them before they can execute.

I'm not saying it can't happen, I'm just saying the chances are slim and, more importantly, their reason for pushing secrecy is most likely not the true reason.
The article suggests that government can't get rid of bitcoins. But given the upper limit on the number, couldn't the government simply buy them all?
That's not really language dependent--that's how floating point numbers always work. And with good reason--there are actually a ton of different NaN bit patterns in the floating point standard. I think anything where the exponent is all 1 is an NaN (except maybe for infinity--I don't remember the exact details). The point is that two completely different patterns of bits can be NaN.
There are two big problems that we deal with. First is estimation of customer lifetime value. We use a latent attrition model, which is the 'pattern matching'

The second is figuring out which promotions/emails go to which people. This is a supervised learning problem. We train the model with users past responses to discounts and their past behavioral states (which are the posterior probabilities from the latent attrition model). Then we use this to predict how users in those states will respond to similar promotions in the future.
Sorry about that. My email is njstartups (at) gmail (dot) com. Thanks!