skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A whites only restaurant in a racist town doesn't seem very disadvantageous, in fact that would probably be the selling point.

I would imagine that those who don't discriminate would continue to not discriminate while those who do discriminate would continue to do so. Removing the law doesn't make women less likely to get pregnant. I am not sure your concept that we should remove the laws so that everyone can discriminate against women equally is really advantageous or very upstanding. Nor do I think the idea that people are going to discriminate despite the laws & it's too hard to prove that they're discriminating is a valid reason to remove the laws either.
I don't know if you can draw that drastic of a conclusion from his post without some other knowledge of his particular situation. For some people Git offers very little advantage over SVN, a small team with a single desktop or embedded produce is not going to see the same advantages of a DCVS system that a massive web team does that is seeing daily releases. As such a developer with their use case may feel that the effort to learn it for their situation was not worth the effort.
Show HN: Ruby evented IO, my first attempt: HTTP client/server/proxy toolkit
How to Ask Better Questions in UX
These types of presumptions are difficult to understand in user testing of the final product as they lay covered beneath layers of interface and interaction.
The Essentials of Message-Oriented Programming with Smalltalk
It really is ~1990 all over again.
It was John McCain a few years ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-zoPgv_nYg
He explained that he'd have to hire another person in the meantime, and pay her accrued vacation time. Then potentially lay off the second worker.
Thx Stan. Glad you got something from it.
I'm always wary of consultants - we've had some really bad experiences using recruitment consultants.

I absolutely agree that the main aim of an interview is to determine if a candidate is able to think in a structured and analytical way. I'm much more interested in talking about situations when you might choose UDP over TCP, rather than being able to recite the details of a particular HTTP specification
That's just the highlight color. Assuming you're using Chrome, it's pretty eager about highlighting random stuff; other browsers may be similar. Try selecting some text.
At a couple of the debates, basically everyone except Paul was competing as far as how badly they wanted to bomb Iran. I'm hoping that they weren't serious and were just cynically talking about killing lots of people in order to get a good soundbite for the rubes, but it's scary any way you interpret it. It's like these people are totally disconnected from the fact that they're talking about war.

First article for "republican candidate iran" from Google:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/07/us-usa-campaign-re...

EDIT: Here's an account of the exchange I was thinking of, Paul made the extremely controversial statement that he wasn't in favor of starting a war, and they all piled on him immediately. The fox news guy said he "jumped the shark" by not advocating immediate war.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/President/2011/1216/G...
:) Thanks mate.
Very underwhelming.

His point about risk is very unclear and/or misleading. He suggests we should think big vs small. It's almost insulting to read an article this vague. What do you even mean by small and big? As far as I know, businesses that aim to make 2M/yr rev have a better shot than ones that must make 100M.
I had a CPC464. I put an incredible amount of time into coding on that computer.
Governments like the one described in this article remind me of a massive monolithic PHP program where all the functionality is lumped into a single blob of spaghetti code. Ugh.

The negative impact of government regulations like this are proved by reducing the size of a company to one.

Example: if you start a business, and hire yourself as the first employee, should you be forced to give yourself 3 years off for maternity leave?

Of course you could never do this. It would kill your business instantly.

Just like the Unix philosophy of writing programs that do one thing and do it well. Society functions better when we have many smaller social institutions with focused roles.

Government doesn't need to do everything. There are plenty of other social constructs that have proven more capable of providing many of society's needs.

Governments should stick to the task of protecting individual liberty.

Businesses should stick to the task of providing quality and innovative goods and services.

Family, community, churches and private charity should stick to the task of taking care of those less fortunate.

We as programmers and developers can help improve society by demanding that (like our small but beautiful software), social institutions stick to singular responsibilities to which they are most suited.
"doesn't it make sense that women make less money when, on average, it costs more to hire them?"

Why is there an assumption that a women should cost more to hire? Don't men also take paternity leave? Why is it assumed that a woman must be solely responsible for childcare? No one seems to worry that a man might have children when hiring.
"they wanted me to ship the old one back and reorder the new one. I'm like why?"

Because if they put a barrier to entry some people won't do it and they'll have saved themselves $100?
Aggregators? Threadsy's gone, but I'm still searching for a universal inbox
Ask HN: What does your resume look like?
Hey,
I'm a CS undergrad and I'm looking to apply for a few summer internships this year but I do not have a lot of work experience or a lot of stuff to show off (just a few open source contributions and small projects).
It would be awesome if you could give me some advice on making an effective resume. (I assume this would help a lot of newbies like me.)

Thanks!
This reply is the Slashdot review of the Apple iPod when it was released. It is a great example of how some people (incl. many geeks) look at a product/service, and only look at the raw technical specs, and presume that it's very easy to replicate or not very innovative. Since the iPod was a massive success, it shows how sometimes raw technology doesn't make or break something
Another example, proving government intervention in private industry is a bad idea and let markets and consumer demand work out their course.

Not sure when Washington will understand that? seems definitely not under current administration.
Thanks samlve!

How about javascript, jQuery and MooTools?
Having a "first session" and "current session" exposes very interesting functionality. It suddenly provides a quick way to keep track of what search keywords they used to get to the site, and could be later linked to an account if later created.
Sounds great. Let's try to play a match in Online Baghchal. We can have chat about where to meet for beer ;) Thanks.
URDU SEX STORIES: Pyasay Din. Pyasi Raatein..
The Critics Rave... for Microsoft?
It's interesting to see you say that, because the creators of Unix seem to feel the same way. See papers arguing against the addition of the '-v' option, the size and inelegance of the X window system, and so on.
Harvard's Privacy Meltdown, Reanalyzed: Controversial Facebook Data
Can you use an approach like the NFLScorebot is using?

https://github.com/nflscorebot/learn/blob/master/learn.js#L1...

Scraping the data from a public page is probably better than using a private API.
Negative votes (or down votes) are the worst thing ever invented. Their purpose is punishing comments (or news, or whatever) which are bad: spam, rude, unrelated... But, instead, people use them for punishing ideas they don't agree with.

I write in somewhat big blog with a considerable number of comments, and I see this everyday. A pretty good comment gets downvoted (and, in the end, hidden) only for not agreeing with some idea. Comments also get downvoted because some people don't like the commenter.

I think negative votes should be removed. You only have a "vote" button: you like the comment, you vote it. Don't like the comment? Ignore it. Of course, I would add instead a "report" button, so you can still manage spam and rude comments.
That's not really a gripe with the book, so much as with the designers of Unix who did not always do the Unix philosophy right. Yes, find(1), I'm looking at you.
One of the Economist's trademarks is not providing reporter bylines (though IIRC contributors are listed in the masthead). The columns, FWIW, are generally named for historical and not current authors, in print, though on-line I'm starting to see some bloggy, attributed pieces.

This means that individual ability in writing or covering a specific beat is really hard to figure out. Given the huge variance and highly idiosyncratic nature of reporting, I find this to be a major pain.

While I find the Economist to be generally worthwhile reading and can understand its adherence to tradition, this is something that really should be dustbinned.
What is it like to be a whale?
I wonder what the karma threshold for downvoting is these days. Maybe it needs a bump.
RefHeap
"How do you feel about the idea of being able to quit your job at any time?" - Very strange things are happening here. For example, if you become homeless, you can't exercise your freedom to be on the streets anymore. If you're on the streets, you are _fined_. If you can't pay up, you are prisoned. Now it's easier to see how unjust this is. You will feel less sympathy for a small business owner, who can't exercise his or her freedom to give a job to whoever he or she wants, until he or she wants on whatever terms they agree. But soon you may find yourself "protected" by the state in a very similar fashion, how our poor homeless people are now protected in Hungary.
In the Engadget video, they say that for developers it's $4000. If that's still true, they should probably advertise it better on the site.
Respective blog post regarding their launch.

http://blog.refheap.com/blog/2012/01/06/brave-new-world/
That's the Like button.
But the profit on those x86 chips is probably larger and it all goes to Intel, while little of the profit on ARM chips goes to ARM.
OK, thanks for the information! I wonder how all those small companies manage their cashflow though. Can they receive money to their bank accounts just like they would if paying taxes? It's kind of difficult to imagine they're all shuffling cash around.
JavaScript iteration techniques, good technical interview material
I always promote FIRST to high school students when possible. I very much feel that it was one of the most (if not the most) important experiences of my career. Nothing else has even come close in terms of how much there was to learn, both in electronic and mechanical terms, but also in team building and other ancillary skills. I didn't really realize it at the time, but I really do feel it was pivotal to my career so far.

I had FIRST on my resume through college, and that work was always the top question for interviewers. It was easy to give a really passionate response, and since rarely had they heard of it, I'd get a chance to explain how the program works and exactly what our team did. I just wish that it was more widespread, not very many schools have FIRST teams. We were able to gain some school-wide attention for our team as well, and it grew significantly after my senior year. If FIRST was a 'sport' at schools across the country, we'd be in much better shape for the next generation of engineers and scientists.

If you have the chance to join a FIRST team (as a student), you absolutely must take the opportunity--it'll pay huge dividends.

(I was on team 195, I'm now an engineer at Microsoft.)
Somewhere below 1902, but not above. I think I have a decent handle on when it's appropriate to click down. 2000 is probably a good place to put the threshold.
Why shouldn't you name names?
The author seems to contradict himself in a comment[1]: My objective is to show why Git is superior. (Thanks to [2] for noticing.)

[1]: http://felipec.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/mercurial-vs-git-its...

[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3437677
That's ok, the commercial libraries aren't much better. The visitor.js website I am in Reno instead of San Francisco for example.
I'll take issue with a specific point: affirmative action. Affirmative action starts with a premise different from yours: that college admissions shouldn't be about past performance but about future potential. And if there's nothing genetically wrong with black people, then blacks should be demographically represented in colleges. If they're not, then there's something wrong with admissions.

"A black person that truly deserved to get into Harvard..." You come from the premise that you deserve to get into college based on your past performance. That's valid, but you should be making arguments against the premises of the affirmative action, then.

"Furthermore, since affirmative action shifts the whole bell curve to the right, blacks are disproportionally more likely to drop out of university, since they are likely the least academically qualified to be there. This creates further racism as over the years professors tend to note that the blacks they teach tend to drop out."

According to the guiding principles behind affirmative action, this isn't simply a consequence of the policy, but another injustice to be addressed. Blacks aren't genetically predisposed to dropping out, they just have very different social and cultural circumstances that aren't conducive to graduating. The things that you (I presume) and I (I'm Asian) take for granted, many black people cannot. A proponent of affirmative action would argue that we need more social college programs that help and encourage black students in ways that lead to better graduation rates.

"Many blacks that get into Harvard and graduate are treated as sub-students by employers like major banks."

This is simply prejudice on the part of employers. Why should employers take into account how someone got into Harvard, instead of judging them solely on their performance at Harvard?

My point is that you apparently don't fully understand the premises and reasoning behind affirmative action. Many who oppose it don't.

[Edit]: I suppose my meta-point here is that it's easy to take a hard-line view when you don't fully grapple with the opposing argument. When you really fully try to understand the other side, you come to a more nuanced position, and a respect for the complexity of issues. I think it's parallel to the Dunning-Kruger insight that you don't know what you don't know. Certainty is a sign of ignorance, even in yourself. If you are certain about something, it's time to re-examine your assumptions.
Memoization explained using a python implementation of fibonacci
But it is different when your product is for a technical audience. In this case, people who know how to write JavaScript.
Maybe that's the solution. Negative votes do not promote healthy conversation if they're used like sirwitti explains. Here in HN they are more or less working, but HN is a very special place.
The goals of Bayern Munich and Ahli 1-2
I was thinking the same thing. If we all took his advice and went for the big markets, we would all be selling consumer goods and getting crushed by WalMart. Niche markets are awesome because here, we can win.

For my money, organized crime has more in common with big box retailers than startups, because the amount of cash on hand you require (not to mention the infrastructure) is a pretty nasty barrier to entry. The market is dominated by a few key players and focus is on sustainable growth. Startups are about rapid growth and disrupting established industries by artificially lowering the barriers to entry.
There is a css rule to disable user selection which might be handy here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/826782
I meant technology consultants, not really recruitment consultants :)

besides, you can silently participate in the interview, or review the sound recording afterwards.
New York Flexes its Tech Cred (NYTM demo Wrap-up)
The fact that browsers accept defective html is the most evil thing that happened to the web. Any library that tries to parse "real world" html just contributes to that evil. I am astonished that we tolerate this and still call ourselves (software) engineers.
...its badly mis-titled as it contains very little discussion on actual UNIX programming.

A minor edit would fix it: The Art around Unix Programming
I'm not sure I get it.. it's another pastebin, with syntax formatting? Not much of a description on the site.
Building a Custom Fancy ListView in Android
In this tutorial we will walk through the process of building a custom ListView with alternate background colors and an image icon set to every row.
My Taco Bell Temple
My cousin's wife blogged about the food industry. "I literally thought for a long time that those things were for hippies who were trying to prove something to Corporate America." Great blog worth reading.
I just don't like how only select members have the ability to downvote.

If downvoting exists on the forum all members should be able to do so. imo
I just wanted to say you guys crashed my site with all your traffic.

Lesson learned: don't send HN to an EC2 micro instance. I upgraded to a medium instance, let's see how it works...
A user shouldn't have to understand every feature of your product for it to be valuable.

This is the best take-away and couldn't be more true. I think the majority of startups get it wrong. I consistently hear founders talking about 10 tiny features that when combined, their service is better than Facebook.
Even if that's the case, you would most likely get an employee of lower quality or with a lower commitment if they know they will be laid off in 3 years.
>And if there's nothing genetically wrong with black people, then blacks should be demographically represented in colleges. If they're not, then there's something wrong with admissions.

Perhaps genetics and racism are not the only factors affecting demographic representation in colleges. See: Asians.
I read that link, which is apparently by the creator of Review19, on how similar it is to Trello. One thing from that list really surprised me: "Review19′s target audience — web, creative and software teams — are often distributed around the world. Offering an in-browser, video conferencing option is a critical feature for Review19."

Why does Review19 have to provide the in-browser video conferencing? Why can't people just use Skype or GMail's video chat? It seems like an enormously difficult-to-develop, bandwidth-intensive feature that people can already get elsewhere for free. I'm genuinely curious what critical benefit this integration provides for the users of Review19.
S3cmd notes
http://blog.refheap.com/blog/2012/01/06/brave-new-world/ The launch blog post might make things clearer.
Joinbox.com and Engag.io are two new attempts to solve this problem.
"if they cared, they'd lift the embargo on aircraft parts so these people don't die because of badly maintained passenger planes"

Huh? He is saying that we should show care... I think you should re-read what he wrote.
Ask HN: Is there a repository of failed startups (re-usable startups idea)?
I was wandering if someone keeps records of failed tech/internet startups and their codebase?

Maybe it's not a bad idea to go back and re-use some of the failed startups whether it's a codebase or just a business model. I found a lot of reason for failed startups but not many use cases - mostly scattered around the Internet.

If someone would built such a database would you contribute your failed business model and codebase?
Consumers becoming fed up with consumer satisfaction surveys
This story of Intel and ARM is fascinating because it is likely to become one of the purest case studies of disruption theory. If ARM can successfully change the basis of competition in the server market to power consumption versus pure performance and disrupt Intel, it will be another powerful example.

On the other hand, if Intel can actually capture share in the low end market (mobile devices) by hitting the right power-performance mark, they will provide a great example of how an incumbent can successfully fend off a low market entrant. Andy Grove would be proud.

If Intel manages to win in this next phase of computing, it will hopefully start to give companies pause before they outsource what some consultant deemed to be "non core" (manufacturing, in this example). Christensen has pointed out how much damage this is doing to long term results [1].

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/18/clayton-...
Any well funded group of HAMs should be able to iron out the implementation details.
Jane Street releases open source alternative to OCaml's stdlib
Ask PG: is hckrnews.com blocked, and, if so, why?
via http://hckrnews.com/

"Jan 7, 2012: After more than 1.5 years in operation, it seems I've been blocked from accessing news.ycombinator.com"

hckrnews.com is a very handy, alternative interface, among many alternatives, to news.ycombinator.com.

Is this deliberate or accidental, a misunderstanding, etc.?
While I agree with much of the sentiment expressed in your post, I must take issue with:
Still, americans have the right to do those things (to one another), if that's what their society wants and believes in. People are not justified to call them "evil" because of that, nor to try to topple their government. The same should hold true for any practice of any SOVEREIGN nation.

Can a society really be said to 'want and believe in' something if the society isn't structured to allow for a reasonable form of self-government? We shouldn't be looking to protect sovereign nations. We should be looking to protect sovereign peoples. If a group is truly sovereign and self-governing, then their choices should be respected. Not incidentally, the requirements for a sovereign, self-governing people align closely with principles of human rights.

I find it difficult to conclude that countries like Iran(rampant electoral fraud), North Korea(dictatorship) and Saudi Arabia are home to sovereign peoples. Sovereign nations, sure. But a border seems like a poor substitute to the collective wills of a people. And it's far from clear that these countries' actions are the expression of that will.

I suppose a rebuke to this point would be to question whether any nation is truly governed by a sovereign people, or if this is merely another form of Western projection? But I think that would be a difficult argument.
Don't underestimate the difference between The Netherlands and even a seemingly well developed country like Hungary. Our GDP per capita (PPP) is over twice theirs. What could you still do with half your income? Arguments that hold here don't just carry over to there.
Type systems vs Interactivity
http://www.nhl.com/ice/page.htm?id=26389

CTRL+F for: Linking to the websites and embedding content

Quote: "Certain Services may provide you with the ability to embed Content into other web pages, such as features of the NHL Network Online and the Team video players at nhl.tv that enable you to embed NHL video into your blog, fan site or other web page. All use of embedded Content must be for non-commercial purposes only, and may be disabled by the NHL Parties at any time. Prohibited commercial uses include any of the following actions taken without the express approval of the NHL Parties: "

That sounds like it would cover the API even if it's not mentioned explicitly.
This is being downvoted, but I am serious. In the pictures you can see the wings have been crudely reattached to the body using a white tape to cover up the supposed break. Hence it seems possible that the plane crashed, but not from an altitude that would do major damage.
They talk about this as if it's a new thing. ASW has been around for what, 7 years?
It absolutely can, and as noted even if it works you still run into issues.

The overall problem is that in the end it becomes a game between bad employees and the management see how can play the rules against the other the best, which is a phenomenal waste of time and energy.