skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Without any other information, I'm clearly better off going with the A.

Firstly, your opinion that you are "clearly better off" is discrimination. The only information you have (per your design) is that 50% of group B performed lower when they were at a disadvantage (conversely, the other 50% of group B performed as well as group A even though that other 50% were also at a disadvantage - hence, more qualified than group A). Using your self imposed limit on available information, you would be better off selecting the candidate that belonged to group B (50% were effectively equivalent to group A as they performed lower when at disadvantage, and the other 50% were effectively superior to group A as they performed equally to group A even when at disadvantage). If you choose to ignore the existence of that disadvantage then you are correct - but that disadvantage exists.

Secondly, what is the real world example of lacking any further information about a candidate other than the group they belong to (i.e. their race)? And how is selection on that single point of information not inherently racist?
Read Less!
Isn't Netflix adoption much much greater than all the streaming music services combined?
Note at your ease!
In this post i will be introducing you to one of my pet project namely, Sticky notes. It is an extension for google chrome browser. It uses HTML5 offline storage API to store your notes in the browser itself! It means you won't have to worry about the Internet connectivity while creating and accessing notes, which is a major problem when using other online services like todo.ly, Google Tasks etc.

It is very simple to use with very minimalistic click requirement to perform any task like creating a note, deleting a note etc.

Here you can install the chrome extension : http://goo.gl/H0tPw

I hope you will like it.

You can provide your feedback by visiting the above link and i would love to incorporate the features that you would like to see in sticky notes.
XMPP on heroku with Ruby
Alternate title: List of congressmen who have some idea of how the internet works
> My point was: I can swap a spindle disk of the same size with an ssd of the same size and reap all the benefits without changing anything beyond that.

And what does that point has to do with anything?

> Yes, really. And evidence was provided by both sides and it all comes down to a judgement call, a personal estimate which feature or which mental model seems more preferrable to you.

Wrong. It's not a judgement call, I mentioned specifically for which cases git branching is superior, and I constructed a challenge to show that git is superior in that case and NOBODY answered the challenge. Conversely, NOBODY provided a case for the opposite; that mercurial's branching is superior in any case.

It's very simple; you can do more with git branching than with mercurial branching. Period.

> Well. You do have a knack for flawed comparisons. It's like saying "Limiting yourself limiting to one tool, a screwdriver if you're trying to drive in screws is not a good decision.

Completely irrelevant. You can't get out of the hasty generalization fallacy by pointing out a case in your favor. Yes, sometimes proficiency in more tools is better, but not ALWAYS. Just like yeah, in some cases black people like chicken, but not ALWAYS.

> The couldn't care less about svn's need to hit the network for pretty much every operation since the central repository is inside the same gigbit LAN and will never move.

Assumptions, assumptions, assumptions.

> As a side note: mercurials UI is superior to git's not because it resembles svn's but for one singe major reason: It's consistent where git's is not.

There have been calls for suggestions for improvement, including radical changes since years. NOBODY has ever suggested to replace 'rm' with 'remove'; it's not an issue.

If you want to talk about real consistency issues, how about branches vs bookmarks vs anonymous branches. In git they are all branches.
You can run GC manually in Ruby, but at the end of the day, it's a stop-the-world GC; your program doesn't get to do anything until it decides that it's finished. If that takes too long, you drop that frame. Additionally, Ruby doesn't have the concept of primitives (mostly), and all objects are stored on the heap! So, every time you use a float (which you do a lot of in games), you end up with a new struct on the heap that has to be garbage collected eventually. Ouch.

(By way of demonstration:)

ree-1.8.7-2011.03 :002 > 123.456.object_id
=> 33681660
ree-1.8.7-2011.03 :003 > 123.456.object_id
=> 33674740

Languages with incremental GCs will yield between phases of the GC pass, letting program execution continue even when a GC pass is in progress, making sure that you don't end up with dropped frames, which vastly improves the player experience.
and he doesn't worry about the day to day operations of any of those 400 businesses
How Chicken Scheme compiles to C
30 Story Hotel Built in 15 Days
Read chinasmack.com translated comments. If they're indicative at all, then they seem to realize that they are constantly being censored and "harmonized" on these Chinese controlled sites.
If you just put the word "custom" in there I reckon it would make a big difference ;)
Get a Midlife
Share the Joy of Coaching on Coachtube.com
A spot where you can upload your own coaching videos on any subject you wish.
They're not really any more effective at stopping the spread of politically embarrassing material. If anything, people openly joke about how they have a 河蟹 ("river crab") society (a pun on 和谐 / harmonious).

As an example, look up the story behind the catchphrase "我爸是李刚."

http://www.chinasmack.com/glossary#%E6%88%91%E7%88%B8%E6%98%...
Quirky? Never heard of them. Do they dance? Do they ponder?

What if this case is just one more variation of a theme with 500 incumbents?

Ok, I googled and have seen some of quirky's designs on the "hey this is design" type of web sites. They appear to have established brand and an extensive network of retailer relationships. It seems a different game. A press release gets them eyeballs.
Well said, except it is not true about the ice melting under pressure -- a weight of a human is not enough (same holds for skating). The ice is slippery because of its anomalous behavior on the boundary, which is still not fully understood.
Are you sure about that? Gary Johnson's website implies that he is firmly against not only SOPA, but internet regulation of any sort.

http://www.garyjohnson2012.com/issues/internet-and-technolog...
Ask HN: What was your first ramen profitable app?
The stridency/accuracy ratio of this comment is interesting.

http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html
Done ;-)

https://github.com/twilio/hurl/pull/9
Cool case, I can see myself actually using this one.

It would have been cool to see how the popouts extend and rotate but I think we got the idea from all the different positions they were sitting in.

Authentic dancing also helped a lot that this product is dance-party ready, if you use an app like Djay.

For anyone wanting detailed deathstar level specifications in a video, I'm sure more information will come out. I'm curious how the popouts work.
Why programming in Haskell on an iPad is a good idea
Nano Hummingbird
AcerCloud Is Acer’s Answer To The Media Cloud
Why Godaddy?

http://cl.ly/3g3M1c1L03001l0k0C3b

[edit: your github link is misspelled]

https://github.com/sopajs/sopajs FTFY
I just want to give this guy money. Hilarious.
"I'm not going to judge whether these jobs are meaningless, but I'm pretty sure they produce a drastic improvement in quality of life for those who are employed in these jobs."

You're right of course, "meaningless" is probably too hard a harsh word choice. Looked at another way, dancing girls promoting powdered coffee mix probably moves a lot of coffee. And having a guy operate the elevator button made a 3-star hotel feel like a 4-star. In fact, one thing I notice every time I'm in Korea is that the level of customer service is generally very high simply because there's so many people working at places.

I was thinking of this the other day when I was in a Home Depot and couldn't find somebody to help me find a dryer vent for love or country. "If I was in Korea I'd have half a dozen employees showing me the aisle, and dancing girls promoting the product" I was left thinking.
Make Tests Clean and Clear Without Duplication
Indeed. I have to say I'm rather embarrassed that I have yet to get a solution to pass every test case due to the time limit.

I've enjoyed the problems nonetheless. If nothing else it's been a good excuse to learn some features of a few languages that I haven't used yet.

While I don't expect anything to come of this employment-wise (and yes, I am looking) I'm glad to have participated.
The situation in Australia is fairly complex, so rather than attempting to summarize I'll just point you here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral...

See also: http://nocleanfeed.com/
Ha! I created an account just to upvote your comment. Been there, done that.
tl&dr: switch for performance but miss Ruby
The cause of its popularity in the games community comes from the fact that it is, by design, meant to be embedded in larger programs. So, for example, it will compile on any platform with a conforming ANSI C compiler.

And for x86/x64 and ARM, you can try LuaJIT to get even more zing (though you probably won't need to).
One thing I have noticed about a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs is that they all have a stable home to fall back on. If the worst thing that can happen to you financially is going bankrupt and living with the parents, I think it instils a certain confidence in you. It is a level of confidence that someone who has to support their parents or siblings cannot afford. The entrepreneurs I am thinking of range from close friends up to Branson, Gates, Jobs et al. All of these guys have come from good homes. I feel lucky to have a safe base to fall back on if it all goes to shit. Thanks mum. Thanks dad.
Java += operator
A friend and I built a Facebook arcade app (similar to MindJolt) that paid well for a while (a few months) until Facebook made changes that reduced the virality of games.
It's funny, I remember seeing similar numbers between IIS and Apache in the early 2000s right before the dot com bust. There's gotta be some correlation between number of new public internet sites and OSS Web Server adoption.

We've known for long time that horizontal scaling for large sites is only cost effective when you use an open source web server and aren't taking a hit for licensing.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/06/scaling-up-vs-scali...
This post should be titled, "Why I fucked up by choosing Ruby to write a game." - Or "What the fuck was I thinking"

I love Ruby, I spend a lot of time writing it. I also write kids games for iOS. I would never consider Ruby(in it's current state) a good language to write a game in. Anyone who would has clearly; never written a game before; or never used Ruby for anything serious before.

I agree with the other posters, you should investigate ObjectiveC though. You can get ObjectiveC packaged and running on Windows BTW, don't worry about that.
I thought it obvious that I was referring to the problems of the electorate and competence at solving them. Apparently you did not find that to be quite so obvious as I had thought.
Is printing really so slow and unbuffered, and output so voluminous, that output is really hotspot? The advice is completely opposite from real world best practices. You should print as soon as you have any output, so that your consumer can process output in a concurrent pipeline, and use a lower-level (concurrent!) buffer to batch output in an environment-appropriate batch size, for TCP or disk or whatever is underneath your app.

The other points, about using an efficient algorithm instead of a merely correct one that assumes unreasonably large resources, are more on target.

Before coding any algorithm, always plug in the problem size bounds to your O() function estimate. In these contests there is usually one obvious large number that tells you where your algorithm needs to be sub-quadratic
I suppose it does: but it's the honest truth. I have two months of ruby code that's rusting now, and it was quite a difficult post to write.
The GP [SeanLuke] does make one good point, which is that using a BSD-style license is a good idea, because it gives you ammunition to help defeat a "creative" claim that you should be liable for problems other people have with your code.

Otherwise, I agree, there are a fair number of inaccuracies in the GP [SeanLuke] comment.
I didn't read it this way. Don't try to show off your knowledge -- it will become known as you use it. I think he was advising to take some time to just absorb the new environment. Nobody wants a new guy to come in and start advocating obnoxiously for everything he was doing at his last job.

If you take time to understand some of the history and reasons for why things are the way they are, you might come to realize it makes sense, or you will be able to build an effective case for change once people have come to respect your abilities (proven by doing, not talking).
cough ObjectiveC
We Added 1.6 Million Jobs in 2011— Where Did They Come From?
Mike Pall's LuaJIT[0] is excellent from a game dev perspective--incremental GC (so you can spend a fixed amount of your frame budget in it) and JIT with a huge number of optimisation make it fairly compelling to write the top 50% of your game in (and not a terrible choice for the bottom 50%).

I think you were absolutely right to switch from Ruby, I can't see the problems that you had getting any better unless Ruby lets you manage object allocation (in which case you could allocate to a per-frame memory buffer and just nuke it at the end of every frame).

[0] http://luajit.org/
Michelin Guides only cover Europe (including the UK), the US (not Canada), Japan, Hong Kong & Macau: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelin_Guide#Other_ratings
I didn't knew how to make an enumerable with an yield.

http://csharpindepth.com/Articles/Chapter11/StreamingAndIter...

I had used it to make a state machine but didn't know its relation to IEnumerable. The article was enlightening to a C# latecomer like me.
> college admissions shouldn't be about past performance but about future potential

These two variables are highly correlated. Do you think adding a fudge factor for students from disadvantaged groups will give you a more accurate predictor of future potential than just looking at past performance? Is there any data to support that claim?

> Why should employers take into account how someone got into Harvard, instead of judging them solely on their performance at Harvard?

Judging them solely on their performance at Harvard should still lead you to the conclusion that AA students are worse performers on average. That's true even in the hypothetical world where AA students don't come from a disadvantaged group in the first place. If blue weasels and red weasels have exactly the same distribution of skill, and you add affirmative action in favor of blue weasels, then blue weasel students post-admission will underperform their red weasel peers on average, for reasons that seem mathematically obvious.
Heh :) I'll take the bait :)

I've written lots of Ruby for things that are serious (large websites with lots of traffic), and I've worked as part of a team that built on commercially available games in C++ that sold lots of copies.

Ruby has come along enormously recently, especially with 1.9.3 and the other flavours that are out there now. I thought it might be worth trying it and advancing the state of the possible. Eventually I decided that actually shipping something was more important.
Army Robots Grow Tails
I think this kind of thinking can be demoralising to newbies like me. I do not care that I did not start programming at 14. I was playing with kites and chasing girls. To me they were really fun. Now that I have a lot of time to focus on coding and have discovered how much fun it is I am absolutely loving it. I just got off a five-hour flight and did nothing but write crappy Java. I loved it.

All I can say is that my gut tells me I will feel the same way in 10 years' time. Here's to years.
Note at your ease - chrome extension
I wonder if this inspired DRb[1]. It sounds very similar. The biggest problem is that it's synchronous even across machine boundaries. Celluloid and Dcell[2] are the same basic idea but more explicit.

[1]: http://segment7.net/projects/ruby/drb/introduction.html
[2]: http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2011/05/introducing-celluloi...
Reading a transcript is just not the same as watching Feynman talk, which is such a delight. 240p or not, I encourage everyone to watch the video.
This is a great list. You've nailed all the major resources. Good job!
Was called the CleanFeed.

Was "delayed indefinitely", but most likely to take it out of the public spotlight... that was a year ago ish. Oh, and elections were on, then.
What does the spirit of open source have to do with the number of downloads for some commercial, closed source apps?

Open source isn't infinite transparency.
Is Huawei a Paper Tiger?
My first profitable app was a ruby/rack based CMS I built for my affiliate sites.

I had to make something ridiculously secure, simple to develop, easy to maintain and extremely fast - all while keeping uptime as near to 100% as possible. It ended up evolving into the product I use today across all my systems and gets better with each revision.

I consider it profitable as even though no one besides myself uses it, it has more than repaid the time I spent developing it and the sites it runs provide a large chunk of my company's revenue.
That was not the point of my comment. It was a realization of how it came across (aka how I got here).

My main point, however, and this in reply to your post (that I have no doubt it was honest and on the back of some tough thinking) was that you simply started using the wrong tool for the job and then, realizing this, found a more appropriate tool. Nothing wrong with that, but your post came across as "Ruby sucks so I'm going with C++".

Having said that, I'm glad you "saw the light" and I do wish you the best of lucks in your development endeavors! :)

And remember: your next endeavor might be in Ruby, C++, whatever… Just do some thinking beforehand and choose the right tool for the job to avoid "rotting code", which we all know is incredibly frustrating! ;)
they are good value if you know what you want

I bought two of these[1] for hacking on[2] and, in my experience and opinion, the ones I got are appalling value for most people.

The remote control works like a combination of a mouse (wiimote style against IR LEDs in the unit) and keyboard (the buttons.) So you're using a remote control to emulate a mouse and keyboard to interact with an interface designed primarily for a touch screen.

In the Android launcher, I found you have to first use the remote buttons to highlight a launcher icon, then use the "mouse" wiimote thingy to -also- hover the cursor over it, and then press and hold the OK button (not tap it) in order to launch an app.

The devices work reasonably well with a proper wireless keyboard and mouse. But in that case why not just buy a tablet with HDMI out for similar or less money? Or dust off an old PC?

Add that to apparently patchy video decoding support, and my verdict is: "really, don't bother".

If/when the promised open source GoogleTV support drops as part of ICS AOSP, things might change. Then they'll actually have a TV-oriented interface not a kludge.

[1] FV-1, S5PV210 based, the first result of the search link.

[2] I bought them to port GNU/Linux w/ X11, with a goal of porting XBMC. I'll hold back on that rant. ;)
The Bushmen live in Africa. I would hardly call that environment abundant with a friendly climate.
While conceding immediately that you generally do want to take whatever "free" steps that are available to you to avoid frivolous lawsuits, what's your take on how likely it is that someone would prevail with a claim like "a bug in the software code that you abandoned all claims to cost me millions of dollars"?

(I ask because I'm curious, not to further a debate about PD).
I love how he covers everything from:

"For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip."

to:

"You know you can't put your hand through the chair; that's taken for granted."

What an incredible mind.
Building a Sign-Up Page That Works
Of course you did, and I say that as a self-described Ruby programmer. What I really want to know is what gave you the idea that it might be a good idea to use Ruby for a project so obviously not suitable for Ruby?
I thought something was off when reading the article. You pretty much put it in words for me. The focusing on Tokyo was especially blatant.
Another amazing line: "So I am not going to be able to give you an answer to why magnets attract each other except to tell you that they do."
My thoughts exactly.

NSOperationQueue *queue = [NSOperationQueue mainQueue];
[queue addOperation:[NSBlockOperation blockOperationWithBlock:^{
// do something
}]];

or

NSOperationQueue *queue = [NSOperationQueue mainQueue];
[queue addOperation:[[[NSInvocationOperation alloc] initWithTarget:self selector:@selector(selectorName:) object:param1] autorelease]];

Edit: on re-reading the post in detail, I see the problem he is solving is different from the one the above code solves. Clearly there is value to what he has made. I wonder if it could not be re-coded using gcd and/or blocks, but NSOperationQueue is too high-level an API to be appropriate.

Still, I can't tell you how many times I've used the code above to create simple async systems.
Exactly. Waterloo have had some solid pops, just as everywhere else. Waterloo simply seems to be some of the most visible.
Your points seems to be that your prefer the iOS/iTunes ecosystem. I think we get that.
Most ridiculous video ever. <3
what exactly is the purpose of this?
In addition, the type of employment has changed in Japan. The career job is gone, replaced by temp work.
While what you say may be 100% true you might be shocked by the number of Ruby and Python devs I talk to who tell me that Ruby can do anything that C++ does if you're even a half-decent Ruby or Python dev. I've literally asked people, "What about something like Gran Turismo 7?" And I've literally been in rooms where every dev there (none game devs, all web devs) basically said if they were writing it in Ruby it could be done, but they wouldn't trust Sony devs to be able to do it.

This may not be the case for all Ruby devs, but I think having these stories out there is still useful.
I'm using SDL for writing a DJ application and have it cross-building on Linux, Windows, and the target platform (HP TouchPad).

For the Windows build I'm using the excellent http://www.mingw.org/ Mingw32 environment. I compiled SDL and my other needed libraries myself and there's pretty much no code differences.

The only downside to mingw32 is that my target platform has full POSIX and mingw32 doesn't, so sometimes I have to choose carefully to use stdlib functions and not a POSIX function.
Mimosaciti Corporation IT News & Security News
Ask HN: What response time is acceptable for auto complete inputs.
Looking at sites like Google, their autocomplete can respond within 30-50ms, which is clearly well below the threshold which any human would regard as being slow.

What should ordinary folk try and aim for when aiming to deliver similar auto complete functionality for search fields?

I'm using Solr, for driving my autocomplete, but my main application stack (which is using Zend Framework/PHP) is just too darn slow. After a request comes in to my application, it takes about 100-170ms to respond to any request.

So I'm curious as to what we should aim to server these requests in, in order to appear extremely responsive.