skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't see any reason why they would be normally distributed.

The odds of the Central Limit Theorem failing to apply here seem extraordinarily low. I am one of the people who think it tends to be overapplied, but this is exactly the sort of scenario where it applies very strongly.

Speculating about species with alternative gender breakdowns with non-normal distributions has no effect on the fact that in humans our gender differences are very much normally distributed in almost every way relevant to the discussion of what career one would choose. Yes, such a species is biologically plausible, but what is, is.
I don't agree.

Lots of proofs are irreducibly ugly, even when the idea behind them is simple. Just too many edge cases and details. Automatic proof systems can avoid this.

I think of it much like garbage collection and higher order functions. The machine code of a garbage collected program might be messier than a manually managed one. But python code is prettier than c code.
I wish this weren't the case. In a government where an embarrassing email is more important than sound policy, we all loose. Yet, from both sides, we cast out politicians for gaffes and misspeaks while leaving those who don't offend and merely mismanage and embezzle to reap the rewards.

Maybe I'm just being pessimistic.
And how does the central limit theorem apply here?
I love his explanation:

Now why did we switch to Passenger? Simple: the keyword is remove moving parts.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful [...] aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.

That is pathetic.
I find it interesting that the Secret Service wear shades. Maybe so people can't see their eyes? It's odd.
Ask HN: How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box?
After reading the recent posts on how people use their Mac and Dell/Windows I was just wondering if there is any one using FreeBSD as a desktop OS and how they use it. After being a Windows user for years I am now a FreeBSD/OpenBSD intermediate user interested in finding guru's advise on proper ways of using it.
Cool. I wrote this similar simple web app a couple years ago (unofficially) for my university, USC: http://usccrime.org/
It's been tried before, check out http://www.micropledge.com . That site doesn't seem to be active any more.
I'm using FreeBSD on the desktop.

Desktop environment: KDE3.

Text editor: kwrite.

Office suite: OpenOffice.

Web browser: Konqueror for most sites, Firefox for a few sites which don't work in Konqueror.

Email: Thunderbird.

Other communications: Kopete (for ICQ), aMSN (for MSN), ksirc (for IRC).

System administration tools: FreeBSD Update for base system security updates; Portsnap for updating the ports tree; portupgrade for updating installed ports; tarsnap (of course!) for backups.
I will be amused if he has to give up his Blackberry. Bush used his power to indefinitely detain and torture people he didn't like -- in a military base in another country... then we complain about Obama wanting to be more productive and send e-mail?

Anyway, I assume Windows Mobile (or Android) will be just as good for him? The government can setup their monitoring server, and he can IMAP from that. In fact, I will set this up and maintain it for free, just because I'm such a nice guy. (I should tweet this -- he follows me on Twitter ;)
That's too bad. (I'm male, btw.) Where I work, on an Agile team, we have lots of social interaction. We try to pair with a different developer every day. Each story card (requrement) we implement involves much back-and-forth conversaction between us (the developers) and the users (or more often, but not always, their "representatives" - the Business Analysts).

Aside from that, I don't think D & D has come up once the whole time I've been on that team (3+ years). Between being busy with the work we're doing, and the rest of the world's events to discuss, there's no time for games. Politics. The stock market. Parenthood. (Non-parenthood for the single guys and girls too.) Professional sports. Dumb jokes. Etc.
Are you conceding or just ignoring axod's point that men and women are different in more ways than anatomical?
> Pretty much any other job requires no refreshes

You mean to tell me that being a doctor requires less continuing education than CS? Really? You sure you can back that up?
Obama's office is, until January, across the street from us. Aren't we cool? The impression I have is that the way they're protecting him is by maintaining a bumper-to-bumper caravan of Federal Protective Service vehicles radiating three blocks in every direction from the building.
Make it, and I will love you forever.
Very few commercials on YouTube, which I think are a source of a lot of the discontent.
Managers love measurement. With all the story point values and burndown charts and iteration numbers, Agile is an overzealous PM or Engineering Director's wet dream.

All the dessert, none of the vegetables. On my project for my employer we're using 'agile' planning methods but we're not releasing the iteration builds to the users at all, and we have a fixed delivery date that Must Not Change. I call it 'Agile Waterfall'.
Lolcats: deeper than you think?
Scribd sucks bigtime. Too many ads.
Yes, it's about not being able to see their eyes. The idea being that you don't want a close-quarters attacker to know where the agents are looking at a given moment.
I use FreeBSD at work and home.
Its nice to have an identical setup on the laptop and colo.
When I want to deploy something, I make a package file on the dev box and simply install it on the server.
Desktop:
window manager: ratpoison
browser: firefox
editor: emacs
email: mew (runs in emacs)
Some advice that hasn't been mentioned yet: make sure your publisher supports you. Writing a book is difficult and you want to spend your time on the content -- not making sure that there are no typos, teaching the publishers how to run the code, doing the layout, maintaining different versions of the book, etc.

I recently wrote a book, and I got very little support from the publisher. It was a disaster, although I didn't realize that until after publication. I was the first person to write a Perl book for them, and they had nobody on staff that could even install Perl. The editors didn't do any significant editing, and in fact weren't even native speakers of English. They didn't even manage to publish the right version of some chapters. When they made the code from the book available, they did so as a word document containing code snippets from the book (instead of the runnable tarballs from each example and chapter that I provided for them).

Basically, your name goes on the book, so any fuck-up will be attributed to you. If something goes wrong, like things did with my book, you will get hate mail every day, criticizing you for things that you had no control over.

Oh yeah, and when the code you wrote the book about goes out of date, people will send you hate mail for that too. It is also apparently a hobby of people to nit-pick things like your variable names ("OMG you used $c instead of $ctx, YOU ARE SO DUMB!"). I'm not sure what motivates people to send me e-mail about things like this. Do they I think I care what they think? Do they want me to magically change every copy of the book? I don't get it.

In case you haven't noticed, the experience has changed my life. Before writing the book, I was really excited about open source projects and talking to people. I genuinely wanted to help people learn to program better. Now I am bitter and misanthropic because of the constant influx of hate mail. (I could go on and on about this, how people don't want to learn, how teaching is a waste of time, etc., etc... but I will save that for another day.)

I'm not trying to talk you out of writing a book, of course, but just make sure that your publisher cares about your book. If they don't, you may regret writing it.
I also work on a quasi-agile team. We do pair programming, but we often get assigned to the same pair for weeks or months at a time. It's sort of like being in an arranged marriage. I've told management time and again that this doesn't turn out well, to no avail.

Granted, pair programming does offer interaction. The hours go more quickly while pairing. However, I often prefer to work alone when I can, so that I can have some semblance of privacy and personal space in our bull-pen work environment.

I have to say that the recent financial turmoil and U.S. election have lead the conversation away from D&D, the latest video game, or the plots of Star Trek episodes. It has been a welcome change of pace. We have dumb jokes, too. The puns, ohhh the puns. ;)
Scribd's iPaper format is so much lighter-weight than PDF and other document formats that it makes a qualitative difference in my experience. It's like having embedded Flash videos instead of QuickTime downloads.
The problem's not that they're a shallow generation. Actually, I think the Baby Boomers were a very idealistic generation, and this (paradoxically) has led to the corrupt leadership. The civil rights activists, hippies, and leftists (with a few exceptions) didn't swing around to become the yuppies, sellouts, and corrupt political figures. Different people did.

My father's pretty similar to me in worldview, ethics, and politics. When he was growing up, he couldn't have even imagined working at a hedge fund; the concept of working for money was considered crass, if not repulsive. (He was actually quite incensed when I first said I was interested in trying out trading.) In 2007, it was perfectly normal for a liberal, idealistic young person to go and work for an investment bank or hedge fund, because that was seen as the best way to establish oneself and go far later (e.g. Jeff Bezos worked at Shaw before founding Amazon).

I would note that the problem with the Baby Boom generation isn't that they're "selfish". My parents aren't bad people. Nor were most of my teachers; they were great. On the whole, the Boomers aren't worse than the rest of us. The difference between them and us is that the better half of them almost entirely eschewed the career paths that led to power-- finance and corporate leadership-- leaving the shameless and greedy bastards to take control.
"Tribes". Ugh. One of the worst concepts that keeps getting reapplied to people on the internet.
I'm a technical guy, but I don't think this has to be a polarized debate. I think business founders might have a few roles to play early in the startup:

1) Hire new talent
2) Raise capital
3) Handle day to day things (frees the technical co-founder from much of the time-intensive due diligence)

The business guy cannot conduct technical interviews, however. He also needs to be extremely reliable if he's negotiating term sheets. And he needs to stay active with business development stuff, probably leave it to the CTO to manage the technical people.

Maybe it's possible to have both business and tech people, but I do agree that it's best to have more technical people early on. After all, how do you forge business relationships without a product? I would say if anything, the business guy should be responsible for going out and pitching every day. Get those business terms down to a tee, and make it a goal to have many high-quality and interested investors. That is something that itself can take up all of a technical founders' time.

I met with one of the guys who started and sold EUNet (one of Europe's larger ISPs). He said "you know what makes a really good executive? It's the people who know to do the right things. Leave it to the middle-level managers and product developers to know how to do things right." Perhaps one of the goals of a business co-founder is to be absolutely sure about the market and the idea, or to always challenge it. Someone has to ask "are the engineers building something people want?" Most of the time, engineers are building something cool to them. And they're usually eager to work on challenging things. But is it something people want? I would say you're very lucky if the technical co-founder has this type of aptitude. I can only think of a few who do. Levchin has it, Zuckerberg has it, Gates and Jobs (Jobs being arguably less technical, but extremely product-driven) both have it too. Those are difficult people to find.
Yeah. Referring to PayPal as your "secret vault" is probably misleading, too.
I am a man and I feel the same way. I recently graduated and have been working as a hardware designer for the past year and a half. I find cube life very depressing and am increasingly losing my motivation.

I have better social interaction, though. My work has people who are hard to converse with because of their lack of social skills but the majority of people aren't like that.

Even though I hate sitting in my cubicle all day, I really don't like most meetings because the information discussed isn't interesting and my eyes glaze over. People get into pointless arguments and I sit there hoping for the meeting to end. The only meetings that I like are design meetings, but most of our meetings just cover status updates.

I yearn for a job that doesn't involve sitting in front of a computer all day. I love hardware design and programming, but 8 hours a day of it is very taxing. I suffer from RSI in my wrists and have yet to find a long lasting remedy.

Maybe the best option would be to start my own hardware or software company. Working for someone else just adds to the dreariness. Other than that, I have been thinking about becoming a doctor.
I think what Jon's trying to say is "make sure your publisher doesn't do what Packt appear to have done to the first ever book on the Catalyst framework".

Not only did they successfully kill jrock's book but based on his contributions to the project and associated work they also killed his motivation.

So: good publisher, thick skin, pick two or don't start.
Indeed. But you don't need a thick skin, you need armor.
1st note: before I allowed scripts all I saw was:

Blog | Contact
© 2008 Experiment House LLC

Blog and Contact were links, but that was all that was on the screen.
Your site isn't that shiny and fancy, so it has no reason to be so dependent on JS.

It's a cool idea though. I could see developing on it.
I do not have any from the top of my head, but visit VCs website and search their enterprise portfolio. Once you find a few companies you like, go to their sites and see what the customers they target and email those guys.
Why? Just because email is effective for normal workers doesn't mean it is necessarily the right tool for the president to use.
No dividend. Not intended to be sold.

The company is held only by the founders so we can control its progress and ensure it becomes the company we envisaged.

Our employees believe in that dream. Since there's no monetary value to having equity, they don't care that they don't have any. They do, however, make more than I do.

As for "well give it out anyway, they could always sell it" I refer to the point of "becomes the company we envisaged" and what happened to craigslist.

I never said our model was common. I never said it was wise for the majority of companies, or even viable. But it -does- work for us.
It's easy to build something that can't be sold. So while you might not think the biz guy is valuable at the start, many of us would think so. Otherwise you'll end up with YAW2ATWF (Yet another web2 app that will fail).
I don't. FreeBSD is dying. Haven't you heard?
Oblong industries, inc.
Also remember - it hurts an employee just as much to be overcompensated as it does to be undercompensated.

Why? Can you expand on that?
Agreed.

> "I can’t save it like the PDF. I can’t print the whole thing. Fk, I can’t even copy and paste!"

But I can READ it much more easily. And 90% of the time, all I want to do is read it. Take a quick glance at it, maybe skim it. And Scribd means I don't have to fire up a PDF viewer just to do that. The Flash videos analogy is apt. Youtube's flash videos aren't good for movie watching, or downloading videos, but they're perfect for quick 30-second clips. That's what Scribd is for documents.
Wall Street Lays Another Egg
Interesting article, but the author's selective memory and faulty logic continually undermines the point he's trying to make. My favorite was this gem:

"Past U.S. generations invented the airplane; invented the automobile; discovered penicillin; and built the Interstate highway system. The Baby Boom generation has invented credit default swaps; mortgage backed securities; the fast food drive thru window; discovered the cure for erectile dysfunction; and built bridges to nowhere. No wonder we’re in so much trouble.

This completely ignores developments like the personal computer revolution, the Internet, modern telecommunications, satellite technology, space exploration, advances in biotechnology, dramatic reductions in global poverty, etc, etc. I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but you get the idea.

The author would have done well to acknowledge that the reality of the situation is more nuanced than the picture he attempts to paint.
I see a difference. Just because the British government is increasing surveillance doesn't mean it is also as monolithic as its parallel in 1984. Watching the BBC does not preclude active citizenship. More to the point, I doubt viewers who can appreciate the humor in Blackadder or the drama in Rome are completely incapable of questioning things they read or hear.
Math.

j/k :-)
i find it a bit interesting that comments are disabled on that video...
what are they afraid of???
Thanks for the tip.

I'd like to get a Mac as soon as I can afford it, but that moment is a long time coming.
You can get ahead, it's just harder during a depression.
I'm surprised at comments here condoning the murder. Getting fired from your job is no excuse for taking someone's life. I don't care what the economy is like - I don't think this guy deserves sympathy, especially not from an educated, smart community like this. Millions of people have lost jobs before, and they've struggled, tried hard, and moved on without resorting to violence.

I know a family member of one of the victims, and they didn't deserve this.
Ok. Thanks for that explanation.
That would all change were it to gain in usage.
Zed wouldn't let you join his band?
It doesn't seem like the ground was yanked from under his feet.

"Wu, a test engineer who worked at SiPort less than two years, was "let go" Friday morning because of his performance, a company spokeswoman said. Early police reports indicated he was laid off, but the spokeswoman said that was not the case."

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10993931
I thought that was hilarious. The address is oddly fitting.
Product Reviews:Joana's 70-80 WotLK Horde Leveling Guide(Sun, 16 Nov 2008 14:24:03 GMT)
Which of them didn't see this coming for months now? People need to cut their debt.
For what it's worth, '94 was the year he was elected Governor of Texas.
> I agree that the best biz people are the ones who come from a technical background and have successful transitioned into a biz dev mindset.

Not disagreeing with you, but if I'd probably not like to be called the "tech guy". Or the "biz guy" for that matter. I'd feel it too pigeon-holing.

Maybe works for others, and when the division is very cut&dry - I'm probably just being oversensitive - but I'd personally find labels like that too limiting - especially in a startup where you only have, say, 2-3 people... each with multiple skills and differing, overlapping levels of proficiency.
No, that's not the problem. People are just much better at stopping the old practices than picking up the new compensating practices. For example, they drop the 500 page requirements spec but don't start talking to the users on a weekly basis and documenting the outcomes.
This strikes me as a market research tool - trying to find out what people want, the needs, the problem to be solved, the pain to address. It's tricky for users to make the connection between problem and solution (hell, it's tricky for anyone - so why not users?)

Here's my suggestion: target developing knock-offs (copies of existing products). There's a long and glorious tradition of this in open source (linux, gimp, open office, samba, mySQL, etc). It works because users already know they need it, and how to use it, it's already integrated into their behaviour and their other processes and other software - and programmers have a clear specification to work from. This narrowing the kind of project you seek to fund (i.e. a niche) will help you in many ways, as any business book will recommend (even though narrowing your options seems like a limiting thing...)

But please don't use this to undermine good-guy programmers, who took the risk of working to understand a problem, design a solution and get it accepted - use your bounty powers for good, not evil. That is, use it to break monopolies that are hurting customers in small industries. If they have any sense, the monopolist will back down, and some good will be done (whether the open source product is actually used or not). Sounds like good, heroic fun!
Just read that essay. Very interesting.

If it's so easy to spot the trend stories coming from a PR agency, surely someone on here could rig up a tweaked memetracker that would isolate them out for public ridicule. Right?
Why is this "story" on a major national (in this case international) newspaper? Why is this even on hn? Does the New York Times not have anything more important to report?
Dupe (and very old): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=222520 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217682
That's more correct, actually, and I used to use one of those. But I decided it didn't have enough firepower. Now I prefer my homeopathic Death Star, in case I get attacked by a whole planet at once.
USB 3.0 to Deliver a Tenfold Speed Increase
Thank you for your contribution. Is it really impossible that a genetic difference accounts for some of a person's willingness and/or ability to devote the huge amount of effort that's required to become a 'genius' in any pursuit? I propose we extend your theory: the total inability to grasp complexity is also attributable entirely to environmental circumstances.
Bla bla bla.... What I just heard is a whole lot of nothing. Building a "green economy", very nice and all but it's time leaders in the U.S. start addressing the bad underlying fundamentals (greed, the sick focus on bigger and better, a debt financed addiction to consumption, a monetary system and money supply controlled by a cartel of private banks, a failing currency, etc).
There's also this: http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/
Xorg + fluxbox

emacs22

Firefox

And WIN4BSD when I need to test my work in IE or other Windows browsers.
Doctors are required to go through a certain number of Continuing Medical Education (CME) courses each year to keep their board certification. Many of these courses are in sunny vacation spots such as Hawaii, San Diego, etc. Depending on the seminar, some doctors go for a few minutes to get credit and then go golfing.

That being said, many doctors routinely read journal articles on the latest advances in medicine. I would venture that not as many engineers read IEEE articles. Still, there are many trade publications targeted towards engineers that seem to do a good job of keeping them up to speed.

Arguing over who spends more time keeping up to date is pointless.
Why can't magazines get the Web?
The most important bit for me:

It also has better power output, 900 milliamps compared to 100 milliamps with USB 2.0. That means up to four devices can be charged from a single USB port and charged faster.

This is good news - although afaik, USB2.0 actually delivers up to 500mA (in units of 100mA).

Either way, will be nice to finally have a contender for the universal charger.