skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The gender difference I'm pointing out isn't mistaking assertiveness for arrogance (in fact I'd say this happens more frequently with men, as statistically they end up in a greater number of leadership roles).

The gender difference I'm pointing out is in how those who take offense to the bitch/asshole label push back against that accusation.

Anecdotally, I've noticed its often the case that women will make an appeal to victim-hood ("You're just calling me that because you have a problem with powerful women"), which is something I haven't seen men do. Sadly, they are often correct. But a small portion of the time, they are mistaken, and somehow the specious claim of sexism is particularly odious. That tiny portion of the overall picture is what I was pointing out.

With men, it seems more often that either they shrug off the accusation because they are fine with being an asshole (which is particularly distasteful), or they respond by further turning up the arrogance dial ("I'm not an asshole, its just that I'm better than you").
Order of operations. -4^2 is equivalent to -(4^2).
Does anyone have data on how much it leaks in practice? Also, could maliciously crafted input result in a DoS vector for Boehm using applications?
LinkedIn Hits 150 Million Members
Getting started with iOS development on Heroku
Why an entrepreneur should read the alchemist
LTE Micro-SIM Cards for iPad 3 and iPhone 5
That comic (and accompanying article) make a good point. It's easy to see how annoying (or scary) that would be. Though I would say the men depicted are total douche bags. I won't defend them. I will defend the guy who likes to say hi to you in the cafe every morning, or the co-worker who buys you snacks when you work late, etc.
In NYC I would say that it's still a mixed. The comment section on gothamschools.org (great local edu news site) is full of Angry Teachers waiting in the wing to jump on editorials and commenters with vitriolic language.
REasonable people can object to nuclear power because 1) no matter how good the safety systems are, no safety engineer will claim a 100% safe system; there is always a balance of probabilities and 2) nuclear waste isn't fun. I'm not suggesting that these drawbacks outweigh the positive, just that I could see how an informed person would say that the risk of nuclear catastrophe (however minute) is not worth the benefits (however great.)
How to Download Windows8  Free Free
This is the second time in 2 weeks someone has chimed in on an HN thread to change a discussion from "something involving education" to "whether Patrick McKenzie has a bias against teachers".

If you disagree with a thought someone expresses on HN, address a comment to the thought. Redirecting the discussion towards the motives of the commenters isn't simply uncivil; it's boring. No. Worse. Hygroscopically boring. It sucks all the juice out of the whole thread.

I am partly irritated by this because I know Patrick does not have a vendetta against teachers. I am partly irritated because I know the "bias" Patrick is displaying here is a hacker trope: if you interviewed 100 hackers, 95 of them would say the same thing about secondary education. But I'm mostly irritated because it's a clear example of a superficial argument. "Hacker vs. teachers". Who could possibly care? He's not biased against teaching... but if he was, so what? In what sense would the thread possibly be different?
They Know You're Reading This : All Tech Considered
Just based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience: no, that's not it.

I work in a field where algorithms are not relevant for 99% of the time, an neither me nor anyone I know tests for them when hiring. Few us are Google, most of us just develop non-rocket science applications. And we can barely find the developers that can hack that.
Would it be unreasonable to want all that, but also in stereo?
I miss the days when most of the tests were all bluebook essays including science, computer science, history, etc.

You youngsters have it too easy...
Why Microsoft Shouldn't Focus Only on Windows
They are both competing against me: http://jungleblaze.com

And I'm 36 and so much more mature. So there... ;-)

By the way, I am EXTREMELY impressed with what gumroad has been able to do. He announced it on HN a few weeks after I had started development of mine. While I do see it as a competitor, I also see companies like Digital River as competitors and love the fact that there are people making it easier for non-techies to sell things on the web.
Anonymity as culture
Is professional modeling a professional setting? What if models were judged by their intelligence? Would that be inappropriate? ;P
It would indeed be interesting to know how they do it.

If someone has finally developed a way of sharing large amounts of data in an efficient, decentralised, and secure way, then it's not just the copyright holders who need to be afraid, it's also anyone planning on investing in Facebook (or those operating any other content-driven walled-garden services).
Lthread v0.5 is out
I thought this was going to be about gaming before I read it. Retro designs have become de rigeur in gaming over the last couple of years and it's boosting innovation by making it possible for indie developers to compete on a more level playing field against the big studios (e.g. MineCraft).

This article demonstrates how it's almost the opposite for non-game interfaces. Instead, it's the plucky upstarts that can take the risk on novel interfaces since they don't have large numbers of users to annoy (and I bet if Google tried to get radical with Calendar now, there'd be a real storm of hate over it).
On topic of scales. http://blog.visual.ly/12-visualizations-that-will-change-the...
Welcome to Earth - Universal Time-lapse
Honestly, there's no easy way to tell if programming is solitary because it has to be or because the culture that grew up around it prefers it to be. Consider pair-programming for a counter-example.
Eh, why wait ... http://groups.google.com/group/ll-next/

If you like talking about programming languages or implementing them join the fray. All kinds of languages please.
The problem is, of course, what you identify as "[a] good manager has some grasp of the field so that he can block...."

A good manager has to have a minimum of understanding and/or a maximum of trust in some of his subordinates. Far too many in our field have either.
It's great to see someone of your age taking the initiative to start their own business. It's commendable.

However, if I were you I wouldn't make a big deal about your age & lack of funding.

As a potential buyer, I'm not comfortable with giving my credit card details to a 17yo kid. Especially as the problem space is such that it's really easy to get started but pretty hard to get right..
I do not agree with the sentiment that it's only an innate ability. I was completely ignorant of most algorithms until I actually set out to increase my knowledge of them. Once you start each one becomes easier to grasp and you can then think in terms of solving a problem using some of the generic solutions you've come across. Like anything it just takes practice.
Warner Music Group sees increased revenue from iTunes, Spotify
Steam games are DRM encumbered. If Valve decide they don't like you any more, you can no longer play the games on your Steam account.
What outdated model would that be? And what different models are more successful countries utilizing?
meaning if a native English speaker says it, then it's okay,

I'm pretty sure descriptivism involves some number of people sharing an agreed meaning, not that all speech by all native speakers is OK.
>One thing to add is that `Sara70` creator of this thread, mentions some non-related reason for this (The reason for this horrible shutdown is that the Iranian regime celebrates 1979 Islamic revolution tomorrow.) which is wrong.

How do you know this?
There is a terminology problem with that article. People do get casual (or sloppy) with these terms, but its worth keeping them distinct:

The note describes memoization as using a "cache". That's a problem because memoization and caching are both useful, but they are different things.

A memo (which it appears is implemented by the Python library you mention) stores the results of earlier computations for re-use -- just as you've described.

A cache does the same thing except that if a cache becomes over-full, some earlier cached results may be recomputed (because they were dropped from the cache).

There are two critical differences:

Minimum space requirement for a memo: O(N x S) where N is the number of unique computations to be performed where S is average size of parameters and results.

Minimum space requirement for a cache: arbitrary, although performance varies with size.

Number of repeated computations with a memo: 0

Number of repeated computations with a cache: at least N where N is the total number of unique computations, and as many as T where T is the total number of computations with duplications.

A cache is useful in contrast to a memo when N*S is uncomfortably large, but "most" of the repeated computations are members of a set of size M where MxS' << NxS where S' is the average size of params and results in the M-set.

A memo is useful where NxS is conveniently small, or where it is unacceptable to repeat any computation for some reason.
That's only the legal description of discrimination, not the practical one.
I would be more surprised if they did. For Kickstarter to succeed, they need the entire site doing well, not so mich individual projects, so tools to monitor individual projects are probably not the useful.

On the other hand, stats about the whole site, eg donations per time period, new projects being created, total visitors, etc, would be much more relevant. Business like Kickstarter are about the long tail, not the mega-hits, and, if I were running it, I'd want my analytics to represent that.
I don't get an error when I hit next, it just freezes and sound stops playing.
I think there's a difference of kind, and not degree, between the services that you use for financial gain, and the services you use because you like them. I can understand if you don't read Facebook's TOS. I haven't. But if I used Adwords, and I depended on it as a part of my business, I would read the TOS.
What do you mean with alternative media?

The "alternative media" is what conspiracy theorists use to convince themselves that 9/11 was an inside job.

If by alternative you mean a place like HN where stories are being commented on then I agree but you will hardly find one sided support for that kind of claims here.

Which is why HN for all the bad trends we see here is still one of the best places to get our apriori views invalidated.
Starting a Company Is Not Risky
This is really inspiring to see.

I give my respect, admiration, to the empowerment Kickstarter is enabling in the world. People say they do crap like empowerment all the time.. Kickstarter seems to say very little themselves, all I hear is the success stories.

It's a delightfully simple concept: Put a great idea out there and let it be loved and supported.

Ideas that wouldn't have seen the light of day are, fuelled by early adopters and pioneers.

Being on the web for almost 2 decades makes everything look the same, or at least kind of blur together over time.

For me, with information and innovation; since Gutenberg, the web really was the second big thing.

Maybe enablers like Kickstarter are part of the third leap for our world where they are creating change in the real world from innovation.

I've rarely seen something successful on Kickstarter I didn't want to buy. Normally I can't decide as quickly on items in the retail market that compete with it.

The continued popping up of Kickstarter stories and dreams becoming a reality have made me think about all those things I wondered about.

Could they become a reality? Where could I start learning about how to kickstart something successfully? (I Might be a search or two away but the feeling of possibility is great.)
What was the name of that website where every other word was linked to another page on the same website? Reading this article felt a bit like that.
Not setting your lock screen security is not like leaving your front door open once, it's like not having a front door at all.
Opera 12 Adds Support for "Do Not Track"
There are no such thing as real democracy. So perhaps you are judging on the wrong premise.
Welcome to the Parallel Jungle
Relax, he was just poking fun at your error in using 'sudo' (the linux super-user command) instead of 'pseudo' (the prefix meaning counterfeit).

Not sure if this is a response to the joke or not, though...
>But we can be certain it doesn't appear in purely deterministic machines who's every
>parameter can be assessed at the fine grain level.

I don't know why you think this statement doesn't apply to humans. We're deterministic machines as well. More complicated perhaps, and less is known about the "fine grain level", but there is no evidence that we are anything more than complicated meat machines.
If I see one more 'teenage startup' post like this on HN (or elsewhere) I think I'll be sick.

It was cute at first, but now I only cringe whenever I see a title like this. Tech blogs do it, news sites do it, and as we can see even the teenagers themselves do it. It's pure link bait.

As said in another comment here, it's irrelevant. Almost every single young entrepreneur's website I see puts their age to the very forefront. "Look at me! I'm only this age! Here's my startup!" (which, a lot of the time, turns out to be nothing but a LaunchRock page).

An associate of mine is the about the same age as these teenagers, but is the complete opposite. He runs numerous 'web startups' and, more importantly, actually generates revenue (high seven figures annually). Investors would fall over themselves to invest. Tech blogs would salivate at his story. But he stays away from that.

The thing is, there are countless young founders like this. Generating huge profits, making big VC deals behind the scenes, working away under the radar. Don't be fooled by the way tech blogs and news outlets try to make it seem so unique.

Disregard your age. Ship a real product. Get users. Generate revenue.
To further your point, the very highest on base % player ever was none other than Barry Bonds, the greatest HR hitter ever. The mere threat of him connecting was enough to convince record numbers of opponents let him walk for free... much like moves by Zuck now or billg back in the day sent everyone else in the tech world scrambling.

Singles are nice. I'd love to have an Ichiro on my team. But I'd take top notch slugger over him any day.
Werner Vogels on How Amazon Web Services Wins: Fast, Flexible, Cheap
The thing is hash-tables and B+trees are data structures and not algorithms. I agree that if you don't know basic differences of algorithms you will run into performance issues but you will also run into problems if you don't know the difference between a data structure and an algorithm.
I, too, recognize this as a weakness in myself. Project Euler can easily make me feel like a loser, and the crowd that chants, "If you can't do pointer arithmetic, kill yourself," doesn't help, either.
The "serialization using ByteBuffers" should be clarified that it is "serialization using direct ByteBuffers" -- as in they exist in the native OS memory space and not inside the JVM's heap.

Direct ByteBuffers are excellent when you can make use of a long-lived, fixed-size buffer that you are using to communicate with a native resource (e.g. socket, file, etc.)

My own experience with using direct ByteBuffers is allocating read/write buffers to a running Redis process that I use to write commends to the server and read the results back. The difference in performance using a direct buffer instead of raw byte[] (basically a standard ByteBuffer) were astounding.

I have seen people argue against the use of direct buffers pointing out that at some point your calls and payload have to cross the JVM-native barrier and using a direct ByteBuffer simply moves the point of entry/exit which won't change the performance of the entire round-trip.

I can't argue with that, but I would point out that in my own work with Redis, having a native process input and output data to and from a native OS buffer that I can then pull into the JVM gave me at least an order of magnitude improvement in speed than sticking with raw byte[] in and out over a socket.

ASIDE: I attribute my success here to the fact that I was able to queue up out-bound commands as fast as possible inside the JVM, pushing them out into the native buffer space which streamed them into Redis; reading back the replies as quickly as possible in a separate thread. My understanding is that by moving the "blood-brain-barrier" to this point, I am allowing Redis to consume and produce as fast as possible as long as I keep the input buffer full and output buffer relatively empty. In other words Redis wasn't being blocked (for the most part) by waiting on me to push and pull data in and out of my running JVM on every single read/write.

ADDENDUM: Just had a fun impl thought for anyone that read this and thought it was interesting... a custom InputStream and OutputStream impl along the lines of the JDK's Buffered streams, but the input and output streams are actually backed by direct ByteBuffers.

The use-cases for the stream would need to be very specific and the underlying approach clearly spelled out in the Javadoc, but it would provide a nice bridge between standard JDK stream-based I/O and the NIO work without burdening the caller with knowing about how to use the NIO APIs.

For anyone interesting, I'll likely add a first-pass impl of this to the Universal Binary JSON Java libs[1] later today to compliment the re-usable ByteArray stream impls that are there already.

[1] https://github.com/thebuzzmedia/universal-binary-json-java
Hello! All I ask is for your opinion: If you were developing an iPhone running (fitness) app, what kind of neat or untraditional features would want to implement? Thanks! :)
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IMO, the hard part isn't rendering enough polygons to be photorealistic.

It's crossing the uncanny valley of human facial expressions, so they look natural rather than creepy.
Startup founders: reach out to journalists and reporters
As a startup founder bootstrapping my own site, I found a service called Cision.com that provide media contacts (journalists, freelance writers, etc.) This database is used by lots of PR firms and media people to find out who's who. But the price is steep, about $2,500 for the package. What you get is a whole list of detailed contacts infos (phone number included) of all journalists who's writing about your vertical.

So being an entrepreneur myself, my idea is to split the cost with someone else, ideally 4 or 5 other startups to lower the cost (but more is better). If we get a group of 5 or more, our average cost will be lowered substantially.

So if you're looking for journalists to reach out to them, this is it (or you'll have to spend countless hours going through Twitter and LinkedIn). I had a demo with them and a bunch of screenshots as well. Ping me if you want to see.

(Disclaimer: I'm a regular HN here. This is a throw away account because I don't want to risk posting stuff that link to my original account.)
Can you get a virtual server with SSH running on port 80?
Well, the permanant "special" is a bit of a red flag...
> ... given a maze and a cheese, any route to the cheese more efficient than the one the teacher suggests is morally suspect.

Somewhat off-topic: The peer-instruction (PI) movement just launched an online community [1]. This semester I've started using a variation on PI in the law-school course I teach (advanced contract drafting and -review). It seems to be working well, and the students really like it.

"The PI technique relies on the power of the 'flipped classroom.' Information transfer (i.e., a teacher transferring knowledge to students) takes place in advance, typically through online lectures. In short, students study before rather than after class. ¶ As a result, the classroom becomes a place for active learning, questions, and discussion. Instructors spend their time addressing students' difficulties rather than lecturing. ¶
While originally developed for Mazur's introductory physics courses, PI is now used across multiple disciplines, from the sciences to the humanities."

Of course, this all presupposes that the students will actually do the reading in advance, which is not always a given with 3Ls ....

[1] http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/press-releases/peer-...
99 Problems But Money Ain't One
everything2.com ?
If you want to hustle do it now, get aggressive, get your product out there, make a better product, cut a better deal with influences/power users etc.

Keep working on this or other ideas and don't blame your lack of success on external factors it is self defeating. First to market historically has almost always lost, all about how execute it's a long long race to the top and when you get there, better not slow down. Google wasn't first, facebook wasn't first, apple is never first.
I had a hard time reading this and extracting "the limitations of this guy's studies", do you have any more details?
Can't you see the poor the guy is just talking about his frustrations? He sees a guy with a similar idea who just got a little over a million in investment and he's basically saying "damn, that could've been me but I did x, y, and z wrong plus there are a few things going against me that are out my control".

Nowhere did he say Sahil isn't skilled. Now, I've spoken to Sahil before and he really is a really impressive person but putting that aside, I don't think building a product in a weekend automatically makes the builder skilled (though in Gumroad's case, yeah, he is skilled). You can launch crap in a day just the same as you can in 10 years. Irrelevant.

I think you underestimate the power of investment too. A better product doesn't always mean success. To me that idea is a myth in the same family of the whole American Dream, you can do anything if you work hard idea. A better product is certainly an advantage but perception counts far more than reality and $1M can buy you a really valuable perception. That $1M gives Gumroad credibility and press. Meanwhile, this 17-year-old nobody could be on to something far better but nobody cares... yet.

He's not saying he's quitting, just that he feels like quitting. The really awesome thing about this is that while everyone here is piling on this kid he just helped himself out. Maybe he did use a link-baity title but it sure worked. He may get overly critical comments here but I know word will spread to places online where the people won't have the same mindset as we do over here and when this story reaches those places he's going to get a lot of positive attention instead. I like this kid, he's going to do well. And mentioning his age was smart, not irrelevant. If he were 30 this wouldn't even get posted but he's 17 and everyone wants to root for the young underdog and read his 1 in a million success story. This is really really sneakily smart of him. I think he knows exactly what he's doing. Lay off the guy.
I'm currently working on a similar solution that will have some of those features - http://www.gigbasket.com Beta is due to launch in March 2012.

There are a few similar services implemented already though, but they are either too complex or too primitive in my opinion, therefore I decided to give a shot rolling out my own solution. Nevertheless, the ones that I have found are:

http://www.jobspeaker.com/

http://applymate.com/

http://gigcart.com/

http://www.jobkatch.com/
That's it! I thought it was [something]2.com.