skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suggest avoiding the word "discriminate"—its emotional overtones are too strong. Here we're merely differentiating between multiple candidates, and doing our best to be fair. Enshrined in law is the notion that it's unfair not to hire someone merely because she's planning to take maternity leave shortly after starting. I admit that calling this "unfair" confounds my intuition—forcing a company to subsidize a new mother strikes me as unfair, and neglecting to disclose a pregnancy borders on fraud—but perhaps I can trigger a sense of unfairness even without reference to the company's well-being.

Suppose Alice and Barbara both apply for a job for which they are equally qualified. Alice is newly pregnant, but (per the law) the prospective employer isn't allowed to inquire about this. If the company hires Alice, the company suffers—and so does Barbara. It's impossible to afford pregnant women special treatment without harming women who aren't (and perhaps don't plan to become) pregnant.

Life is full of choice and chance. When trying to legislate away the consequences, expect bad side-effects.
Wikipedia is a fantastic resource, but it is first and foremost an Encyclopedia, a reference. It has many times helped me refresh my memory or helped explain something I read first in another context. But it is not a good place to learn a brand new subject.

There are many good resources to learn math, most in the form of books (some of which have digital versions). Personally, I find it best to find a subtopic that interests me and dive in. Though I will say that I would recommend "Chapter Zero" to most people wanting to get back into math after a long break.
Horizontal scrolling is the expected behavior on tablets
Video Tut: How to recall email from Outlook.
Mighty morphing hexapod bot is back
For performance-critical applications, I think binary encoding is warranted. After all Ethernet/TCP/IP are binary as well.
Fake activism hurts real activism. Please label your fiction as such.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amina_Abdallah_Arraf_al_Omari
Ah, but the only person who considers the "root" of your product blog to be the blog home is you.

Everybody else thinks they're reading a blog on your product site, and that clicking the logo will take you to the root of that. In other words, the homepage for your product. When it doesn't, they tend to simply hit the back button enough times to leave.
How to cool a PC with toilet water
Contrast with Heinlein on writing: "Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."
I'm going to graduate in a year. How do I prove my skills to get a great job at a stable startup?
Metatrader Java API
Provides Java interface to MetaQuotes™ trading servers using the standard MetaTrader client terminals
The Tap Lab, Backed by Harmonix Trio, Pushes Mobile Gaming Into Real World
It appears the link you provided authenticates anyone who clicks it as you, is that intentional?

The user email addres is: berhanero...@gmail.com (obfuscated here for obvious reasons)

And the account in question is fully editable.
30 million users later, Instagram finally arrives on Android
Wow. AMAZING advice Jason. I took Amy Hoy's 30x500 course, which opened my eyes to how a 10% month to month growth rate can be crazy in just a few years. The chart shown in a recent post of hers is mind boggling: http://unicornfree.com/2012/3-years-of-bootstrapping-half-a-...
Don't know about the circuit. Hopefully someone competent will jump in and verify it won't kill you. But the picture of the Focus device raises the obvious question: how do you position the electrodes precisely? If you read the studies, different positions (over different brain areas) give very different results. (The difference between placing anode vs. cathode over the brain area is night and day.) The Focus looks like it is designed to be plopped onto the head like headphones. Exactly what brain area is being stimulated and on whose head?
> We have millennia-old assumptions about peoples' relationships with work (that there will always be useful work for people to do, making it fair and reasonable to structure a society where everyone who can work must) that are about to become invalid

This makes no sense. Work can be categorized as either creative or non-creative. Computers, software, robots, etc. are destroying the demand for non-creative human work. Great! Every person who loses a non-creative job, ends up finding a creative one! Machines are incapable of doing anything genuinely creative and in my humble professional opinion, will never be able to.

That leaves all the creative work for us. And the fun part? The creative work market is only limited by our imagination and our imagination is truly infinite.
Any of you fastmail.fm customers, can you tell me whether or not they support calendar sync/sharing? If so, how well does it work for you?
To be fair, most revolutions are started / headed by the bourgeois, but the foot solders are generally from the working class. Also, other than the American Revolution, most are about the suffering of the masses - at least plausibly.
Employees and the Sales/Marketing Function of a Company
it's done to be funny

Sleeping with the hooker is not framed as a funny or positive thing. The game makes it an empty and depressing act, leaving the main character feeling unfulfilled.

Also if you sleep with her without a condom you get an STD and it's Game Over, so there's even a helpful PSA included.
Why You Should Try a Hackathon
That's kind of my point. In fact, let me go back and add another company from that era: Netscape. VCs backed Netscape, too. Their whole model includes a built-in failure rate.
Writing a new programming language from scratch in order to enable the writing of a new HTML rendering engine from scratch is at least ambitious!
Downvotes totally undeserved. The notion that you have to use a specific browser- even if it's "a modern browser"- should have died with IE 6. Progressive enhancement of web applications is not hard, and is only overlooked because of ignorance or laziness.

"use chrome" sounds an awful lot like "site only available in IE 6". That's why we're in this mess.
How does the need for technical skills differ from the past?

How many of us in the HN crowd could jump onto the factory floor, or hop into a tractor on a farm and do it successfully on day one? I've been doing the latter for most of my life and I'm still not very good at it. Programming is a different skill set, but it's not any more difficult to acquire than any other skill needed to be employed now or in the past.

The need for "unskilled" labour has mostly been a function of demand. If you can't find a skilled person to drive your tractor, you have to take your chances with training someone who is not. The job has to be done regardless. The crops will whither away to nothing if you are unable to get them off the field in time.

I think we'll see one of two scenarios play out:

1. Programmers will be in ever increasing demand to the point where companies will be forced to hire anyone off the street and bring them up to speed on the work, like farmers and manufacturers have had to do in the past.

2. Programmers will not be in proportionally increasing demand and only the very best of the best will be employed in the field. Just acquiring the skills will not be enough to find you a job.
Not nearly as extensive as any Linux package manager. I've tried.
I'm confident I would have helped out my friend. If he can't hack it once he gets the job, nothing I can do to help. I'll help anyone get a job (in an indirect way such as this) and what they do there is up to them.
Sugru in primary colours
You and I might disagree on tax policy... that's fine! We might disagree on flavors of ice cream too! We're still fine. But, when you say that I have no right to call my husband my husband. And the very idea that I have a loving relationship with him that the government might recognize and treat equally with a same-sex couple. That very idea prompts you to go google for "nom", then find the donation page, you then have to go get your wallet, you then have to fill out the form on the site, then you type in the credit card number (check it twice!), you then click donate. All of that action was precipitated by the very thought of me and my husband being married. Remember, Prop 8 happened after gay marriage was legal in California. I'm far less offended by Westboro, because they have no concept of what they are doing. They function in a crazy world that is separate from ours. To know that a fellow language inventor has such feeling about me... that is hard to describe... and is different than a normal political disagreeance.
Operations research and hard systems modeling are neat. The only gripe I have is that often times the models make simplifying assumptions which hold tenuously at best. One example of this is the Gaussian copula used in VAR. In actuality, neither the marginals nor the copula are Gaussian in the large majority of cases; they ARE stable distributions, but the tails can be absolutely HUGE. The Gaussian distribution is attractive because it is well behaved, and in most cases we don't have enough observations to properly understand the full tail structure of the underlying distribution. As a result, you get quants that make a model and call a small subset of points (which are completely valid) "outliers". Then when we observe the tails of the distribution, things fall apart because over-leveraged bankers made decisions based on the notion that the model accurately reflected reality.
Is there an API, or any easy way to get the URLs of the large images? I want these images to rotate as my desktop background for the next few decades.
Really cool. I didn't know there was an awkward oil painting of Hillary Clinton hanging in the White House.
classes will be on freenode IRC chat, channel #ubuntu-meeting
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1940 Census Individual Records Released
You may be right. But I really find it difficult to see the harm in one-upsmanship over apologizing to customers. I've seen much worse ways of one-upping others.

I mean as you say, things are always going to break, whether you do shitty stuff or not. What's wrong with making an effort to make the most sincere apology you can in that case?
Zombies, Run: Why $7.99 beats $0.99
It relies on Mozilla's notifications API, which Chrome does not support (AFAIK).
Bone-headed HR move, particularly in light of the prevailing laws but quite apart from them, too. It's invasive and uncomfortable, and probably not a place I'd feel welcome as an employee.

What it mostly reinforces to me, however, is just how terribly ignorant and wishful laws like that are. If I build a business and bottom out my bank account, kill myself with 100-hour weeks, and build my very life around making the company work, you better believe I have the right to know if the person I'm hiring plans to take off for 6 months right after being hired. And you better believe that weighs against them in the hiring process. I didn't set up the business as a facet of family planning services: I want to hire someone who's willing to work hard to build my business in exchange for pay. If a person knows they're going to take 6 months off immediately, then it's not time to apply for a job, because you're not going to be working; apply for something when you're ready to actually do it.

It continually amazes me how government largesse and layers of indirection break people's natural intuitions and allow them to condone forcing a third party to pay for their own life choices, in a vain attempt to mitigate the unfortunate trade-offs that accompany our constrained mortal existence.

Transparency is not a bad thing. There are people out there who want a solid job that pays well and fulfills their ambition while making good money; and there are employers willing to offer those things in exchange for solid performance, a reasonable salary, and reliability. Get out of our way with this red tape garbage and let us find each other and do great things.
Typically a team would be "named" for its location, general responsibilities, and/or the codename of the project they're working on, particularly if they're large enough to have an actual COO and a "Director of Development".

A project codenamed FizzBuzz is not out of the realm of possibility, but it would strike me as a very unusual choice to name a project after a programmer interview test....
Want a Raise? PayScale Has An App for That
How is probability theory decidedly non-discrete? As far as I know as long as the number of possible outcomes is discrete (and in CS applications this is the common case) the integration of density functions turns into simple summations and there is a vast body of results and research limited to just this area of probability theory.
Until engineers are finally able to build autonomous robots to fix your plumbing. And if they can fix your plumbing they can certainly fix a lot of other things.
Are you sure you should be submitting "LWN subscriber-only content"?

It seems like they might not be too happy about that.
Amusingly the proposed solution in this blog post is almost line-for-line exactly the method Reddit uses to rank comments - proof, I think, that the method isn't "too complicated."

When you're working with a system managing orders, where there's a direct human interaction with the algorithm (like the top-level poster is), simplicity is somewhat important. When you're working with a system that's designed to look like magic to the end user, making the system more magical is often better, because it makes it less intuitive to game.
Yeah, the auth token is in the url. You should get rid of that. Fun to see the utm params as well. I guess you are a "Disengaged User."
Introducing Push Notifications for Firefox
European Commission Opens Antitrust Investigation of Motorola Mobility
Ask HN: Review my startup, qwinelizabet.com
Just launching a new concept of social casual betting in mobile&web app.
Would be great to have your feedback!
- currently on Fb connect because of social design - should we have twitter, email,...?
- we believe people bet because of fun and social challenge and so we avoid gambling with money - do you believe that can work?
- we invented a character - the Qwin Elizabet - to make it more fun and casual - we are betting on that! - what do you think?
If he had donated $1000 to a fund opposing inter-racial marriage…

Bravo. This is exactly the argument we should make. If he had donated to pass an anti-miscegenation law, we would all know it was wrong.

You're free to believe whatever you want. You're free to believe men and women marrying men and women is wrong. You're free to believe that whites marrying blacks is wrong. It IS supposed to be a free country.

But when you donate to pass a law about it, it changes from belief to infringement on rights.
The JavaScript interface is tragic. Here's my take on it: https://gist.github.com/2293096
I guess I'm a bit confused about how you're using casual to describe gaming. I'd argue that King Quest were some of the least casual games in history. I'm a lousy FPS player, but none of the Modern Warfare games would require a tenth the time I spent trying to get past the Yeti in Kings Quest V.

The old Sierra games required constant focus and diligent note taking that I would have thought would rule them out from being casual. You'd never get anywhere with these games just spending ten minutes a day playing on the train. It can work for Monkey Island, since you can keep slamming things together until you win, but the Sierra games punish anything short of building a complete mental map of the game universe.

EDIT: I suddenly became afraid that this post came off as snarky or sarcastic. I didn't intend for it to be. Honestly, I'm just getting old and recognizing that the definition of casual changed while I wasn't looking. I really do want to know what it now means for a game to be casual.
With Over 30 Million Users On iOS, Instagram Finally Comes To Android
There's a difference between being honest and saying: "we fucked up, here's what we've done to prevent this from happening in the future, here's a credit for some free stuff" and posting pictures of yourself at the verge of tears. We're past diminishing returns and into theatrics.
Loved this game as a kid. My granddad had a computer with it installed. When he was downstairs talking to my parents I'd load it up. At the beginning of the game it had a bunch of questions to 'prove you were and adult'. I rarely got past those questions! That was half the fun, when I actually got in the game I didn't really know what to do but loved the way you could apparently do anything.
Wait, wasn't this an April Fools' Day joke?
Show HN: my weekend project - built with jQuery and Bootstrap
Just a small note, your website breaks the back button. It would be nice if it did not break the back button though.
I'm not talking about importing the generic functions themselves at all. I'm talking about importing the modules that export those generic functions, so that I'll have the modules in my namespace to be able to name the generic functions.

Again: dot-notation lets me write:

import scala.collection.immutable.List

def addn(n: Int) = (list: List[Int]) => list.map(_ + n)

Instead of:

import scala.collection.immutable.List

def addn(n: Int) = (list: List[Int]) => List.map(list,_ + n)

See the difference? And then, remember that map() is not a multimethod. It doesn't actually do dynamic dispatch on its first argument, or on any other argument. It's a type-class method; it does static dispatch on the functor type List[].

You cannot define map() as a generic function, at least not in the sense that Common Lisp and Clojure use the term "generic function".

It can be conveniently expressed as a type-class method of a class 'Functor f :: * -> * ' or a trait method for a Functor[A]. Not a generic function.
Basecamp via Chrome Frame
Marketing site or the app itself? The app is a Backbone app and uses pushState, which might be what you're experiencing. The marketing site... is just a normal site :-)
Your "fork me on github" image is broken. I bet you'd get a lot more watchers if you fix it ;)
I think OP is LWN's editor!
Simplicity is definitely a goal. These days, not a day goes by on the Rust team in which we don't discuss ways to simplify the language.

My colleague Dave Herman always says that language design goes through cycles: You identify a problem, add solutions to fix it, then discover that these solutions are best merged with some other ideas. The result is that, as a language evolves, complexity goes up and down. I think that we're coming off a peak of complexity and the language is going to evolve toward simplicity in the near term.

Just to name a few simple examples, removing the alias analysis pass and removing "native modules" are some simplifications that mostly have consensus at this point.
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The biggest potential problem I see with this is that contributions are non-refundable. Unlike Kickstarter, which has an all-or-nothing “pledge” model, 8-Bit Funding sends contributions to the project creators immediately. That means small transactions have less value (thanks to PayPal fees), but also that creators get funding straight away for immediate needs, perhaps helping development get going sooner. It’ll be interesting to see how this works out.
Agreed. BTW, I just changed this. Clicking the logo while at the blog now returns you to /
What provides the background music to your code?
What do you listen to while furiously hacking away?
Talk shows? Podcasts? Techno? Trance? Particular song(s) on repeat? Pop? Sports? A Prairie Home Companion(!!!)?
Check my account name against the author of the article :)

I appreciate your concern. I do occasionally post a subscriber link in a place like HN or reddit with the idea of sharing some useful news and making people aware of what we do. So you shouldn't be worrying about me abusing the LWN subscriber link mechanism (which I implemented in the first place); instead, you should worry about my shameless and transparent marketing efforts :)
If you think this has not already been implemented in the UK for a LONG time, i.e. pre-RIPA 2000, then you are very naive.

Ask anyone who has ever worked on infrastructure at a large UK ISP or exchange (e.g. LINX). Copious secret services systems are already used.

The key difference, the key burden that is being (publicly) demanded in 2012 by the services is real-time! Presumably, this was such a burden to the overall infrastructure of the majority of UK ISPs that they just pushed back when requested... hence the new law proposals.
Yes, the explanation of "imaginary votes" is by far the simplest way of thinking about the situation. Having mathematical formalism and a rigorously studied methods makes me feel OK about doing it though, otherwise I would be very uncomfortable with the approach :)

I love Bayesian statistics from a conceptual point of view, but the ease with which one ventures into the land of analytic intractability kind of puts me off more complex models. MCMC is such a clumsy tool (in addition to taking forever); variational methods look interesting to me but I don't really feel they are quite there yet.
"License"? I wasn't aware Amazon was claiming any sort of control over use of the AWS API. Certainly any such assertion would raise serious legal questions like some of those now at issue in Oracle's lawsuit against Google.
Yes, Wikipedia has it's advantages as an encyclopedia.

I simply mentioned it here since Steve advocates just diving in and following links on wikipedia as a way to learn a subject.

This might be a great way to find out what stuff is out there to learn or for somebody more familiar with Math to get a synopsis of a topic but as a learning resource for a newcomer to any particular field it seems likely to reduce you to a jibbering wreck very quickly.
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I'm using "messing" in the same sense the gp used "mucking":

Ubuntu was soooo close to surpassing Windows from a "I just want to get stuff done without mucking with the machine" standpoint.
ساخت مغز مصنوعی، پایان عصر انسان طبیعی؟
As someone who uses both constantly,
Whitespace languages and curly braces are the same.
For a good programmer, she can take out the curly brace and it should look like a whitespace language. Likewise, a whitespace language would just have braces inserted everywhere there would be an indent change. '{' for forward indent and '}' for backwards indent.
v. nice practical writing advice
Note that we don't forbid shared mutable state entirely (we don't forbid anything really, as we have an unsafe sublanguage that allows all the pointer tricks that you can do in C++), but we want to contain data races. Basically, as the FAQ says, "you can break the rules, if explicit about where and how".

We've learned that, especially when it comes to concurrency, there really is no one model that supports everything you might want to do. Instead, the idea is to support safe, data-race-free language constructs, and to make those the easiest ones to use. Data races (and memory unsafety) are clearly marked in "unsafe" blocks, with the idea that if you find a concurrency bug in your software, you can grep for that keyword and go over those blocks only, instead of having to crawl through the entire codebase.

The same principle applies to null. You can get nullable pointers (use option<T>), but you have to declare that that's what you want. You also have to declare some strategy for handling the null case every time you use the pointer, or at least communicate your intent to fail on null via the .get() method. The vast majority of pointers in any program aren't nullable, so in practice we've found that this eliminates a lot of bugs.
Real-Time Communication (aka Video Conf) in experimental Firefox build