skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I look at code I see structure. Before I even see individual squiggles, brackets, semicolons, I see structures and blocks of code. One code-block indented in another, "oh look this is a huge block here", "these are 3 nested ones" and so on. Brackets don't help me there but indentation does.

Let me ask you this, do you already indent your code? If not it is probably a tangled mess and I wouldn't want to continue the conversion with you. But, if you already indent your code, then why do you need brackets? You are wasting space and you are repeating yourself. It is like enforcing that every declaration of "int counter" to be followed by a comment saying "// declaration of counter as an int".

The only reason to use brackets is to minify a piece of code or to appeal to C++ or C programmers. So Javascript benefits from having brackets. I guess Rust does too because it is trying to appeal to C++ programmers.
True, Rust has more syntactic rules than Go, but it's still (in my mind) a very small language, especially compared to C++. The developers are very conscious of language complexity and will not introduce new concepts spuriously. The increased complexity is because they're aiming Rust at a different application domain than Go, and for that application domain they feel that programmers require more fine-grained control.
Another version of the flying car
The one example that I've found of a good site that does really good average ratings is steepster, it picks teas that you have previously rated and indicates the rating you gave to them. This way the users rating is much better and will give you a much more meaningful mean.
Instead of displaying stars, Amazon could display a percentage, which under the hood represents the Wilson confidence number. It would be totally intuitive to browse: first come all the 100% items, then the 99's, and so on.
I can imagine the technology behind this would be great for architecture and real estate. Imagine wanting to buy a home and using the museum view to navigate it remotely.
But it's not simply a matter of creativity. Apart from contentious instances pertaining to the complete omission of indentation (if (sdfg) { a; b; }), there are also occasional cases where I'd argue that semantically, you have a block, but syntactically, you don't; for instance, I've always very much favoured the approach when writing OpenGL code to indent everything between a glBegin and glEnd to separate the vertex data from the surrounding code and make it immediately obvious how objects in the scene are grouped. I think several indentation-based languages would ignore the initial indent increase here and consider the indent decrease before the glEnd to be the end of the block containing the group of statements...
Xbox and Playstation have the same kind of games, and Call of Duty is of course on both. Consumers have expectations of what a social game is. Why not offer them the choice of social network to play them on?
New Paper on Test-Case Reduction
Thanks, this was one of the ideas I was trying to get across, that by shrugging and going along with stuff like this, we're condoning and supporting it.
I implemented this in a rating system once. Got multiple bug reports, people complained that the system calculates averages wrong, because there are two ratings and the average is obviously not the number they are seeing.
EasyBib boasts half a billion citations with 34 million students on its platform
Citrix CloudStack to Apache Changes the OpenStack Equation = Brilliant
This is an opinion of course. I always found binary protocols to be harder to tweak in a way that a shortcut in coding provides valid-ish result (working for your specific implementation). It was always much easier, even without intending to, remove some whitespace in text protocol only to discover later someone somewhere relied on it being there.

YMMV... maybe you had different experience in the past.
Safe intelligence augmentation is a "when," not an "if."

Hell, Piracetam is extremely safe and seems to be worth around 10 IQ points. There's going to be lots more innovation on that frontier. We're already making anti-degenerative-diseases progress and hopefully figuring out nutrition for real, as well as cracking DNA and various personalized medicines.

Intelligence augmentation will be bitterly debated and fought against when it comes online, but it's a hell of a lot better than some of the alternatives.
To follow the Dieter Rams quote, good design is "as little design as possible". Those pie charts each display 6 pieces of information and are intended to compare and contrast those data points in 3 contexts. 18 points.

When you realize how little message is actually contained there then they seem to be less about telling you something useful and more about looking pretty.
HTC One X with Android ICS - A competitor for iPhone
Yes, that's a very good idea (and actually the one I had in mind when I talked about correcting the bias). The real problem is when avoidance of surveys correlates with one of the survey answers, like "Should we start using micro surveys?".
The Top 9 Most Costly Financial Services Data Breaches
Despite the focus on other industries, though, financial services continues to be a top target for data breaches, caused by hacks, card scams, insider data theft, and the loss of a portable device that contains financial or private information.

And the details of the data breaches are downright scary, or ingenious, depending on your point of view. Here are 9 of the largest most recent financial services data breaches.
> doesn't have his GED because of some unfortunate circumstances regarding his classes being on the 2nd floor of the school and having broken both legs.

His school is exempt from the Americans with Disabilities Act?
Really cool! Is this for 8-bit inspired projects only? Your "Learn More" sections says it's for any game, but it would be kinda strange to see super advanced 3d games on here.
Why show the second figure to the user? They don't need to see the calculation you made to determine the sort.

Just sort the objects in the order determined by this formula and only show the ratings given by users in the interface.
Actually, developing web applications isn't much different. you still need to obey the rules and follow best practices (especially UX-wise), otherwise customers will go to another provider. So by saying you have a huge freedom, you are just lying to yourself. Because you don't. Unless you're making stuff for yourself alone.
Yahoo! Groups was awesome. One of the best acquisitions they made. Originally written in Python in 1997.
Printable Robots: MIT Project to Let You Design and Fabricate Your Own Machines
All network IO in go is non-blocking. Channels and goroutines avoid the nested callback mess. Go is also a better designed language than JS.

Gorilla[1] provides nice libraries for web development in Go.

[1]http://gorilla-web.appspot.com/
So, anyone have the formula for 5-star ratings?
He's the stupid person's idea of a clever person. A one-dimensional actor who has played "very smug man" for so long that everyone's forgotten that he's not actually accomplished anything worth being smug about... And Hugh Laurie was always the talent in their double-act.
It sounds like they have room to grow on the quality scale. They miss some good ones, as a recent HN post on a successful reject (who just missed the cutoff) showed.
You have overlooked a critical point: no one has to mess with this (otherwise quite simple) formula anymore, except the programmer, and even he already got a working piece of Ruby code.
Could you recommend a book or an online course? Or anything really? As more of a self-taught programmer, I'd love to be more acquainted with the mathematics that go along with computer science, but I'm really not sure where to start. I've been waiting for khan academy's offering on the subject but it's been years and it seems like they'll never get around to it.
It seems as though Apple's innovation is becoming synonymous with "gimmick". First it was Siri next it will be 3d pictures and video?

I couldn't be any less interested. Just one more reason to switch to Windows Phone.
Patients Know Best (patientsknowbest.com) -- though we're not hiring aggressively at the moment (which is why we don't have an entry on this page otherwise...), I imagine it can't hurt to keep in touch if our mission looks interesting.

Our webapp is currently old-school enterprise Java, partly because we're building atop a few major bits of OSS that are Java/JEE, but we're not opposed to becoming more polyglot as we expand.
what?

There's nothing wrong with the math. It just requires better educators to explain it, with analogies and metaphor. Why would you compromise the data/outcome in a hope to simplify the problem?

Further: wouldn't you look to hire (and train) the best people who understand the domain they are in, thereby being able to judge whether the outcome of an equation is valid or not?

Hint: insurance/loan underwriters regularly end up in situations where the human component of a transaction may look different than the data, and react accordingly...
You're confusing physical sex and internal gender identity. Protection varies by state: http://www.transgenderlaw.org/ndlaws/index.htm
Read, Reply, Archive, Delete
Fund Raiser for Google PageRank Alternative
This Open Source Project aims to bring some real time trending, Open Graph factoring and transparency to web search. Please help us make this a reality.
Says code editor roundup, but doesn't list code features like highlighting, auto-complete, or SFTP/GIT/SVN file access.
You should take a look at Rust's typestate mechanism:

http://doc.rust-lang.org/doc/rust.html#typestate-system

The way I understand them (and I say this a lot, but I could be wrong) is that it's like a more powerful version of Eiffel's design by contract, which allows the compiler to test whether invariants hold at compile time rather than just throwing assertions at runtime.
er... and the problem with bucket categorizing?

80-100% = * * * * *

60%-79% = * * * *

etc..
Requirement of Materials by Piping Code ASME B31.3
Ouch, I managed not to see that at all. Thanks!
>otherwise customers will go to another provider.

Isn't that the whole point (let the customer decide)? It's your project and you can design it any way you want as long as it works. You can try something new but it doesn't mean you'll be popular.
> Finnish government, seriously? Is this the best you can do?

Apparently yes.

Here in Italy it's been a long time since people or minority groups of a industry have had a saying in metter of political and economic strategy.

With the current electoral law we can't choose our representatives (you can vote for a party that already decided who will represent voters in the parliament), referendum proposals almost never become an actual referendum, getting lost in bureaucracy or opposed by the parliament, people are never listened to (one recent eclatant example being the government telling people that of course they can protest against distruction of Susa Valley (Val Susa) but the government will proceed anyway).

So, IMHO, democracy, as it is now, is not working...
>Would you stop visiting Google if it had a homepage full of news?

Yes, clutter = slow, slow = I wouldn't use it.

I can't actually remember the last time I saw the home page outside a screenshot, I just use the chrome url bar search, which is about the limit i can currently imagine for a sparse search interface.
Most of SPDY's "speediness" comes from fundamental design properties, not its regrettably atextual implementation.

From Google's perspective, this level of optimization is appropriate -- they have scaling problems most of us could only dream of. From everyone else's perspective, however, it's very over-engineered.
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How To Design a Successful Interview Process for Hiring Top Talent
> We won't get rid of hookers until we change or get rid of capitalism

While that's true, prostitution was just fine in every other system. Maybe if we could get rid of scarcity of resources, there would be nothing to trade for sex. But that still leaves us with all kinds of psychological reasons, so maybe if we could get rid of human nature...
And as soon as humans saw that decision making formulas were too complex to understand, they relieved themselves of responsibility for those decisions. "Why didn't we place an order?" "Because the computer decided not to and I have no idea why."

And somehow the solution isn't to have the computer output a detailed description explaining why it arrived at the decision that it did?
I agree with everything you posted above and have no solution better than "hushmail and live with it".
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Yes, that is useful. That's why Python has with statements, for example. C++ RAII or Java try-with-resources can be used similarly.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0343/
While I agree with the spirit of the article, this is one of those cases where a Bayesian treatment is conceptually much clearer.

Assume that ratings are being generated by a stable stochastic process where the underlying distribution is multinomial (ignoring the ordinal character of ratings, for the time being) and use a dirichlet conjugate prior. This gives you a posterior distribution over new ratings for an item. The benefit of a posterior here is that it lets you rank items by thinking in terms of the probability that the viewer would rank one item higher than another at random. By adjusting the magnitude of the alpha parameter to the dirichlet prior, you adjust your sensitivity to small numbers of observations. A small initial alpha will lead to rapid changes in the posterior upon observing ratings, whereas a large alpha requires a significant body of evidence.

The best part of the multinomial model with conjugate dirichlet prior is that the math is REALLY simple. The normalizing constant for the dirichlet distribution looks scary when stated in terms of the gamma function, but given this is the discrete case, just pretend everywhere you see the gamma(x), it is replaced with (x - 1)! and you will be ok.

Let me know if you would like to learn more, I would be happy to help.
JPA Named Queries
Df
asfasfasfasdfasfasfdasfsadfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfdf
The cost of Groupon's incompetence
Brendan Eich of Mozilla gave $1000 to support gay marriage ban
http://www.ted.com/talks/amit_sood_building_a_museum_of_muse...

This is the video introducing this project at TED.
GMail and other webmail providers just need to add this and make it a configurable option in the settings. Heck, even Outlook should give the users this option via some wizard (they seem to have one for everything else!). Totally agree that this needs to be as invisible as possible. When I first set up PGP in Thunderbird a few years back it was quite a bit of flaffing about, add to that the fact that your key reside on any one of a million servers...

The cynic in me says it's been done in this way on purpose, i mean, don't want to make the feds actually do any work to be able to snoop around my emails.
7 Key Drivers to the Best Investor For Your Startup
Here, I'd like to quote one of my friends' opinion: Google, right now, is driven by fear, not by vision. This fear-driven development (FDD... :-D ), is not a good sign. I don't know whether it's because when the organization exceeds certain size, this must happen or there are other reasons behind it, but I do believe that, when exceeds some limit, innovative and creative idea lost the best environment to grow, unless you try to keep the organization at a reasonable scale.
But how is Simple Stupid in the Amazon case a better output for the user? Do you, as an Amazon shopper, really believe that the item with one 5-star review is a better bet for you than the item with 580 reviews and an average of 4.5-stars?
Nice post, and a good explanation of how CSS handles identifiers and strings. But I can't figure out why you'd want to specify a font-family without using quotes. To save two bytes?
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I feel like there's an American Spring going on. Before 2012, people have been very reluctant to blow whistles on unethical activities in their own companies, for fear of losing their jobs (likely) and damaging their career in the long term (unlikely, but much scarier). That seems to be changing, with the NYT Goldman Sachs article and various revelations coming out in Silicon Valley. People are finally speaking out about ethical violations (such as the gross violation of policy inherent in a Facebook walk-through in a job interview process) that, a few years ago, people would have been terrified to disclose.

People keep silent about all kinds of scummy things that are happening because of fear, but it's the silence that allows bad actors to have as much success as they do.

In light of this, I think a lot of people, who have nothing to do with raganwald and don't know who he is, wanted the resignation letter to be real, not fictional.
10 Ways to (re) Structure JavaScript
Well you said it yourself: within reason.
Commercial TV stations are popular because they do it within reason.

Yes you can always try something new, but IMHO you're wasting time if there's no real purpose - other than taking a totally new approach by breaking common rules - in the long run.
Meet Cisco/Insieme's recruiter
Tell me more about Piracetam? I want 10IQ points :)
For those who do not understand the Wilson algorithm, see this post which was on HN recently, explaining how it works in a little more detail: http://amix.dk/blog/post/19588

(I agree with other commenters that it is complicated and lacks common sense to average users, but I feel like I have a general understanding of the concept thanks to the above link)
Chance of rolling a Yahtzee is 4.6029% (Markov Chain analysis)
I'm curious, who filed the bugs - the users of the system or the fellow builders of the system? If you rolled back this algorithm based on the bug reports, it sounds like you might have ended up listening to the prior bias of the people on your team, rather than the feedback of the people meant to use the system.
No, never. This story is preposterous in the depths it trolls to try to compare Yahoo with Google. Yahoo was a ontologically sorted link graph. Years later, after AltaVista imploded, they picked it up, but to call them a search giant? Ridiculous.
I think this book is very good. Lots of exercises and very clear. http://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Norman-L-Biggs/dp...
Actually these are listings from y-combinator alumni. That's cool.
Ask HN: Hiring Practices for Recent Grads
My son recently graduated from CMU with a Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics. A company in NYC invited him for an interview. We're 800 mile away.To my surprise, they do not cover travel expenses. Am I a dinosaur, is this a common practice nowadays?
Opera Mobile To Get Extensions
Evidence that human ancestors used fire one million years ago
I've been trying out the Art.sy beta, and although the Art Project seems to have more functionality, I like the navigation experience on Art.sy better. Art.sy is simpler and more artwork-focused, which leads to more random browsing. That said, Art Project is very well done. The winner of this market will probably be determined by content, ie. who can sign the most museum partnerships.
It only became news when the likes of Google and Wikipedia decided to protest and carry out a blackout... (I am not in the US, but this is what I have read)
Hooray. Seriously. Your situation was not just a moral trap but a legal one. It wouldn't surprise me if the whole exercise was an attempt to make you "dirty" for some future use.
Track sent emails in Gmail and get notified when it is opened
This actually looks really good. Congrats on the profit and good luck going forward. Good Article too, (saved for later)
I don't think Google is on a good path right now, but I would majorly hesitate to compare them to Yahoo. Yahoo has dawdled for years with no clear vision of what the hell they are doing. In fact, you could argue that Page's current strategy is a play against turning out like Yahoo. It's a pretty clear vision, even if I don't like it, and it's certainly product-oriented. They're focusing on one product and streamlining all the random crap they used to do just for the hell of it.

I don't know what will happen with Google, but I don't see Yahoo's fate in their future.
Levels (Skrillex Remix) Meets Metal
Guitar Dubstep
This was a system where I was supposed to display a star-rating (1-5 stars, with fractional stars as well) for each item.

The people reporting the problems were the users, and yes, this was bias, as they expected averages. That was exactly my point — while the statistics behind this method are sound, it is not what people expect. Building systems that don't do what people expect is difficult.
How is it a problem if the five-star reviews display first, then the four-star, and so on?
It seems like none of the projects have much finding.

Crowd-funding sites like this are likely one of those domains, like auction sites, where only the biggest few sites can really succeed. They don't work well without a huge base of funders.
I've been using this search engine for a week and I really like it. The only thing I've noticed is that Google has conditioned me to never look at the top section because that's where sponsored ad's are so I have to force myself to click on the top link.

Brainwashed by GOOG :)
This is awesome. This is perfect for what we need for our startup. We are going to use this. We won't need to worry about the negative aspects listed in these comments due to our use case. Wow. Thanks, HN. :)
The New Science of Building Great Teams
Home Secretary Theresa May has said the move will help bring "criminals, paedophiles and terrorists" to justice.

However, the home secretary told the Sun that "ordinary people" would have nothing to fear from the government's plans.

I think those 2 quotes sum it up really. And they say the Arab nations are oppressive... I can't believe the kind of morons we have running this country for us, but certainly explains when we're in such a financial sh!t.
> IMHO you're wasting time if there's no real purpose.

You're arguing something that no one has mentioned.
I saw your tweet that applications this cycle seem unusually good. Hence with 50% more applications and 50% more interviews, it seems that YC didn't scale when it comes to mitigating the risk of missing good startups. Unless of course the applications are graded perfectly - I'm sure you've been working to improve that. I'll let you know how you did on April 16th :)