skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of these things is not like the others.

(Visual Basic wasn't a web-specific technology)
I can't get past how needlessly wordy this article is. It's as if someone is trying to flaunt their language skills and it distracts me from the actual content; I must admit that I read the whole thing and did not catch wind of the author's point.

Sentences like these just read as nonsense to me:

"The intuition behind the theory is nonetheless compelling, which makes the scarcity of policy prescriptions frustrating."
I wrote an opensource scrabble/boggle solver.

Input your letters and we return the best words.

http://words.gumyum.com/
I think you're missing Unimpressive's point that if something can be run virtualized we don't cease to refer to it as an operating system. If Linux had been (perversely, ahistorically) developed as jslinux first before the bare-metal interfaces were implemented would it now be considered not-an-OS? Conversely would the act of porting it have blessed its status as an OS without regard to the presence of the same semantics and facilities in the browser version? I think if you're making this argument you're running against the tide of common _and_ academic usage, plenty of research OS projects have been tested on hardware simulators. Perhaps the easiest way to simplify this is to ask whether you can present any rule other than "browsers don't count" to distinguish the virtualized Linux case from the jslinux case.

The point being made is not that a browser is an OS, but that something using the facilities of a browser to implement all the operations and environment of an OS is... an OS. This seems almost like the duck typing versus strong typing approach - one view is that it's the behaviors that define the identity of something, the other is that it's the inheritance & implementation[].

[] Alternatively since it's April Fools, I'll argue that you're interrogating this from the wrong angle and presenting an essentialist view of OS-hood.
"that article made his fellow employees look as if they were traitors to the forces of good."

I didn't read that into it. The original piece by Pierce simply made the case that it's unethical for Zynga to gain ownership of a game he made and marketed completely in his own time, and since they were inflexible on that point, the decision was relatively straightforward for him. He then went on to criticize the design of Zynga's products, to explain how that made his decision even easier. The implication that other former coworkers are compromising their character by joining Zynga is never made by Pierce; it's your own interpretation.
Helped build ffi_gen, which uses Clang's parser to transform C header files into Ruby bindings. https://github.com/neelance/ffi_gen

Contributed some additional Homebrew recipes.

Gave a talk at CloudFoundry Open Tour. http://speakerdeck.com/u/jvoorhis/p/hacking-cloudfoundry
Yes, the 100K is based on a back-of-the-envelope, but for a startup with zero revenue every development and design hour we can spare helps us focus on the real task at hand: figuring out our market fit and making a great product.

This is less about supporting this browser or that browser and more about making sound business decisions and putting our users’ needs first. We’d like to think they would rather see requested features over support for a browser they don’t use.
Node.js bases everything around async programming, and this is just too difficult for mediocre programmers to wrap their heads around, and use effectively. (But it's fantastic for good programmers.)

I don't think Node is even trying to follow in the line of those other easy-to-use languages. Why would it want to?
"Related Films" on that page might have been the first April Fools "joke" I actually laughed at today.
No because the problem isn't searching for things, it is finding things that you know you want to install.

Let's say I wanted to install an app for Foobaring on my iPhone. The iPhone isn't the right tool for comparing the various choices, browsing reviews, reading comments. I'll just bust out my laptop, do some Googling real quick, make a decision, and then go type the name of the app I want into my phone and click "Install".

The problem is when I type in the name of the app I want, I may not find it, if the app is called "Foo-Bar 2000" but I searched for "Foobar 2000". The other option is App Store itunes:// links.

Having alternative search engines won't solve that problem.
I would have chosen Christian Bale
This may be unhelpful, but I think the color that best fits the question is plaid.

Just as you may say plaid is not a color, you may tell an entrepreneur he can't do "that", but he will.
Very cool project and I enjoyed reading your notes. I'm going to look into using this for the project I'm currently working on.
"With all his silly, comic roles in the past, it'll be hard for anyone to take him seriously."

Isn't that exactly what people said about Jim Carey, Robin Williams, Will Smith, and Tom Hanks (just to name a few)?
It is a little weird because every other major corporation also has a lot of data about you. Your landlord can come into your house and sell a list of items you own to the highest bidder. Everyone you ever owe money to you sends all your information to the credit reporting agencies. And so on, and so on. Singling out Facebook and Google is a little unfair. At least they have a privacy policy that you can opt out of. The credit bureaus? Not so much.
I found the last paragraph/sentence a little weird -
"Until then, I think people will still continue to mostly build in Rails with a large contingent going to iOS – the latter not due to the superiority of the development platform, but rather because that’s what is needed to access iOS users."

Rails -> iOS??? Apples and oranges.
I am always wary of these grand theories people come up with about why great civilisations fall. People tend to project their own values onto history. Conservatives invariably argue that societies fall because they become decadent and valueless, while liberals contend that societies became too stagnant and inflexible to survive. Observer bias is a big problem in the study of history.
> Since the inputs are identical

They aren't identical because NaN != NaN. That's what "identity" means.
Would tags & test suites be a good way to resolve dependencies?
GiftRocket (giftrocket.com)- San Francisco (no remote, no H1B)

Community Manager- employee #1

We're a small YC-backed company (W11) working in the gift card space. We have been growing like crazy over the past year. We're looking for a technically minded community manager to help us handle customer support, gather and analyze feedback, and help with portions of our marketing efforts. The position is also employee #1, so we expect this person to become a leader in our organization as we scale.

More info here:
http://www.giftrocket.com/jobs
Developing for ie in the old days was usually at the expense of other browsers because of stuff like active x. There was no way to port that stuff to other browsers, which is why you had ie only websites. there will never come a time when writing standards compliant code becomes the problem your predicting. But the reality of today is that writing standards compliant code for ie is somewhere between difficult and impossible defending on what you're trying to accomplish.

IE is deserving of the trashing it receives.
"The authors do a convincing job of explaining why things are they way they are, but fail to explain how we might go about changing them."
I am not a lawyer, but I do know that HR departments at larger companies coach their employees not to speak poorly of any ex-employee for fear of defamation lawsuits. The industry standard even for horribly incompetent employees is to say only when the employee worked for you, what their salary is, and on the very edge of acceptability is "would you hire this employee again?" as a simple yes/no only question.

Most employers would have a fit if you got on the phone, even in a private conversation, and bad-mouthed an ex-employee you managed because of defamation lawsuit fears. And that's from a one-on-one, he said/she said deal. Blasting this stuff over twitter is so much worse.

tl; dr -- Zynga's lawyers are probably in crisis mode right now.
Something like "Code Streaming for Mere Mortals", or "Code Streaming Made Simple" might seem like a less peculiar choice of words. I just envision the reactions of horror should the masses subversively be exposed to streaming code.
>In his CV we see that Pierce has a long history of positions, quite varied, and none of them held very long. This is consistent psychologically with the sort of person that the rest of his situation indicates he is.

Do you mean Porter, not Pierce?
This is great! Very impressive.
Damn. I was looking forward to seeing Noah Wyle return to the role. I also wish the folks from The Social Network were in charge.
I've been working on Toour - http://ontoour.com - get travel ideas from people who travel like you do.

Alpha in 2 weeks!
The author's key argument is that extractive institutions lead to state failure. Like most theories of state failure, there's some good examples but enough weak or counter examples to discredit it as 'the' answer. At best, I'd argue that extractive institutions are a block to success: countries with them have one fewer barrier to overcome.

I recently researched the thorny issue of what consititutes art, and the leading idea in that field is a cluster theory: a set of ten ideas which commonly associated with things accepted as art. Some objects don't have all ten, but together they provide a powerful guide. My point in mentioning this is that state failure seems to follow the same pattern. Geography (ie Jared Diamond's theory) is a factor in state success and failure. Culture is another factor. Economic system and the nature of institutions (extractive or inclusive) are two more factors. (And there's bound to be a few more).

A state can succeed with only a couple of these. Lacking them all is a sure sign of failure. Having them all likely comes as close to guaranteeing success as possible. But thinking there's some single indicator that determines state failure is a doomed project.
I understand your argument, but I believe it's still statistically incorrect. I don't have research to back it up, but I'm faily confident that full-time employees are more likely to have a job a year from now with same or higher income, than startup entrepreneurs.

Yes, accidents can happen to everyone. You can get fired. Your startup can fail. Somehow, startups seem to fail more often than large companies. They fail in slow motion, us at startups fail fast.
There seems to be a common sentiment that experienced devs can tame IE, thus it's not really an issue.

Speaking as someone who can tame IE, I can categorically state that I don't want to. I'd much rather have that time back so I could do something much more fun.
http://www.roomify.tv - One click video meeting rooms. We have applied to YC S12.

Feed back been great so far. Average user time of 6mins and 15% bounce rate.

Would love some more feedback, here or @kseggie, kavan@saymama.com.
SEEKING FREELANCER - California or Remote

I am looking for a backend engineer with extensive php/mysql experience to fine tune and improve features on my site.

If you are interested, please email me at rush.tea AT gmail DOT com
Microsoft was a startup once. When does a startup transition in to being "the man"?
I had to AdBlock typekit.com in order to disable the custom font on this site; normally Firefox config option gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled disables custom fonts, but not here.

(I think the "idea" presented here is silly; I think it's an April Fools. Any given NaN (IEEE NaNs have lots of different representations) should hash consistently and compare consistently with functions specific to the requirements of hash tables, i.e. one for which NaN = NaN for any given NaN. You shouldn't be able to store multiple NaNs in the hash table (unless you're specifically using distinct NaNs) no more than you can store multiple keys for '1.0', so there should be no quadratic explosion.)

(Oh and furthermore: I only know rudimentary Python, but timeit taking a string parameter for the code to time rather than a lambda is revolting.)
Seems like its better to just cause a cultural shift by jumbling it all together. Nerds are learning about business, business people are getting more into code. Long term win-win, short term usability problems.
It's a gradient transition. Being employee #10,000 is different from being employee #100 is different from being employee #1.
Cliff Theory: How Handset Makers Die
Honestly, I drop support for IE <=8 for most of my sites. IE9 is pretty good and aside from a few glitches and IE specific stuff (usually 1 small hack around per problem). IE doesn't pose as much of a problem as, say, Android browser or Mobile Safari which will do things like ignore overflow:auto.

I can't imagine supporting IE 9+ would take that much money. But then again, I don't run a startup.
San Francisco, CA - Sift Science [H1B ok]

Sift Science is bringing machine learning to the masses. Our initial product is a hosted model to detect fraud online. Fraud is a huge, difficult problem because the bad guys are getting more and more sophisticated: just in the last month, they've hit our customers with money laundering schemes, used botnets to script mass creation of dummy accounts, set up fake Twilio numbers to fool SMS verification, and more. We're helping our customers fight back, and have huge plans beyond fraud.

We're a 5-person team of ex-Google and ex-Zillow engineers, and we're looking to hire engineers with expertise in machine learning, data mining, visualization, and large-scale distributed systems. Our stack includes Hadoop, Rails, d3.js, MongoDB, etc.

If that sounds exciting, send us a resume at jobs@siftscience.com.
US Senator on Facebook, Google: Privacy is a casualty
The implicit comment is that the article's substance is of no conceivable relevance, because it fails to mention the most obvious possible cause - human genetic diversity - for the pattern it purports to analyze. It's one thing to refute or qualify the null hypothesis. It's another to ignore it.

Why shouldn't it be the null hypothesis that genetic diversity is the cause of global inequality? Human beings have been thinking about this subject for a lot more than the last 50 years, you know. All I think is what more or less everyone used to think - since when Jesus was a little boy. If that's not a null hypothesis, what is?

So, from my perspective, the OP is like a long, vague explanation of how stress causes ulcers or marsh miasmas cause malaria. It's impossible for any such analysis to be any more cogent than any other - all are equally wrong.
So, a bit of a layman's guide to Constitutional Law:

The Constitution specifies that there are rights that are not enumerated in the Constitution (or the Bill of Rights) that are yours nonetheless. The SCOTUS has found that this includes "the right to privacy."

Here is the first link from a 2 second Google search that might prove enlightening on the general scope fo the issues involved: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightof...

Here is another:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut

Generally speaking, if the SCOTUS says it's the law, you can consider their decision to be nearly equivalent to a general incorporation into the Consitution since all courts below it are essentially BOUND to follow that decision if it's relevant. If SCOTUS says it's illegal, it's illegal.

And I would disagree with your characterization of what "key Supreme Court majority opinions" say. The reasonableness test is one that gets bandied about quite a bit. You're going to have to cite specific cases if you're going to make that claim.

Here is one that supports mine:

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-1259.pdf

Ctrl-F "reasonable expectation of privacy"
There is a general dislike for monolithic theories in the social sciences and humanities for a reason: they tend to be reductionist, and this theory seems to be no exception.

And in regards to parameters (a "cluster" of factors) that can be indicative of a failed state:

Looking at the submission's chosen title here, I would at least have expected some sort of connection to the actual idea of failed states[1], which are yearly ranked by a combination of multiple influences, where institutional organisation is a factor alongside others.

[1]: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/failedstates
SEEKING WORK - Remote (St. Petersburg, Russia)

Python/Django (more into backend)

Libraries/APIs: Twilio, OAuth, some Google APIs, BeautifulSoup, basic scraping.

Developed for Linux server, cloud (GAE), basic scripts for Windows. Comfortable with both git and SVN.

Have prior experience with C# and embedded (C/ASM for MCUs); wrote a bit in Erlang, but not for commercial projects. Was more into maths/physics early in the University.

I'm working part-time already, so this is more like a call for connections. I can handle small-to-medium size projects myself, but I believe an ideal situation now would be helping out someone more experienced, or supporting/extending existing codebase; so if you are a Python/Django developer or a consultancy looking for some occasional help now or in the future - feel free to drop me a line.

Did a little tool for HN - poll visualizer:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2977909

GitHub page: https://github.com/egor83

You can reach me at egor.ryabkov(at)gmail.com
IMHO, Node.js will not directly compete with Rails/PHP as long as it forces programmers to program in an async style. As an example, async style makes it impossible to implement lazy loading (a technique commonly used by ORMs). Furthermore, Node.js is basically based on the idea of cooperative multitasking[0] which carries a certain trust issue in large teams or projects with lots of third party dependencies.

There is definitely a niche for Node.js but it's not likely to become a direct competitor to Rails.

FWIW, I'm currently writing a web app with Node.js and have written multiple Node.js modules and native extensions.[1]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_multitasking#Cooperati...

[1] http://syskall.com/how-to-write-your-own-native-nodejs-exten...
Since English is not your native language, perhaps the right question you may be wondering is how much does it cost to publish/print physical copy of a book?

Using Lulu's print on demand service, you can get a single 300 page hardcover book printed for ~$23 USD, or as a softcover perfectbound for $13 USD.

Hiring an editor to review and properly edit your manuscript will cost at least several hundred USD.
I am not sure, but I do know that your brain is making associations with everything you experience, whether you like it or not. Might as well use those associations for something useful.
He may be a tad young for the stuff after 2000 (i.e., the part more interesting and familiar to most potential viewers) but I have a feeling that this Noah Wyle kid could make a decent show of portraying Steve Jobs.
A headline generator for my favorite gossip blog: http://robertelwell.info/mediatakeout-headline-generator/

The look and feel is a total tribute to MediaTakeout.com. You can search for terms in the corpus of generated headlines. It was just an excuse for me to play with NLTK and CSS. Nothing too impressive :)
I built my first Live Wallpaper for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monzonito....

Also built an android app for a manufacturer of GPS tracking systems. The app allows owners to control their assets(cars, motos, boats, etc).
Certainly the UK seems to have taken a giant leap in this direction recently (unless this is a misguided April fool article):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17576745

I think you are deluding yourself though if you believe that most major govts are not doing wholesale digital trawling to the best of their (advanced) abilitites already, regardless of whatever legislation is currently in place.
The solution may be to design your site and test in Internet Explorer before even looking at it in any other browser. It might be faster for you to resolve the quirks in FireFox & Chrome then IE. Reversing your process might speed up your development time by 20%.
It sure does. Developers seem content to keep moving the goalposts and treating "inferior" users as slime.
Star Wars ANSI
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Good entrepreneurs need to stand out and attract attention, but they need to do it in a way that holds attention and interest. Maybe sky blue, but I think you need to look beyond a single color
Did you run the code?

The reason why the behavior here is bad is because Python uses probing to implement hash collision detection. Essentially, once you've looked up the hash, you have to check to make sure the value stored at this hash is actually the key you are looking for. However, floating point equality is different from bit-wise equality, and so once a NaN is stored as a key in the table it's unretrievable, since it will always report that it's not equal to any key you may be looking for.

Maybe it's April Fool's, but only in the fine tradition of WTF but true.
Seems like I read an article recently that covered this in more detail. Very recently...
> Just last month, someone I know got fired on the spot after 15 years at a company for not reporting some personal stuff between other employees.. something he wasn't involved with, at all.

15 years seems pretty damn stable
I think the two situations offer a different kind of stability. Working for yourself, obviously you can't be fired. So you have the stability of knowing your job is not going to be taken away. But you may not get paid one month, or even pay money out of your own pocket some months. So rough times can feel very unstable and stressful, depending on how much money you have in the bank, payroll costs, etc.

Being an employee your job is dependent on somebody else and so they have the power to fire you. But at least while you are there you know that you'll receive a paycheck for the hours you work. (Obviously assuming a reputable company that is not severely struggling or going out of business). So you have the stability of knowing you will get that paycheck.

I think most people feel like they can deal with getting fired and finding a new job. But they don't deal well with the constant, ongoing stress of not knowing if they will get paid from one week to the next.
Experimented with a Pinterest-like column layout (using twitter feed as example) and came up with this: http://bjorkst.am/twcols (resize browser window and watch transition magic)

Also re-designed my personal landing page ( http://bjorkst.am )
It's worth mentioning the upcoming .Net 5 runtime featuring await/async operators to dramatically simplify async programming, read more at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2010/10/28/async...
Surprise! As you might have guessed, Google Racing is an April Fools joke brought to you by Google and NASCAR. And while we won't be providing self-driving cars to compete in the races, we look forward to working with NASCAR on future projects.
I don't think that this is what was meant in the post you are replying to.
I built http://www.likelist.ca over a weekend and a few days. (Free App Engine Account)

I built it to surface the likes, favorites, +1's, ... that tend to be hidden on most services. Basically about.me + Pinterest for your 'liked' content.

[edit]: If it is not clear enter your user name in the textbox

[edit]: source: https://github.com/nabilt/Like-List
Ummm. I read this after SICP. While I found it to be an easy way to pick up a lot of "gotchas," I definitely wouldn't give this to someone as an intro to CS or programming. It's a good book though.
I just realized that working outside on a gusty day is a challenge with the Air. I'm a little afraid it's going to blow off the roof.
I rebuilt my own site - http://swapped.cc - not exactly "in March" though... it took closer to 9 months :)