skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't part of the point of the fan (other than the venting sewer gases) to cover the noise of people using the restroom? I find the idea of a very quiet fan counter intuitive for that room.
Russell was and is an excellent read although what he wrote is now mostly over half-a-century old. Sorry to shamelessly suggest interesting historical reading but I personally found for example "The Problem of China" a wonderful document, elegantly written, that captures Western and Japanese policies towards China and amongst the major powers between the world wars.

This is not a direct quote, but I remember reading the sentiment and it was chilling: "If Japanese and American expansionist policies continue to persist, I would not be surprised to see it lead to a war within this century".

Freely available at Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13940
It's really despicable that Google has decided there is a single way that the Internet must be used, and that if you don't abide by their rules they can use their near-monopoly on both search (discovery) and advertising (revenue) to entirely exclude you from it. We are now living in a world where Google has managed to replace the URL bar for 99% of users with a search box (whether or not the URL bar actually is a search box, which it now actually is in many browsers).

Hell, I myself am guilty of not bothering to type in URLs anymore (yes, just like those poor people who used to search "Facebook login" and one day got highly confused when an article about logging in to Facebook that happened to support Facebook Connect to leave comments ranked higher): I just search for things like "cdnetworks portal" and "1and1 client login"; I even, and I shit you not, do a Google search using the Chrome OmniBar for "google images", as I don't remember what the URL for that part of Google is.

[edit: As adgar correctly points out below, the following paragraph is a misunderstanding of the mechanism that was used by this website to implement this split-test algorithm. However, it seems fairly obvious to me that the mechanism used to implement the split test does not matter. Meanwhile, the reason I went in this direction is due to Matt Cutts specifically stating the trade-off in the below paragraph on the Google webmaster video series; it is not because I assumed something from this article's conclusions.]

Seriously... there is /nothing wrong/ with a site choosing to A/B test people by returning different results from the server, and yet Google insists that doing so is somehow harmful and that it would be better to wait entire extra round-trips to do client-side testing using JavaScript, a process that in the end is not only a worse experience for the user and a more complex and less secure mechanism for the developer but has /the exact same fundamental behavior that Google claims is evil/.

It is /exceptionally/ irritating as their rules may have some (highly arguable) philosophical purity, but in the majority of cases leads to a /worse result/. For example, it would be /much more correct/ for sites like Hacker News to mark that the comment/title at the top of each page "is what search engines are allowed to see and index" and that the rest of the comments below it are "ancillary content that absolutely must not be indexed". Otherwise, when you search for a comment using Google, you find every single point along the tree that connects from that comment up to the root of the page, as the comment is present on all of them.

I found myself thinking about these issues a lot recently while working on writing some custom forum software, and even went and skimmed through every single Google web masters video that Matt Cutts put out, and the end result simply made me angry: I was finding myself purposely designing worse things so that they could be "indexed better", and when I'd look at what I was doing and go "this is nuts: is Google really that important?" I'd have to sigh and sadly remind myself "yes, it probably is".
So the Mafia are hiring Rails devs, cool I guess? How about people just move on and care about something more important... like beer.
It's hard to bet against Zynga with Marc Pincus still in charge. Pincus is a smart cookie. :)
The NodeJS to Objective-C Bridge
SF Climates iOS App Offers Neighborhood Specific Weather Reports
But finance is not pure mathematics. It's more in the realm of applied mathematics. There isn't a whole lot of organic money (ie, not prize money) in pure mathematics.
"But the language is the same, the newspapers are the same, the political parties are the same."

I don't disagree, but only if you generalize at a high level. It's absolutely amazing how much of the world you can cover with something not much more general than this -- all you need is a fluency in English, the BBC/Al Jazeera and a working knowledge of the basics of left/right politics.

I've personally managed to get by just fine in most of Europe, parts of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa with these three. It takes about as much work to figure out, for example, the local politics in Paris, France as it does the local politics Angelina County, Texas and have a competent discussion with a local.

All that being said, growing up in a the more industrial and densely populated part of the U.S. I feel more at home Paris than I do in Angelina County.

Remember, only about 80% of Americans speak English as a native tongue, we have as many dialects and accents as the U.K. (and some are not mutually intelligible to outsiders). Some dialect of Spanish is the second most common. But it's as varied as dialects in Spain are.

In the more metropolitan areas, I suspect the percentage of native English is much lower. In the area I spent my childhood in (just outside of Washington D.C.) I was the only child under 18 who spoke English as my native language...and the parents of my friends spoke languages as diverse as Turkish to Korean -- often with little or no English. Only one of my university friends spoke native English, the rest were Persian, West African, Turkish, Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean and Indian.

I've gone weeks without eating "American" or Western European food without even it being an effort or something I noticed much later.

That flavor, that huge variety, is a hallmark of the area I identify with...and I can find an area that feels like that from D.C. to Toronto. Angelina County, TX doesn't feel like that. It also looks different. The ethnic groups are all different, all the place names are different. Politics changes and suddenly boarder control and water rights are major topics of discussion. Head over to San Antonio to get some urban flavor and it still doesn't feel like home.

London on the other hand feels more like where I grew up than Houston. Lots of the Television is the same, the politics at least sound familiar in some sense (lots of the same names show up), the ethnic breakdown feels similar, food variety is about right. Sure cars drive on the wrong side and the money looks funny. But it feels similar and the buildings kind of look similar.

Minneapolis? As out of place as I was in Paris.

I've digressed, but I think the original point still stands. The U.S. shouldn't be thought of as 1 country or 50 countries, but maybe about 5-8.

Here's one that's about as good as any other

http://sperglord.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/cultural-usa-ma...
3D Printing Gives Amputees Custom-Designed Legs [video]
Aboriginal Art Demystified at Mukmuk Fine Art
Muk Muk Fine Art showcases Aboriginal artworks from Utopia and the Central and Western desert areas of Central Australia and some of Australia's leading contemporary artists including Jasper Knight and Adam Cullen.
The analysis here makes sense. It is likely that the redirection test tripped Google's URL cloaking detection algorithm [1]. I've not used redirects for split testing before, rather I use client or server side variations. Redirects don't make sense from a page speed and UX stand point which is why you don't see them advocated for use in split testing.

One thing that rang alarm bells that you and readers should be aware about is to do with this statement:

> The VWO javascript automatically redirected equal portions of the traffic to the test pages.

If you are not randomly assigning visitors to a group and instead just putting odds and evens in separate groups when you run more than one test at once you are will synchronize those tests and generate incorrect results.

[1] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
> It would be fun to see a language where process Id's - that is names of processes - have a type of what that process receives.

I like this idea. It would allow you to catch and log incorrect messages at the sender. And it would reduce the amount of static configuration by facilitating service discovery. But the type specification would be difficult to design well.
But it does not include any compounded interest. If you invested 350K in corporate bonds what would that be worth today?

This is much closer to what the ticket buyers actually did.
That's all true and valid. I do believe there's a distinction between a person from an upper-middle class family, racially and economically privileged, who has the intellectual ability to get a Ph.D. and the typical welfare recipient. And even if a college degree doesn't guarantee anything nowadays, people with college degrees do have many more opportunities than those without. Which is reflected in, e.g., Medicaid and food stamps, which is why we get so surprised when a person with significant higher education ends up on Medicaid and food stamps.
This is a pretty cool idea, but it could easily go out of control if even one news outlet picks the story up. I'd raise the price by a lot (like $9.99 a question), in order to keep volume reasonable.
Why am I not surprised this is about bugs in Flash?

It ain't much better on the artist side. The UI revision after the Adobe/Macromedia suit was so bad it was one of the major reasons I left the animation industry. My friends who stayed have AMAZING piles of helper scripts to patch it up and make it halfway usable.
SSD is still expensive for the mass. Fast boot for Linux is still very much relevant for the few who can afford SSD. It's great for embedded devices using Linux.
It's a nice concept, although I'd more interested if it were written by someone who knew what they were talking (enough not to be proposing things like which blatantly violate conversation of energy, i.e. "antimatter power plants"), and who didn't structure their predictions in the form of a narrative exposition of Malthusianism.
Several other varieties are available at the farmers markets in California. When I was living there, I frequently found Bacon and Zutano avocados at the Palo Alto market, for example.
That timeline made me feel very, very small
That was a simplification on my end. I'm sure VWO does randomly assign the traffic to the variations. I just wanted to get across that part of the traffic went to page A and part of it went to page B.
I play games because they are enjoyable.

You know the awards/achievements that seem to be included in every single game these days? I completely ignore those.
They already have that. www.createspace.com. It's an Amazon subsidiary.
It's a really cool idea. I would worry about it interrupting normal life. If Gloria has limited availability (on lunch, sleeping, at a movie or otherwise living life) then the app is significantly less useful.
The answer actually IS objective. The limit of complexity is defined by the fact that our short-term memory can simultaneously hold only five entities, plus or minus two. So, if the code requires one to hold more than seven elements in mind simultaneously - no one will be comprehend it, even the programmer who wrote it.

I once inherited a module written by a more junior developer. He indiscriminately used several dozen global variables that were used and modified in various parts of the program without much of a system. I spent about two months trying to understand how the module worked without much success. Ultimately, I had to completely re-write it (with great difficulty) to get rid of global states, and bring the number of entities affected by each function to under five-to-sever.

This biological limitation affects our development tools. That's why we have object-oriented programming. The goal is to keep the number of items we have to deal with at any moment under that magical limit of five to seven. Incapsulation is a key component of OOP used for this purpose. Without it all will be lost.

Sometimes I think of an alien race capable of keeping track of 100 items simultaneously, and try to imagine what their programming languages look like.. :)
I agree. I think the urban areas in much of Europe are a much better reflection of their surrounding areas than those in the U.S. Atlanta for example really is different than surrounding Georgia. But I wouldn't say that Atlanta feels anything like Minneapolis for example.

Also many of the European cities have such a different flavor than U.S. ones, how they're laid out for example, that going from Munich to Paris is a tremendously different experience. More than Atlanta to Minneapolis? Yeah I think so. But likewise Paris to Tokyo is even more of a difference than any other comparison above.
Nordstrom. Most of the sales reps are trained to know a good deal about suits and are extremely helpful in helping you find the right suit (YMMV base on location). They also usually have a place that can hem and do tailoring in most locations. Some even have a dry cleaning center located inside the store (also YMMV).

That said, they can at least recommend you something if nothing else. Those guys are required to wear suits all day too.
Looking through the ebuild it looks like a decent amount of it is related to keeping it from using bundled libraries instead of the system ones when building. After that it looks like most of the rest of the complexity is related to getting things installed to the proper places.
I bought a 64 GB Crucial M4 SSD for a boot drive for my Linux desktop about a year ago. About a month ago, it started giving read/write errors eventually leading to kernel panics. (Didn't lose any data.) I switched back to the hard drive.

I don't see a huge difference in productivity for normal desktop use. An SSD is definitely quieter, and somewhat faster, but caching means most of us are already not hitting the disk that hard. (Obviously if you're doing intensive work with big data that doesn't cache well, that's a different story.)
HN needs more Adobe bashing.
I was referring to the concept of financing your growth through first customers. There is always a cost. Sometime it is just opportunity costs.
I grew up on a farm, so I was not without connections, but it was actually on the suggestion of my father that I got started down that path.

I knew pretty early on that programming was my thing. That was where I put all my focus, getting my first part-time dev job in high school. Farming wasn't even a consideration in my mind. It was only after working full-time in the software game for a few of years, dad approached me and suggested that I take some of the money I had earned, find some land to rent, and buy some crop inputs with it. I agreed that it sounded like a good plan, and he helped me put it in motion.

My farm is strictly cash crop, so the work is highly seasonal. Right around this time in the spring and later in the fall there is a lot of work to do, but the rest of the year is fairly light on the time required of me. The second thing that made it work is that I was already telecommuting and my hours were flexible. There have been days where I've been in the field all day and working on code all night. Additionally, it's not completely unheard of to find me writing code from the seat of the tractor. Mobile internet access has been a lifesaver.

I hadn't really considered this to be an interesting topic to the HN crowd, but maybe I should write up a more detailed blog post about it?
It seemed you were arguing against using transactions by default because they didn't roll back a call to a web service. I meant to point out that the issue in your case seems less about db transactions and more about the code and error handling.
IMHO, If you have an income stream that supports it, then the answer is not "a side business". It's "go to school for something she wants to do better". And if taking care of the kid doesn't give her a chance to leave the house, the answer is "online classes and night classes when you're home to take care of the kid".

(If the thing she wants to do better is "draw" then here are some super awesome free drawing lessons from a master animator: http://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com/2009/12/preston-blair-le... )
Have there ever been any court cases where patents have been invalidated or upheld based on any flavor of existing copyleft licenses? And is there any way to apply GPL to the kind of broad concepts which are successfully patented ("One Click Purchase", as opposed to "OnceClickFramework::BuyNowFunction")?
Is it doing a full fsck every time? Or is this just... the beta tax?
Ping G15 Driver
RO ラグナロク rmt
I think the article was seeking to address the widely held view that the vast majority of public assistance recipients are black, and relatedly that they're lazy, uneducated (by choice), and all around primarily responsible for our nation's financial problems.

Of course this has never been true, and part of the point of the article was that it's even less true today. Perception is very important in how people view these issues. When people see someone they can relate to, someone that looks like them, or their sibling, parent, next door neighbor, etc., it becomes a lot harder to sit in judgment and be morally dismissive of their circumstances.

I've lived in various parts of middle America, Tennessee, South Dakota, Montana, and many of these people feel these programs should be abolished exactly because of this misperception. Of course when you point out that their grandma, or auntie or cousin is on Medicare, food stamps, etc., their immediate response is - "Well I'm a hard working, Christian American, I deserve these things. It's those OTHER people who are the problem."
It wasn't even the flash that failed, the controller stopped my bios from posting until the sata polling timed out.

Yes it was a cheap SSD, but the difference between the high end and low end should be performance. Not "breaks vs !break". When that is true I'll buy another SSD.

That is not to say that SSDs are "bad", they are just not for me, yet. I like my computers to be low maintenance. I stopped fiddling with hardware for performance a few years ago.
Amazing. I'd like to see a similar one going backward in time.
Vladimir Arnold once said that there is no such thing as applied mathematics, only applications of mathematics. I think he was right.
If you were using VWO why not have a single landing page with different content?

Also why did you segment the traffic during the test (ignoring traffic that didn't match you criteria) instead of doing it at the analysis stage? Is this a limitation of VWO?

I haven't used VWO rather I have rolled my solutions and I found segmenting traffic during analysis allowed for a great deal of discovery and indications for further testing. What if one of your test pages caused people who searched using a phrase that didn't indicate an intention to buy converted those users better?
Remember kids, optimization doesn't matter!
Yeah, I did that in the 90's too. Got kicked out of a Rite-Aid for being a little too obvious about it.
pot. solution: pinboard inspired pricing - the more questions are in the queue (or the more question packages sold), the higher the - in app purchase - price.
Compare Payment Gateway Fees [PayPal, Square, Dwolla, etc]
IE’s F12 Developer Tools: Five badly needed enhancements for IE10
Wow, is that code terrible. I wonder if there would be a market for a "Flash Compactor" to remove all that dead code and speed things up?
If you think social games are easy or cheap to make then you don't know very much. That goes for both facebook and mobile.
Actually, I always thought it was good of Blizzard to have as one of the in-game tips "Invite your friends to Azeroth, but make sure to spend time with them in the real world too!"

The cynic would retort that they said this and then did nothing...
Amazing that it ends with:

"The controversial agreement, which opponents say was conducted behind closed doors, aimed to fight against counterfeiting at international level through greater co-ordination of anti-counterfeiting measures and tougher enforcement."

WSJ is a great place for propaganda and framing it wrong.
Are you a solo founder? You may want to surround yourself with other founders. They will make sure to give you a pat on the back when your real-time Google Analytics dashboard shows 0 active users. Hang in there...
> A sense of touch may be all that is needed to reduce phantom limb pain, among other things.

Actually, I remember hearing that a simple mirror can do that.
Usborne Books is a major distributor of childrn's books. Sales are robust, it's big enough to have real influence & support but individual sellers can make good in their own region. Pretty much a "make as much as you want to" (with proportial effort). Worth looking into. http://www.myubam.com/ecommerce/opportunity.asp?sid=H3967...
Is that a big problem? Why don't the gun owners who perceive that as a problem use the safety or buy a gun with greater trigger pressure? If they don't do those things, why would they want to pay to add this feature?
Sure, it's exactly the same as PHP opcode cachers market.
According to the article, some of these people would book dozens of seats then cancel them at the last minute (with no cost) when they decided they didn't want to go.

On flights no one was taking, this wouldn't have been much of an issue. But on flights that are regularly full, this could have easily prevented normal paying customers from purchasing the seats.
Titleist Sonoma Putter
When was the last time that you shelled out $10k, $100k or like those $500k (in 1980s terms) for a single person's air travel expenses? With today's real inflation + financing cost certainly far beyond $2M.

Spending such amounts in the first place demonstrated very strong confidence and trust into AA and was a very sweet deal for AA as well (I'm sure it still is even though they are now wanting to get rid off the benefit of their counter-party / don't want to pay their part of the deal).

Keep in mind that none of those were in their teens when they put out such amounts so they are now merely coming to the end of their traveling spree. After all, this is only a life-time deal for those passengers if AA survives that long (and that wasn't so sure at that point as well).

For that amount - $500k in the 1980s - you could buy a pretty large house that even after the housing crisis will today still be worth a large multiple of that. Another example - even with all its ups-and-downs a better indication of the change in real value of the 500k till today might be e.g. the stock market with the Dow being below 1k then and now about 13k (this goes both ways and might also provide an indication for AA's financing cost since then).

But AA seemingly prefers to charge their normal U.S. customer even for luggage checked in, give vast discounts to their largest corporate customers (TMK the biggest in the industry - up to 70%), hike up their advertising spending and cut down in services.

The last figure I've seen is that they increased their spending for online display ads by 600% to about $27M - I guess a few 100K soft cost (the planes also fly without those few airpass holders and almost never fly at 100% capacity) for letting them carry on flying for a few more years and use this as a demonstration of their great customer service would have been better spent and provided a better story any online ad could ever tell. In other words - priceless!
Use twilio to cache the calls. Charge for urgency of response.
I think i was sold with the nujabes background.

Great work by the way!