skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It's not that people who do great things don't have an interesting story because to them it's just a normal day and they're so awesome they don't recognize it."

"Great" things also depends on your timing and what the competition is doing. (Remember Job's Newton?) Bad timing could be having the right product at the wrong time. Good timing a little earlier than the competition in some cases. As well as luck. And also honesty and how you deal with people you work with, suppliers. And this only scratches the surface.

I mean even with respect to sports the winner in any given year is dependent on the quality of the other teams or individuals playing, right? The second fastest man would be the fastest if the fastest didn't run that race.

"It's that greatness comes from doing. The more you do the more chances for greatness."

And in a sense the key to the VC business. If you put your money behind enough possibilities (with some reasonable vetting) some of those ideas will succeed. I mean if they could predict better the ideas that would hit (even assuming the timing was right and there was nobody else trying the same idea) they would have a much better success rate than what the currently have, right? The success rate is not great actually.

"I certainly would like to know tips that would make it more likely that the things I ship, write, create will be well received and popular"

One of the problems with reading to much about what others say (on HN or elsewhere) is that you get a watered down version of the world since there are always different points of view. (Horse by committee is a camel?) No single vision directing things. To many points of view. Something that I am able to achieve given my skills, knowledge the way I was raised and a million other variables might not be the right approach for you. Just like you may be able to walk up to a random woman in a bar and pick her up with a line and an approach that wouldn't work for me. Just like Jobs could make people do things by his words and his presence, his looks, his voice that (insert smart but dull person here) can't.
Completely bungled the explanations of both the Uncanny Valley and the Turing Test, but still managed to tell an entertaining story.
How is having people agree on bad decisions a good thing?

Because the decision affects everybody. Even more so, everybody has a greater stake in the system of decision-making than they do in the decision itself.

Look at it this way: suppose ten people are in a lifeboat stranded on the ocean. There are no supplies, and everybody is starving to death. Logically, killing and eating one of the people would allow the rest to survive. However the group votes not to do that, and they all starve. Later it's discovered that had they lived a few more days they would have been rescued.

Or you could play it the other way: they all unanimously decide to draw straws - the "law of the sea" -- and yet it does no good.

In either case, having consent of those involved is more important than optimizing around one individual's opinion, even if that opinion represents an outcome that's in the best interest of the most people involved.

You don't have to believe me. Play various scenarios out a few times yourself and work through it. And it's not unanimous agreement, not at all. The trick, as the other commenter pointed out, is to create a simple and understandable system where the minority still participates when they lose arguments. (Obviously eating the minority in our example would prevent such participation, which is why only unanimous consent would work, and it would only work in coming up with some selection criteria, not actually applying it.) I think you'll find that people deserve the dignity of being wrong, even when faced with their own death.

I'm also not saying that "we should not even try." Far from it. True learning takes place in a group setting from the bottom-up, in a peer-to-peer fashion. Once critical mass is reached, persuasion is used to convince the majority. That's the way systems of people operate, which is much, much different from the way we might like them to work, or the way a mathematical proof might work.
It's actually quite useful to have talks like this spreading across the Net. They act like chemical tracers, flowing through the memetic channels of crackpottery -- once a blog picks one up, you know immediately who you can ignore.
If this weren't a US government website, I'd swear it was a hoax!
"About a year ago I had to implement a system where the table name could be configured for an application. Why would you want to do that? Lots of reasons really, like if you have a table generator via a web interface."

This is the reason you don't use a web-interface to do this. Allowing admin-level traffic to enter through the same channels as user traffic is generally a bad idea.

It's a major hole to an important layer in your defenses. Opening it up and you ask for trouble... even if you establish permissions, those can be bypassed with escalation exploits.
It's also "quite reasonable" to correct for outliers like those who cause accidents. If you drop those people off your dataset, then your distribution is a flat line because it's too lacking in nuance to describe anything useful.
I had the impression that, with recent budget cuts and the like, such active case management was becoming a matter of necessity, lest the courts be completely overwhelmed. In your view, is that correct?

That is, of course, not to take anything away from Judge Alsup, who did a commendable job with this case. I've never seen a judge take so many expert witnesses to task like that, especially the on in Oracle's motion for JMOL.
Great news!

For better or worse, there's a lot of benefit from rich people dedicating their lives to beating drugs like this. In a perverse way, Mike Milliken getting prostate cancer was one of the best things for beating this cancer.
> The password must be exactly 8 characters long.

This is probably the root cause of bad passwords. In the case of Average Joe, he is now having to choose something memorable which is 8 characters long. 'PassworD'
DocHack.us | documents and file hosting
DocHack.us is my latest project for DalessioEngineering offers documents and general files hosting (images,archives etc), free to signup and to use and you get unlimited disk space. Upload your photos, documents, host your videos, and share them with friends and family.
Looking for feedback! Thanks
Active case management like this ultimately reduces the court's workload. Letting the lawyers run free permits them to bury the courts in paperwork.
An excellent book about this topic, which also gives some suggestions on how the majority and minority should actually conduct themselves to make sure this happens, is Danielle Allen's Talking with Strangers.

http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/014665in.html
I think concern #2 was addressed in the original article: add a "fade out" threshold so that results are fixed to some time span.
Built and released in 48hr - create and run quiz
There is reasoning; it's just not valid reasoning.
Don't Waste a Single Moment
IBM....

I've interviewed a guy from IBM before. He insisted on commenting everything and having getters and setters for all of his fields.
If you google you can find out why I didn't think this was such a good idea...
https://www.google.co.uk/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=11&sou...

Being in a company has a lot to do with how well you get along with people. You're new, and so I suggest that you listen carefully, ask questions about things that you don't understand (otherwise you'll feel like a dumbass next time they bring it up, and you still don't know what they're talking about).

When you've been working somewhere for a while you also tend to dismiss the problems around you. Make sure you note down all of the things that you find wrong about the place - ask people why these things are they way that they are - it could be a misunderstanding on your part, but it could also be that there are genuinely things that need fixing.

Make sure you keep a notepad on you - note down everything that you learn, problems that you see etc - it'll come in handy.

After a couple of weeks you can start acting on fixing the problems that you've seen - if you actively seek to solve problems, then you can become a hero in the company - the guy that made our lives better.

Lastly remember that if you want something you'll have to fight for it. Don't be afraid to disagree with people, but you have to play a fine game when you've just come into the company - you don't want to piss people off, but you also don't want to set the expectation that you're OK with shitty code.

I hope that helps! have fun out there ;)

Lou
http://TheStartupSlayer.com
# yum info smem | grep URL

URL : http://www.selenic.com/smem/

First changelog entry is by "Matt Mackall":

http://selenic.com/repo/smem/shortlog/61?revcount=120
A Quiz About Integers in C
Thank you all. It works.
> Unfortunately, it's likely this is due to the high profile of the case and the deep pockets of the litigants.

The litigants don't get to choose which judge hears their case. There are rules to exclude judges who have a stake in the matter (recusal), but they don't just get to pick who they want to hear the case.
DocHack is my latest project for DalessioEngineering - it is a brand new product that is willing to offer documents hosting, free photo sharing, documents and video sharing. Upload your photos, documents, any type of file, host your videos and files, and share them with friends and family.

It offers unlimited bandwidth and unlimited space so you can use it as much as you like.

I am really looking for some feedback and constructive comments.

Thanks
I don't think that offering potential clients a service which doesn't exist yet is the best way to go forward, all this would do is damage the credibility of the company before you go ahead.

You should create a minimum viable product, something simple and functional, something which gets the job done.

Release it for free, develop a user base which is loyal, then as you grow and learn what is good for your service and what isn't, expand features, add a "pay to link your " + insertParameterHere + "services together."

Such as, give a free account able to be used on up to say, 10 employees at a time where one person can set todo's for the employees, then to expand once people use the free version, add a CHEAP (I'm talking $2 per month cheap, 100 users at $2 will benefit you more at the start than 2 users at $50, because the more you are used, the more people will know about your service and the more hits you get on google, one upping your competition who charge 25x you) subscription option, for say 25 employees where anyone can assign todo's to others, as well as comment on existing todo's, change deadlines, give reviews on todo's already completed.

Go from there.

Yes, this will be expensive.

But I would advise learning some simple programming yourself, this will help you to get slightly less ripped off by your chosen developer.
Another option is dotCloud's static service: http://docs.dotcloud.com/services/static/

$ cat >>dotcloud.yml <<eof
www:
type: static
$ dotcloud push myapp
$ dotcloud url myapp.www
Actually you are correct that in situations with latency (i.e., you have the opportunity to play a machine at t=0, another opportunity to play at t=1, but you don't receive results of the plays until t=10), UCBx doesn't work.

It's not even a question of statistical power, it's just a matter of typing. Typical bandit algorithms use the function play_machine: Machine -> Float. In the situation you describe, the type signature is Machine -> Future[Float].

I'm working on a modified version which handles those situations, however. It's along the lines of UCB2, tweaking the formula so that the numerator is proportional to the number of plays you've submitted while the denominator is the number of plays you've received. Once I finish the math I'll write it up.
You can read the bios yourself. After Arline he went on his "debug how to sleep with women binge" and then slept with his students' wives. Most complained that none of them could live up to his dead wife, and the more ill-treated ones wrote to the others saying that the best way to get out of a Feynman relationship was to make a few dollars by claiming to have missed your period.

This is all passed over quite briefly in Genius, but you'll find more evidence elsewhere.
Gmail, at least as of two years ago, let you choose a new password after correctly answering the security question. I once tried to answer the security questions to all of my close friends' accounts. I then sent the ones the I succeeded on (and was presented with a choose your new password screen which I then closed) and email suggesting that they change their security questions to something more secure.
You are going to have to help me out and at least try to make an argument instead of linking to others. That wikipedia page doesn't suggest anything in your supporting as far as I can tell besides 'when talking about animal rights, the ability to feel pain is a sufficient argument' and backs that statement up with 'higher functioning is not required because no matter how crippled, humans are still sentient'. This is an emotional argument and I am forced to say that ratiponallly no, humans that are sufficiently disabled are not sentient.

The lobster article just starts with the premise that they are sentient, dismisses the complete absence of brain structures that, if we lacked, we would likely be considered braindead, and say 'but they don't like being boiled!' Terribly unconvincing.
I'd say it depends. Even "average" can be several different things depending on your definitions. More precise than "average" is "mean", and even better than that is the "arithmetic mean". Typical is typical in its ability to be misunderstood.
I sometimes wonder if it would be better not to talk about these sorts of things and hope they die off in obscurity.
I found have boost::spirit to be a fascinating view of parser combinators in C++. It produces extremely fast parsers, but for large parsers can take over 15 minutes, and 4GB of RAM, to compile (from personal experience).

I haven't quite decided my final opinion on boost::spirit. I often use it for tiny hacky things, but have generally stopped using it for really big parsers.
I've yet to use Node.JS for anything yet even though I want too, it looks like Node.JS is only being used for analytics and chat applications is that all it is capable of or are people not fully using the power of Node? Balloons.io is a beautifully designed chat app, better than that of any other Node chat demo I've seen, nice one.
You are correct for practical purposes.

However, you are mathematically wrong. Doing things the way you describe is another form of A/B testing, just one designed to reduce the regret incurred during the test. You still get the linear growth in regret I described (i.e., there is some % chance you picked the wrong branch, and you are leaving money on the table forever after).

Of course, your way is also economically correct, and the theoretical CS guys are wrong. They shouldn't be trying to minimize regret, they should be minimizing time discounted regret.

(Yes, I'm being extremely pedantic. I'm a mathematician, it comes with the territory.)
Google docs context-aware spell check
If you dont know anything about haskell (orat leastanother similar language). Then do yorself a favour and go learn more about it :)

If you already know what haskell is about, id say its killer feature is the rich type system. Not only is it very complete (including support for generics, overloading and much more) but the ecosystem as a whole is oriented towards static safety guarantees and having the compiler help you avoi errors. For example, option types make so you never ever get a nullpointerexception and after you get the hang of it you can also start encoding other proprties of your own. As a bonus, the language itself is quite clean and pretty, something I find surprising for a language designed by comitee.
I don't think you're contradicting the essay. I absolutely agree that the more you produce, the more likely you are to produce something great. But it's also true that the more you produce, the individual likelihood that each particular work will be great increases - assuming, of course, that you are mastering your craft and approaching the "muscle memory" level of ability.
So by acknowledging the mastery, we have changed the practice.

by acknowledging the mastery, we have changed the experience for the end user, but not the practice of creating the sushi. People may reserve a stool a year in advance, but for him it's the same - people come to eat, he makes sushi.
Be careful about how you target small businesses. This seems to be a space that attracts a lot of idealistic BS about doing it "affordably" as if small business are automatically "poor" and helping them do it better is some kind of welfare style social obligation to make the world a better place. If you want to give the world a hug and buy it a coke, have at it. Just don't assume that is some kind of sane or profitable business model.

Best of luck.
Inescapably Connected (2001)
In my corner of the FIDO moderators were harsh but just. I find it that generally people appreciate tyranny when it leads to excellent result where it matters, in this case quality discussion on various topics.
Judge Alsup is probably only a handful of judges in the world who have the knowledge to preside over cases like these. It's sad to think the nunmber of cases like this that have resulted in the wrong outcome all because the judge and or jury didn't fully understand the case enough to make a logical decision.

The ending line in the article made my day: "As a programmer, Judge Alsup clearly knows how important it is to avoid bugs."
I know some intelligent people who fall for this. The thing is, if you tell them the arguments in this article (which I have, though doubtless less adeptly), they just find a way to insist that it's intentional. Of course the sequence is simple! That's the power of it!
That should probably be as easy as providing a way for games to tell Unity to turn off compositing, right?
It did very well in all its trials. To get approved for use in any indication a drug has to go through a number of clinical trials - a Phase 2 in a small group of patients and multiple Phase 3's in a larger group.

And that's for one indication only. So a cancer drug might try to get approved for "4th line" use in some cancer, meaning the FDA says it's okay to use after 3 other drugs have failed. After some success there, the drug company might push to expand its label into 3rd line or front line treatment and sponsor more clinical trials to compare it to the drugs currently used at those times.

I don't know what trial this article was talking about specifically, but there were a number of other trials abiraterone did spectacularly in beforehand. Unfortunately, I don't recall the specific data from years ago when I kept up with this stuff.

Cancer drugs frequently "work", but just barely, stopping the progression of symptoms for a few months or so, and this is enough to get approved. On the other hand, you have Gleevec[1], which turned a certain variety of leukemia from invariably fatal to a death rate of just 1%. Its efficacy was noted early in the trials and got approved quickly.

Similarly, abiraterone's efficacy showed clearly in the early trials, although it's somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between "barely efficacious" and Gleevec.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imatinib
surrounded by lots of "green" co-workers who required significant hand-holding despite the fact that they too completed their small projects to get hired

When I hear talk like this coming from devs in a given startup, it only confirms that their work culture is terrible. It doesn't make me think their devs are bad. It's more of the "rock star" and "ninja" wishlist stuff. No company-- not even Google, Apple, or Facebook-- is going to employ only developers who are all at the top of their field. If you're a startup, you must have a pathway to get your average programmers to greatness.

When I hear stuff like "hand-holding" it makes me think of companies that hire based on keyword matching. They don't want to put anything at all into their employees, they just want the best output right away. No wonder these firms are always complaining about not being able to hire talent. They could develop talent, but they don't-- it's either getting the creme of the crop engineers (which they're not going to be able to get anyway since they can't compete with the above-mentioned companies on salary and benefits) or nothing!

The really creative startups I'm seeing now are those that train. They know there's a war for talent, so they're willing to invest in somebody who isn't a rock star today, but has potential and very well may be tomorrow.
What does "Twitter based" mean? It uses Twitter for authentication? Or it uses bootstrap? Or tweets?
I'm totally guessing, but perhaps there is no way to memoise when using preprocessor magic and so the algorithm for constructing the parser is O(n^2). (Of course my parser combinators don't memoise either.)
My sister sent me a copy of this book when I finally completed my associate's degree (as a graduation present -- along with a stuffed toy in cap and gown announcing "I iz a brane."). It's a wonderful little book.
Great idea. I'm having trouble getting it to work ( https://github.com/vdemedes/joconut/issues/5 ), but I'm looking forward to trying it out!

One thought came to mind for a potential leaky abstraction: unlike HTML and CSS that can be "undone" and are idempotent, JS has side effects that can't be undone, and isn't always idempotent. Are there JS patterns we need to embrace or avoid to ensure Joconut always "just works"?
>it looks like Node.JS is only being used for analytics and chat applications is that all it is capable of or are people not fully using the power of Node?

Node is still immature, so it makes sense to use it in spite of the relative roughness only when it has a distinct advantage over other available technologies. Its ecosystem has also streamlined the building of server-push apps.

You can use node/express in lieu of rails or django, but it doesn't offer anything particularly interesting here. Analytics and chat apps tend to be built on persistent servers that have long-running stateful sessions, which the node ecosystem has focused on making easy... you could use EM or Twisted or Netty, but they aren't as shiny / low barrier to entry.

So, we are seeing people take advantage of the comparable strengths of a new technology that makes certain apps easier to build.
Humble Bundle bigger on G+ than on Facebook + Twitter combined
"is EVER that interesting a question."

Agree and it feeds into the idea that you need to have some grand plan in your mind at all times. When you read stories about people in the news they are always presented as very clearly being "a" or "b". "He always knew he wanted to be President" or "He wanted to be a ball player but ended up being President". Anyway the question can in some cases even be annoying and make you feel defensive. I dated a girl once who insisted on knowing what it was I liked about a particular dish. Why is it important why I like pizza? I just like pizza. Think a minute (if you are a straight guy) about why you like tits. Go ahead. Not sure about you but I can't answer that question. I just like the way they look. Is that an adequate answer? It triggers some thing in me that makes me feel good. I think it's easier many times to describe what you don't like, than what you like. I like air conditioning because high humidity makes me feel yucky. So air conditioning helps me avoid a negative feeling.

I think the key is like you detailed. In the specificity of the question.
George Lucas Retires
Yi - The Haskell Scriptable Editor
Best algorithm ive seen for politically matching users to the 2012 candidates