skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One data point, one result. Obviously it's a universal truth right?

There are probably thousands of examples of people making an outstanding return on investing in property. And the example given in the post is extremely contrived:

"For example if you can start a new business with $50,000 then sell 20% of it to an investor for $200,000 in 1 or two years, you’ve created $1m worth of value in that time. Do you think if you bought a property for $1m with a 10% deposit, it would be worth $2m in two years or less? No way."

How many people can create companies worth $1M in 1-2 years that with certainty? How about compared to how many people can buy property? And what if you had invested in a house in China back in 2007-2008? The value of your home would have doubled by now so that your $1M would have been worth $2M with no extra effort.

Context, timing, skill, and luck play a great role into what makes a good investment. Let's be wary of over-generalizations made from anecdotal examples.
Sometimes I find it a littl bit interesting that .NET community typically lag behind Java community in general (be careful interpreting general vs all).

In Java, the best known book that can be considered comparable with Jon Skeet book is written by Josh Bloch of SUN, Google, and API design fame. He literally suggested to avoid Reflection and use other features unless you are in the business of writing IDE, compiler, code analysis, etc.

I hvae done Reflection in the past and fow not to do that stupid move again and will spend more time figuring other solution. It is not about I cannot grasp Reflection but the code tend to be less elegant, less readable, and not compiled safe.

I would use dynamic languages if I found myself using Reflection a lot.
Yeah, I also went to Amazon looking for the definitive negative review, but I have yet to find it.

I'd forget the argument-from-authority, though, and just say that Graeber went into this project with some kind of irrational antipathy towards "debt", which despite years of careful research he's been unable to shake. Much like if a KKK member decided to write the definitive history of the US Civil War [substitute less inflammatory example if you feel like it] he might put together a really well-researched, well-footnoted piece of writing but still be just plain missing some fundamental piece of understanding due to the blind spots he had when going in.

The history of debt, in all its glory, is a fascinating subject. There have been debts which turned out mutually beneficial, debts which drove debtors to ruin, debts which drove creditors to ruin. There have been debts imposed under terms unfair to one party or the other, and debts between close friends where the terms are kept extremely lenient both ways. There have been formal debts and informal debts, debts of money and of literal backrubs. But Graeber, for some reason, seems to skip over all those debts which make the concept of "debt" look good and only describe those which make it sound bad.

It's frankly just plain weird. It reminds me of Eric Cartman's class report on Asian culture: "Asian culture has plagued our fragile planet for centuries. It must be destroyed."
A very technical answer to the question “Why is the sky dark at night?”
Reminds me of governments
> Apple has hidden APIs that nobody is allowed to use to compete with Apple's software

which APIs do they not let others use (aside from the icon updating thing Calendar uses, siri, and weather/stocks)?
I wasn't aware of a cure for cancer.
The periodic cancellation of all debts thing was one bit that I found fascinating and wished had been expanded upon. I mean, what actually happened historically after that?

I mean, did the credit market dry up overnight? Once the precedent has been set that the king can cancel everyone else's debts for no reason, what reason would anyone have for lending money? Or did some folks come up with "un-cancellable" debts which are deemed not to be cancelled in jubilees (under penalty of private leg-breaking)?
What are they using? Besides iTunes.
Maybe it's just me, but every other quote in that article has been changed with square brackets.

every [company] I thought was doing interesting things.

I was being helpful by [looking at] product features [on a] business level

On and on...I've never seen so much of that _ever_ before.
> What's the problem here?

The tiny US userbase means most people disagree with you. That's the problem.
I'm using v5.623. With the lite install and classic skin, there's almost no difference (for my use cases).
Skyhook's SpotRank
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Neither of my parents (both college-educated with multiple graduate degrees) ever really "got" GUIs or the web. They learned computing with punch cards and later with teletypes and vt100 terminals. They were fine with DOS when PCs came on the scene, but just never really made the leap to graphical interfaces and the web. My dad in particular thought it was all a bunch of silliness and it actually contributed to his loss of interest in computing (he used to program Z80s in assembly to control laboratory equipment. He could also progam TI 980 minicomputers by toggling machine code in on the front panel. But he never saw the point of the web.
I've talked with a lawyer and you can establish a business and then run other businesses under this umbrella company to avoid liability. That's my understanding -- but this isn't legal advice. It makes sense if you have a product that isn't as polished as it should be (experiment) and it causes loss or damage to your users. Of course most people are fucking around with twitter api's and mashups and whatever is hot these days, so I think that is where the author is coming from.
> My example was about imperative languages. You assertion on how many ways one could screw up on OO is irrelevant and besides, you'd really need a good understanding of OO to even try implementing those.

Isn't OOP languages also imperative, at least most of those languages (java, C++, .Net, etc)?

I thought that OO was mostly an "structural" paradigm, where you organize your code as objects and methods that apply to those data structures, and you got inheritance and stuff like that.

Imperative programming on the other hand is about programming with statements, no matter if you are using gotos, routines, objects, etc. You just instruct the computer how to change from state to state.
I bet the temperature to get magnesium to ignite is much higher than the devices would naturally produce or be exposed to. The only burning magnesium I've ever witnessed was either ground into a powder or in thin strips. It probably wouldn't burn so well in bulk.

This was the first thing that popped into my mind on Monday, though. The original NeXT cubes were built out of magnesium, and after NeXT left the hardware business someone famously burned an old cube. If I recall correctly, it took quite a lot of effort to get it burning.

The tale of the burning incident is here:

http://simson.net/hacks/cubefire.html

As you know, years ago, when NeXT first contemplated making computers, Steve Jobs decided that machines should be in the shape of a cube, and that they should be built from cast magnesium. Although magnesium is a relatively expensive metal, it is remarkably strong and lightweight. No doubt, this let NeXT save on shipping expenses, although the added handling and manufacturing costs was one of the factors which led to the cube's high cost. At the time that NeXT brought their system to market, the only other company to incorporate a magnesium case was Grid, which was making a portable computer. (I am told that Apple also uses magnesium for the inside case of its Duo computers, but I haven't been able to verify this fact...
Phoget Beta Sign up
Phoget is getting close it its beta period. What features would you like to see the most?
This is not a property of the English language. It is a property of the person reading the article.
This is wrong advice If you are trying to get more people to click. My experience from having Done more banner than I care to remember is that it increases click rate .
Here's an interview/behind-the-scenes piece that Rolling Stone did with the creators of WinAmp in 2004 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ou8YIbH0j_3qSpepPy1VruHe... I thought it was funny how the Rolling Stone author comes across as a drooling fanboy :)
I think it's fair to say that, between VLC and Apple, Winamp still might not have made it if AOL hadn't been incompetent. But AOL was and it does rather boil down to their fault.
Thumbnails On Firefox’s New Tab Page Could Expose Your Private Data
> > And I'll stand by comparators being easy to get wrong, particularly when values may be null, polymorphic, etc.

> Trivial key extraction does not make that any easier: instead of being hard, hard cases become impossible.

Perhaps you missed this bit:

> > Overloads can be used for a comparator function based approach, but it should not be the first choice.

Key extraction makes trivial cases less error prone than comparators; overloads can be used to make the hard cases possible. Comparators everywhere make all cases error-prone.
Dealing with a flat launch
To solve this problem one needs to be able get users location anonymously and apply machine learning to figure out future density at a given location. Unfortunately we have the technology but cannot utilize it to its fullest, based on the fear of privacy.

True that the app comes back with zero results for your city but it might be useful when visiting a foreign city like New York, San Francisco, etc. where there is more user activity related to virtually checking in.
Depends on location, there is probably still money to be made in property. Melbourne of instance probably now has very little undeveloped land within 10km of the CBD, even 20kms is mostly filled in. The population is still rising quickly and lots want to live inner city. So I don't see those prices crashing any time soon.

Granted it is a little like Apple shares, as expected high future demand would be built into the prices.

HECS is such a better system that what you read about US student loans that I wonder why they don't have similar. HECS doesn't touch your wage until you earn around 50k and even then only takes a small percentage. No one feels like they are taking a big financial risk here undertaking higher education.
They refaced the exact mega-man sprites. The "borrowing" of the mega man sprite animations so blatant that, as the authors, I'd be worried.
Discussion of an interesting technique for password management
> what they never really emphasize is that once you take out a mortgage you've got that $1,000 monthly payment (for example) that you've got to meet EVERY month, for the next 30 years or until you sell. And you have insurance, property taxes, maintenance, etc.

You've got a similar obligation if you rent. Rent or buy, you're still out on the street if you stop paying.

> Carrying long-term debt and especially owning a home really does impact your thinking. You become more risk-averse.

Meh, student loans, the ultimate long-term financial obligation, didn't make me risk-averse at all. I'm slightly more risk-averse today -- and I do own a home -- but I attribute a great deal of that to getting older. The prospect of starting over from 0 becomes less appealing the older you get.

> As far as buying property as an investment, i.e. renting it out, the "common wisdom" is that you make your money when you [sell]. You absolutely need to get a really good deal when you buy [...]

Yes. If you're considering buying a place that you'll possibly rent out in the future, you need to be serious about it and do your research. When I was scouring the internet for articles and forums about it, I was shocked to see just how serious -- and * unbelievably fiscally conservative* the people are who buy rentals seriously are.
That wasn't meant to be the implication. If I had my time again, I'd add the word "mostly" to the last sentence, but apart from that I'll just clarify.

The point I was trying to make is that using open-source, in the way Apple has, allows the customisation to go beyond the mere gluing together of black boxes. The thing Apple has woken up to is that 95% of the black box is reusable commodity stuff and it's that customised 5% that makes it "sing" with your hardware.

This level of integration just isn't possible without the source code. You can try writing everything yourself, but that blows time to market, and required development resources, out big time.
Scott Young talks about getting an MIT education for $2k on TEDx
No problem with Microsoft keeping the device hands off. The problem is with a tech site regurgitating a press release while claiming first hand knowledge of the product that they haven't used.
Agreed. It's so beautiful, but so constraining. I'm a much better developer for having used it, but returned to Python/Ruby/Java[for-speed] after spending lots of time with Haskell.

That said, I desperately miss static-typing and Hindley-Milner type inference... I keep searching for the perfect language.
You can unbind it by deleting it after using it so it is practically anonymous.
edit: never mind, I get it. it's compatible with programs targeting Windows 95, since it's a crt function, but not Windows 95 headers. I was confused by http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/td1esda9(v=vs.80).as...
My cofounder has had similar experiences. I don't have the data handy, but last time I grumbled about a "click here" he told me about a couple of times he A/B tested it and got substantial wins.

I still wouldn't use "click here" in normal writing (e.g., a blog post); I think it's unnecessary and a bit gauche. But I'm happy to do it on landing pages and other places where I really do want people to click there.
Instead of pushing an object that responds to "run", why not just pass, say, a lambda?
I suspect that AOL made promises about how things would work and how they would be a multiplier for Nullsoft's efforts.

In an acquisition I was involved in, the acquirer made us all sorts of promises about how the new world order would be wonderful. They even made sure everyone was involved in training on their company "way" and values etc. Things didn't go that way - several of our people left early because they preferred small companies over large ones, and there was a need for a considerable amount of planning and integration with the acquirer. This left less manpower available for our products and things ended up worse off than if we had not been acquired. I gave them the benefit of the doubt for a year before leaving. The products were quietly shelved a few years later with the acquirer effectively having burnt $300 million. The irony is that at he beginning they said they had made mistakes with previous acquisitions, had learned from it and wouldn't do it this time.
It's hard for me to think of a good reason why a construction company should be writing custom software, instead of buying something off the shelf.
What a lot of people miss when comparing the returns of a home to say, the stock market, is that a home also provides a place to live. Of course a home would return less, because if it didn't the price would quickly shoot up because people see the inherent value in having your (lackluster) investment put a roof over your head.
> Secondly, the error message that users are presented with SCARES THEM.

Antivirus customers are they type of users that are scared, they are typically users that don't know what to trust. I feel you, I really do.

> It took us quite a while to figure out where that "false positive" link was.

This was a huge peeve of mine, the form is pretty impossible to find unless you use a search engine.

> When we finally did discover the issue, it wasn't clear what to do. It took us quite a while to figure out where that "false positive" link was, and we weren't even sure that it was the right place to send it to. Even worse, you claim that they "should" have the programs whitelisted within a few business days. This is patently false and never happens that quickly. It took a month before the executable we submitted was whitelisted and you know what? It didn't help one bit.

Normal turn around time is a few days, it shouldn't take a month. Was this around Christmas? Were the files served via https? Are files unique between downloads? Were the files mirrored to different domains? Did the team have actual executables to vet?

I understand your frustration and I am sorry it feels like Symantec is working against you. Please continue to fill out false positive reports, the team takes those seriously. With false positives, it shows the system is flawed and they'll take a deeper look at fixing the fundamental problems, otherwise they think the system is working perfectly.
Everything You Wanted to Know About Google+ on Flipboard
The entire point of UX is "how can we change the interface to adapt to the user", so I'm not sure the GP's point stands.
Microsoft Surface: Apostasy Or Head Fake?
If one were willing to be a bit crude, the problem could be summarized quite succinctly: ignorant fucks fuck ignorantly.
TF2 is a very different style of FPS, except maybe for scout and soldier.
What browser/user-agent are you using? They might be doing something wacky with non en-US traffic.
Exactly - I've seen this before. EMC made a lot of promises when they bought the company I worked for - now it's all but dead.
Funny, I've had it the other way: I was working on a project as a senior dev and had interns writing Godless functional code using Guava and Functional Java, and having a grand old time seeing how much concurrent code they could fit into a single statement.

The fact is that Java is not a functional language and to bolt on functional pieces and then ignore the imperative, OO nature of Java is stupid. Don't get me wrong, I love functional programming, but Java is not and will never be a functional programming language, and developers that hate on programmers who use a language in the manner in which it was intended to be used are the real fools.

It is a poor programmer indeed that writes pathological code (and functional code in Java is pathological) and then blames his team for not understanding it.
"anonymous function" is a term that refers to a syntax for declaring a function without immediately naming it. A function can't "become" anonymous at runtime by leaving the environment in which it was created.

"lexical closure" is a term used to describe the way that functions behave at runtime. A lexical closure can be used as a first class value, and retains the scope that it was created in, as opposed to adopting the scope in which is is called. Example:

def foo(bar):
a = 2
bar()

a = 5
def baz():
print a

will print "5" not "2". but note that `baz` is not anonymous because being anonymous is a syntactic quality and in the source code, `baz` is named in the same operation as it is declared.
I've never heard of that population before, it's quite an impressive thing to see [1]. On the other hand, the author's statement makes it sound like it's a common phenomenon around the world when it's not.

[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=melanesian+blonde&hl=en&...
MemSQL - 80,000 queries per second
Show HN: Unix Permissions Calculator (Experiment with Backbone.js)
I wanted to learn how to use Backbone.js a while back but had problems grokking information from the docs and various tutorials.

This weekend I decided to buckle down and try to create a simple app with Backbone.js. This was the result!

I'm not really sure if I'm really using Backbone in the way it's meant to (I followed the Todo tutorial) but if anyone has any comments on how to improve on my Backbone code, I'd definitely appreciate it!
I would have taken the money in a heart beat.

But to complain about how AOL, in hindsight, could have built iTunes out of it is mildly annoying. It's a mentality I see sometimes entrepreneurial culture.

Taking it to the "next level" is hard, whatever that level happens to be. It's why you sell, rather than going it alone. If you think you can build iTunes (or Google, or Facebook, or Amazon or...) then build it. Don't sell to someone else and wonder why they didn't or couldn't.
I came here to comment on that sentence. I think it's a great idea, at least compared to the alternative of evaluating yourself. That's how it's done where I work. I mean talk about the LEAST objective person you could ask.
Same here. I don't think there's any difference for any use case, it's pretty much the same player. I do remove all the bloatware, though.
The author of the blog post has promised more extensive tests with other datasets in future posts. Also there is an ongoing GSoC project for setting up a systematic benchmark infrastructure + performance optimizations for the scikit-learn project. So let's wait and see. We will soon have more meat for finer analysis.
How to share Backbone.js models with node.js
Do you mean that interstitial version that used XML and had a whole new interface and everything?
Because: https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/adff4a706a5d7ad18ef053...
Have a look at the RCV1 benchmarks on this page: http://leon.bottou.org/projects/sgd

SGD is still slightly faster but liblinear is behaving good enough in that case.
Jaket Euro 4E – Euro 2012
I've had a lot of experience with schools banning a dependency of something rather than the thing itself, allegedly because they feel that gives them more time to prevent it. If they can take a camera away before students start sexting, then the student never will have started sexting. If they wait until the student starts, then it actually happened.

Of course, that means also banning all the legitimate uses of cameras, implying that the school thinks students' primary use of cameras is sexting, which I find obscenely offensive.
This post is a perfect example of the quintessentially quippy, conceited, young male American perspective that dominates HN.
To me Winamp was always more of an accessory to Napster than anything else. Don't get me wrong, it was a solid program -- but it was really not much more of a utility through my eyes. On the other hand Napster really stands out in my mind as something revolutionary (ethics aside).
Here's the question I don't get - how do you fill "support" roles? Like how do admins fit into this structure? Or HR? Are there really people, who given a job at a video game company and no defined role, would choose to set up meetings and answer phones?

Or similarly, how do you determine that some devs build awesome video games while others maintain a corporate intranet or do some much more mundane task?

Clearly, it works. And in a theoretical sense, I can see why when everyone has somewhat similar skillsets. Can someone fill in the blanks for me when there are specialists and support people involved?