skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My impression is that 9gag is a social fad. Memes became mainstream and the 'cool kids' (the early adopters) are already making fun of le upboat XDD I mustache you a herp derp.

9gag is pretty popular in Israel[1]. My coworkers (20yo) still read it, but it was all the rage a few months ago, and in a family dinner my 13yo cousin asked me if I know the site. All this indicates the eternal cycle: 'knew them before it was cool' -> mainstream -> 'omg are you still into that?'

Dubstep (recent example) stopped being cool because it went mainstream. Memes will not stop being cool - image macros are the laziest way to get information - but 9gag (unless they do something crazy) will become just a site. Remember the esoteric tumblrs?

[1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mghhLqu31cQ
But you do study Philosophy, Medicine, Economics, Archaeology and Anthropology and many other subjects without having studied them before. The subjects that are not (or are rarely, or badly) taught at school often expect people with little existing knowledge but a strong interest and an enquiring mind. Computer Science falls into this category. Also if you think of Computer Science as being primarily about programming rather than the maths, theory and science of computing I don't think you fully understand computer science.

I chose to do Computer Science because I wanted to properly understand computers. I had essentially no programming experience although I had tried a couple of times but hadn't found the right way in, (QBasic by Example didn't work for me and I didn't discover K&R or a C compiler which I think would have worked better for me). At the end of my degree I was definitely not a great programmer but I could program in Java and ML (taught in the degree programme) and C/C++ and the WIN32 APIs self taught and used for my final year (significant scale but poorly structured) project.

There people on the course (at a very famous university) who really couldn't program at the end of the course but knew the material and official answers well enough to get good degrees. There were also many that started with good programming skills but it was certainly possible to learn enough in the three years to be able to start work and do useful programming and build experience.

Something that surprised and disappointed me at University was how few people seemed to really try to take advantage of being there and learn generally within and beyond their subject rather than being course and exam focused (not just CompSci but all subjects).

Am I a great programmer? No, but I've only spent 15 months within a professional development team, another couple of years on demo level and proof of concept software in an R&D environment and the last year self retraining in iOS and Rails development following five and half years in Product Planning and Business Development.

Who should you hire? I don't know but some simple programming tasks I. The interview stages are probably a good idea. If you want someone who is just a programmer maybe someone incurious is a good bet if they have the skills you need now but whether they are self taught or university educated I think the big question is whether you want someone to fill a particular role now or for the future growth potential that they have. If you are only interested in the fully capable now rather than the trainable (and mouldable to your company way) you may miss out onbetter long term bets.
I think it does. Of course, I think this as somebody who has just begun learning about it, so I certainly don't speak from any experience :P.

Particularly, category theory seems to center around abstraction. I think abstraction is essentially the core of CS (but maybe that's just because of SICP) and exceptionally important in everyday programming. Learning this sort of math (along with some related fields like abstract algebra) essentially allows you to unlock a higher level of abstraction.

This can help in two ways. For one, it allows you to write more general code and create extremely useful libraries. The Haskell standard library, naturally, is a great example of this. Additionally, it helps with thinking about conceptually difficult concepts in programming. For example, even just the basic ideas of category theory really helped me to understand and work with non-deterministic programming. Thinking about composing non-deterministic functions, and how these functions behave much like normal functions, made life much easier.

Category theory is one of the more abstract branches of math, so it's no surprise that it lends itself to great programming abstractions. Understanding and using such abstractions in a uniform and systematic way is extremely useful, so I think it's definitely an area that would be beneficial for programmers to study.

It's also fun, but that's another story entirely :).
Well, you have more karma by far, so hopefully you're not too upset :D This link mentions the affiliation so perhaps it just gets more attention because of that. I have been in this spot often, but in general meta-HN stuff is a bit OT, so sorry heh.
I don't understand why reddit doesn't do the same thing on Facebook, perhaps in a mor ethical way with links to sources and sparing a few donations once in a while.
Unless Social Networks change, they'll die.
This is also one of the most basic lessons of decision making: decisions are independent of the results of those decisions. The results are inevitably shaped by luck too, and it's impossible to say which one caused the result. You can, of course evaluate a decision as a good one if its correlated to a good result over a high number of trials, but survivor bias and success stories deal with very few trials.
(Please correct me if I'm incorrectly tying decision-making and correlation vs. causation into this)

The crux of the matter though, is that we have no alternatives. We don't have the ability to perform controlled trials to verify any of our theories like in science, so we must look at the past and derive any lessons we can.
could you just add a mouse-over event to each ad that sets an isHuman flag?
He certainly is, I was just expressing some frustration.
> This makes Apple a screaming deal. There are other good stocks out there, and if you decide to trade on the fundamentals, you can make great returns. Its not very difficult.
The thing is, part of the reasons it is so easy is that almost the whole world has convinced themselves that its impossible and instead doesn't invest or puts their money into index funds.

Really, it's not that hard? Do you have a track record to point to?

It's been my experience that most people who say "it's easy" are those who look back and say, yea of course I knew the tech bubble would burst at exactly that point, etc, etc.

There is a saying, right but early is wrong, right but late is wrong. Sadly, it's often not enough to just be right, you either run out of money or nerves, often both:)
Why HTML5 will revolutionize web-applications
I've been dabbling with the idea of taking Awk style patterns and translating them to JavaScript to run in Node.js (with the intent of allowing Awk style programs that also allow higher-order programming constructs). At this point I've got the translation working for some simple cases.

I've been pondering whether to trying to generalize the concept to work on http requests instead of just files, at which point I think a fairly elegant micro web framework could be made that applies Awk style pattern / action pairs to the incoming http requests.
Looking for feedback on user experience
Oh my god, I can't believe this. Is this article stating that REAL PEOPLE don't click on advertisements? Oh my god, no...
This is a convenient dichotomy for that part of all of us that wishes to think ourselves “critical thinkers”, but not at the cost of looking carefully at the meaning of words. Math and Science are the two fields whose understanding requires this. This is the first and most important of the requirements of Math and Science: know, as precisely and accurately as you can, what you mean. Simple to express, but difficult to achieve in practice. It takes unrelenting effort. I know that for myself, all my instincts conspire against it. It is much easier for me to think I am a “critical thinker” because I can criticize what some other people think, without the discomfort of examining my own preconceptions and assumptions, or even getting a clear idea of what they are. And it is all the more easy with legions of academic departments willing and even eager to train me and support me in the practice of trading verbal tokens with my colleagues, and affirming my own notions about the folly of the notions of others. I suspect that is much of what happens with the liberal arts.

I have some experience with the teachings in math education. Here, the liberal art of teaching and the hard science of mathematics meet. In my experience, the hardness of hard science is always softened in the service of “education”; “education”, which is split into factions with zealous supporters, wins by force.

Here's how this plays out: someone observes that, say, arithmetic with integers can be modeled with, say, tiles with different colors on each side. They create a lesson to help students get a conceptual understanding, using integers of small absolute value, to get avoid unnecessary details in the computations. Than an educator “realizes”: “hey, as long as they ‘get the idea’, well, why continue with practice in difficult computations when they already ‘get it’ with the tiles, and the tiles are so much FUN?” Training and practice in more involved computations is dropped, along with practice in a lot of the trickier details of this new kind of computation. They can use calculators, anyway. The learning becomes, at best, almost exclusively qualitative, and those students who complain that the class is become boring and unchallenging are labeled malcontents---err, “resistant to modern teaching methods”. Later, high school algebra students need calculators to calculate “-3 * 4”, and a high school algebra teacher must reteach arithmetic, perhaps doing some “conceptual” lessons of his own, and the progress of learning is retarded.

Students abandon this “math” in frustration. The DOE demands more money to solve the education crisis in America. Rinse. Repeat.
1) Buy facebook stock

2) Create massive ad clicking botfarm

3) ???

4) Profit!
Well yeah, getting a training data set, and then having your algo not be poisoned, seems like it is a challenge all around!
Also sad that this great book is going to be mothballed because the author was lazy in trying to make his otherwise valid points. The quotes were not scandalous, they were about Bob Dylan getting sick of his music and image, and wanting to leave the industry altogether, only to find that once he did, he was more inspired then ever and produced his best and most influential work.

From Ted talks to interviews, and articles, I have found myself drawn to Lehrer's work (and in the best way, usually finding out he wrote a piece only after discovering it). His work on creativity and innovation is very interesting. After making the initial mistake of not being rigorous and forthright about the truth, I don't think it takes away from the underlying knowledge he is trying to share. Also, his letter of resignation was very sincere and took full responsibility of his actions. Kudos, hopefully he learned his lesson and continues in his field of study, I for one find it useful.
Here's what Mr. Graham said:

You can translate most of VC-speak with just 2 rules:

1. "Here is a termsheet." -> "Here is a termsheet."

2. * -> "No."
My highlights from Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
The truly radical change in Hangout is of course the recent addition of an alert sound being played when Hangout warns you they're about to kill your chat for no particular reason.

Long lived hangouts rarely get to stay on screen, so the silent "are you still there" message shortly followed by a disconnect was painful.

I'm still not sure how much money Google spends on maintaining p2p video calls open that makes it worth pushing users to stop using Hangout so darn much.
Wow, I did not expect that. This post led to a massive dose of nostalgia (Stanford alum who's been banished to the east coast).

Minor suggestion -- it would be cool to have an option to overlay building names. This is really neat -- thanks for sharing.
I answered the grandfather's question "Does Germany import a lot of power?"

Also, I think that is highly relevant. If you do not include imports, countries with few natural sources automatically will appear to be green. For example, I bet many small island groups will have close to 100% renewable energy production, including those with huge navy bases such as Truk and Diego Garcia.
I couldn't agree more, however, if humans are too expensive, I still don't mind the robots getting there first. The moon landing was an outcome of the cold war. I find it hard happening again. Sending humans all the way to Saturn - it is very far away - is a dangerous task with too much at stake.

I would love for all wars to end, for all the military budget to go to NASA instead, and for us to become a truly inter-planetary civilization, but that's just not a realistic wish, at least not for the next decades.

But robots. Robots we can do now. Curiosity landing on Mars next week. It can do truly amazing things, scientifically more than a team of humans could.
You do realise that what some would consider texture creep has been happening since OSX 10.0 beta with the over use of "aqua and pinstripe" followed by "brushed metal".

So this ridiculous notion that it didn't happen under Steve is nothing more than a figment of your imagination.
Cheddar for iOS is now Open Source
I'm sorry, but a terrorist is just someone that the hegemony does not like or is using to scare you.

I am 100% serious. https://vimeo.com/13726978
I remember poignantly an argument I had with my cousins about education. They themselves are teachers, two elementary and one specializes teaching kids with special needs. All of them are extremely dedicated and very passionate (to the point of tears) about learning and teaching. They love their jobs and the kids they work with.

The argument I had was that it wasn't teachers that were the problem. It was the institution of education that allows the problems we see. Unfortunately for my cousins and I that I was too inarticulate in showing them they weren't the problem.

Ken Robinson did my thoughts far more justice in his TED video about education paradigms [1]. To summarize, why do we educate our children along a yearly conveyor belt with compartmentalized subjects and standardized testing? The whole system mimics the factory assembly lines, complete with specializations and quality assurance.

We allow process to educate children instead of people. We can effectively replace any teacher with another and our expectations and the system itself doesn't change in any meaningful way. We squash the organic and relational learning with rote memorization and rigid structure. We don't foster curiosity or exploration. We value conformity to structure and authority. There isn't any opportunity for kids to "scratch their itch" unless it falls within the existing structure.

I do have hope for the future. Places like Khan and Wikipedia allow for the curious exploration of subjects, and the Internet allows for participation and dialog that weren't available a few decades ago. I believe we are waking up to a different paradigm of learning that has the ability to transform education from it's Industrial Revolution roots. I also believe this will give passionate teachers, like my cousins, the freedom from the rigid structure that allows them to foster the natural interests of their pupils.

If we allow this form of organic learning, then Standardization is effectively impossible. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. This gives more flexibility to tailor the education to the kids' interests. However this means we will have to accept that some people will want to grow their kids in ways that are hard to swallow. Creationism comes to mind. I don't have a good idea how to counter this.

[1]: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_par...
Uruguay could be the world’s first marijuana republic
I think nope, just that many of their users are non-profits.
The haskell-platform package, in every form and version on every platform also contains a cabal binary, see https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/?package=haskell-p... to see this in fedora. Some of the advice you got here was I think not good because you pretty clearly affirm that you installed the fedora Haskell Platform. On #haskell this could all have been debugged in seconds after the difficulty first appeared.
> I'm still not sure how much money Google spends on maintaining p2p video calls open that makes it worth pushing users to stop using Hangout so darn much.

Maybe because it's not p2p?
Subscription service sends you 'letters in the mail'
HTML5 & CSS3 Fundamentals: Development for Absolute Beginners | Channel 9
[gif] Dream Automation ~ the best automated disaster recovery you can have
After Flop, Olympic Diver Outs Hateful Troll on Twitter
All About Mountain Lion’s Power Nap Feature
All that is really no excuse for not developing a foolproof system. And if you know that you don't have a great system to catch fraud, then you should simply leave some money on the table.

See, the essence here is not to come up with a great algorithm. This is not a programming contest. But to create a system where everyone (publisher, advertiser, ad-network and customer) wins.

In this very early stage, the success of Facebook's Ad network should be measured only by one metric - ROI of Advertisers. And that number has to be consistently better than Google's.
No. The 9/11 hijackers were educated and not poor.
Jack D'or got me over 40 text messages. A bit of overkill I'd say.
If you're using a chi-square or its better relative, the g-test, then outliers do not matter.

If you're using ANOVA or Student's T-test, don't do that. They assume that you're sampling from normal distributions and you are not.

What you should do is truncate extreme outliers, then use a z-test. Start at http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/index.html#asli... and use the arrow keys to go through about 2 sections to for details on that.

If you have any questions, shoot them to btilly@gmail.com.
The problem with mechanical turk impressions/clicks is typically the country of origin, since they usually involve paying people in third-world countries a fraction of a cent which is still worth some nominal amount to them. Say you are an advertiser who runs an ecommerce site that only ships within the US. You don't want to pay for impressions/clicks from people in India because you can't actually sell to them, even if they are "real" people and not a script.

Also, there is "brand marketing" and "performance marketing." I'm not sure they have classic definitions, but generally brand marketing is based on "mindshare" and tough to quantify. This is basically any TV commercial -- Budweiser doesn't expect you to jump off your couch the second you see a Bud Light commercial, but maybe a week later when you're in the supermarket, you spot that new brand of beer and recall the commercial with Jay-Z rapping and grinding with some models, and think, "eh, maybe I'll try Bud Light Platinum, I will purchase this and consume it later because I like the idea of rapping with models," even at a subconscious level.

Performance marketing is all about ROI. You spend $100 marketing dollars, and you want to make at least $X back. Typically $X = 100 in this example, although in some cases you may want to adjust profit margins or even run at negative profit (for example, if you want to maximize revenue even at an unprofitable rate). Almost any advertiser on the internet has a performance marketing mentality, mainly because it's much easier to actually measure performance. This is why advertisers like the OP are frustrated with Facebook, because paying for bot traffic makes it extremely hard to hit their performance marketing goals.

You are right though, in that this is a huge gray area. To give two extremes, let's say you run an ecommerce site but you'd also like to monetize with ads. So you reach a deal with a shopping comparison site to display their products on your pages in your footer. If you buy AdWords to your site, and those visitors from AdWords scroll down and click on the shopping comparison ads, they are probably fine with paying you for that traffic, although you are probably paying something like $2/click. If you make a page with JUST the shopping comparison ads, and buy traffic from someone who basically infects computers with trojans and overwrites their Google search results to be your site (say at $0.01 per click), then you'll get clicks on the shopping comparison ads and make lots of money, except the shopping comparison site will realize these clicks don't lead to any actual sales for their merchants (since this is extremely poor quality traffic since all the users that end up there have basically no intent) and will kick you off. Somewhere in between adveritsing for "first page Google AdWords" traffic and "trojan/botnet" traffic is basically every other form of internet advertising, and how gray that area is, is typically completely defined by your business partners.
I can tell about Microsoft Touch Mouse (last mentioned in the article) first hand. I've been using it for about seven months, and sometimes it is annoying. Idea is great - multitouch mouse, but implementation is shaky. I'd like to call this bug "unintentional scroll".

Since its surface is touch-sensitive, it is really easy to perform unwanted tasks like scrolling, when just moving it or clicking. For example, when holding Ctrl and trying to click a link to open it in new tam, you should be really accurate. If you're not (I'm often not) it starts scrolling and with Ctrl it just zooms in and out web pages.

You can get used to it, but it happens from time to time anyway.

On the other hand, Microsoft Arc Touch mouse ir an awesome portable mouse to keep in your bag. It takes time to get used to it, but when you do, it is awesome. It fits anywhere, because of its design (flat, when switched off). It is light. It is wireless.
Just like any nice laptop display was useless for many years without a second, crappy CRT monitor...
Nonsurvivorship bias.
Would it be useful to have a kind of open source database of "trusted" bots, just to get past that hurdle? I do realize there are many more issues apart from declared user agents.
Sure. But not being "Cool" doesn't mean not being "Popular".
If we ever plan to have an extended presence in space then examining artifacts left on the moon would be very informative. We left a lot of machinery up there, exposed to the vagaries of space for 40 years. There's a lot to be learned from the state of that equipment.
If what is stated in the title ('YC S12') is true, then definitely yes. 9Gag has been around for close to four years. But that begs another question? Why did they choose to join YC then? They already had their product out and had a pretty large user base - what does YC have to offer them?
Inside Look: Engineer Needed To Help Build Developer Scoring Algorithm
I should have clarified that I was trying to ask a more general question as to why bootstrapping is seen as a superior way of starting a company as opposed to taking on funding.
didn't work for 2 beers i tried: http://imgur.com/GTMoG
They started 2008 [1]. So far afterwards.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9gag
We're a social good for-profit.
More realistically, it could also be used to drain your competition's ad budget, giving you a bit of an advantage.
You're most likely wrong about Steve throwing a fit seeing this piece of junk.

Steve liked skeuomorphism even when it made Jony Ive 'wince'
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/apple-designer-jonathan...
Social Meets Search with Bing, Available to Everyone in US Today