skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article makes the mathematical point, but deliberately ignores social reality. Yes, 100 generations is sufficient time for the premise to be possible, to fully propagate genes from every ancestor to every descendant.

But reality doesn't work that way. Human population groups breed within themselves. Mating pairs are not chosen at random from the entire human population. Consider all the remote groups that would have to be covered to satisfy the assertion. Someone alive today would have to become a common ancestor of every Lapp in Finland, every Aborigine in Australia, every Inuit in Nunavut, every Maori of Polynesia, every Falklander, every North Korean, and countless more groups that barely have any contact with the world community, let alone interbreeding. (And maybe we'll actually launch a Mars colony or interstellar generation ship, literally making it impossible.)

The article does mention this very offhandedly, inserting the clause "If people in this population meet and breed at random". But that antecedent is plainly false so the conclusions are not defensible.
Some of the most popular Youtubers have their content viewed by hundreds of thousands of mobile viewers so this will make a substantial increase to their revenue (6 and 7 figures for some). Assuming people choose to watch the adverts of course.
>Yes, as I die I'll be able to look back on my life and see that I had everything properly organized into neat folders.

Whereas you are mr. Joe Adventure, middle name "Unpredictable" now?

The same thing could be said for all "todo", "time management", "GTD", etc solutions. Why the snark for this particular idea, which sounds a lot more involved and useful than 90% of the GTD apps out there?

Actually reminds me of the "personal customized web portal pages" of old, which could be even more interesting in this day and age, showing latest tweets, mails, bank balance, upcoming events, RSS feeds you follow, etc, on top of basic stuff like todos etc.
It sounds interesting to me. I'd like to hear more about what you're thinking. I love tracking data like this.
The existing body of Emacs Lisp packages is sufficiently large to make this a cost-prohibitive task.
If this were a Kickstarter, I'd buy the top package. This is something I've wanted for a long while. Good luck!
Stay classy? My friend, the H.S.S. HN Classy ship sailed away many years ago.
> philosophy and religion are products of the human brain activity, which is composed of cells, so why can't these functions be approached in a scientific way?

That's easy to answer -- because they aren't subject to potential falsification, by way of comparison with reality.

Scientific ideas, to merit the name, must be testable against reality, and if reality disagrees, the ideas must be discarded.

Philosophy and religion don't have this property -- they (a) don't need to pass a reality test, and (b) in most cases they cannot pass a reality test. This is by design, not by accident -- if religion and philosophy had to meet this standard, their purpose (freedom to speculate about untestable things) would be undermined.

> there are scientists that actively try to expand into the other realm.

Perhaps, but not as scientists, only as individuals not doing science. And because science rejects authority, a scientist who philosophizes is just another philosopher, no better or worse than any other.
While AirBNB & Dropbox are successful enough now to consider them "exits" - they haven't actually sold or ipo'd.
True. I didn't know the best term to use here on HN. But on the site I think changing Version control to File History is a good idea. Thanks.
You think you have problems? I am 40 and one of those silly "girl" people:

Pair programming is like those girls that go to the restaurant bathroom together.

In Andy Singleton's universe, I should just go die already.

P.S. Used Assembla on a client. Very subpar tool, IMHO.
Yup, IIRC, in the God Delusion, Dawkins talks about a belief spectrum. The spectrum ranges from 1 thru 7 where 1 is a strong theist who believes and knows there is a God and 7 is a strong Atheist who knows there is no God. Dawkins mentions he is a 6 (low probability of a God, doesn't know for sure but chooses to live on the assumption that there is no God) and leaning toward 7.
The cute XKCD comic aside, the distribution is also useful because, for certain types of things, a lot of fairly to very negative comments are illuminating even if the average rating is still pretty high. It's not just about polarizing material. If you look, for example, at genre fiction you'll get a lot of fans who give 5s no matter what sort of crap the current book is. But if there are also a notable number of 1s and 2s, that's often a good red flag.
How I Write LaTeX
Apple, Google - please spend on R&D not IP
Well I took an open source project (gitlabhq) and just scraped id down to make it user friendly. So you could check that out for now! Its an awesome software!
Wasn't meaning it as intellectual, was more meaning it in as obsessed with pattern and order.
Yeah, climacs. http://common-lisp.net/project/climacs/

By the way. Porting the C part is one thing but what to do about all the emacs lisp packages? a compat mode?
Why Fedora 18 Will Be The Practical Choice For Vanilla Enthusiasts
I think he meant that he would be more interested in using it as a general task tracker, rather than a CV add-on. Maybe a way to track any personal goals like weight-loss, excersize, personal projects, home renovation, etc. instead of just marketable things.
>What is the probability that a descendent carries even at least one gene from the "Most Recent Common Ancestor"?

If you think about it, its very nearly 100%. The fact that he is the MRCA means that a particular gene of his conferred an enhanced survival advantage. This enhanced gene is likely to exist in all of humanity currently living.
Because I can write. Whether people love or hate what I say, I'm at least entertaining and informative at the same time. Even if my essays are full of hilarious bile I still make sure that there's a kernel of awesome information that's very true, or an informed opinion I can defend.

As for my credibility in technical matters, well I do make stuff people use, but more importantly I make stuff that helps other people be awesome. That's my niche.
Really? There's only two bits of punctuation there, and they don't take much to explain: #(...) is an anonymous function; % is the argument to that function. (I'm not counting > because ... it's just the greater-than sign.)

The Haskell version doesn't actually do the same thing. The Haskell returns [76, 82, 88, 90]; the Clojure returns ((49 58) (76 82 88 90))---it groups the input according to the result of the function, it doesn't just filter it.
The Startup Compile Cycle
Both the Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000 and Dell sk-8115 have two main sections. (I'm sure others are like this, but I only have experience with these two.) The top part is effectively a tray that does a great job at collecting debris and liquid. It's entirely plastic can can be submerged. Under that is the membrane which separates the 2nd part of the keyboard, the electronics.

While this Logitech K310 just allows you to submerge the entire keyboard, anyone with experience cleaning these things will know that simply dunking one in water won't get all the crumbs and hair out. You'll be taking it apart anyway and in that vein the ones on the market now are just fine.
Routing Concerns
"Choosing google.com instead of google.nl however is a clear choice."

No it isn't, .com is the global domain, not the english one.
This is coming from a person who probably hasn't seen a benefit from using services like Mint.com. Since I've started using it I have been drastically more aware of my finances.

The stuff that you are able to put into neat little folders _should_ go into neat little folders.
An escape mechanism for what? To escape the fact that you are a package of meat spinning on a rock, spinning about a ball of burning gas, spinning about....

It is an escape, a hope a dream that at the end of this day in day out life to wake up to something different rather than to cease existing. It is the most arrogant, self sustaining idea out there. That you as a person are important, that your opinion will matter, and that the concept of who you are will be carried forward by more than your sperm/eggs.

Faith is the concept of believing in something you can't prove. It is a thesis that is backed by our need as a species to propagate forward. The proof is in our minds (or spirits). It gives us something to latch on to. I just don't understand why it has to be considered a bad thing?

I have to also throw out there that philosophy has a great way of showing that doubt is at our core. I think some of these arguments are fanciful, but why is it not possible for there to be something more out there that we can't detect?
For me, scrum masters have always been regular members of the team who had the added responsible of organizing the meta-scrum aspects of the work. They scheduled the planning, retro, etc meetings as well as set up the task board once work was decided upon. They made sure meetings and stand-ups were running smoothly and stayed on point.

I could see where a person whose entire job description was "scrum master" would seem superfluous, but I have yet to work somewhere where that was the case.
They aren't dropping packages off on the White House lawn, or flying up the Hudson.
The New High-Tech Dating Technology? Meet in a Bar
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
Wow - talk about dodging a bullet. I just had a co-worker tell me to try something similar since I'm an avid Dropbox user. Although I don't use icloud, this story probably saved me quite a bit of frustration.
I sent you (OP) a note saying i'd join via a freemium model, but i like this too. I'd pay a flat fee upfront if basic updates were free.
I Surprised Myself == True (Python in 30 Days - Day 10)
What freaking standard is it to write dates as mm.dd? Not cool. In many countries it's the exact opposite or that is how you write TIME (ie. hh.mm instead of hh:mm).
My favorite introductory textbook on machine learning is the Tom Mitchell book: http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Tom-M-Mitchell/dp/007...

The Bishop book is the most popular though: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387310738/ref=pd_rvi_gw_2/...
I'm partial to visual design and I'm fairly certain CC's dashboard wasn't an inspiration here.

They share inverted palette and a grid layout, but other than that if you set out to design a "cool" looking and functional 2 column table, it'll end up looking as posted project. There are just too few convergence points for this sort of design pattern.
But you can't do that with Coffeescript due to the lack of semi-colons.
Founder Market Fit
Lazarus Free Pascal RAD IDE 1.0 RC2 is released
The thing that doesn't work for me in Agile: being treated like a baby and spoon fed little bits of work with little room for responsibility, initiative, creativity and a personal touch.

For the "agile" teams I've worked on, the developers have had the most input as to the breakdown of tasks compared to anyone else. So, no one was "spoon-feeding" me work. I would see what the goal of a feature would be and the team would discuss the best way to break that feature up so that work could be done.
Awesome idea. I think it would be awesome if it had the additional ability of exporting my data into a form I could use to update other things like LinkedIn, my paper resume(.doc or .pdf?), and a website (html or even a widget type deal). I just had retyping and tracking. He's got the tracking down and if I was able to keep everything updated with it I would be willing to pay for it.
I would pay $13 to watch "Timescape" in 3D.
ad hominem plus non sequitor. Nice argument.

Refute my premise that being a jerk to airport security is a bad idea.
Is that your experience? Where I work, I know at least 6 people who switched to zsh, and only one who is still there (everyone else is back on bash).

The main problem seems to be that the benefits don't outweigh the problems. The two things which did zsh in for me is finding it not installed on remote machines, and not being able to use it to distribute scripts. On the other hand, bash is everywhere and almost as good.
OP, theres some things you should definitely consider in here. ^^
Paygate for the second page.
Yep, I'm trying to dig myself out from this problem now.

The Rails Tutorial (railstutorial.org) uses Factory Girl and integration tests for just about everything, which is a fast enough approach for its toy application, but I've found that when your application gets more complex your test suite takes forever to run, and setting up the tests gets more and more painful (especially when you start dealing with external APIs).

Does anyone have any opinions on the best resource for teaching effective unit testing in Rails? I'd love to speed up my test suite while not losing coverage.
> Pair programming is like those girls that go to the restaurant bathroom together. What are they doing?

Why don't you ask somebody who pairs, rather than writing an uninformed rant against it?

> If you are customer, you pay twice as much and you get churn.

Oh I get it, you're approaching and commenting on all of Agile from your software-as-contract-work perspective. Let me enlighten you: most software isn't sponsored by a single customer on a per-diem basis. But while we're here, let me say this: if you truly think you get half the productivity from a pair, then you fundamentally misunderstand the gains of pairing.

> I recommend a more efficient alternative – review pairs. Person A and person B use a code review system to review each other’s code before release. You get the same benefit without the neck cramp and the BS.

There is more to benefit from pairing than just on-the-go reviewing. There is also the fact that you retain your focus much easier, you spread technical knowledge when you shuffle your pairs, etc.

But on the subject of reviews, your reviews are also much better because they benefit from FULL context, and the suggestions and modifications are made EARLIER (which is much less expensive than getting to the point of being ready to commit and having to refactor everything).

Oh and about the neck cramp remark: do you really expect your devs to pair without having mirrored monitors, two keyboards, etc?
How about concentrating on teleportation instead?
Deployd: a Node app (and GUI) for building real-time API's
I'm the seventh generation to work the land on my family farm. It is pretty amazing to think that so many of my ancestors before me did the very same, albeit with less modern technology. The original barn and first brick home (I'm told there was a rough wooden home that preceded the brick one when my family first settled on the land) still stand there today.
Good luck with getting a consensus definition of "startup" on even this website alone. A lot of the advice that I read here is applicable to a "lifestyle business" - because I still have to make many of the same decisions with regard to product, marketing, hiring etc. I have some different constraints and optimization targets but that's true of any two businesses.
One thing I like to do is try to start conversations with people who believe very different things than I do. For a while I was doing weekly bible readings with a very interesting group of Christian people (I'm not Christian and have never been religious). It got heated. I was very challenged and forced to analyze my own beliefs and the presuppositions I brought to the table. I'm sure they felt that they had to do the same as well and I think we all became better people for it.
Agreed.

It looks like the author was getting some heat for that point.

http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/87899/...

If you take him for his word, I'm sure he didn't mean anything by it (he says he's in that demographic). But I can't say that I'd let him off the hook that easily. Off-hand comments like this almost always come back and bite hard.
Totally agree, it hurts my heart that something this poorly written is a top post on HN.
Learn to test your intuition, a statistics aha, and radians - Better Explained
EC2 Price Calculated & Reserved Instance Cost Optimizer Updated with high i/o
There are legitimate reasons to tout it. As a startup, it's a constant battle to convince partners, vendors, big customers and potential employees that you're growing and not going away. Announcing a funding round is very convincing in that respect. It's social proof from respected people that have done their research.
1) That support article was written in the Tiger, if not the Panther, time frame. It's been around since at least 2005.

2) Mucking with this folder's rather like mucking with a Courier mail store, or a MySQL data directory: If you're gonna screw with it, you'd better know what you're doing and how all the pieces work. Apple hasn't published those details, and likely never will, so don't touch it. They've placed it in a hidden directory for a reason.

3) iCloud was never targeted at power users. Maybe it'll evolve at some point, but I wouldn't bet on it. Power users can use Dropbox, like they probably already are. Apple's not doing anything to stop you, there.
Agile -- the part where you plan what you can finish in a 3-week "sprint" makes developers to work slower. Tasks that should take 3 days are stretched to 3 weeks. The only way to have developers working honestly, is to arrange teams where developers are equal skill, so nobody can bullshit the other team member, by over-estimating.
I didnt realize until i went back that there was a full-scale demo of this. I thought this was just a landing page with a concept image at first.

If you're like me and didn't notice, here's the full demo: http://kennedysgarage.com/status
They are regulated, but not as a bank (in the US). It's complicated. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-858264.html
The Programmer’s Virtues
The main problem is the illogic of it: "if young people don't flock to something then it must be wrong." Wrong.

I don't agree with agile either but I actually have reasons. But to be fair, the article did say "Seven Things I Hate ...", it didn't say "Seven Good Reasons to Avoid Agile". The thing the article leaves out though is a reason for me to care about the fact that he hates something.
Do you know how much boilerplate crap is required before you can do hello world with express?
But your core domain classes are still coupled to their persistence mechanism in the name of 'pragmatism.'
I have absolutely no idea what this line does.

If you don't know Perl, why should you expect to? I didn't know that #(...) represented a lambda in Scala until a moment ago.
Regarding the unhelpfulness of online reviews, my company has problems with manufacturers/sellers writing 5-star reviews of their own product listings (ASIN's) on Amazon. We've begun (manually) data mining 5-star reviews to identify whether each 5-star-reviewer has any other reviews (or wish list, to indicate the possibility of a real user account), then calculating the % of reviews written by no-history user accounts. Of the ASIN's we've assessed, the gut-level-doesn't-seem-like-heavy-review-fraud listings can be in the 6% range, whereas the looks-like-review-fraud ASIN's are above 20%. We're working with Amazon to identify and penalize these manufacturers/sellers, but internally at Amazon the Seller Performance team is separate from their Community (user review) team, so it presents a challenge. Also hard for them to separate valid complaints from sour grapes complaints.
Factory Girl has saved me countless hours - I love it.

You can use build instead of create to avoid the db, as per previous comments. You don't have to use it at all if writing a simple unit test.

But for teeing up complex scenarios prior to a fat integration test, it rocks.
Even ThoughtWorks has/had developers who don't particularly like or believe in pair programming, but go along because it comes under the company's proclaimed orthodoxy umbrella most of the time. (ex TWer, so I know whereof I speak).

I used to champion pairing when I used to work at TW, and used to be puzzled at why some (very talented) TW developers thought it was all hogwash, but TW is a fine company in many ways and you eventually learn to tune out the extremes of the company's (Roy's ;) )eccentricities and get on with the work. You need to do this at any company, nothing specific to TW really.

In many teams, pairing is loosely practiced.In others, 100% pairing is the norm. So it all depends, even at TW.

That said, you have a point in that TW has some very strong and vocal proponents of 'pure' pairing. I used to be very gung ho about agile dev when I was at TW. These days I know better.

just my tangential 2 cents, and not really contradicting anything you said, just qualifying it a little.
Is Netflix really the only site which does this nearly-braindead machine learning approach?

Once you realize that people have different tastes and you know someone's preferences that is the obvious solution. Or is the process of crawling through that much statistical data that expensive that it can only be offered to paying subscribers?
Microsoft lowers price of Kinect to $109.99
I fully understand the thrust of what you're saying, but feel like it's reading a lot into my thoughts that I certainly don't intend. It's a bit smarmy too.

Still, abstract from what I actually said or meant it's an educational perspective and I genuinely thank you for it.
Role Usage Patterns: a superior alternative to inheritance
This is a silly complaint. You can't choose how to be regulated. I can't volunteer to have my software business regulated as a sewage treatment plant, or as a stock brokerage. PayPal isn't a bank so laws that regulate banks don't apply to them any more than they apply to Amazon Payments, Google Checkout or Stripe. However, the laws on money transfer organizations apply to them in all 50 states.
Personally, I think one can learn enough about agile to apply it usefully without ever learning what a "scrum master" does. Maybe this goes back to the discussion of process vs. best practices.
Upvoted both of you for civility :-)
Such a sad and unfortunately typical attitude of enterprise java developers. No wonder anyone with with any interest in programming avoids java like the plague.
Most of these complaints apply to any workplace or group that advertises itself to follow a certain methodology.

Half the problem with places calling themselves "Agile" is the need to advertise to the world the process you use to do what you do.
You might want to have a look at https://trackpanel.net , it is a side-project which I have created (and use) for just this purpose.
Suggestion for the OP: offer a no-questions-asked money-back refund (say 30 days), and/or allow people to have a free trial period.

Optimizing a successful business around people who think $25 is a lot of money to spend at one time is a tough road (I'm happy to talk offline about personal experiences here). No offense to @almost, I'm not saying he's being cheap, only that he may not value this niche as other people (similarly, I would be a horrible customer for Pokemon anything). The bottom line is $25/year is about what paper refills cost for cheap day planners; not a lot of money in any objective sense.

I'd try to capture people who perceive more than $2/month of value in what you offer, and tune the product to offer them even more.
I've always made the choice not to watch YouTube ads.

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