skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The big problem I see with that characterization is that CC-BY-NC doesn't establish any price for commercial use; it rather forbids it totally.

That is not a problem at all: believe it or not, a work can be available under multiple licenses. Here's how you establish a price for commercial use: you talk to the author and you ask him if he'd consider giving you a commercial license, the you discuss the price.

> I don't know how something can be orthogonal when it correlates strongly.

Because it only correlates due to medium and publication costs.

> The point which I had trouble explaining above was that there also some for-profit uses in this category which NC-using bands would not mind, like ad-supported bloggers.

Or so you believe, that doesn't actually mean it's the case. Furthermore, and as I noted above, this is a non-issue: the ad-supported blogger can send a request to the author and get a license directly.

> In that sense, my impression of those who select NC is that they really just want to embrace the newer ways that people interact with music, without allowing the older modes of interaction to exploit it.

That is not my impression at all.
Vandalising cameras is not (IMO) a valid response.

These cameras are put up with the intention of protecting life / liberty / property. Perfectly valid and laudable aims in a democracy.

The problem is that the uses of the systems can become subverted and spiral downwards, through lack of controls and oversight.

As an example imagine cameras and software to identify sudden violent actions in a street, flag the incident for review, follow all the involved people as they walk down different streets switching cameras intelligently.

That seems a good thing.

Bad thing: not knowing you were being monitored last night and upon review nothing violent actually happened.

Badder thing: not knowing you are being monitored as part of a skin-color recognition innovation.

Badderer things: oh lots, but all about technologies being used outside of strict, "just cause" reasons.
Looks like this has been fixed. Thanks :)
A lot of genetic traits follow normal distribution due to the way genes are combined. It doesn't follow at all from this that human skill follows a normal distribution, especially looking at the whole population. It seems to be more like a power law distribution.
Has this been resolved?
Interesting question, do great developers at the top throw the curve, leaving most developers below average? What about those who wreak havoc and ruin, which must be fixed by others? Achieving -10x productivity might be difficult, but are there more negative productivity developers than rock stars?
We did the same thing to put our authenticated user on the request object, but I still didn't like passing the request around everywhere, so eventually I made some middleware that attached the request as a threadlocal variable, so clients could just refer to the variable if they needed it.

The caveat, of course, is that if you are using anything other than a vanilla CGI-type gateway, you need to make sure to clear out the threadlocal variable at the end of the request. Don't want it getting reused by somebody else. :)
Congrats! This is truly awesome.
Distribution of software development skill in the entire population is probably normal. However, developers are not the entire population, they are a tiny slice of the right tail. So the distribution is more like an exponential distribution, which has the mean smaller than the median.
"It is quite possible that Twitter has a similar situation where most tweets come from a smaller number of users"

It's not only possible, it's certain. The average Twitter user doesn't tweet very much. I don't know if it's 5% or 1% that's responsible for half the tweets (I could find out), but it's definitely a small minority. This is expected for every content-based social network.

http://diegobasch.com/some-fresh-twitter-stats-as-of-july-20...
Agreed, and if I recall correct, you can turn that feature off and call websites directly.
Do you have any reason to assume that programming competence is a "natural phenomenon" ?

We're not talking about the statistical central limit theorem here, we're talking about people who are passionate about programming and spend years working on their craft.

You can only invoke the normal distribution thing when you're talking about an outcome that is the average of many independent quantities.
> (2) is hard to do nicely in C

Hard? Like "registering a window class, writing a window message handler, creating a window and running a message loop" unbearably hard? That's not to say that there shouldn't be a split into an engine and a UI modules, potentially running in separate processes (and done in different languages if need be).
It really depends on the specific situation. If a recruiter approaches me directly, then the ball is in my court. If I have to approach a recruiter, then I assume that they have an upper hand (usually).

I do not send over my Resume/CV to a recruiter who approaches me until he gives me the following:

1. Who is the end client and what location

2. What is the min. rate OR can he match my desired rate ?

3. type of job (fulltime,contract , right to hire etc?)

4. What is the client looking for a.k.a job description? (This one is usually vague unless the recruiter really understands the domain. But I can figure it out if it is in my specific domain of expertise)

Once he gives me these 4, I become very responsive if I am interested and give him everything he wants including the boring Resume/CV and the whole nine yards.
Actually, a lot of natural phenomena does NOT follow a normal distribution. The problem is that most people assume it does anyway, and that's where a lot of errors come from.

Statistics requires a lot of correct assumptions in order to be accurate; sadly, most people overlook or fail to check their assumptions.
It's the part where he writes, "...Kansas City's support for Google's network went well beyond deregulation to outright corporate welfare," that I found striking. Maybe it's just a poor choice of words but it seemed to me like it set the tone of the article as a condemnation of Google building out their network at the expense of the taxpayers, and completely ignoring that they were providing what would from any of the established telcoms be a very expensive service to the city in exchange.
Dear Google_Surveys, The Statistics Addict In Me Wants To Hug You
Wow. I guess I disagree with you about the innovation in the laptop market. I showed my wife the MacBook Air yesterday, and she was amazed at how different it was from the stuff she was used to.

And your argument about "what's left to innovate on a tablet's hardware" is also pretty shortsighted. I'm sure that you had the foresight to predict the iPad?

Change and innovation aren't magic. But saying that there's no more room for innovation has been proven wrong, time and time again.
Downvoted for "republican arithmetic". (I very strongly dislike the Republican Party and what it has come to stand for over the last few decades, but the world has enough political arguments already without injecting them into technical discussions like this one.)
So artistic freedom means you get to restrict the artistic rights of others, even if they play by all the rules otherwise?
When Silk is set to fetch everything through Amazon, the default, do all DNS queries go through Amazon as well?
A Post-Mortem for G4, and What a True Geek Channel Would Look Like
Let's wait until the hardware is shipped before we compare this to much with stuff you can purchase today. It's easy to "Surface" with a new product and tout it as the best thing since sliced bread.

But all the sites that depend on linkbaiting will have a field day for a few weeks.
Hard is relative. Clearly.
Learning Android Development - Day 7
No.

The name is html5shiv, and it is something you fashion out of javascript and shove into the guts of IE.
I would take GP's comment over someone preaching on a subject that he has no direct experience with. Latter is far more damaging to the discussion. The insulting tone is well justified.

Having done my share of kernel development I can assure you that anyone who brings up a topic of rewriting Linux kernel in (even) C++ gets laughed out of the room. When someone starts suggesting that there are plausible alternatives to C for kernel development, it is indeed a clear indication of no prior experience with the subject matter.
I wonder if the advent of web programming makes this process all the more confusing?

When I took basic Java and VB programming courses in college 10 years ago, we focused only on Java and VB. There was no HTML, CSS, JS, frameworks, etc. And you could have a complete, functioning program with GUI from the start.

Now, to create a web app, you have to learn all those other things in addition to Ruby, or Python, or PHP. As you advance in skills you'll likely move to either front-end or back-end, but when you start out creating everything from scratch, it feels like there's so much more.

(This coming from someone who did IT work for the 10 years following college, and is not trying to break into the web developing world).
I completely agree with you. When I'm not hacking, I'm a musician. I'm currently beginning work on an album and thought about putting it under a free license. However, this album will roughly be half a year of full-time work (yes, that kind of work can be horribly time consuming), since I'm doing everything myself, from start to finish. This is why I plan on selling it, most likely on a donation basis. The free license doesn't keep me from doing so while still providing all the niceties of copyleft licenses.

There's just one thing: I don't want others to profit from my work. Listeners can get the album from wherever they want, do whatever they want to it or with it, I don't care. I suspect that if they like it, they'll drop me some form of donation and if they can't afford it, I'm also happy with a simple "thank you". But I definitely don't want my works to end up as cash in someone elses pocket, so that's why would be choosing a CC-NC license. If that goes away, I'll have to come up with my own license, or just use a non-copyleft license, whatever is easier and cheaper for me.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for sharing. Music is meant to be shared. That's why I want to encourage people to give it to their friends, hence the free license.

There are quite a few similar use cases for a NC license, so we should rather look into the issue of where "commercial" starts, rather than removing the NC license and losing potential free works.

I hope that makes any sense at all.
This TLD messes up HN's title: "top-level domain representing the Occupied Palestinian Territory | Hacker News .فلسطين" I assume this is because Arabic is right-to-left, but it's interesting that only the title is affected.

Edit: This affects Mobile Safari on an iPad (iOS 5.1.1).
Build a Call Queue Metrics Dashboard with ASP.NET MVC
He's just saying there is little room for innovation in the tablet hardware space. I'd tend to agree. Once all tablets are light, responsive, high resolution, reasonably powered (RAM/CPU), and have all the standard frills you're really past the point of diminishing returns IMHO. There's not much you can do with an iPad 3 you could't do with the first iPad, though it's a nicer experience. The iPad 6 is probably going to be much less of a leap from the iPad 3 than the 3 was from the original.
Yes, and terrible engineers can also completely ruin the process. As can a terrible manager. What's your point?

A real UX person will be able to and should provide high-fidelity mocks of the entire flow, preferably with an interactive demo of some kind. They will certainly have design skills and preferably programming skills. However, those high-fidelity mocks are the last stage in the UX design process. If all you want are those final mocks then you are doing nothing more than asking for a new coat of paint, and what you really want is a graphic designer.

So, you're right, everyone on the team should be responsible for good UX, but it really helps to have someone who can slam together some mocks after the meetings, or whose job it is to come up with a completely new idea to solve our nasty onboarding flow problem. Because George, the guy who's in charge of making sure our DB doesn't implode under load? He might be able to help out with the UX, but he's already got a full-time job to do.

Your image of a UX person that produces no mocks, no prototypes, no designs, and just sits in meetings is a sad one. Those people should be fired, because they are not doing anything -- certainly not UX.
I found this very cool! I clicked on the article thinking it would be about crowdsourcing, but it's actually about a cool machine learning technique I didn't know about. Plus, it was very well explained. Thanks for writing it!
A look at the Valuation of GrubHub, Inc.
Yep, fixed! And the social buttons no longer hover.

What do you think of the line-height @ 160%? too much?
Looks incredibly cool. What JS library/framework is this using?
Ok I think I answered that question by doing this:

cd ~/apps/.labrador
rails s -p 3002
firefox localhost:3002/~/apps/myapp

now I get:

No such file or directory - /tmp/mysql.sock
It really annoys me that questions like this aren't welcome on Stack Overflow anymore. This is a great example of a question which doesn't have "one right answer" but is still constructive and relevant.
It's a good story, but I think you're remembering both the plot details and the themes of Jurassic Park differently than I am.
Philips’ In.Range keeps track of your valuables from your iPhone
German Traffic Light lets you play Pong
Starting with the data is sage advice. Reminds me of a Robert Bringhurst quote that smacked me in the face when I read it:

"Typography exists to honor content."
So people talked about Apple positively in the past. Now they don't. That somehow reflects on HN... why?
The equivalent construct in OCaml is "function", and it suffers from the same limitation, and it's quite idiomatic to match on a tuple.
From the comments on Google+:

"Very true. Along the same lines, Google+ is the Major League Soccer of social networks. Other countries have very successful soccer leagues that happened organically. The US tried to manufacture a soccer league, and it spent a ton of money in doing so. It so happens that the most talented athletes in the country prefer sports that are already popular. The most interesting people in the league are has-beens from Europe. Still, nothing wrong with being the fifth or sixth most popular sport in the country.﻿" -Diego Basch
yes, but in the long term.. Chile is often used as guinea pig to do this sort of things, so before go all the way and start a huge data center in Brazil, it pays off to try it in a smaller scale somewhere else in the region and learn from it, Chile is perfect for that, it has the political stability, infrastructure and just enough population to have a decent amount of trained profesionals available..

Another point is, the data center will serve all LatAm not just Chile, so what really matters is where in the region you can get the fastests and more reliable bandwidth links to the US at the lowest price..
It did take it quite a while to get really cheap tho - I remember reading a PC magazine article in the late 90s declaring the arrival of the till-then mythical "$1000 PC" era - computers used to cost $2-3k, and these are USDs of 2-3 decades ago (probably worth double in today's dollars). if you spend $1k on a pc desktop today you'll get absolute top of the line hardware, even $500 will get you a solid mid-range desktop.

only in the last ~5 years with the arrival of netbooks did we start seeing PCs get really, really cheap.
i still feel the hn engine is optimised for expounding rather than discussion. the threading is nice, but in the absence of a reply notification, and with the nesting depth capped, having an actual discussion tends to be difficult.
I personally think the 2, 12, 20 time frame is too short. Although 2 is probably too aggressive, I really think that this type of movement will happen within the next 5 years.

I hope I get to be a part of it.
You don't do that by disobeying your boss - you do it by quitting, finding your own clients, and saying "your competition is taking 6 hours to do this, and I can do it in a fraction of the time by using new language/feature/technology/process X", and beating your boss at his own game.

If your boss isn't paying you to look at the new technology, do it on your own time and in your own projects. If you want, you can come back afterwards and say "based on my personal experience, we can save time/money by switching to X" and give them the opportunity to try it out - or to overrule you.
I remember Barnes and Noble had a job offering that was looking for "rockstar developers to work in a start-up like environment." When the guy asked me if I were a rock-star, I said no. He ended the conversation right there.
Yes, LambdaCase only supports one argument. That covers the most common cases, such as foo >>= \case ...

See the discussions at http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/4359 and https://unknownparallel.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/the-long-an... for the history of this.

Multi-argument lambda case proves quite difficult to handle sanely, because normal non-lambda case doesn't do multiple arguments, just tuples. Having multiple arguments requires separating the pattern for each argument somehow, a problem that doesn't come up for non-lambda cases.
Not enough payment methods available. I would have an account if they would offer paypal.
I would be surprised but not totally shocked if either Microsoft or Apple bought Twitter. Tight integration into OS and devices + the huge critical mass of active social users + the social and cultural relevance of Twitter would be assets for them.
Apple and Samsung having to argue each other’s multitouch systems are fantastic
The app looks great, Good luck Jeremy!
It's kind of a big leap to go from "This is not a strict subset of JavaScript" to "You're ignoring the web." If you really want to deal only with JavaScript-native data structures, I can't see any reason why you couldn't deserialize EDN into those. If you really like the added data structures in EDN and don't want to lose those in your JavaScript program, you could just use Mori or something similar.
Yeah, I think this is an important point. If you don't agree with your bosses architectural decisions, you probably should have discussed those initially. If you feel like your boss wasn't listening to reason, does he have a boss? Simply going off and doing your own thing seems like a particularly bad idea, and I'm not sure I'd want someone on my team acting in the same manner.
I thought that e-commerce was one of the things MongoDB said it would not be good for http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Use+Cases#UseCases-Whens...
I love MongoDB and I use it on many of the projects I work on, but I'd want something transactional and ACID compliant when dealing with money and purchase tracking. How are you mitigating the risks of data integrity compromise when using Mongo?
Amen. "Rock star" or "awesome" in a help-wanted post are code words for me, meaning that the hiring company or manager is a) a douche, b) woefully inexperienced, c) doesn't understand developers, or d) all of the above. I hit the "next" button whenever I see the code words.

I am an excellent developer with many years of experience, but I have never once described myself as a "rock star."
2560x1440
How am I missing the point? You make it sound like the marketing was really innovative, whether or not the product was (it was a great product that could speak for itself, you're absolutely right). It (the marketing) was different and fresh for the period of time, same as the product.

I'm not saying that the iPhone isn't innovative or that it's success is solely due to clever marketing. I'm saying I'm getting tired of these threads where people think that Steve Jobs heard the word of God like Muhammad and recorded his schematics and source code and the iPhone came right out of left field. It was a combination of a great product, at the right time, with the right sales pitch. All of us would be so lucky as to find the product-trifecta.
Im not convinced that app.net needs to beat twitters numbers to win. If they continue with the paid membership model, then they can carve a nice niche in the developer community.

Not related to his point, but he isn't actually part of Svbtle, right? Not that it really matters, though I bet that annoys the hell out of dcurtis.
Identifying and Eliminating Extra Oracle DB Latency
Quite a few packages on Hackage use type-level naturals, hand-implemented using mechanisms like a type-level zero and a type-level successor function (and often a type-level "times 2" function to avoid the huge inefficiency of a unary representation). Building type-level naturals into GHC will allow all of those packages to become much cleaner and saner.

Type-level strings (AKA Symbols) also allow very impressive constructs, such as type-safe extensible records using type-level strings as keys.
Browsing habits aside, I find something else annoying about it. When I click on the article, and the video sits in the middle of the page with text above it, I want to read the text until I reach the video, then watch the video, then continue with the text below it. As soon as the video starts, reading is disturbed. To me it completely kills the "flow" of the article.

And just my two cents: There is nothing wrong with any opinion. It's an opinion after all isn't it? An opinion is not a universal truth. It's something personal that people like to share for some reason. That what makes discussion so hard at times.
I think Vooza already tried this.
C# is not that great either. It's the IDE and all the supporting libraries that make a difference. And in this lies the problem - what if these libraries change, what if the IDE goes away or it license changes. Chances are that in a few years your UI code won't even build with then-current version of the C# toolset. On the other hand, C-based UI that depends solely on <windows.h> will.
As an addendum to your article on hiring "rockstars". A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece further highlighting how 'rockstar' is a broken metaphor in the development world, based on personal experience performing with rockstars on stage.

http://news.nucleusdevelopment.com/2012/08/03/so-you-want-to...
If the government can give a subsidy that causes a business to do something that has positive externalities greatly exceeding the cost of the subsidy, isn't that a wise use of government resources?
This is awesome!

Can we hope for Redis support in the future?
Eventually they'll be able to distinguish the minute differences in identical twins' epigenomes.
The use of superlatives in the job ad can work to your advantage when it comes to negotiating pay. If they want "awesome" devs then they should be prepared to pay "awesomely"....
I am not much of a stats guy, but median seems more appropriate in some ways because you're hiring a person, not a statistic. Of course, it'd also be fair to say that your median developer is significantly less awesome than someone in the top 10%.
What did you attach the request to? Pyramid does provide a way to get the current request:

pyramid.threadlocal.get_current_request()
Show HN: Write your own text game. Would like feedback
India gets its Square Clone, Ezetap
I don't think the timeline for the development of the Arabic script is quite right. I believe it's more typically put 3-400 CE, with the Nabatean script slowly accruing Arabic-like features over time.

Of course, my knowledge of the history of writing extends to a single undergrad course and a quick skim of Wikipedia as a refresher. I'll happily admit I'm wrong if that turns out to be the case.