skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That may have been the case, but research shows that it often takes several different placebos to find one that works. In fact, the chances of depression remitting when changing antidepressants are comparable to the chances of a disease being treated when changing placebos.
Damn you! I'm about a month away from re-launching an ecommerce site in MongoDB. I probably could have used this six months ago :-)

Oh well, very nice product, glad to hear of yet another use-case for MongoDB and ecommerce.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366203
The OP is correct. Cardinality in mathematics is the number of elements in a set[1]. What you are probably referring to is the concept of cardinal numbers[2]. I guess you can skip the smug tone.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number
> "Moral rights" in this contexts seems to be a utterly Orwellian contraption.

No more so than the right to privacy, or publicity rights in general.

> There are few more fundamental rights than the right of free speech

There's absolutely nothing effectively fundamental to free speech. Not even one country provides for unlimited and unrestrained free speech, yet most of them seem to work well enough.

> and this so called "moral rights" are utterly incompatible with free speech.

I fail to see the relation, let alone the "utter incompatibility". Not that it matters, as both are social constructs
This sounds like a great way to approach the problem.

While the author's boss might have too narrow of a field of view in technologies, the author shares his/her boss's strategy to use a hammer as his sole tool, regardless of whether he's driving nails or screws.
I'm not sure how submissions like this are still showing up so commonly or how they arrive at the top of the list. If ever there was a community of people capable of solving the problem of "improving HN", this is the one. I supply a problem statement and solution below.

Problem:
HN has problems which seem not to get fixed despite recommendations made to the maintainer(s?). Why? I suspect it's because maintaining HN is one of the lowest priority jobs to the maintainer of HN. The guy is busy! Fixing problems or implementing possible features quickly would have very low ROI to such a person. This isn't to say that he(they?) doesn't care - just doesn't have time because his other responsibilities are actual responsibilities, not a hobby. This is the equivalent of hiring an independently wealthy person to work for your company. The person may really like working for you, but you can't rely on them. They have little incentive to stick around if they get even slightly bored.

Solution:
Make a new one. Someone make something better. You know where your primary audience lives (here) so you know where to find users. Monetize it in some way so that I know you'll keep working on it. Make it your full time gig. With the number of users you could get, you wouldn't have to ask for much. A donation model would probably pay you a pretty good salary. Be nice to the community and make reasonable attempts to fix the issues they bring up. They'll probably even help you fix them if you need them to.
Yes, your post does sound "grumpy". If you're aiming for civil discourse, then there's no reason for you to phrase your attacks as condescending rhetorical questions.
suneel, many people make this mistake. I went almost EXACTLY the same route you did. Although, I had already known HTML, CSS, and some Javascript, I was wildly unprepared for what I would encounter next just to learn how to get a working prototype. It basically took me 8 months before I got something running on Heroku. I went through four different Django books with some success here and there, including the Django Project's simple Poll tutorial three times without grasping it. Little to my understanding, all of it made sense once I used the book written by one of the creators of Django himself. I also used a lot of StackOverflow and the guys hanging out in #Python and #Django Freenode IRC channels were awesome!!!

The trial and error got me to learn a lot of things. In addition to the six things that you've listed, I forced myself to learn VIM as well. You probably use VirtualEnv, which you've forgotten to list.

Anyway, it's always good to see others going down the same road and sharing their experiences. Do you have some links to some of your early projects?
Object oriented programming for non programmers
Definitely, the goal is to support all of the most common e-commerce models (standard, drop ship, subscription, private sale, etc) out of the box and free. There may be different default admin versions to start with also, but the admin is easy to modify for anyone with HTML knowledge, so it's expected that certain features will work differently for different models.

MongoDB makes this much easier because the database only needs to know about the way you are using it, and not the various other ways that unrelated businesses might use it.

Digital file delivery is on the roadmap now (will publish this in the near future).
Why would you do that? The main point of it is to be portable across Windows and Unix, and I can't imagine that many robots care about that. It was developed for node.js. If your robots were running Unix then I imagine you would just use the normal C APIs or something like libev.
>Microsoft is going to feel this as well, as manufacturers won't be very happy selling $200-$300 tablets with $100 ($200 for enterprise versions) Windows licenses.

That does not make any sense. If you think Windows 8 Pro x86 tablets like the Surface Pro(running an Intel Core i5) are competing with the Kindles on features and price, think again. They will be expensive, but far more capable and powerful(heavier and less battery life too). For example, they can run the full Visual Studio or Eclipse.

You can take a Surface Pro and a Kindle Fire with you, run Eclipse with the Android SDK loaded, connect the Kindle Fire to the Surface and take the program you just wrote on the Surface and run it on the Kindle! Or write your code while on a roadtrip or on the subway and debug it on your Android or Windows phone(don't know how Hackintosh it can get for running apps on the iPhone).

Can you do that with a Kindle, iPad or any other tablet on the market right now, which are used by most people as consumption devices?

Where Microsoft is competing with the Kindle, Android tablets and the iPad is with Windows RT, which is a different beast(and costs less than $100 for OEMs + they are rumored to get kickbacks on ecosystem sales). The only big advantage Microsoft has right now in this space is Office RT.
His usage is correct.

Cardinality refers to the size of any set. This includes finite, countable, and uncountable sets.

The sequence of cardinal numbers is transfinite: 0, 1, 2, ... , n, ..., aleph_0, aleph_1, ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number
Yeah, but it's undocumented.
Ask HN: Front-end to Back-end or vice versa?
When you're building a personal project do you start with the front end design and build the back end around it or do you build the back end and conform the design to fit?
We are discussing CEOs of startups and their negotiation with professional investors. In that scenerio, I cannot imagine a reason why a VC should give up something in the negotiation because he feels like the startup doesn't know what they are worth. Both sides have lawyers and advisors and the CEO is an adult who can analyze his future as well as anyone else.

If the CEO is unable to negotiate what they are worth, they should hire a dreaded MBA to help them.
And Amazon will always trail in terms of innovation, because selling things at a loss doesn't give you much room to spend on R&D.

And your view of history is skewed; IBM released the PC (5150) in 1981. Compaq shipped the first compatible in 1982, and by 1985 the PC market was thoroughly commoditized.

Jump to the iPad's release in 2010. It's been 2 1/2 years, and still no signs of the tablet market being commoditized. It's still an iPad market, and not a tablet market.
I've had quite the opposite experience. Every programmer I've convinced to try haskell has had problems with records. It is incredibly limiting when coming from any language that has objects or structs. Having to prepend every single name in every single record with the information that is already in that record's name is horribly ugly. I think there is no progress made because nobody can decide on a perfect solution, so all the good enough solutions sit and rot.
I installed LFS many many years ago, and learned huge amounts from it.

Anyone who does sysadmin work, and doesn't already know this stuff, should take the time to run through it.

It might just save your snazzy new start-up some embarrassing downtime ;)
Automated DRM keeps spoiling the show, from the DNC to Mars
Thanks for the response. Do you remember why you shouldn't tell people? In case they want to buy you?
Not everyone around here is a programmer, or has really thought about how fractions are represented in binary.
Fox News would be a perfect addition to their reality distortion field.
This means the <title> tag inside the <head> element does it not? As in

<html>
<head>
<title>Something SEO worthy</title>
<head>
...

Or is it a separate <meta> tag?
Yeah, this week I found myself giving the "I'm not willing to share" answer, and hated myself for it as soon as it came out of my mouth.
Do the top-level people at Twitter not realize this? Why would they continue down this path?
> I get defensive, if you want to call it that, because I think any attempt to specially encourage one involuntary group is patronising.

If anything this RailsBridge workshop shows that there are woman who are voluntarily interested and want resources like this workshop, so this is definitely not involuntary.

> You can't ask woman-kind why none of their group aren't attending because she has nothing to do with the rest of her group.

We aren't asking individual women to speak for all women, that would be silly. However, when women share their experiences in tech or attend events like this, we get reactions like yours where women are challenged and questioned for seeking knowledge in the first place. Instead of attacking women when they participate in tech circles, try listening and stepping back.

> It's also the grouping that confuses me. You want more women in the community, and so you are encouraging someone to join your community based on an entirely irrelevant property. You only want them because of their gender. You look at them, and see a woman - just that one property. It's objectification, de-humanisation.

So treating women like human beings with genuine interests and struggles and listening to what they have to say and offering resources for them when they are under served in tech is objectifying and dehumanizing?

Let's clear something up: women in tech are actively discouraged from existing in those circles in a variety of micro- and macro-level ways. I do not see women as just women, but I do not deny that being a woman is part of their experience and it shapes their life in a way I cannot experience since I am not a woman. Nobody should be excluded from programming and tech because of their gender, but pretending that men and women are on an equal playing field in terms of treatment and opportunity is ludicrous.
Well, abiogenesis, for one.
Good move on their part, although I'm surprised they weren't able to create something like this in-house. Basically if you crawl every freakin' web page on the internet you pretty much should find all the bad guy's landing pages.
Nobody has cast doubt on anything in modern quantum mechanics. If you look at the abstract, it makes this much clearer than the BBC article does:

"While there is a rigorously proven relationship about uncertainties intrinsic to any quantum system, often referred to as “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,” Heisenberg originally formulated his ideas in terms of a relationship between the precision of a measurement and the disturbance it must create. Although this latter relationship is not rigorously proven, it is commonly believed (and taught) as an aspect of the broader uncertainty principle. Here, we experimentally observe a violation of Heisenberg’s “measurement-disturbance relationship”, using weak measurements to characterize a quantum system before and after it interacts with a measurement apparatus. Our experiment implements a 2010 proposal of Lund and Wiseman to confirm a revised measurement-disturbance relationship derived by Ozawa in 2003. Its results have broad implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics and for practical issues in quantum measurement."

In other words, Heisenberg originally thought that the inability to measure two incompatible observables (like momentum and position) was because of something that is now called the "observer effect": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics) The observer effect applies even to classical systems without quantum mechanics! You just can't measure something without affecting it in some way [1].

The modern version of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says nothing about measurement disturbing the system. It instead says that there is an inherent uncertainty to the system. I've been seeking clarification on what exactly this means for a long time and have never really gotten a satisfactory answer. I've tried Physics Stack Exchange, my QM professor, even Hacker News and most people either confuse HUP with the observer effect or they reply in illy-defined terms that don't help me any.

The best that I can figure out on my own -- the true HUP -- is thus: You can prepare a system in a certain state. You then take a position measurement and a momentum measurement at the same time. You get two real numbers. Now, you repeat the experiment. Create a system just like you did before and take measurements of r and p. After multiple repetitions of the same experiment over and over, you'll get two long lists of position and momentum measurements. Take the standard deviation of the position measurements, multiply that value by the standard deviation of the momentum measurements, and HUP guarantees that the resulting real number will be ≥ ħ/2 (reduced Planck's constant over 2).

[1] Well, there's a few loopholes if anyone is curious.
The money wont last forever.
That point is moot.

He failed to follow the first requirement (ANSI C). Everything else afterwards is merely more justification to distrust him or her.
I wonder if a placebo would be just as effective if taken at home as a Tylenol or similar.
Godaddy Auctions off your old domains now?
I had a domain that expired for one of my customers. They contact me to renew it and its up for auction on Godaddy's auction thing. Then, I go to renew the domain and they want to charge me $4.99 to sign up for the auction thing?

GODADDY SUCKS!
I'll be switching all of my 100+ domains to namecheap.com.
This is a pretty naive view of the universe. Humans have been civilized as we know it for what, 4000, 5000 years? In a little over 100 years we've gone from horse-and-buggy to detecting dark matter and building particle accelerators.

The universe operates on a time scale incredibly more significant than that, and so it's conceivable that there are intelligent beings that have been around for millions of years. Their technology and the form that they take would likely be so far beyond what we know that a similar gap in evolution would be entirely plausible.
9/11 and Global Consciousness
The New Smartphone Incrementalism
We don't cause a fuss just when the proportion is not exactly right. We cause a fuss when the proportion is way out of whack and obviously wrong. When like less than 3 percent of Boston Ruby programmers are women, something is blatantly wrong. There are probably more factors at work than mere spontaneous career preference that are causing this seriously skewed distribution.

This is not just an abstract inconvenience either. Whenever you are part of a historically marginalized minority -- whether by color, gender, or nationality -- it will likely be more uncomfortable for you to enter fields where you are the only person from your group. This is particularly true for women.

Not only are sexist comments more likely when there are not a lot of women at events (see http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-...), the women will also likely feel more uncomfortable because of the disproportion. Let me quote a posting on our outreach mailing list thread from a woman to elaborate:

"I have definitely never experienced anything threatening or offensive at a Ruby group meeting. But, you show up at an event where there are 50 men or more to 3 women, and you grow to expect some double-takes. Some women, like me, are okay with that. A lot aren't. And it makes it hard to show up alone or when you don't know anyone if you know you're going to stick out like a sore thumb. A man can show up at boston.rb for the first time and not have anyone pay the least attention. A woman cannot.

"There's some critical mass that needs to be reached before that's not true anymore, and it's just hard work to get there. There needs to be enough women who don't care if they stick out, so the women who do care don't stick out so much. And you need to make plans to meet the women you know there, so they already know someone. That could be a component of any project night, outreach, or mentorship effort -- encouraging people to come to the meetings, and affirmatively planning to meet them there."

I hope these points carry at least a little weight for you. Thank you for raising the challenge.
Innovation vs. Refinement
Create an Experience
I don't know if it qualifies as a startup, but I've been seeing ideeli ads everywhere and once they figured out how angry people got at clicking on an ad for a sale and being sent to the homepage, I'm guessing their conversions spiked way up.

I finally bit the bullet last night and ordered from them. I worry for my financial future.
Seems like the only logical reason they are doing this is because they are in the start of an acquisition. They have to prove some type of revenue stream (ads) and restricting users to the twitter site/app will help them guarantee the made up numbers.
Pumped about this. Going to take a look when I am done with the nine-to-five. Good work!
They still have huge engineering challenges and as long as that's true they're going to be able to find people willing and interested.
Trust me, the UK model works well compared to what the rest of the US gets..
What do you mean by 'independent toolchain'? And what part of the OS were you looking to learn about?

Remember that LFS, despite the name, is not about learning Linux-the-kernel, it's about learning 'Linux-the-operating-system' (which is more precisely referred to as GNU - using 'Linux' to refer to the OS is technically incorrect, though very widespread).

Most of the time this is just a point of either pedantry or politics, but if you want to build your OS from scratch, you really need the entire toolchain[1] if you want to build a 'usable' system.

[1] You can sub parts of other toolchains, so I guess the more correct answer is that you need an entire toolchain, with the GNU tools being the de-facto default toolchain.
I very much doubt Twitter is interested in an acquisition.
Really can't agree with where Twitter is going with their API cutoffs, a year ago, I would've sat down for an hour or two just to build in a Twitter tweeting function into whatever software I was writing.

It was an easy, no fuss way of getting social media into software. Facebook caused me no end of bother, its API was (still is?) an 'it exists, and here's the calls, good luck buddy' affair.

Now, I'm not sure the functions I used would pass the API ToS.
> sorry to break it to you, but a little over 49% of developers are below average.

I'm being nitpicky, but this isn't true (unless you're talking about the median).

I think developers follow a skewed distribution by most measures (prolificacy, quality), with something more like a power law distribution. If this is true, the majority of developers are below-average. A sobering thought!

The opposite is also possible however. If 90% of developers are equally good, and 10% are really terrible, then 90% of developers could be above average. If this is the type of problem your devs are solving, you shouldn't be paying top wages or trying to get "ninjas."

Nitpick aside, this is a great article about avoiding the wrong kind of self-selection in your applicant pool.
I knew there had to be others building e-commerce with MongoDB, but have seen very little of it so far. We've be happy to help you in the future if your site can benefit from it.
"rent a well reviewed wife "

Now that phrase could have 100 meanings. You probably don't want to use that as a tagline for sure.
I wish more companies knew what they really wanted before asking people to come in. I am at the point where I am getting sick of sitting through three hours of clown questions that having nothing to do with the type of coding that I would use in production only to find out weeks later that it was all a waste because I am not what they were looking for. I understanding perfectly that I will not always be a good fit for the job, but go bother someone else if you want someone to jump through three levels of interviews only to decide that you want a different skill set.

PS Thanks for indulging me in this rant. This just happened last week and I am still a bit annoyed that I wasted that much time at a company only to find they wanted someone with a completely different skill set (ie RPG).
I've heard a lot about twitter's support for third party apps. I have never encountered one of these apps myself. When I see quotes like "the world of third-party developers", it suggests that there is a large number of applications somewhere that I'm missing. What are these apps?
Awesome point there.

Almost by definition, anyone who really is a badass, rockstar, ninja, etc. at what they do is viscerally repelled by the cockiness exuding from job ads seeking people who describe themselves as such... and would never dream of applying for such jobs.
> The exact goal of the NC attribute is peculiar to our transitional stage: it is attempting to embrace the Old Media Model for the corporations that are stuck inside it, while being free to use in the New Media Model.

I can't agree with that. The exact goal of the NC attribute is to make money from others making money out of your work but to let people who don't make money out of your work not have to pay.

That has nothing to do with "old media" and "new media", and is orthogonal to them.
Why do you say that? It is likely their only out at this point.

Sell the network effect, let someone else try and monetize it.
If you think all hiring requires is a 'challenge' I have a bridge to sell you.
I agree, however, I would argue that 1 needs to be an independent process, with an IPC mechanism rather than a library. This would allow for multiple systems to access the same research data - If my experience in research maps to the specific situation (not all research is the same), this means that several experiments can easily have a rock-solid data source, without needing to debug the library integration every time, and allowing for post-processing chains to build of each other.
That's fantastic news! I wear those terribly unfashionable goggle-like sunglasses for old people that go over my prescription glasses. Looks like I'm safe for the near future. :)
Part of the project is writing it in C, so you cannot and you should not.

Sorry for the bad tidings.
Or maybe it's just a more informed opinion than one from Holland.

Time will tell.