skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's be plain: it was the only way to get the code examples to work. ;)
> Aren't there any legal protections for customers in scenarios like this ?

Sure, but to avail yourself of these legal protections, you need to go through the legal system -- filing a suit in court. The law might guarantee you'll get what you paid for, but it can't force Google to offer phone support.
Well, some people hypothesize that your utility can be superlinear in the positive region. Utility = (gain or loss)^3, for example.

Of course, the stats prof says he buys lottery tickets because they are fun. I do something similar - even though the expected gain from video games is precisely $0, I still play them.
The practice of a company keeping tips that most consumers assume are for the person/people providing the labor has disgusted me since my days in catering in NY, where it was also a common practice. At least they were clever enough to add an 18% service charge and not call it a gratuity.

On a side note, if you ever get married or have a big catered event don't just tip the person in charge with an envelope full of cash, take the time to hand each service person their share, otherwise they will most likely never get any of it.
> The amazon book looks outdated and I am a bit surprised by the lack of django 1.4 learning material for newcomers to the framework as this is key for it's popularity.

The problem with print books is that they fall out of date so quickly. Rails has the same problem--perhaps even more so due to the rapid development pace.

I was really looking forward to the Prag Prog Django book, as they usually release updates and revise the eBook editions, so it's a shame the deal fell apart.
>Things I wish I knew about MongoDB a year ago

The post reads as a series of criticisms about mongo. I don't love mongo, but I'm not aware of any data store that can perform that type of query purely from an index.

Now, the description was vague enough that he could have been describing a real bug I'm not aware of - at one point I've seen MySQL decide to use an index for sorting instead of for filtering when that query plan was 500x slower. If mongo has a bug like that one, disregard my comment please. :-)
Prelude emacs cheat sheet to welcome new users to emacs
https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude/issues/221
This is because you're not after money but after welfare (whatever that is).
The paper was accepted, under condition that these comments are addressed. Considering that the paper contains no meaningful content whatsoever, it should have been outright rejected.

It seems that the journal is one of a number of recent "low tier" (putting it mildly) journals that mainly profit of the processing fee they collect to publish the paper.

I doubt this could have gotten accepted, even conditionally, by a more established journal with a reputation to lose.
The title is misleading. I came in expecting a proof found by an automated prover being explained by a natural language generator. Instead, it's just another joke paper where meaningless content is generated by some random process.
Sorry to be 'that guy', but are you sure you attached the correct link? Chris Harrison's CV is (sadly) in pdf on his website!
Has google ever commented on the "no support" policy?

It's incredible to me that this is their stance.

It also seems to directly violate "Do no evil" pretty frequently--effectively shutting down someone's livelihood, in this case.
Crime News Jon Benet: Patsy did it says Steve Thomas
The cumulative impact of a lifetime of spending $5 per week is much less than winning a lottery. Most people can sustain a $5 per week hit, especially if they get the mental benefits described by the parent article.

There are better things to spend $5 on, but it's not a huge deal either way - as long as you stay out of the addictive/compulsive zone.

The losses covered by insurance are very impactful. Most people can't sustain the massive financial hit that comes from, say, their house burning down. It can make sense to lessen their day-to-day quality of life by spending money on insurance, to guard against that massive downside risk.
Then why even bother giving a referee report? But I guess scammers do many strange things...
"... as opposed to TouchWiz or Sense or whatever UI has been bolted on top of the Android innards."

Uh, what? This is a Google/ASUS device, you won't find any of that stuff here. I'm pretty sure the Nexus 7 is as close to AOSP as you can get...
VCs make nearly all their returns off a few big hits. So on the big hit, they will certainly:

1) make > 150k.

2) Sell out instantly, or at the very least in chunks considerably bigger than 150k. Even if they do sell out in 150k chunks, that will drastically reduce their returns - returns = log(outcome/investment)/t, so increasing t will lower returns.

3) Return the funds to investors.

Sounds like this law will, in fact, cut returns by roughly 50%. Or maybe 30% if the exit takes a long time.
This is a great thing for startups to exploit who really care deeply about all of their customers. They can easily take business away from large, monolithic companies that don't really care about losing one measly person.

Many of our big wins come from doing something better that Microsoft or Google already might do, but doing it 10x better AND offering great customer support.
The focal point is discovery. Not other queues (or other libraries that can build queues). This is an interesting way to approach it, thanks for open sourcing.

We chose to solve the discovery problem a bit differently in NSQ (https://github.com/bitly/nsq) but I could certainly see some interesting opportunities to experiment with a distribute hash table approach as well.
Wow. Every comment except one trashed you.

Certainly it would be safer if pedestrians (like me!) didn't listen to music while walking, but I'm not willing to concede the principle that traffic laws be obeyed.

Just because I didn't do every last proactive thing to avoid an accident doesn't excuse the person who caused it.
Ha! On the ground in France, it's not really hostility, it's more indifference and rigidity. Some are hostile indeed, but some are helpful as well so it balances out. It's still a general pain in the backside though, and boy do they know about not communicating between services, losing papers you sent, and asking you 5 times for the same stuff... But to our problem it is the actual tax rate increase. From 30 to 60% overnight on investors' exits. Not neutral for business.
With insurance, you're already subject to the risk. With lottery you choose it.
Mailing List Etiquette
Don't the Nordic countries have a lot of taxes?

Not on corporations. They do tend to have rather high taxes on middle class individuals, however.

http://blogs-images.forbes.com/kenrapoza/files/2011/09/Corpo...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2011/09/09/a-cross-cou...
If MS Surface hardware isn't complete garbage, I'd be much more excited to see Android running on it. In the same vein, wouldn't it be nice if we could run Android on a iPad 3?
Hm. Most people collect on insurance for very-sustainable costs - drug benefits, dental for checkups, routine visits to the doctor. Where do those fit into this argument?

Personally, I would like insurance that pays only for large expenses. I know its a sucker game to pay insurance; since the insurance companies profit I must be losing. But 'group insurance' is not something I can change.
Meanwhile, the people who sell you the lottery ticket act completely rationally. Funny---it's still lottery tickets, but when the odds are in your favour the hope is no longer needed.
Vaccines Could Be Emailed and Printed at Home
Yeah the new 75% income tax bracket in France really is putting the Laffer curve theory to the test. Will be very interesting to see how it pans out. I'm sure socialist governments elsewhere in Europe is following this grand experiment closely.
Wow, I had never read this piece before, but it exactly describes the croatian school system. Kids & students just memorising information. Even the teachers don't explain what something means, because they also went through school memorising stuff.
Ebooks are just great when learning especially on dual screen setups. AFAK Rails books get updated really fast - and there are at least a few good introductory courses. There is a Django video series coming but who can wait untill December :)

http://gettingstartedwithdjango.com
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the book and blog post.

I've been asked on Twitter about student discounts, short answer is don't do it. Long answer: if you have a book specifically targeting students, price it so they can afford it, otherwise don't bother as it's more work for you and they probably won't buy it anyway.
You're right about heuristics, but the relevant wiki page for bias is really "Cognitive Bias"[1] rather than "Statistical Bias".

Also Holmes is not a good example of a rationalist; his main ability comes from being a fictional protagonist. Holmes cannot be a much better source of rationality advice than Conan Doyle, who quite literally believed in fairies.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Bias
"Normal" Windows won't run on ARM afaik. So you'd be looking at running WinRT which is stripped down version of Windows that doesn't allow things like sideloading or desktop apps.

Ubuntu will be a better bet for people who want to run desktop type applications on their tablet. Quite how popular a use case that really is remains to be seen.
Are you proposing that the socialist nanny-state in Spain has caused the Spanish financial crisis? or its crazy real estate boom?
What good alternatives are there to Google apps? I may hate them for not having support, but because it's such a good product i may be forced to use it.
I'm still looking for a great alternative to Gmail/Google apps for my business email. Something that supports IMAP and has a reasonable webmail front end. Fastmail is the closest thing i've found but this could be a perfectly fine startup which probably simply isn't sexy enough for anything to actually go and do.
You might also be able to open an LLC and receive a Tax ID number. It probably depends on your state.

How do you plan to take the money back to India?
I know that Charles Scwhab has a checking account with no foreign transaction fees, including free ATM usage worldwide.
Insurance significantly reduces the possible (or significantly likely) variance in a persons financial well-being. This comes at a cost in total wealth that is worth while because it brings the chance that one would vary into territory where the money one has is not enough for basic utility. Insurance on the other hand increases the variance (meaning the slight increase in expected value comes at a cost) at the other end of the spread in a way that does not guarantee any kind of minimal utility. Minimal utility is more important than huge potential diminished returns.
Think so. Please let me know if you know more.
Word? Excel?
Because an accepted paper without some report is something that has never been seen and thus highly suspicious. No typos to report? All the prose is perfect and understandable? No missing references? No formatting issues?
Testing y
just testing the waters... sorry
when I access that page I can't help but being distracted by animated ads to cut down my belly.
Learning to Program, Learning to Slow Down
This sounds to me like asking "Why would a scammer do something that makes the scam more plausible?". The answer is, of course, to make more people fall for it. Their target is tiny (people that want to write math papers!), so they need to give at least the appearance of being legit.
Any idea if this can be dual booted with Android/Ubuntu?

I've been wanting a lightweight notebook and a tablet computer for a while now and I'm on a limited budget. This could do that perfectly.
HN seems to be a really great idea.
WinRT and Mono
The Nordic countries do have a lot of taxes, and Norway most of all. And that means Norway is not the easiest country to do business in, unless you're into oil, gas or fish. The one big killer in Norway, is taxation of working capital. Which is why a Norwegian Facebook or Twitter would be impossible at this moment. If you have a company valued at say $100 million, but you're losing money at a rate of $200k per year, you'd think you just need to raise those $200k somehow, which shouldn't be too hard. But guess what, since you're valued at $100 million, you'd have to somehow raise another $2 million each and every year, just to pay your taxes.
Isn't distributing your ebook as a simple pdf an invitation for people who don't want to pay for it to copy and circulate it for free? How do you get around this?
Offtopic: I'm sorry, but the font you're using is horrendously unreadable; the "i"s (for example) are mostly missing:

http://i.imgur.com/cwn1Q.png
This is my problem with Ubuntu and Unity, and why I much prefer Linux Mint as a "Windows replacement" OS. They say they made that side bar to "work well with touchscreen devices, too", but as we can see Unity on a touchscreen devices offers a pretty poor experience, and the sidebar is just about the only thing that is meant for touchscreens in Ubuntu. The global menu and everything else is clearly meant for a PC and a mouse.

So why annoy the PC users with the sidebar, when it's not even that good of a UI for tablets? They're much better off designing a tablet-first UI for tablets, if they want to get into that, and stick with designing a well optimized PC UI for PC's.

I've never been a believer of one UI for all form factors and sizes, because you usually end up with the UI being optimized just for one form factor and size, and mediocre or downright terrible for others. You need to optimize the UI for its own form factor and size. It's the only way to make it work well.
_At least one_ of them is wrong.
Hopefully this means Ubuntu for Android[0] is getting ready for primetime. I'm stoked about the future with this. A phone which boots into Ubuntu when docked, and allows me to get rid of all other devices is the stuff of dreams for me.

[0]http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android
Microsoft has a number you can call for any problem with their paid products. Admittedly, it's not free, but the fee is refunded if the problem is found to be caused by Microsoft. Anyone can call and open a case, regardless of support contract.
1) If you're in the US like you say you are, this is a resume, not a CV.
2) The "website" link for Food Trucks Near Me does not work.

Also, I'm a bit baffled by these graphs. While they look nice, I'm not sure what they're conveying. Is there an endpoint for learning/competency (100%) like a bar graph would suggest? If anything, I think a pie chart might reflect your abilities better since it doesn't claim that a College Senior is 50% done/proficient/knows everything about Python or whatever (I don't claim that you're not awesome with Python but that's quite the bold claim, even for someone with many, many years of experience).

Otherwise, looks good and definitely beats a paper resume.
Not really. There is a C compiler for every platform worth its salt.
As a programmer, it never occurred to me that you would not keep your resume, be it online or on paper, under version control.

Your resume looks good, but I have some (personal) objections to it.

The bright background, most people seem used to it, but I don't like it; something more subtle (gray) could make the site look more smooth.

The free space, just because you can scroll, it does not mean that you should waste screen estate like that; e.g. on a 23" screen, almost half of the screen is occupied by your name.

The skill bars are a controversial topic. I am considering them for my resume, too, but to me setting the values seems rather arbitrary.

Section priorities, visually the skill bars take up a huge amount of space, yet the projects section (which is more important, because it's providing proof) looks like some background noise due to its size and different background color.

I think it's a good start and can become a great online resume!

It's always easier to judge other people's work, so you are free to punch back, you'll find my resume at http://me73.com (WIP).

PS: If I was in the position of deciding whether to hire you or not, I wouldn't; given your experience section, you already seem to be actively holding 7 positions, how could you have any time left for my business?
Announcing the OCaml Labs project
Some people don't care about getting books for free. They just care about the convenience of getting the book.

If you make the book more convenient to get than downloading it for free, the more likely you will make money off of them.
"who calls the software on their phone the Droid Razr's OS or the Galaxy SII's OS?"

I do. "operating system" is a very ambiguous term. Depending on who you ask, Linux, GNU, Gnome and Ubuntu are all called an "operating systems".

Android is not a operating system in the sense the term is used for Windows 7 or iOS. The comparable OS to those systems is what Samsung, HTC, Google etc. ship with their devices. Different operating systems based on a common platform.
Bottlenecks can also be managed with various design and deployment strategies. There has actually been a lot of thought and time put into some of these products and they do have to solve the same problems you are concerned with.

Like I said, I'm glad you had fun with it. But you stated in your article, that there are not existing solutions without a single point of failure, and that simply isn't true. That's the only part I object to.
You can't get around this. People will pirate it and they do. However, those who pirate it wouldn't pay money anyway so there's no loss.

And because it's literally two clicks to buy it with PayPal, it's easier to buy it on my site than to try and find a pirated copy, so for those who want to buy it legally it's really easy.
Yes, I know. I called it. It's been a week and I have gotten one minor response to what should be a routine question about a setting on Azure blob storage.
7 Startup Mistakes Kill the Best Profit Projections
Do you use affiliates? I know this was one of the primary sales channels for "Evernote Essentials".
Great article that highlights the main issues with fast-growing billion-dollar behemoths like Google: "[...] I was so dreamy eyed about Google that I didn’t take the proper precautions [...]". It's insane that they get away with providing 1st level support for critical infrastructure to paying customers using a forum manned by volunteers!
The promised five rules about selling thousands of copies are contradicted by three to four of them:

Rule #1: No publishers. Publish the book yourself.

A publisher usually has marketing and distribution options at hand that you could only dream of.

Rule #2: No 3rd-party sales channels. No Amazon/Kindle, iBookstore, etc.

If your goal is to spread it as much as possible than you've got to use any possible option.

Rule #4: Publish as a PDF. Optionally also as EPUB, depending on topic/audience. No dead-tree version, please.

To sale thousands of copies you should try to offer a diversity of formats. While there is no reason why you should not print the book to sell to those who prefer it, a "dead-tree" book is no ebook and thus the submitted post is correct that you should avoid that when trying to sell your ebook. I guess.

Rule #5: Price high. Price for the value you provide, not for what feels right.

To sell thousands you should probably not use a high price, but price rather low.

I pulled my answers out of the air just like madrobby. Yeah, I am getting sick and tired of these marketing fluff unscientific best-practise posts. Same level as the usual life improvement blogs for me.
How To Incorporate Feedback Into Lean Mobile App Development
Yes, a gobbledydook author (the program, not its creator) passed peer review of gobbledygook reviewers.

The insinuation that the mathematical community at large had any involvement in this self-proclaimed journal is false, and then headline is linkbait unworthy of HNm
A Cartoonist's Standing Drafting Table
Ah, but that's just it. I do pay. All of these accounts are paid. But there is no reliable support.
Then why does anyone have acne?
Well, thanks for calling me clueless based on...your hunch, I guess.
Are you an author who is successfully publishing books?
Natural-treatments-for-anxiety-relie
Since a great deal of people today hate taking medications for their disorders, they often choose alternate medication to treat their anxiety
No—I've had the experience that it doesn't work for the types of technical books we (my wife and I) write. Or we're just really better at email/twitter/blog marketing. :)

But it's definitely a good option for many types of books.
Why did you choose to put skill bars at the top that have no frame of reference rather than a listing of actual accomplishments? Your skill bars for node.js and mongo are at expert levels...what have you made with them?

* There are a lot of design issues with this but the main problem is how you prioritize your weakest qualities...the Education heading is the most obvious one. If you have nothing to list than just remove it. It's obvious YC type people don't require that someone graduate from Harvard in order to be successful. As it is now, it at best makes it look like youve submitted a draft resume. At worst, it shows that you can't break out of the conventional mindset, such as the one thinking that Education must always be at the top of a resume
Well they certainly got the the expected value of "promises".
You mean going BACK in that direction. All (or most?) art used to be directly commissioned.
The tittle first mislead me because I thought somebody generated a theorem-prover smart enough to find something worth publishing (note: I know nothing about computer generated proofs of theorems).

After reading the "article" I found it obvious it was void of sense. "Let \rho = A", what is A? And who on earth would bother to write 0 as tan(\intfy^{-1}) ?? There are also proofs "left as an exercise to the reader"! Amongs many others those are obvious clues that the article is just a joke.

But thanks to that I know that the journal "Advances in Pure Mathematics" is a scam...
Use Contrast Ratio to easily calculate color contrast ratios
Back before Google Apps, I was using 1and1 for hosted Exchange.
Predictable analyst is predictable:

Buying Motorola saddled Google with all the pain of a badly run OEM staffed mostly by people Google would not hire. I hope the patents are worth the pain.

As for Android, it has had the effect of making Google the leader in mobile ads. Otherwise, might Apple, or Facebook, or Amazon, or Microsoft, or some independent ad network be the leader? And then we would have analysts asking why Google didn't make a phone and own the ecosystem.
I think you missed the focus of the article. He's talking about very specialized books with small total markets (in the 1000's). With that in mind, these rules seem helpful.
I've heard the same thing about banking the support calls for an unknown future problem, and my reaction is always the same; "We have had 2 devs working on this problem for x hours, at $y per hour. MS support calls are purchasable in packs at $z each. We passed the point for calling (really hard math here) hours ago. By the way, remind me which business school did you get your degree from?"