skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> And what is the problem in America? They don’t fit in the clothes.

This. So America gets completely different cuts of clothes. If you're not overweight, or huge, most clothes sold in America suck. I didn't realize this until I spent some time studying in Italy, where even the cheap t-shirts they give away at 5ks races fit so much better and look so much nicer on me. It wasn't until then that I realized the cut of the clothes, not just "size" or "style" make a huge HUGE difference in appearance. That, and when you would walk into a store, the employees will say "don't buy that, this here fits your body style soo much better" and they are right. In the states, I've noticed people just buying whatever is trendy, with zero understanding of what actually looks good on them, and what doesn't....
This article is heavily based on what current (esp. western) religions are concerned with now.

Religions used to be concerned with lots of different things in the past. For example the supernatural world, like witches and the devil visiting a house, or disease caused by immorality or lack of religiousity. Modern Christianity mostly cares about sex, but in the middle ages, they were concerned with witches, a few hundred years ago they were opposed to democracy, equality before the law, or overthrowing Kings.

The fundamental moral principles of religions like Christianity, and also many others, are things like: everyone is born with equal rights

This has not always been the principle of Christianity. Back in the Day™ some people were born with more rights. Kings had the right to rule over commoners etc. It was a sin to disobey & rebel against your King/Lord/Duke/etc. since they had a divine right to rule. Christianity has only recently (i.e. ~ 100 → 200 years) accepted this "equality" idea that the Enlightenment was about.
I believe some of the earliest religions were essentially sex cults that attempted to appease the gods and goddesses of fertility. More generally, the first shamans and priests were those who had acquired some insight into the workings of the natural world, yet, intentionally or not, shrouded them in mystique and ritual, creating barriers of entry to the knowledge they had discovered.

That sex is a particularly strong human motivator would drives religion's appeal to religion consumers while sex's role as a status differentiator would drive the appeal to religion producers. In short, I think the role of sex in religion is less a recent growth strategy than an ancient component that helps explain the religions we have today.
The Neuroscience of Speed Dating Choice
Yep, command line sucks. But it's a question of critical mass and network effects. Command line tools are always there, even when you're on some weird ssh tunneled setup. There's been a number of times when I've been fumbling with some goofy gui setup while some senior level dude is trying to help me with something and they always kind of roll their eyes and say, "Just use the command line."

I think the way most people learn these things is to have someone who knows what they're doing sit down next to them for an hour or so and explain how everything works. I suggest finding someone like that -- flailing around with google is orders of magnitude slower.
Same thing struck me about his prose.
Your 313 figure is incorrect. Obama won with 332 votes to Romney's 206. See the link I posted.
I was in an upscale department store in July and spotted a very nice Prada cap, with a fairly distinctive shape.

In September I went into a Zara near me and spotted a cap that was pretty clearly a facsimile of the Prada piece. I was really impressed at how quickly they had put it together. I assume they started manufacturing it immediately after the runway show.
NASA to deploy water-seeking robot on Moon in 2017
I would get rid of GSLs. I would go further, too, and make the current financing process illegal.

Imagine if you went to the local car dealer and he told you "Every car on the lot is $200k. But give me a detailed listing of your assets and income and I'll adjust the price such that you can barely afford to buy one if you take out as much financing as possible."

That kind of price discrimination is illegal for your local car dealer, but it's exactly what happens when your kid goes off to college. Not only that, colleges collude so that you can't play one college off against another.

Of course what they say is they're just making sure they have a "diverse" student body by cutting the less well off students a deal. But the net effect is the college takes in the maximum amount of money in tuition.

It's the biggest driver of ever-rising tuition, and were I in Congress I'd go on the freakin' warpath against this industry.
Hot damn, this makes testing easy. Thanks a lot for the module! There's a small typo in your page. "HTTPretty monkey matches" should be "HTTPretty monkey patches".

Great job though!
Florida is killing Computer Science
Storyboard and Table View Controller Tutorial. Part I
Why defend Apple? They've completely abused the patent system and caused the courts (and ultimately taxpayers) money for things that don't benefit us, the customers.

I'm not saying Samsung is any better; the courts really need to crack down on these types of things, and Apple has so far avoided the wrath of the courts.

I for one hate this new patent troll Apple. Patents are to drive and protect innovation, and Apple has been trying to stifle just that.

I think the courts should have been more specific as to where to place the "court-mandated statement", such as just below the product line, but above the legal stuff everybody skips, since that's where the most customers will see it without obstructing the flow of the page.

It's just underhanded for Apple to hide this rather trivial statement that nobody is likely to actually read. Many of the people on Apple's site are likely to be on Apple's side anyway.
That's why the article talks about looking for "2 or 3" warning signs rather than just one. Just about any customer can show one of those warning signs and be a perfectly acceptable customer, but when they have several, they're almost certainly toxic.
> Javascript ploting for the next set of graphs I need to produce for my research though is something I'm actually pondering about. It has the ability to be interactive which can be really helpful.

If you haven't already, you should check out the wonderful ipython HTML Notebook:

http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/interactive/htmlnotebook....
Quite a few years ago I was hired to create a DMS for a used car dealership - they gave up the contract half way though to use an existing piece of software. So it's also that car dealerships are cheap, they really think any presence is good enough.
Investors afraid of Groupon, Zynga and Facebook
It's ironic that linux is dying slightly compared to last year (according to the link).

Not that I think linux is going anywhere :)
I'd recommend Stripe.com for simplicity nowadays, but as you mentioned you're in India - your options change.

My last recommendation would be PayPal. My top would probably be Amazon Payments, if that works, or a middleman service - like Recurly, which can help you find the best merchant - though I am not a fan of Recurly either.

Do you need to accept credit cards directly from your site? If not, Google Wallet/Google Checkout may be a decent option.
Yes, there are no secondary indexes right now (they're coming, but it will take a little time). Currently "age > 25" will do a scan, but if the db is sharded it will touch only the relevant shards and the query will be completely parallelized. We also do internal sharding for multicore performance, and the query will be parallelized across cores as well.

All of that is only good for relatively small amounts of data though, so we'll be adding secondary indexes soon.
Artificial Intelligence Professor Makes a Search App to Outsmart Siri
As someone who recently installed GNOME on a Xubuntu system and then uninstalled it, I can say firsthand that that still leaves a bunch of cruft, does not cleanly remove all packages.

It's not GNOME's fault though -- it's an annoying issue with big metapackages. Same thing happened with XFCE on a stock Ubuntu install.
Great recap Sam. And nice photo.
Don't miss the end (pp. 41-43), where he calculates that the net economic benefit of mating between "systematizers" as very positive, modeling the resulting higher wages compared with the cost of autism (as 3-SD systematizing behavior) and Asperger's syndrome (as a 2.5-sigma trait).

In this model, net economic result is still very positive, even if the lifetime economic cost for a case of autism is $5 million, and the presence of Asperger's cancels out any benefit in earning (not likely!)

This is a nice result for the ever-growing industry of online and offline forums for assortative mating, particularly in this field of interest.

So here's the upshot for economic development organizations: support your local geek conventions!
PyML: Python HTML Generator
As always, depends on where you want to be. Mountain View area , you would pay $1000 and up. To pay 1k though, you gotta be pretty lucky.
>Correlation != casuation.

This. It's not at all clear people make more money as a result of college or if people who are generally more likely to make more money are also more likely to go to college. There are certainly some very famously high earning college dropouts.
Racist Teens Forced to Answer for Tweets About the 'N***er' President
2 Months of Android at Singly
I respectfully disagree.

moving around a filesystem for instance, in a GUI based tool I click on a folder and view it's contents. In a commandline tool I type an often long path, hit enter and view a list of files and/or folders in that particular folder. If I want to move up or down I issue another command that I have to type. I don't get any visual cues as to where I am in the structure either.

I fail to see how typing 20 letters and hitting enter is easier than one click with a mouse. In respect to histoory I think that what happened was that normal users moved on to a more intuitive and faster interface for normal things.
Agree with this ordering. I would start tackling abstraction. Eventually, it will come naturally when you program. Encapsulation is also another important point.
"Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

I guess trucking can be considered "information"...
Well religion is about control , and religion , in western society use to be a powerfull politic tool. The goal of religion is not to enlighten people about the "unseen world" but to control people's life and "morality", shame them (in case of christianity ) so they can go back to church and ask for forgiveness. Fetishization of sex is not a growth strategy for religion. Most religion growth has been acheive through violence and war.
Would love to see if indexes and a sane schema were used for the RDBMS case. I've built extremely large reporting databases (Dimensional Modeling techniques from Kimball) that perform exceedingly well for very adhoc queries. If your query patterns are even somewhat predictable and occur frequently, it's far better have a properly structured and indexed database than using the "let's analyze every single data element every single query!" approach that is implicit with Hadoop and MR.

Not to mention the massive cost-savings from using the right technology with a small footprint versus using a brute-force approach and a large cluster of machines.
Correct currently no secondary indices. Ranges on fields other than the primary key will require a full table scan.

-Joe Doliner, engineer at RethinkDB
Actually, I'd love to know of any cases where an outsider with a nontraditional background like this was able to solve a famous unsolved problem that had withstood significant academic and economic scrutiny. Is this a collective myth, or does it ever actually happen?

The only example that comes to mind was Ramanujan, who made many new contributions in number theory, but it's not quite the same thing -- though his genius was unparalleled, he was also working on domains that were at the time not as widely studied as nuclear fusion is today.
Like making another social app?
It would be even more excellent if people for a change wrote more _in_ scheme instead of _a_ scheme.
How to launch a web startup
San Jose is a bit farther away from San Francisco, but the prices are lower there aren't they?
Don't get hassled by opinions of other people but keep improving. Here is how I would rank the things that makes a good programmer in a real world:

1. Abstracting a problem - Understanding/analyzing problems and finding solutions. You first need to be able to solve it before anything else.

2. Coding Efficiency - How quickly you can code it? In most scenarios (at job/freelancing/etc), the ability to deliver a working solution on time matters most. You can always improve the code if it is not perfect but it is hard to make up for a lost customer/time.

3. Code Efficiency i.e. How fast the program runs? If your solution works the next thing to ensure is that the performance is good.

4. Simplicity/Readability/Maintainability - After that you can refactor the code to make it more simple, readable, and maintainable.

5. Enacpsulation and everything else comes later.
This was how I learned Haskell. I rather liked it.

That said, looking back, I'm not sure it encourages the best coding style or the best idioms. It's perfect for getting your head around the paradigm though!

I'm currently writing an analogous tutorial for implementing Prolog in Haskell, but it's on a bit of a hiatus thanks to some school and research related deadlines coming up. Hopefully people are interested in something like that :).

Interestingly enough, the Prolog interpreter is actually shorter than the simple Scheme one--largely because we can take advantage of the list monad for the backtracking. I think it's still a very cool exercise.
Great work! One question: is there any manual that explains the implementation details of the internals? Some manual similar to those Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, etc. provide?

The only docs I found in the company website that goes deep into the internals are Advanced FAQ (http://www.rethinkdb.com/docs/advanced-faq/). It is more of an architecture view, though.

The reason I ask is that with a good understanding on the internals, the engineers who understand database internals and distributed systems will have an "more" accurate idea on the capabilities and the limits of the features. Thus, if they decide to adopt RethinkDB, the understanding will help them design their applications to take advantages of the benefits and avoid the potential issues (or surprises!). MongoDB was not very good at documentation. It claims this or that feature works smoothly. Then, people found out many potential issues and limitations. That is one reason it leaves a bad tastes to many engineers.
Sorry, I was looking at the wrong page while I wrote that. But the greater point stands -- swinging Florida, Ohio, and Virginia would not have swung the election.
> in one language

It doesn't say "in one file".
If these are the problems you see with CLI, then you're doing it wrong.

- Discoverability: tab completion, apropos manpages, listing out your search path directories, using your Debian GNU/Linux distribution's package management tools to search / explain packages and commands.

- Dependencies: Debian GNU/Linux, APT, and policy. There's a reason I'm an unrepentant bigot. Debian-based distros are a fair substitute. RPM remains a pale shadow, largely for lack of policy. Proprietary operating systems have fundamental conflicts of interest which preclude an effective solution.

- Bugs: Addressed in policy and via an active user and developer community, with low barriers to communication and interaction between them. Again, Debian GNU/Linux nails this. No, it's not bug-free, but you'll find very, very few showstoppers in stable releases.

- UI: If you're not using pipes, command expansion, xargs, etc., you're mostly doing it wrong. Pasting into vim allows you to sort your linebreaks via regex replacement or any of numerous other means.

How old are you, kid?
He has limited his data to the USA; but should we not also see increases in Europe and UK as well, given the similar shifts in society and the manner in which people choose their spouses?

If there were other factors that were found in the USA but not found in other countries (whatever that may be, environmental or otherwise) then there would be statistically significant divergence.
Yep, you got me. I hadn't read the FAQ. Thanks for that.
The fundamental moral principles of religions like Christianity, and also many others, are things like: everyone is born with equal rights; treat others as you would treat yourself; try to alleviate the suffering of others.

This is projection.

Secular thinkers conceive of ethics relationally. Kant's categorical imperative. The harm principle. It's all about how you affect other people -- you shouldn't do them harm, and perhaps on a good day, you should do them good. Beyond that, who cares?

This isn't a Christian way of thinking, though. To a Christian, the object of central importance is God. How he views things. How your actions show your love for him. The pursuit of righteousness, for its own sake, because it is important to Him.

This is not just my opinion, by the way. A central prayer in Judaism is the Shema (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shema_Yisrael): "Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is one,". And Jesus affirms this as the central and most important command, and expands it (Mk 12:19):

"The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel;
The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this
is the first commandment."

The central commands of both religions don't say a thing about other people.

There are a lot of external, moral things we agree upon. But consider, for a moment, even the most famous set of rules, the ten commandments:

1. You shall have no other Gods
2. You shall make no artwork to be used as an idol
3. You shall not misuse God's name
4. You shall rest on the seventh day
5. Honor your father and mother
6. You shall not murder
7. You shall not commit adultery
8. You shall not steal
9. You shall not give false legal testimony
10. You shall not be jealous of your neighbor's things

Think about those for a second. The secularist is right there with us on 6, 7, 8, and 9. Those are external, measurable, harm-related. But look at the rest of them! 1, 5 and 10 are purely internal; thought crimes, if you will. 2 and 3 are purely religious -- who are you hurting exactly if you break these? -- and 4 sounds like a good idea, but making it a commandment that bears the death penalty seems rather like overkill.

Is it that Christians are dumb for thinking these are important? No, it's that we think about ethics differently than you. To suppose Christianity approaches ethics like a secularist is to seriously misunderstand Christianity, and to project your own way of thinking onto it.
Thanks Joe.
"These aren’t scientific benchmarks by any means (nothing’s been especially tuned or optimized)..."

I had to smile when I read that. Working with data, sometimes optimization or redesign can yield significant performance gains. (Especially when reworking some of my colleages queries or code...)
http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/

Alternately: http://zshwiki.org/home/

/thread
"Not looking dumb is not an option."

I'm going to be quoting you forever, thanks.
How to update your app on AppFog with Git
I remember using netscape (maybe 4...?) I'd just upgraded and remember for whatever reason double clicking on a html doc on my desktop and watching it sit there load up an entire suite of apps I wasn't going to use.

That was it, immediately switched to IE. I preferred Netscape but the load time was too frustrating.

And then when firefox came out (or at least one of the later version) I remember repeating that exact same thing. I needed to open a html file on the desktop and IE was sloooow. So I tried firefox, much much faster. And then there was firebug.. no contest, game set and match.

I switched to chrome for about a year because it seemed to render pages faster but about 3 months ago I ran into some weird problem where chrome stopped playing youtube videos properly. Tried everything, no luck, switched back to firefox and actually... I think I'll stick with it, it's a great browser.
Releasing a project like this means working very hard for a long time without anybody patting you on the back saying you're doing a good job. It's exhausting, a labour of love.

Get it now?
The original TC post about profig:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/20/yc-profig-instant-virtual-p...

The HN thread about profig:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4408037

I'd like to know more about why they shut down. 2 mos. is an unusually short period of time for something like this to happen. Wondering if this was simply a case of another shiny ball opportunity being presented that was difficult to pass up or some other deal breaker problem.
IMO the only drawback is learnability. And it is countered by the fact that you can make some serious gains in productivity with only a little time invested.

I started really investing in cygwin last year and I'm constantly moving more and more of my work into it. All my coworkers have a tedious build process that involves lots of clicking around windows explorer while mine is a two character sequence that has some other value-add factored in.

In addition to these benefits, shell tools take much less memory than gui ones, and I really notice the difference running mysql & psql on the command line vs firing up pgAdmin or MySQL workbench.
Hiring Kenyan technologists
I'm a Kenyan MIT grad in the US (please see my profile) putting together a team of volunteer technologists in the diaspora to help Peter Kenneth get elected. The odds are huge, but we can spark a movement on the internet that can translate to massive activity on the ground and inspire the rest of the world.

PK's constituency has been voted best-managed in the country and he was one of only two legislators (out of 222) who voluntarily chose to pay taxes when Kenyan legislators voted not to. Kenyan MPs are among the highest paid in the world and continue to award themselves massive salaries and perks.

This is the first time I'm getting involved in politics, but I'm strongly compelled to do so.

Please reach out to me at kenyan.technologist@gmail.com. Get in touch too if you think I'm violating HN etiquette.
red bull, on launch, did everything "wrong".

mr mateschitz chose the narrow, tall can. every retailer told him to fuck off, he should comply with the standard coke/pepsi can. he did not comply. every retailer told him that red bull was too expensive. they wouldn't stock a dead product. he did not comply. the german authorities banned red bull over its formula - too much sugar and caffeine, a health risk. he did not comply.

red bull got noticed by the youth in austria and germany, because:
- it was different, new. you could spot someone from afar drinking it. white earbuds anyone?

- it was expensive. it was special.

- it was dangerous, forbidden. bavarian youth was driving over the border into austria too fill their trunks with precious red bull and 'smuggled' it into germany.

pitch perfect branding strategy, way before their equally brilliant extreme sports sponsorship.

tidbit: france only just recently lifted the BAN on red bull...
313 was Nate Silver's average outcome prediction. The mode of 332 is what actually happened.