skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem I have with software patents is that they basically do the same thing. They request monopoly power over the invention while not disclosing how someone in the field could implement it, which would require source code, etc.

Since software patents don't disclose enough for another programmer to implement the invention, I don't see how they are benefiting society. They don't share the knowledge but still get the monopoly benefit.
Quality is definitely going down.

I bought a blazer from them which looked amazing, but a week after wearing it, it was "frizzy"---some of the finer fibers were starting to unravel on the outside.

I purchased a set of boots last year. They lasted a single season before the soles cracked.
I had problems accessing google services from China long before. I just started using proxy for all google websites, so I didn't even mentioned last changes
Reminds me of perl's CGI.pm html generators.

Also, these are similar, though not function based: http://www.jsonml.org/ and http://jsml.org/
"exceedingly well for very adhoc queries"
vs
"If your query patterns are even somewhat predictable and occur frequently"

Aren't those ... largely opposite? To say "very adhoc" i would anticipate that as largely meaning "not predictable". Also...can you perhaps quantify "very large"? How many terabytes? I've done a decent amount of work with the "new school" OLAP approaches (hadoop / mapreduce, etc.) and found them to work quite well especially in certain cases such as time series (think weblog analysis) where sequential scanning is a simplistic approach.
Loved the very first video listed (TED talk on data visualization). This list is going to have a serious impact on my free time this weekend. I'll have to ration.
... and it will.

We had to start from somewhere and we also wanted to get a feel of what are the most requested libraries so we can focus our energy in those directions.

alex @ rethinkdb
If you were the CEO and had the majority shares, why did you allow your co-foundres (employees?) to take a controlling interest? The story sounds vague, so it is very hard to say who is right or wrong in this case. Perhaps the best course of action is to learn what you need to learn from this, and to go build a successful company on your own?
This is the only place I have enough perspective on to say anything about.
How long before folks complain that the indestructible ball is, well, indestructible?
I don't think it's as big of an issue as you suggest. If you've spent umpteen hours developing the product, the amount of additional time and effort required to put a simple discount system in place is negligible.

You could even set up a standard response email. If someone writes asking for a discount, just send them a ~10% discount code.

It should pay for itself in the form of (even slightly) increased conversions in no time.
Wait a sec. Wasn't css invented in order to separate style and structure? Now we have frameworks and libs trying to marry them back together. Why not just use old style html?

It's also funny that there was such a strong movement which tried to separate the view from the code, and now everyone just accepts that you need to code to make ui. Crazy times, makes me think of all those wasted efforts.
The same thing that happens when we visit websites with Facebook embedded. It just fails.
Indeed - he mentions in the article that he set himself a goal to convert 10 programmers into Lispers. Sounds like he probably has that many just in this thread! Kudos, sir!
Obama's Tech Team Was Firing On All Cylinders While Romney's Was Still In Beta
"Correlation does not imply causation" is not a meaningful reaction to an article like this. Yet, unfortunately, that is the first response many will have to reading this.

This is more about a model than a study, and the model involves causation. Data fitting the model, therefore, implies causation! Not, of course, "implies" in the strict logical sense; it's possible that there is another model that lacks the causal link and also fits the data. But rather, "implies" in the sense that it's reasonably strong evidence - the more confident we are in the model, the more confident we are that there is causation involved.
Outsider ≠ amateur.
Ya, its the party congress hopefully. We'll have to wait until next month for things to get back to normal, and see what the situation is at then. I'm not sure who the moderates are, and whether they even have any control in this; I've heard the dinosaurs that control censorship are fairly embedded and hidden from even the top brass.
FYI an often cited psychologist in this paper, Simon Baron-Cohen, is the cousin of actor Sacha Baron Cohen (of Da Ali G Show, Borat, and Bruno fame).
>It was your implicit threshold you were setting with your argument, not mine

That wasn't my threshold; that was an example of a confusion that couldn't be disambiguated without clear terms for literal vs figurative; it's just that it had unusually large implications for a scenario that require fast, unambiguous communication. (I guess we don't have to care about these scenarios?)

Your own implicit threshold of "if someone doesn't die because if it, I can fuck up the communicative ability of a language however I feel like" is so thoroughly stupid, I doubt you even believe it yourself, yet feel the need to argue for it anyway.

In any case, I'm less concerned with who makes the best tactical moves than on discerning the best idea presented. As it stands, I don't yet see any justification for "let's get rid of this useful disambiguating feature for literal vs figurative" -- but feel free to keep offering them; maybe your knowledge of "tactics" could come in handy here, thought I doubt it. Tactical arguments don't make a language useful. Rather, substance does.

And any time you ever get around to telling me how to indicate the old meaning of "literally" you just let me know. I get that it's not a real high priority for you right now (based on how you think), and I'm not holding by breath or anything, but it would be really cool if you could pull it off. Thanks.
Move on. Making sure they don't get recognition as a 'YC company' or preventing them from presenting on demo day...none of this helps you. Anymore time spent on this is time wasted. Make a clean break, take the lessons learned and go work on your next company.
When It Comes To Cyber Monday 2012 – Exact Match Domains Win Again
Fellow Canadian here - indeed. You'd be hard pressed to guess which way a particular Justice leans politically, unlike our cousins to the south. Heck, our Chief Justice excused herself from Conrad Black's potential hearing because she didn't want to be in a conflict of interest. That's integrity right there.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1285112-...
Its definitely the government, but not officially. Officially there are various technical problems...that are never the ISPs fault. If you get on the phone with them and ask why Facebook is not working, they'll actually say "it must be facebook's problem!". The censorship is not official and all shady, and so going through the WTO doesn't really help.
In startup terms they spent all of their money on marketing and not enough on the product itself.
It wasn't a problem the Obama campaign had. Nor that the current government websites had. This was a failure of management by someone who, it appears, was good at exploiting tax loopholes rather than being good at managing people doing something productive.

I would argue that this is the result of mixing business people into software development. MBAs focus on ultimate results instead of iterative improvement, believe in secrecy over learning and generally don't understand the human factor of software development, much less the infrastructure involved in running it once it's written. After all, programmers are cost centers to be outsourced as quickly as possible.

The only person who admits to being a technical manager for Romney on LinkedIn is an old-school web developer, not a government worker. He's been a consultant for a decade and a half. His company's website uses Flash, loads six different totally unminimized js files and displays gradient images for the background. He is exactly the person I would expect a somewhat-older business dude to hire, if that business dude knew nothing about web development and was uncomfortable with excessively-technical things. His resume looks impressive, he's older than nearly everyone else with web experience, he can probably speak CEO-jargon-ese and he isn't going to make them feel dumb.
That wasn't what he said, and the comment itself was a response to such an attempt, but whatever.
BK, foreclosure of a home loan, and repossession of a car from a loan leave flags on one's credit file that are very different from no credit or even bad credit.

If a person with no credit history in the USA (like a naturalized alien) is added as an authorized user to an existing credit account the credit history of this account is 'cloned' to the new addition.
The government is corrupt enough that they might as well could trigger a revolution themselves someday. Interference from us would hardly matter.
> A certain level of professionalism is expected for a real job. Nobody cares what you wear, or where you work, or how you work when you're making yet another Instagram clone. When you are designing and implementing critical systems, being a professional matters. Most hackers simply don't have the self-discipline to get such a contract.

Disagree.

I work in critical system infrastructure. Dressing up nice to talk the computer doesn't make the code better; aggressively making the code better does. It's my opinion that the better dressed the guy writing code, the more suspect his code is...
There is no price worth the headache. Life's too short and the days too few to have any one of them tarnished by toxicity.
Code that was well-engineered 3 months ago may suddenly become lacking in light of a client having a brilliant new idea/requirement.

And a programmer is not always in charge of his estimates. He may have to arrive at it together with his team lead who is under pressure from 2-3 project managers, thus only the minimal reasonable time will be allocated, without concern for architecture changes or refactoring.
The 2012 LEGATUM prosperity index
The author doesn't mention one time that the result of unencumbered sexual activity between adults is procreation.

Religions generally reserve procreation to occur within a structured family unit.

In my personal belief system, the family structure has a fundamental place in our eternal progression and thus the sanctity of family is of the utmost importance. The 'rules' regarding sexual activity are entirely related to the family structure.

I would bet that most religions that have prohibitions on sexual activity do it for very similar reasons.
That wasn't much of a look inside.
No C++ API???
Google.com blocked in China
This Sick Lung-on-a-Chip May Help with Drug Testing
Well, do you like math?

I think the first thing you need to do is actually learn to like math. If you really enjoy doing math stuff, if you can see the beauty in it, then you can learn it from the shittiest of sources. I used to suck at math in high school, but after joining a prep course I started liking it and one year later I was teaching it to other people.

Suppose a friend of yours wanted to learn how to code, but he keeps telling you how he hates it. You can give him the best book on the XYZ language written by the most awesome hacker in the world, show him some more friendly resources like CodeSchool or whatever but it won't work. Have you ever heard of a programmer who doesn't like to code?

My two cents!
So they force all their users to go through a process that has 1) never been seen before for a mouse, and 2) absolutely asinine in concept anyway? It's a MOUSE. If you want feedback, ask for it. Don't force the user to jump through hoops to utilize the product you just sold them.
Google Docs is always blocked, along with YouTube. Google search engine is sometimes blocked, gmail is rarely blocked as that would cause too much disharmony, but something has changed...these congresses are a pain in the ass anyways, I'm glad I'm out of country this month.
Recording full Java execution in real time: Inside Chronon 3 Recorder
First off, great post. Although it is pretty awesome to see how the community comes together when people are in need, during the storm and aftermath I couldn't help but think about our industry vs others in rebounding efforts. While most startup founders / employees I know were eager, almost rabid to get back to work, a lot of my friends in other industries were very happy to have the few days off, no questions asked.

So my question (which I've been asking myself), do you think that it's an attitude thing? A certain NEED to get back to the grind that our industry has that others don't? Or do you think we are operationally that much better at coming together?
In negotiation there is a threshold where you insult the other party. For someone you don't want to deal with this may be OK, but in general I think it's more considerate to say no than to play games with numbers.

In OP's case, if he had offered the spreadsheet guy some insane amount he probably never would have gotten any business. The more reasonable colleague would have seen the amount and scoffed, forming a poor opinion of OP's business.
Patent laws generally could certainly be improved.

But by far the biggest problem is software patents. There's no need to make all patents (software, hardware, pharma, etc.) the same because the industries and the cost structures / innovation cycles are very different.
Same here. Chrome 22 on Windows 7.
Why Obama's reelection is good for young startupers
Up until a few years ago, a lot of the english-speaking world called it soccer: Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the US, Canada. It is called 'sokker' in Afrikaans. Additionally, in Japan is is most commonly called 'sakka'.

Brits were truly the only ones calling it Football.
Still and all, you can't help but notice how awesomely rock-solid browser textareas have gotten. I've actually had my laptop run out of charge and unceremoniously die on me in the midst of a humongous comment. Reboot, login, open browser, tabs all pop up -- and there's my comment. It's utterly amazing.
JsPyConf - Modern Web Technologies Conference, 2013: Call for Speakers
We are talking about JavaScript, Python and Ruby whom are the underlying technologies of the modern web that we use every day, at this Turkey’s very first combined conference!
Just a few to note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Revolution
There's also the great story about Squarespace, FogCreek and Peer1 employees doing a bucket brigade of fuel up to their generators to keep things up. That's awesome commitment to their customers and business.
Crazy stuff. That was a good recap. The tech scene is awesome.
Thanks for the suggestion. I've added your benchmark suggestion (along with a bunch of other fixes and new data like a 2008 RMSE benchmark along the lines of your Brier suggestion) into the R document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rnmx8UZAe25YdxkVQbIVwBI0...

(I don't know when the new numbers will go live on the blog; Luke handles that.)
Or have some good friends here in advance to help you :-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4764692
Everyone responds to substances differently. People in the thread have indicated that they would code poorly tipsy/drunk, but you claim otherwise and I believe ya.

Sometimes I like to have a couple drinks while working on a side project and I understand where you're coming from. I do a lot of writing and, like many people who enjoy writing, I understand that having a few drinks and getting "in the zone" can be great for the creative juices and process every once and a while.

Many people are "functioning alcoholics." I'm not saying you're an alcoholic but that concept is something to be aware of. The regular use of that much alcohol is a certainly problem for your physical health. I think you should look into other modes of altering your physical/mental state after you come home from work. Do you exercise regularly? How's your mental health? You say that you have the need, "even to the point of anxiety," to do other things than work on code at home. To me that sounds like a problem that could be solved in some other ways not involving alcohol. Have you thought about therapy/medication, or maybe something else?

Food for thought. :) Good luck to you!
I mostly agree with what you're saying, but I also think there's enormous value in making easy things be really easy. Even with today's state of the art adding a shard, dealing with consistency issues, adding replicas, etc. is relatively hard. Perhaps not in a computer-sciency sense (all the problems are fairly well understood), but in an operational sense. Lots and lots of work needs to be done even with systems like MongoDB, let alone with MySQL. And once you're done with that, you can't really run complicated queries easily, so you have to solve that problem.

We set out to make these things be really easy (whether we succeed or not remains to be seen). We want the users not to have to deal with these issues at all whenever possible. You should be able to set up a cluster, add shards, and run cross-shard joins and aggregation in five minutes.

Of course once that problem is solved, there are tougher problems like high-performance cross-document distributed ACID, but I think the industry as a whole is relatively far away from that right now. (there are some solutions to this - e.g. Clustrix, but they require specialized hardware which makes it out of reach for most developers)
Again, biases. You might be thinking, "WTF?" and rapidly moving on. That doesn't extend to people generally. The stronger a narrative, the longer people tend to hit their face against the brick walls of failure, believing the part of the narrative that's been telling them if they work and try hard enough for long enough, their dreams will become reality.

I'm obviously just commentating from the outside, but are you sure she is aware of her options in the same way you feel you are? What exactly are the options of someone who is trying to pursue her dreams? Do you step in and crush them, telling her it's time to give up and get practical? She'll be bombarded with anecdotes from the narrative that tell her to never give up. It's all-consuming. That's what cultural narratives do.

The narrative tells people to become self-actualized. The economic realities of a capitalist marketplace don't really have much room for that. The narrative has placed her in the disheartening place of having followed it and wound up unable to realize her dreams. That can be a very difficult place to move on from.
New Facebook app creates personalized recommendations for clothing
I have nothing to do with RethinkDB, but what are you talking about? Just represent them as strings. (What databases support colors as native types, anyways?) If you format dates YYYY-MM-DD, then you can do string comparisons for ranges.

And JSON has the huge advantage of supporting hierarchical data -- arrays with objects inside, etc. It seems a like a huge step forward.
Epic diffusion of economic power (and risk)!
I suppose these are great if you are never going to move from startup->business.

In the longer term, more government regulation won't be a good thing for your business.

I saw a similar article about startups in Norway sometime back.
So true! Lallouz's comment is also so point on. In most other industries people were acting like children on a snow day. Go Tech!
Excel Surveys now available on Microsoft SkyDrive
In my experience, when you give developers an easy way to mangle everything together, a sufficiently large number of developers takes advantage to cause chaos. Sometimes it takes substantially less effort to deal with artificial hurdles than it takes to keep a team disciplined without them.

(brings back memories of one of my earliest web apps where I'd written a template system that on purpose delegated all by basic conditions and looping to the calling script on purpose to enforce separation; and then two of my developers tried to sneak in a new tag to allow them to embed Perl in the templates...)
Right-on! These scenarios are sadly straight out of real day-to-day life in a successful business.

The colleague one is classic, or worse yet, you're called by the 'expert' himself who trivializes your product yet somehow is calling to buy it.

Top of my list though is this: Customer negotiates again after delivery. "I want a refund unless I get convoluted feature X for free, or $Y off the price."

Don't be afraid to fire a customer just to improve your quality of life. Bonus points for describing your direct competitor as a perfect fit.

Finally, for sanity's sake, never give out your personal cellphone number. If you must be "reachable," use something you can block off-hours.
When writing a database, performance is extremely important. Languages like C++ give you manual control of the computer's resources, which means you can count on predictable performance and memory management. Why is this important? All of your database code must be written with the performance characteristics of your data structures in mind. You need to know how long certain operations or memory swaps will take so that you can optimize data throughput.

While CL and Haskell can be extremely fast and even outperform C++ in certain situations, the lack of manual resource management makes them ill suited to writing a database system. There are few, if any, applications where this matters so much.
Yeah, but if you simply predicted 2008, you'd get a mediocre Brier score on your state victory predictions (because it would punish you for getting 49 compared to everyone who got 50 or 51), and the RMSE is even worse: the margins were different and the electoral vote & popular vote very different from 2008.
First you say this:

"I don't think Firefox from the day it came out to the present day is all that great in terms of UX." Then you prove that statement by talking about who invented features first and say "The driver to innovative browser UI had always been Opera".

These two things are unrelated. I stopped reading after that.
"More of the evidence" seems like pretty much the same thing...
Autotrader.com and Cars.com are the two biggest players, and yes, most dealerships use at least one to list their inventory. However, many car shoppers do search individual dealer's web sites for inventory and find that it sucks.

In addition, I've found many cases where the latest inventory is not listed on Autotrader or Cars.com (and even on the dealer's own site). The only way to know for sure what the dealer has on the lot is to actually visit them in person or contact them via phone or email so they can check their internal system.
Thank you, I never have been able to find this again since reading it.
Agreed. Making someone wait a significant amount of time to vote is not that different from a poll tax.
Positive pregnancy test diagnoses man's cancer
Wrong!

A BK is a unique event from other delinquent accounts on one's credit report that carries extra weight. As do foreclosure and repo.
What if Steve Jobs had been a puppy dog?
I'm guessing he's using a fact (factoid?) that there are a small number of people who could recognize Stux in a packet sniff, but that number is much larger of people who could read anomalies out of that same sniff.
No, but correlation correlates with causation because causation causes correlation. Correlation between A and doesn't tell you if its (A->B) or (B->A) or (C->A and C->B)[1]. And robust correlation pretty much does imply that causation is happening somewhere. So then you have to look at the plausibility of each of those to try to figure out which it is. And since (assortative mating) -> (reinforced traits) has a clear and reasonable mechanism it has a serious leg up here.

[1] Interestingly (A->C and B->C) doesn't cause correlation between A and B despite causing correlation between A and C and B and C. Which is how you can figure out causation from enough correlation datapoints.