skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found this article quite frustrating.

>Condorcet formalized the idea that group preferences are also non-transitive. If people prefer Hanselman to me. And they prefer me to Guthrie. It does not necessarily mean they will prefer Hanselman to Guthrie. It could be that Guthrie would pull a surprise upset when faced head to head with Hanselman.

I found this by far the most interesting assertion, but the examples under "Historical Examples" don't demonstrate this phenomenon at all.

For instance, the author asserts that the Nader spoiler effect demonstrates nontransitive preference relationships. But from my reading, it wasn't the case that that group as a whole preferred (Gore over Nader) and (Nader over Bush) but (Bush over Gore). It was simply that due to the structure of the election, they happened to elect Bush. While this ties into the author's point about the "unfairness" of elections, it doesn't demonstrate nontransitive relationships in group preferences.

Could someone post an example of a group preference configuration in which the group prefers (A over B) and (B over C) but (C over A)?

I understand the concept of nontransitive relationships in general, but in the specific domain of fitness for office, I can't work out how this would come to be.
It's such a relieving feeling when you realize that you are not alone.
I was under the impression that the term "dark matter" was a stand-in term for something unknown that seems to contradict what we know about how gravity works at large distances.
Not sure about that. According to the EULA, it appears that you can only downgrade to Windows 7 if you purchased the professional edition:

Instead of using the Windows 8 Pro software, you may use one of the following earlier versions: Windows 7 Professional or Windows Vista Business.

This agreement applies to your use of the earlier versions. If the earlier version includes different components, any terms for those components in the agreement that come with the earlier version apply to your use of such components. Neither the manufacturer or installer, nor Microsoft, is obligated to supply earlier versions to you. You must obtain the earlier version separately. At any time, you may replace an earlier version with Windows 8 Pro.
I remember reading that OVH is very popular in the Scene[0], for running topsites and the like. The reliability and bandwidth must be pretty good for them to be used by the Scene.

0:http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene
You are addressing the statement "a person with 25 years experience is always going to be better than a person with 5 years experience" - and I agree with you, that's not always the case.

But, I'm saying, all other things being equal (which is what I meant by "You think you can do something for 25 years without getting better at it?" I mean, I meant the /you/ specifically, but it applies to "any one individual")

I mean, there are a lot of other factors. I'm just saying, all other things being equal, you get better with experience. UNIX is far older than I am. So is C. Yeah, how you use both has changed a lot... but most people that have remained employed that long follow those changes.

>I think the only constant thing in software engineering is that you need to be able to learn and adapt.

Lisp, anyone? Most concepts in programming are older than I am. Many of the "new" concepts are rehashes of old concepts.

Actually, I think this goes back to what someone else was saying; It's harder to say "This time it's different" to someone with experience.

I know I've been watching these articles about how vc is switching to "enterprise" and away from "consumer" - My first thought was "wow, I remember the same thing in the very late '90s. they called it 'b2b' but it was the same thing- people eventually realized they needed to start making money."

Many companies seem to want employees that buy into the 'vision' even if that vision is clearly as ridiculous as selling dogfood over the internet. (I mean, selling dogfood over the internet is a valid business model, but it's not the billion dollar business that pets.com hyped it up to be. Just like facebook has a reasonable business model; it's just not the billion dollar business everyone thinks it is.)

Of course, I'm not sure how much that has to do with being old. I wasn't old enough to drink until after the first .com crash, and living and working through it, even as a kid, it was obviously ridiculous.
Growth hackers need to be inbound marketers, but most inbound marketers are not growth hackers.
That's contrary to what we experienced.

We had a UDP flood from an OVH server, and they said they contacted the customer to fix this issue. I checked the IP and it was still running a splash page.

A couple days later we were attacked again by the same IP. After reporting this to OVH again they finally took the server down.
But then you may end up worrying about scratching anything you own. Your phone, your leather lounge, your car, etc.

I guess there is a line-in-the-sand, probably around some dollar-value. I don't care if I scratch the aluminium case of my iPad, but I do mind if I scratch the paint of my relatively new car.

My parents-in-law are protective of their lounge. I don't mind. But I let my kids go crazy jumping on my own lounge, because I don't mind that either.
No shopper cares who Apple fires, but the trade press runs stories about the firings, and those stories include how the Maps app isn't great, and consumers do notice that.
Back when I used a mouse, I always worried that my compulsive selecting drained my mouse battery faster than it needed to. It probably added a lot to my WhatPulse stats as well.
People I've observed (myself included.)

So yeah, it's an opinion. YMMV.
We loved From Holden as well; we grew up there and it meant a lot to us. We might have been able to contest the C&D but at the end of the day, those guys have done exactly what we are doing -- poured their blood, sweat, and tears into building a company from the ground up. If they felt we were going to do harm to their brand, we definitely weren't willing to move forward because we loved the name or felt attached to it.

So that leaves us with establishing a new brand, and while there were some good ideas, none of them really stuck. We're investing our lives into building a long-lasting company and I'd rather build a brand around something that is already really meaningful to me than a made up word or one that has less emotional connection.
I answered your question upthread.
On a related note, at least in Windows, when triple-clicking to select a paragraph, immediate subsequent clicks (any number) do absolutely nothing.

This really bothers me when selecting words because sometimes I triple-click instead of double-click by accident, and I want to undo this but it requires waiting.
Here's what to make of Facebook's Black Friday data: all talk, no action
No, but I tend to scroll, so the top of the browser window marks where I should read next.
Yes this is definitely what I do too. I also tend to repeatedly tap the paragraph on the trackpad, so that fits well with your nervous habit analogy.
If that were true, then I would have also expected them to ease up on the anti-piracy measures.
While it's true that there are "plenty" of map data providers, there are _very few_ that deal with wide swaths of the world. Navteq and TeleAtlas were the go-to providers for worldwide coverage, but you've seen what TeleAtlas data looks like and Navteq isn't going to sell their data to Apple for any amount of money with Microsoft (via Bing) and Nokia backing them.

No, the magic is that there are tens of thousands of excellent data sources around the world. Google has spent the time and money pulling those data sources together into the best geographic database in the world.

Sure, Apple can reach out to regional data providers and try to merge the data into their own dataset (which is what they have done so far -- look at the legal notices for the Maps app to see all the sources they've got so far), but it takes a lot of time to call up each state, county, province, city all over the world and ask or buy every last drop of geodata they have. Once they have it, they have to merge it into their existing data. Google does this with the help of fancy algorithms and boatloads of volunteers and relatively low-paid laborers in India. They also have related products to trade for geodata. Want a discount on your city's Google Apps for Domain? Send us a DVD full of your land records and we'll give it to you for free! Already have Google Apps? How about a free license to Google Earth Enterprise?

Bottom line: Google has spent the time and built the technology to beat Apple to the geodata punch. Google is at least 3 years ahead of Apple and Apple can't catch up with money alone: dealing with governments (for their data) will simply take time.
If the hardware goes down, so do the servers (just like EC2), but they can be brought back up on new hardware rather quickly.

You can of course setup redundancy by creating multiple servers on different hardware nodes.
I'm a habitual selector, but I also have the habit of clicking away from my selection before I perform any other action. Thus never had a problem with this feature.
Definitely. Just pass that memo along to the "apps should work purely through REST API calls" crowd.
I don't see anything here that you can't easily do with google's calendar. You can create multiple calendars, one for routine stuff and one for the exceptions and hide/show them whenever you want.

I think there's a danger in hiding things though, if you don't need to be reminded then maybe just not put it on your calendar (tuesday, eat food, repeats daily.) as soon as you start hiding things you lose much of the benefits of a calendar.
Anyone else play with the highlighting on their iPhone constantly?

I can't read anything on my iPhone without constantly messing with the highlight UI. It's so fun.
I love this response. It captures exactly why I select text on a page.

In my mind it's much like when reading a book and idly toying with the corner, or shifting position in your hand.

I do see why it's annoying for someone trying to read the same text over my shoulder, though.
One way would be to publish a HTTP/JSON API for fetching a specific set of stats from a server given an authorization key, provide a reference implementation, and allow customers to build their own if they're not comfortable with that.

Root SSH logins don't seem like a particularly good solution for this problem.
Good response.

That's pretty much my behavior too.
My decision to vote either 0/0/1 or 0/1/1 is explicitly to prevent my desire for B over A from causing B to win when C might have a chance. Whenever you have to consider the ballots of other voters, you're dealing with tactical voting.
Since the vast majority of these licenses are sold to OEMs to build systems it doesn't reflect anything much. The number sold to actual customers would be a lot more useful.
You're suggesting that Apple is firing executives to improve their PR? True, that puts it in the news cycle, but that's extremely cynical.

And a senior executive at a company as large as Apple should have no effect on day-to-day operations, especially not retail operations.
checkout Hakim's fokus.js if you like to highlight while reading, I run the script in console when I am note-taking (hand writing notes, based on browser text) - very convenient!
> it's to ensure that a trusted source controls what runs on the hardware.

Trusted by whom?
If there were a way would that make this poll be useful?
San Diego: join us for SD Hacker News meetup #35 (Fri 11/30)
If you were on a MAC you would only have to make sure the mouse cursor is over the area you wanted to scroll. :P
> (Far) More

FTFY
OK Ok, I will bow to the pressure and shave my head if I get offered a $350K + options CEO spot. There it is, you win, ageist SV founders!
1) Nowhere in my comment did I say C is closer to the machine.

2) Despite #1 C is still closer to the machine than Haskell, and I'm not sure how you could maintain otherwise

3) Nearly all of the C optimizations will, at best, make a speedup by a constant factor. Things that add (or remove) an O(n) factor in Haskell can and do happen.
I'm not sure why, but I've never used the VCS integration in an IDE.
You do have some control over it, by choosing which third part(y|ies) you work with.
Using PhoenixNAP.com/SecuredServers.com in Arizona for a few months now. Pretty stable so far for a sub-$100 dedicated with 2-drives/Software RAID-1 & 8GB of RAM.

Limestonenetworks is also good in Texas, but starter servers are over-$100 for a similar 2-drive/RAID-1/8GB RAM box.
Nah, the football coach argument is much easier: There is lots of money in college football, and nearly all of it is banned from going to the players. Therefore there are nearly unlimited funds for coaches.
I do it all the time...just out of habit really but it's one I can never see myself dropping...even in nano on an SSH client :p it makes reading easier for me, I installed flux recently too in order to make the white strain less on my eyes...maybe there's a correlation there?
Tried it out on existing code. Was complaining that spacing wasn't a multiple of 4, when I set it to 2 spaces in the prefs. I even reloaded it and verified the setting.

Back to Sublime!
This worked for me. Thanks
If you examine these supposed failures of Approval voting, you'll find that the bulk of them can be attributed to the divide between a "Majoritarian" or a "Consensus-driven" perspective. That is, many of the criteria suppose that the most-preferred candidate of the majority should win, but should that be the case? Imagine there are 3 candidates, one who is adored by the super-majority, a second who is very well-liked by that super-majority and a third who is hated. Meanwhile the minority hates the first and third candidates, but well-likes the second.

We can visualize this like so:

# Approval | Disapproval
80 |-1--2----|--------------3-|
20 |-2-------|-----------3--1-|

So while the first candidate is the favorite candidate of the super-majority, the second candidate has the unanimous approval of population. Which is preferable? I would say the second candidate.

So you see, the criteria themselves incorporate an ideological perspective - a majoritarian bias - rather than articulating some absolute objective truth.

Also I have to take issue with the basis for the "Especially Intolerable Failures" explanation - does it make sense to reject a system for being theoretically capable of producing a result, "regardless of the probability that these paradoxes may occur"? Given 2 systems, one which exhibits several flaws often, and another which rarely exhibits flaws but is theoretically capable of exhibiting a certain offensive flaw, does it make sense to reject the better-behaving system because of a theoretical result? I think not.
Yes, for contrast and reading position
Yep, same. Sites that do things like auto-search highlighted words drive me nuts because of it.
That sounds almost exactly like me too. Glad to see I'm not the only one, I have done this since I first started using computers.
Dr. Clayton Christensen on disruptive innovation in higher education
In these discussions, just translate "cares about" as "is affected by" or "consists of".
You can create multiple calendars? I've tried in the past, but only "my calendar" would sync to my phone, and the only way for those events to show up on "my calendar" was to import them manually. And there's no way to hide events, or make them disappear and reappear.

I think my use case for calendars is significantly different from most peoples'. I need it to be rotating so I'll forget and remember events which are upcoming. Forgetting and then remembering is key.
Simple loops in C++, such as computing an average. "Blame" isn't the point. I was very surprised that students could not read the same kind of code they could write, and I spent time teaching them how to do so because of this realization. Had I relied solely on projects, I would not have learned this and adapted my teaching.
I find it amusing that today I took 14 pages of code from a 20-something developer and reduced to it to a single query and a one line function.
Or not even goals. Two parties vote against a tax-reform package - one voted against because it disagreed with increased mining taxes and the other voted against because the increased mining taxes was too low.

http://www.news.com.au/top-stories/greens-and-coalition-dump...
This makes a good combo with my other favorite Gmail trick: followup.cc
I finally understand why I've been doing this. Thank you.
Thanks! It's actually pretty amazing that in this day and age you interact quite closely to a lot of pretty influential people that some years ago, the equivalent would have been completely un-reachable.
> both ideas and material possessions should be tools that serve us, rather than things we live in service to

I think dustin and moxie are talking about different things. For me, the philosophy behind "The best" is exactly that: you don't need to worry that your friends will step on your cutlery, because it's strong enough to not get damaged. You don't worry about replacing it because of rust or wear, etc etc (enough with cutlery).

By going for "the worst" you end up with a lot of crap that you don't really use or care about. It's what almost everybody does. The opposite means buying only what you need; the best == expensive, so you'll buy less.

The author also dismisses the environmental effect of this mentality; millions of people buying buckets of 50-cent crap every couple months equals a fuckload of plastic waste. This is preaching consumerism, and I'm surprised by how many people fall for it.
I do it all the time. Also, when using Safari, I often pinch in and out while reading. The rendering gets blurry until I lift the fingers, and the moment the text is crisp again, I feel certain satisfaction.
I think if you have to ask, the Air (with memory maxed) will be fine. The Pro is a safe bet to.

Something to think about - if you are doing the majority of your work on the laptop screen, I do find its nice to have a 15".

I have a quad-core Linux desktop with 12gb of RAM. And an 11" Air with 4gb of RAM. For Java development I find them both adequate, unless I'm working with an 8gb dataset - but that might fall more into the testing category.
For instance, check 'Chinese Python' samples [1].

Besides CJK, there are several programming languages that based on non-English languages [2]. A few ones are even widely used in industry.

[1] http://www.chinesepython.org/doc/sample/ask.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_l...
I don't use this editor but I can almost guarantee that its actually pep8 complaining about spaces. Not that this solves your problem but there is a disconnect between editor configuration and pep8.

Side note: Hope you use 4 spaces on new projects! :)
I do this cause I just like to interact with the graphics. Especially if it's a Mac and you have all those nice quartz effects like when you highlight, then click and drag so that the text is floating above some other part of the screen, disembodied from the article.

I pause to think a lot when I read, so this is just sort of fidgeting while my mind thinks about something, I suppose.
> Configurable User model

This pleases me greatly. No longer do I need to rely on plug-ins (and therefore, them being updated) to minimally extend the existing User model for small projects.
Good observation. Same, though I've always used Readability instead of Clearly.
I just do it as habit. It's hard to pick the category from those above. It's probably a combination of "to track my reading position" and "to increase text contrast" but I don't consciously set out to do either of those. It's really just a harmless habit.
First, calling someone a dick while being a dick yourself is not very funny at all.
Second, it may be hard to believe, but I was not actually being malicious. I _really_ want one of these projects to succeed, but I've learned to hold my horses ever since Diaspora.
Third, leave my Stella alone.
Over 30% of people select text while reading. Markerly.com gives publishers a dashboard of text selection and copy and paste trends. We are about to roll out heat maps that show text selection - it definitely tells a story and differs article to article.

Source: I'm CEO of Markerly and I look at this data everyday.
I agree with most of what you said. Sharing needs to be #1 to have viral growth. Large audiences are required for IAP and Advertising to make sense (I'd also add freemium to that list). An intrinsically leaky funnel needs even heavier viral growth to get to those large audiences. Heavy viral growth is probably going to be at odds with privacy.

But I think you need to pay attention to what others are saying. If you can't get users to complete a series of tasks to get to your value proposition, either the (expected) value you're offering is too low, or the expected probability of getting that value is too low.

In other words, with a high enough value proposition, you should theoretically be able to get someone to do something EXTREMELY difficult.
Magna Charta: JQuery Bar Charts
How Memoto went from product idea to 10x funded on Kickstarter
Lenovo Issues Hotfix to Fix The Yoga 13's Partition Madness
Thus resulting in an endless stream of quick-decaying stuff from china to your home.

And a hundred round-trips to the department store, if you apply that to everything in your life.
Yes! It's the first thing I do when I get a new system these days.

In OSX you can set it up in keyboard preferences and in Windows I use Autohotkey.

Working on a keyboard with a regular Caps Lock key feels very strange after all this time.
I bought a "silent" mouse just so I could do this at work, and borrowed the noisy one for home.
Instead of searching through history, you can add this to your .inputrc

"\e[B": history-search-forward
"\e[A": history-search-backward

And this to your .bash_proflie

export HISTCONTROL=erasedups
export HISTSIZE=100000
shopt -s histappend

Now the up/down arrow keys auto search and complete backwards/forwards based on what's written. If the line is empty, it behaves as normal.

This is also pretty neat, in your .bash_proflie:

bind '"\t":menu-complete'

Enables cyclic tab completion

These are the first things I do when I'm on another terminal.
For the kitchen utensils example, I would also tend towards some kind of middle ground. I don't care at all about having the best but the worst is so cheap that if you aren't careful you will end up with more utensils than anyone really needs.

When I first moved out about 5 years ago I bought a kitchen set for under $100, bar plates, bowls and cups it had pretty much everything you would need in a kitchen. I am still using many parts of it today and slowly throwing out parts I didn't really use. I wouldn't buy one again because my kitchen would get to cluttered with too much stuff that I either won't use or use very little.
The two big headline features, the configurable User model and Python 3 support, are both huge. The first, because as is right now, simply extending the User model feels janky and possibly broken, and the second, because Django is probably one of the biggest reasons people have not moved onto Python 3.
I do not fully agree on his Java point. Because C is too hard for beginners, you just confuse students with hard details.

But Python is a candidate, the argument for Java is the combination of the IDE and the compiler. If you make a typing mistake the IDE screams at you, this is helpful for beginners.

After all, is Java that bad? Of course there are people misusing Java with bad design practices. But that is just a reason for teaching object orientated programming.
Advice to a Young Mathematician [pdf]