skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ignoring 99.8% of gun deaths until paragraph 12 is pretty much the most ridiculous form of burying the lede I've ever seen.

Yes he eventually talks about all these gun deaths and then he hand waves it all away, too much thinking:

"I’m not even going to try to answer those questions, because they are extremely complex."

Too much work, forget it. Man, if only scores of other countries had gone through something similar and we could draw on those experiences but ... thinking is HARD!
> I don't know if there are any fixes to the problem that wouldn't cause potentially worse problems

Again, comparison to other developed countries proves there are.
Sure, you have to buy a ticket to win the lottery. But it changes nothing about still being a lottery.
Google Maps for iOS: More than 10 million downloads in less than 48 hours
The scale on that graphic is a little misleading. The spacing on the "gun homicides per 100K citizens" compared to the "firearms per 100 citizens" makes it look like the US has twice an many deaths as the next lowest just like they have twice as many guns. I don't know who is represented by the dot at 2.25 "gun homicides per 100K citizens" but the statistical difference between 2.25 and 3 when compared to 100K is not much. While that same dot represents 10 "firearms per 100 citizens". THAT dot seems to have a horrific kill rate. The US has 9 times more "firearms per 100 citizens" yet less than 1 additional "gun homicides per 100K citizens". Who is that dot?

Edit: Not saying the scale is misleading on purpose... just that it is misleading.
Could it be there is a mistake in your pricing example:

(e.g. 24 t-shirts with 1 color front & back print is $8.66 + $0.25 = $8.91/ea)

The table says 24 shirts, 1 color is $7.28. 2 colors is $8.66. Should it be 2 colors? Or does one color count for two when used front and back?
No, we would be using one of the numerous lattice/linear code cryptosystems for which quantum computers provide no known advantage.
The vast majority of Muslims do not believe in the 72 virgins, any more than Christians believe in harps and literal "pearly gates".
How I Was Almost Adam Lanza
So just donate a few bucks to charity...
I think the only thing I'll miss from the unmourned previous design era were gradients. They served a very practical function: the boundary between almost any two gradients, even subtle ones, triggers the edge-detection algorithm in the brain and creates a border while using up hardly any of your budget for space and contrast.
That is kind of weird. It's my FriendFeed pic from a few years ago. I just changed it to my current fb profile pic :)

thanks
It's a pity that you read it as criticism of Islam as a whole when it was, in fact, criticism of a god that promises 72 virgins. Though somewhat related, those are orthogonal concepts. Having grown up Mormon, I 100% agree with him and am capable of realizing the basis of fear inherent to the common gods.

You, like many in this thread, are personalizing something that Paul didn't actually say because it's important to you and you're ready to defend it. Objectivity is not a strong point when it generally comes to the religious; I'm sorry to paint with so broad a brush, but that's on display here. The mere mention of a-god-like-concept has put a number of folks here into a tizzy, and it's sad.
> It would be cool if this somehow hooked into Amazon's Mechanical Turk and made it easy to request a larger number of reviews.

yeah, because someone who will do thousands of it for 10c is a reliable source of opinion.
Much better ... the post just went from good to great :)
W3C Finalizes HTML5 Spec, 5.1 in draft
A very important point though: public-key cryptosystems rely on one-way functions, functions that are hard to invert in the average case, NOT just the worst case, which is not your typical complexity-theory mindset. So, I would be careful when talking about complexity classes in the context of crypto because it can be very, very easy to trip up and say something that's either not comprehensive or just downright incorrect.
Will you be able to make new projects and make them private?
Who was stupid enough to take the opposite bet? Of course polluting an otherwise touching and thought-provoking essay with God Talk provokes moans from those of us, thankfully many, who have no wish to see it.

It's as if someone took a few beautiful pictures of picturesque landscapes and then in the last few shots the bottom of the photo included their stinky foot and some empty cans of Bud Light. You could make $20 predicting the moans about that, too.
I was amused that half the stuff he lists seems to be for sale at Think Geek.

I do try to buy people useful stuff though. Things that they may want to use for a while, and no gag gifts.
You're really good at these essays.

If you haven't already listened to it, you might like "What Is The Light", from "The Soft Bulletin" by The Flaming Lips. It's a bit on-the-nose but is basically a poetic encapsulation of what you just wrote; Wayne Coyne wrote many of the songs on that album while metabolizing the death of his father, and pulls it off without ever becoming funereal or morose.

I can't quite put my finger on why but have always felt that album --- basically one of the three best pop/rock albums of the last 20 years --- was uncannily resonant for (our yes yes lazily romanticized concept of) entrepreneurs.
Plain old mob mentality, something bad happened, no one likes it, the suspect is dead, someone must be punished, anyone tangentially related is fair game.

Might as well string up the person who sold him a pack of gum last week.
We're continuing to digress, but I have to imagine that the framers of the (generally successful) US constitution must be having a laugh at the expense of the framers of the (less successful) California constitution regarding the initiative process.
Warren Buffett's 20 Ticket Punch Card
$250k is not middle class in California. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class. $250K is upper middle class at the most.
Islam is not singled out. Mainstream Christianity insists on the existence of hell, for example: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P2O.HTM

I'm not competent to categorize other faiths.
All evil can't be blamed on mental illness Paul, but that kind of evil is certainly unfathomable by us.

Riveting article btw. Incredible what you have been through. I was happy to read your daughter is well!
I totally agree. Identity and Spirituality are two of the strongest - despite them being at the highest Maslowian order - needs of the human being, when interacting in highly adapted - always Maslowian meaning - societies. This [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uwr9JT-nk4 ] is as enlightening as it is old. Despite Kinski being sometimes a jerk, he was a social genius in putting these themes forward to society.
Everything except bottom line profitability is a bullshit metric.
If QC is even possible (it seems an awful lot like cold fusion at this point -- always on the horizon, yet some issue prevents it from being realized), it wouldn't kill crypto. A hypothetical "triple-AES" would mitigate a quadratic attack. Lattice/linear code cryptosystems can provide security against quantum computing for public key systems. All a QC would do to cryptography is force everyone to use different algorithms, which is about as useful as forcing everyone to wear different colored clothing.
Yup I've had this problem as well. I think consistency and generous use of white space helps to alleviate this. As well as eliminating non-clickable items as much as possible. Ideally the content itself would be actionable without the need for buttons everywhere.

Realistically if something isn't actionable on mobile you should really be questioning what it is doing there, or whether you can simplify the interface by making it interactive.
Another thing you can do is something digital. Consider picking up a copy of Minecraft for each member of your family (once they get older perhaps) and spend a weekend building something cool together. Hella fun and 0 cleanup.
Like someone posing next to an airplane after 9/11. Doesn't mean anything.
Thank you so much for the feedback! The traffic really isn't too bad considering it's only a week old.

I'm thinking about creating localized versions of the site with a way to choose the preferred review language. Does it sound like a good idea?

About the link... What browser do you use?

Moderating... Yes. I'll add a voting system sometime soon plus a way to flag reviews as spam. I'm too thinking about using a bayesian filter but for now, I'll stick to manual work to make sure there are no glitches. :)
Thank you. Yes sir, you may.
We generally reach out on the support side proactively to help. Anyone on our team is happy to think it through for you.

If you want to learn more in the abstract we recently came out with an education series: http://mixpanel.com/education
I read it, as someone in that boat who ordered but didn't get their phone yet, despite putting in a successful order less than 60 seconds after the stock went live, that he knew they'd fucked up and wanted to make good and could we hang in there just a little longer.

I was pleased with the update and that a senior executive was looking at it, despite the mistakes already being made.

Who's opinion of what he said is right?
21 stunning Facts about Fab.com Business Model: Design & Business
> You pick the worst from a huge region and then use that to argue the case for the whole region (EU).

It only takes one counterexample to disprove a rule. If you meant to say "try living somewhere in the EU...but not the UK", you should have said that.

> Check out the statistics on Australia pre and post the gun laws.

Yeah, not so much. This is a fine example of seeing what you want to see in the data, rather than what's actually there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia#Conte...

> the trouble with flatly comparing the crime figures from various countries

Hey, I'm with you on that one - I only mentioned a couple specific countries in response to you bringing the subject up as if it meant something important.
Good ideas, thanks.
It hit 1 billion views but the world is still here!
We all had a good laugh. Now upvote to make it happen tonight!!
Is he even talking about religion? I thought he was just trying to evoke the purposeful animating idea that people of religion think about when they think about God.

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?", asks the nerd. "No, for thou art not a day in a particular season and the comparison would make no sense. Also, stop using vi."
you could have just asked :) see the post below - it outlines the libs used, the rest probably aren't the best choices anyhow, took 2 days to put this together so it's hardly an example to follow :)
We frequently see statistics quoted saying that the number of firearm homicides in the US is higher than that of other developed countries.

We also see statistics quoted saying that the number of firearms is higher than that of other developed countries.

I'd like to see statistics comparing the number of murders with other weapons. It is perfectly plausible that we have an elevated rate of gun ownership for historical or cultural reasons, and (since they are such highly engineered weapons) we tend to use guns to murder people, rather than other weapons.

If number of murders perpetrated with other weapons is lower than in other countries, its entirely possible that enforcing stricter gun control would not have a significant effect on the total number of murders.

Factors that might go against this hypothesis are the fact that gun availability might encourage people to kill more readily, gun availability makes a successful murder easier, etc... There are a host of other confounding factors, as well.

I don't really have strong a priori beliefs about these questions, but I'd like to see some more statistics. Another interesting statistic would be to see a time-series comparison of overall homicides, gun homicides and gun ownership in America over time.
We frequently see statistics quoted saying that the number of firearm homicides in the US is higher than that of other developed countries.

We also see statistics quoted saying that the number of firearms is higher than that of other developed countries.

I'd like to see statistics comparing the number of murders with other weapons. It is perfectly plausible that we have an elevated rate of gun ownership for historical or cultural reasons, and (since they are such highly engineered weapons) we tend to use guns to murder people, rather than other weapons.

If number of murders perpetrated with other weapons is lower than in other countries, its entirely possible that enforcing stricter gun control would not have a significant effect on the total number of murders.

Factors that might go against this hypothesis are the fact that gun availability might encourage people to kill more readily, gun availability makes a successful murder easier, etc... There are a host of other confounding factors, as well.

I don't really have strong a priori beliefs about these questions, but I'd like to see some more statistics. Another interesting statistic would be to see a time-series comparison of overall homicides, gun homicides and gun ownership in America over time.

edit
As an afterthought, burgeoning fabrication methods (i.e. 3-D printing) will radically change arguments about gun control. Bullets will be an easier choke-point for regulation.

Also, people need to take very seriously the author's observation that the relative infrequency of these events will make prevention efforts extremely difficult to evaluate. New policies will likely have a time-lag, but even if we wait patiently to evaluate them (which seems unlikely in this political climate), mass murders on the rate at which we see them in Europe could easily 'blow the curve.'
Ah, to be young and wild, and have most of my limbs again...

Try expressing a relatively complex state machine with asserts. Then come back in a month and try converting all those asserts back into few English sentences.
Compare to leaving a platter of bagels with a card asking people to pay if they can.

People are not curious if they can take a bagel for free - it's obvious that they can. So people are not tempted to do it just for the experiment.

And people wanting to pay can use cash, so the second situation doesn't apply either.

Most real world situations are more like this case than the cards case.
So true. I bet he didn't even write his essay in the right text editor.
“Retroactive law of any kind sucks.”

Pretty sure that if our Washington politicos can't reach a deal by 12/31, whatever tax law IS set in 2013 will apply to the entire calendar year. As that will likely mean a significant tax decrease from the current law (under which the “temporary” Bush tax cuts expire), you won't find many people sympathizing with your complaint.

Now if you want some sympathy, go with the fact that our state legislature refused to fund essential services, services that the populace wants and needs, due to a minority that blocked balanced budgets again and again. Which led to (a) Prop 30, and (b) the electorate cutting the Republican nihilists off at the knees.

Now that we have a respite, let's get the amendment process going so that we no longer need the 2/3 vote in the legislature to pay for what a clear majority of citizens want.

And if the people whose incomes have benefitted the most from doing business here would rather set up their entrepreneurial shops in Mississippi or some state that has lower educational commitments (but low taxes!), they just proved that they weren't smart enough to have actually earned that high income, anyway, and just got lucky. Let 'em go. Better yet, encourage them to move to Texas and secede so that they won't have to worry about all the immigrants here, too.
If your post has a point other than to provoke people, I don't see what it is.

You and I both know there are plenty of people on HN who both believe and don't believe in God, and you had to have known that a comment like this would cause contention and detract from the point of Paul's post.
I guess I should have bet also on whether Paul would change after I made my comment.
An example in the article, number of pictures uploaded on Instagram, it is not clear that this is a good metric, at least until they work out a way for each additional image to bring in more revenue.
AngularJS is great ( my first app every with Angular :
http://paraiso-flickr-search.herokuapp.com
AngularJS forces developpers into separation of concerns , DI , which are good things , but until one understands why they are good , one will not like AngularJS.

Backbone is in my opinion more a library ( like jQuery ) than a framework. it doesnt force people doing anything , it provides helpers and conveniant "classes" to work with.

But it doesnt solve most of the problems regarding app architecture. AngularJS solves app architecturing problems in a elegant declarative way ( like Flex before it ).
and also vi > emacs

But seriously. Comments are useful. Don't over use them, don't under use them. If you are being dogmatic about your comments, you are probably doing it wrong. Autodoc comments can be nice, when done properly.
The only options I can think of for fast IO would be exploiting the MIPI CSI and DSI interfaces. I think you can get 2 Gbps input on CSI and same on DSI for output. You'd need some fairly specialist interface chips.

What would be nice in a future SoC would be say 1 Gbps Ethernet or USB3 right into the core of the beast. The current USB situation is rather disappointing - I would imagine the team would be avoiding the current IP in a hurry on future devices.
Hacker e-cards to send to your non-coding buddies (to encourage them to code)
Well time will tell. It still seems odd that the natural reaction to them doing dangerous things against your will is wanting to kill them.
If marketing = driving new business/customers, there is no different between "marketers" and "growth hackers."

They use different tools to accomplish the same task. It's time that marketers realize there is more at their disposal.
Totally on point about getting users to actually use it. That's kinda where I'm at right now with what I'm working on, and it's by far the hardest step. Twitter actually had very few users for the first 6 months I believe, but things like Facebook and Instagram were big hits pretty quickly.
Yes, just because something is incredibly hard, doesn't mean you have to stop pursuing it. We thought in the fifties and sixties that with rapidly increasing computing power, modelling natural would be within reach soon.

Oh, how wrong we were. Natural language (and human thought for that matter, because ultimately, AI and NLP might be two facets of the same problem) is so much more complicated than we imagined.

Researching human language and thought gives us insight not only sufficient to engineer interactive systems, but also to understand the human condition as a whole. Just take the entire discussion about rigid designators, and naming across possible worlds in intensional logics (read "Naming and Necessity" by Saul Kripke.) It is but one of the ways in which the need for a good formal approach to language resulted in an amazing philosophical discussion that isn't just about models, but our understanding of the world. Ultimately, natural language semantics can quickly transcend into deep philosophy. It sometimes takes me completely by surprise, actually :-)
counts for two when used front and back since they are separate locations. so if you have 2 color front and 1 color back, go to 3 color column and then add 25 cents for printing on back. lmk if you have ?'s -- support@teelaunch.com
He's done every bit as much as Obama when Obama won the Prize.
What Instagram’s New Terms of Service Mean for You
You're off by a factor of 2.

The extra 1% tax kicked in at $250K for individuals, $500K for couples filing jointly.

That's very well-off anywhere in CA. Median household income in SF County is $73K, and SF County is quite rich compared to the state median of $61K.
> I strongly suggest all developers to ignore this blog post, and to comment as best as you can.

Bad or to many comments are better then no comments. Its not exactly hard to remove them, their absence will never break the build unlike not understanding the implementation!
Ensure that your business critical data is available even during the apocalypse
Why? What country is close enough to the US in size, heterogeneity and number of guns so that you can make a fair comparison?

Edit to answer to the comment below: think what you want. Don't try to convince me. I'm skeptical, you're not. Write to your legislators instead of here. Write your own blog posts.
OK. But the algorithm is over a 1000 lines split up into perhaps 50 20-line functions, and it's mysterious how the whole works by looking at the parts.

I have one particular piece of code, that I wrote, in mind. It was to implement anonymous methods in the Delphi compiler. Given an AST for a method from the parser, it had to rewrite the tree to turn captured local variable references into field accesses on a heap-allocated stack frame, turn anonymous methods into methods on this heap-allocated stack frame, and all while minimizing the number of passes over the tree. And this has to work recursively, which adds a surprising number of wrinkles about the ordering in which you can do things.

So for example any given pass may be building up accounting data needed by later passes. This is somewhat mysterious, because it seems like busywork; and why is it doing this here? Why not fold one pass into another? Why not move work between passes? Well, the subtle ordering problems are not clear at all when you're looking at things at the function level. You can only understand the pieces when you already understand the whole.

And this is why there is a very long comment block describing how this stuff works. Because figuring it out by reading the code is too expensive.

(That ~1000 lines of code took perhaps 4 months to write; having to integrate with rest of a large complex codebase adds countless more wrinkles.)
"God is a fairly abstract, catch-all word that can mean a lot of different things to different people."

Exactly right.
It's perfectly free. I've never been charged a cent for reading it.

Perhaps you really meant to complain that it isn't Free?
I meant in the abstract, just as he did. I was characterizing the discussion, not necessarily his topic.

Sometimes I disagree with you, but man, Thomas, you are on point in this thread today. Thank you.
A bit of Schadenfreude? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude

You might want to actually read the first sentence of the article you just linked to. meaty is not experiencing "pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others".
Parents freak when the wind blows.

Well, at least modern American parents do....
> Since when did specs become immutable? Needs have changed? Patch the spec. It's faster than patching the software.

I don't understand how this can be faster. You patch the spec, then patch the software to match. I can't see how the spec could be patched faster. That is unless you patch the spec in isolation, prior to writing any code, which is a bigger mess. I've never, ever seen any group that can write a spec in isolation prior to writing code to demonstrate it, and have it come out well, its usually a disaster.
I like the happy medium that the Squarespace screenshot suggests - flat list navigation elements that are implicitly clickable due to their arrangement, and lightly-gradiented buttons that pop out as actionable items. Moderation is ideal (as usual).
I'd hardly characterize the ISC license as "esoteric". It's fairly compact, yet plain in its language. Apache 2.0 takes a lawyer's help in trying to understand.
"The power to tax involves the power to destroy." John Marshall, McCulloch vs Maryland
Professional services and agency world, for all its faults, tends to be pretty good about specifications.
The original article concerns a bypass of application address space.