skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems to link to the result page with no data; the actual starting page seems to be at http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/january12013/
Does anyone have a mirror of the article? CNET is giving a 404 error on this one.

Edit: CNET are having site issues, its not just this one page.
@redtuxx Thanks for the link
zed shaw's [something], let me fall all over myself to pay attention to this rot.
What airline? I've never heard of requiring documentation to select a seat (check-in is another thing altogether, especially if the flight is international), but I have heard of airlines reserving seats for passengers with elite status.

(It's typical to not get a seat assignment at booking time, BTW, especially if you're booking a few days before the flight.)
Facebook accused of dodging tax by using loophole
"Seats" is a terrible word to use. Airlines sell "inventory", not seats. You can easily buy a ticket when all seats are assigned: someone will probably not show up and you will get their seat instead. (If everyone shows up, then they'll pay you, or another volunteer, money to take the next flight instead.)
I called it a great idea because it's actually something I could see myself using. My time is my most valuable asset and so I love the idea of having my car washed in my driveway instead of driving somewhere and waiting around. But as I learned with my last company, a good idea doesn't mean that it will be a good business. It's a rough business for the all reasons listed above. And yes, it's a shame they weren't able to figure that out on 500k instead of 5m.
So? Contracts should be as close to your agreement as possible, and be within city/state/federal laws.

If your contract isn't accurate, it's like programming by hammering some shoddy crap together and letting the testers/users sort it out.
I think it's always worth studying Free monads to understand them a bit more completely. After you can see how to construct and map free monads then there's not much left to the concept to debate.
US Birth Rate Hits New Low – A Nation of Singles
Matrix and ExpertFlyer also let you search fare classes, so if you know your upgrade instrument is based on the availability of X inventory, you can look for flights with available X inventory so you can upgrade.
1. For a PhD student, doing graduate research and teaching usually is their job.

2. PhD students in science or engineering are paid to do their work, should not require additional student loans to complete their PhD, and almost always do not.
Haskell helps you develop your imagination:

> I have no idea what the word "boo" is supposed to mean when used as a function name. But I can be almost certain what this "boo" does. It takes a map that has Integer keys and String values, and a second argument that is just a String, and it returns an Integer. So I'm fairly sure that this function does a reverse mapping
We're About To Be Living In A Drone-Filled World
When I was working with this (2+ years ago), it was mostly for integration with databases in DIA's GCCS-J program. Honestly, for the amount of data they need to deal with, it just didn't work (common operational picture stuff).
False dichotomy.

The reverse of keeping secrets (asserting your right to privacy) isn't allowing others full snoop powers (denying your right to privacy), but allowing another to practice full disclosure (asserting their right to freely reveal all).
And yet, perfection in knowledge or execution of duties are impossible, so corruption and ignorance are givens.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Anews....
Personally, I like learning about what other professions are like, and how to avoid asking questions that make me seem ignorant. I would love to read more articles like this from people in other oft-misunderstood occupations.

I don't see the problem with educating a general audience through a blog post in addition to doing so in one-and-one conversation.
Single Camera: Grasshopper 12-Story Test Flight 12/17/12
Typically one or two of the best, and several more of the worst, reviews.
Malcolm Gladwell: Entrepreneurs Should Be Miscalibrated
I feel btilly's comment contained more venom than it ought to have, but it does give you some idea of a common viewpoint in English Canada.

>In what ways? Do you feel that it was specifically intended to kick out English Canadians?

The law itself is probably not so bad, but the perception has been that it specifically targets English speaking Quebecois. There have certainly been plenty of news stories over the years about inappropriate and over zealous enforcement. For example, a store owner receiving a fine for a sign saying "leave the air conditioner plugged in" without a French translation. Now, I don't know, he probably won in court, but the fact that he even had to go to court is a travesty.

>I don't follow - how did that happen?

The uncertainty surrounding the referendum in 1995 caused a significant fall in the value of the Canadian dollar.

>Both of those facts are new to me. Do you have any source/link? Which territory and treaty are you referring to?

I think btilly's grasp of history is a bit weak here, but for an idea of what inspired this bit of the rant read this short section on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_referendum,_1995#First_N..., keeping in mind that Jacques Parizeau insisted that Quebec could not be partitioned, "the borders are protected by international law," while at the same time insisting that Quebec could unilaterally leave Canada.
You did a great job summarizing those topics concisely, but I have some quibbles about the P and NP stuff:

1. NP isn't the set of problems that can't be solved in a polynomial amount of time, but rather the set of problems that can be solved non-deterministically in polynomial time. This distinction is important, since this means by definition that P is a subset of NP, and furthermore means that uncomputable problems such as the Halting Problem do not belong in NP.

2. Your definitions for NP-completeness seem mixed up -- the polytime reduction property you're mentioning is the definition of an NP-hard problem, and you've said it backwards. If a problem is NP-hard, every problem in NP can be reduced to it in polynomial time (i.e. it is just as "hard" as every problem in NP). NP-completeness requires in addition to this the property that the problem itself is in NP. For example, although the Halting Problem is NP-hard, it is not NP-complete, since it is not in NP. NP-hardness of a problem can be shown by polytime reducing any NP-complete problem to it, since any problem in NP can be polytime reduced to the NP-complete problem.
Home car detailing businesses are already successful. Basic car washes are only profitable when done at a facility designed to make them as cheap as possible. I cannot see trying to make something more convenient that takes a few minutes and can often be done at the same place where one fuels their vehicle.
> Whoops! You broke the Internet!

...I just imagined my mom coming across such a "funny" error page and freaking out. Way to go, cnet!
I agree that browsers should make it much clearer that clicking on a button or link which does nothing is having no effect. In my mind this violates good UI design: that whatever action the user takes, they deserve some feedback. There are many very popular sites (including Facebook, at which I am advocating for new approaches) where pages are essentially unusable until JavaScript has loaded but little indication is given to the user.

The other point that the Internet is slow and high latency in foreign countries: true, but in the SF Bay Area it's slow and high latency on mobile devices and this should be a common experience shared by Hacker News readers.
The math of "what to do if startup valuations vary multiple orders of magnitudes less than startup outcomes" is very easy.

If "what to do" was "very easy", everybody would do "it". But that doesn't happen. Investors are not all created equal, and investor returns show massive variance (ie, they are not observed to be uniform.) So something is very wrong with your approach/level of abstraction.[1]

You might want to also read this comment from paulsutter that PG responded to, if you think this is a personal attack on you.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4959964

______

[1] ref: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4859922
Merry Christmas to HN
As a developer, I care about some of the under the hood changes, new features and improvements:

- lighter memory usage
- better power management
- address space randomization (forcible)
- full hardware (direct-x) rendered UI
- storage spaces
- hyper-v
- incremental file histories
- mandatory DEP
- system refresh

Of course, at the UI level, there are various changes that are a mix of good and bad IMHO, but overall, I would say more parts of the UI suck a little less than before.
What's Behind San Francisco's Sudden Building Boom?
Good article. Not sure why I feel I already read that stuff somewhere.
I can't tell, they both look totally random to me! You stumped me!

Spooky huh?

--

Am I wrong in thinking that this will only work with at best a random coin flip precision? Not to mention that the few flips people will be willing to make means you lack any significant amount of data to make such a statement.
> full of statefull functors (intellegent fools they are, the worst kind), I'm happy.

If you are going to be judgmental and calling people fools, I suggest improving your spelling first, or you'll just appear to be one yourself.
I don't know much about philosophy, but I know that Less Wrong's opinion of it is pretty low [3].

Eliezer probably talks about quantum mechanics more than most philosophers, so his recent explanation [4] of how statements about day-to-day objects can be true despite the fact that only fundamental particles really exist is probably original.

[3] http://lesswrong.com/lw/frp/train_philosophers_with_pearl_an...

[4] http://lesswrong.com/lw/frz/mixed_reference_the_great_reduct...
http://www.dnaindia.com/money/report_after-nano-tata-plans-r...

its old viral news, never happened, the project was put on haitus.
> Cleaning up some statefull functors

This makes no sense at all. A functor is a type class, it doesn't contain any state.
He's right http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/28/pf/north_dakota_jobs/index.h...
Even liberal arts majors qualify.
> Haskell makes your functions pure by default. You have to change the type signature if you want to do IO

The author seems to be conflating IO and side effects. IO is just one of the many ways that side effects can occur.

> Purity also means you can't read or write global variables, that's just another type of IO.

Er... what? No, not at all.

Reading global variables is not side effects, much less IO.

Writing global variables is side effects, but has nothing to do with IO.

> Functions that do IO are difficult or impossible to test.

Absolutely not, IO functions are not harder to test than regular ones. Is your function creating a file? Start your test, assert the file doesn't exist, call your function, assert your file exists. Done.

> I now put all my IO in top-level functions that are called directly from main

This is great for homework, but in the real life, IO needs to be performed throughout your entire application, and unsafePerformIO is just not an option. You have to use iteratees for this kind of operation, which adds a pretty thick layer of complexity to your code base.

> boo :: Map Integer String -> String -> Integer

This syntax is clean but it doesn't tell me anything that

def boo(map: Map[Integer, String], key: String) : Integer

doesn't tell me.

> The point is, you can't confidently reason about a function from its signature if IO is involved.

Sure, you can: the mention of IO tells me this function operates within the IO monad, so I know a lot of operations and laws that apply to it.

Haskell is a fantastic language but this article is doing a very poor job at explaining why. I suspect its author has only recently started using Haskell and would have been better advised to wait a bit before sharing his enthusiasm.
Amazing OpenGL demo: Never Seen the Sky
It'd be fun to adapt this for Windows 8's new "adventure mode" minesweeper. There are some significant challenges though; for one, all the numbers are the same color! The nice thing is that you could avoid guessing in many situations by simply using a pickaxe/dynamite/map powerup.
I say the emphasis should be on technical accuracy, not on the affected hacker slang adopted by some silly people. There are a lot of different sorts of people who love working with computers. Some are intensely mathematical, some are nerds who are driven by intellectual challenge (think of the NASA engineers with skinny ties and slide rules who loved nothing more than to tear into an impossible engineering challenge with lives on the line), some are annoying hipsters for whom hacking is some sort of fashion statement complete with special slang to, like everything else, show how hip they are, some are malicious cracker vermin who brag about their toxicity, some are conscientious craftsmen who take great pride in doing good work.... The thing they almost all have in common when they talk to each other is that they know the real names of things and they are more precise in their use of technical terms than the general public. If you don't want to embarrass yourself with the dialog, first priority is factual correctness.
When OS (Politicians/Govt) layer of your system is inefficient, old, slow as hell and has pathetic security subsystem, you need to format the system and install a new one based on today's need. It is a drastic step but a much better then keep on patching the current system and hope that we can get rid of this hell.
From reading in the popular press about Jaron Lanier he strikes me as more of an artiste than technologist. Which is fine by me.

His comments in this article hint at something that nags at me as a musician and lover of music, which is the rise of the concept of "content" to describe creative works.

The ubiquity of digital networks has led to an unprecedented level of commodification of music (for example). Various large entities like (Google, Apple, Facebook) and influential networks of transmission (bit torrent, Grooveshark, Spotify, Mega-Upload) seem to have not only captured more of the value of creative artists, they have also captured huge cultural mindshare. (The tech CEO as rock star).

Google in particular disturbs me as it seems like the search engine has become more important than what is searched for. This somehow feels hollow to me.

I'm interested in general about how meaning is created by and for people. Music is an old means of adding, or at least enhancing meaning.

Now figures like Steve Jobs take some of that role. But there is at least some irony that the gadget that broke Apple into the popular mainstream was a music player, completely un-interesting with out the content that it commodifies.
Startups Adjust to Web's Down Cycle - story of Kabam, Viddy, and LivingSocial
For a simple introduction to the economics of price discrimination from a tech startup's point of view, Joel on Software has a great article [1] which, although it's from 2004, is still quite relevant. That article notes:

"[Charging different people different prices for the same product] pisses the heck off of people. People want to feel they're paying a fair price. They don't want to think they're paying extra...it seems like customers would rather pay $100 when everyone else is paying $100 than pay $79 if they know there's someone out there who got it for $78."

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...
Thanks, I hope you like GitLab CI.
Iphone 4 cases
Every time I look back I feel like how stupid I was back then.
http://www.300house.com/

check this out, for a continued process.
Once this becomes common place, I wonder if we will see proxy services that runs the same item through 100 different area codes to find the one with the cheapest results.
I think he also paraphrased a quote I like fairly well. I don't feel like reading that whole paid-by-the-word essay again, but it goes along the lines of "reality is the thing that exists whether or not we believe in it." A reasonable analogy would be "truth is the thing that is accurate regardless of our opinion about it." I am obviously unfairly dismissing relativism outside of a particular range of variation since to do otherwise makes most discussions about anything pointless.
Great post. Could you please email that to myself 5 years ago?
I'm sorry to hear your GitLab install didn't work out. I agree that right now the setup can be better. Just made a ticket to consolidate the install scripts, hopefully this helps making things work on multiple platforms. https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/2351
At the time Linus was ranting about micro kernels, QNX, a micro kernel, soundly kicked the Linux kernel's butt in pretty much every way.
Italicizing "jokes" is a very serious accusation.
I happen to have knowledge that google indeed does have such an explicit clause in it's employment contract. It sounds something like "... google deals with pretty much everything in computer software field. So if you invent/design/create anything at all computer related, while under employment with Google, we own it by default".
Page weight will always matter to someone.

I'd even go further and claim it matters to everyone in some situations. Open youtube in one tab to listen to a long lecture, open more tabs.. slim webpages still load fast, but "regular" (derpy!) ones take ages.

And then it's also a resource. I turn water off when I don't need it, because wasting water sucks, not because I cannot afford wasting some. Why should bandwidth be much different? I'm all for using what you need, or for making experiments, but the quest for shinyness over content, putting all sidebars on all pages, including jquery plugins and whatnot at the drop of a hat etc.. all that leads to crappy sites and a crappy infrastructure. That is, the same infrastructure could allow people to achieve much more, if more sites were spartanic like, say, HN ^^

Because at the end of the day, I don't even care if I notice it. That argumentation is lazy and shortsighted. See, if the site loads in 200 ms instead of 250 ms, and I load the site a thousand times per year, that's 50 seconds per year -- over 10 years that's over 8 minutes. That may not sound like much, but consider that this is not the only site, and that I am not the only human (and that load time reductions of much more than 50 ms would be possible on a lot of big sites). In total, the amount of time wasted by petty BS is probably quite staggering.
Neither have I, downloaded!
Very Difficult Analytical Puzzles
Here's a link
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...

This article puts the end of Newsweek in the wider perspective of the greatest social revolution in history triggered by the invention of the internet. I think its still very early.
Xbox, PlayStation, WoW, Guild Wars, & more close US sex offenders accounts
The law itself is probably not so bad...

Until they were forced to change it because of the 1982 Constitution, anglophone children of anglophone parents who had moved to Quebec from elsewhere in Canada were forced to send their children to French only schools. This was in fact the primary reason that the families of children who I met in school gave for having recently left Quebec. (Even after the new Constitution, people who had moved to Quebec from other countries were still impacted.)

I think btilly's grasp of history is a bit weak here...

I misremembered the statistics, but not the gist of the facts. As I pointed out in a separate response, the rest of the history that I'm digging up is that 2/3 of the current boundaries of Quebec were given to it post-Confederation. And the bills which gave those to Quebec came with both rights and responsibilities. With the clear message that if Quebec failed of its responsibilities, it could not retain its rights.

Given that historical fact, Jacques Parizeau's proclamation that Quebec is unpartitionable was incredibly one-sided. And I have no clue why so many in Quebec both did, and continue to, accept that position as being undisputedly correct.
Introducing the PiCloud Notebook
Under the theory in these suits, wouldn't Half-Priced Books have to actually vet their inventory to ensure they only sell books that have undergone a proper domestic first sale authorized by the publisher? It doesn't seem to be enough that Half-Priced Books themselves refrains from engaging in a parallel-import scheme. The strong version of the argument, at least, seems to be arguing that the first-sale doctrine doesn't apply at all to books that were imported without the publisher's consent. So not only would parallel importation violate a copyright holder's rights, but so would subsequent domestic resale of any such book. So e.g., if I sold Half-Priced Books a book I bought in Europe (which I've done), and they resold it, both those sales would be illicit, absent publisher consent.

Obviously the real target of the publishers' suits is cheaper versions of books (mainly textbooks). But I don't see how the arguments they're making can be limited to that case, and wouldn't also sweep up a whole bunch of other reasonably common cases where people sell books in one country that they bought in another country. Some examples: estate sales of people who grew up in one country and died in another one; resale of books bought on trips; small-scale independent importation and sale of books that were never published in the U.S. (e.g. novels in the original French/German/etc.). Heck, as an American expat in Denmark, I fairly routinely sell U.S.-bought books in Denmark or vice versa, depending on where they happen to be at a given time and how full my suitcase is.

The more suspicious part of me suspects that, while parallel importation of cheap textbooks is their main target, they wouldn't really mind an outcome that banned those other resales, either, and looked more like a region-coding system. For example, one easy-ish thing Half-Priced Books could do to keep safe would be to filter by ISBN, only stocking books with ISBNs indicating US publication. That'd have some false positives (some foreign-published books are imported with the publisher's blessing), but it'd be more feasible than attempting to determine on a case-by-case basis whether a particular book had undergone an authorized domestic first sale.

An alternate statutory fix that targets only the narrower case could be to legislate: 1) resale of any lawfully owned book in the U.S. is legal, regardless of where it was first sold; but 2) large-scale [for suitable definition] parallel importation with commercial intent is separately prohibited.
The difference is that HBO are still making a product that people want. It's the distribution channel that's in danger of dying out not the producer. As long as HBO are making shows people want to watch they'll be just fine.
Global variables certainly create opportunities for side-effects. The author may be throwing everything into one big pot and labeling it I/O, but they're right that you can't sneak a global variable access into a function without changing the function's type. That's a valid point even if it's poorly worded.

> This is great for homework, but in the real life, IO needs to be performed throughout your entire application

My experience has been that I could get away with pushing I/O out to the fringes of the app and make 80-90% of the code pure. But everybody lives in a different "real life" and it's not unlikely that the kinds of things I do on the side for fun just don't require it.

I fully concur with the rest of your remarks.