skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So what you're saying is, that I'm a bad commentor because I used a label like "sexist" ... but it's just fine to apply the label of "unmarriagable," "selfish," "crass," "immoral," "low quality," etc, to millions of people

Well, sure. "Sexism" is one of the terms that people use to try to control discourse. The other words aren't in that category at all. They may be used well or poorly but they don't have a connotation of trying to restrict what others can say, which "sexism" and "misogyny" do.

Loved the Google posts, by the way.
I'm only suggesting an implementation that is transparent for the user. 10 would probably be just fine, but 25 would be closer to an impossible situation without significantly increasing the odds of a successful attack.
I'd argue that "user happiness" isn't the goal for Netflix, long-term revenue is. That's relatively easy to measure, and certainly easier than something nebulous like "user happiness." You can even test different recommendation algorithms and see which maximizes long-term revenue.

Presumably Netflix knows that the recommendation algorithm has a significant impact on their bottom line, which is why they launched the Netflix Prize to outsource new algorithm development.

Now, Netflix can't give revenue data to third parties, and they also don't want to let third-party recommendation algorithms run on their system because an "average" algorithm will hurt their bottom line.

The question then becomes: which well-understood metric correlates best with long-term revenue?

Perhaps the answer is RMSE, which is why Netflix chose it. That doesn't seem totally implausible to me.
Looking for Co-Founding Technical/Design Team
I am a working on a new startup venture "MusicRewards.com" and looking for technical and design co-founders that would be willing to work for sweat equity. I have raised some money, built a working prototype, but want to add more features, better UI and design before going live. My last music startup grew to over $15 million in annual revenues.

If you want to learn more contact me at todd@musicrewards.com or call me at 678-447-1360. You can also find me on Facebook or Linkedin.
You mention a business strategy, so presumably you intend Tonido to be a business. How do you plan to make money?
You could use innards of some open source PDF viewer (most of them are written in C++).

I managed to get away just with using command line PDF->TXT tool that came with Xpdf [1].

Also MuPDF is awesome [2]. Its bare bones demo PDF viewer replaced Foxit as my default PDF handler.

If you have some more serious budget, there is also PDFlib TET [3], a nice commercial solution with bindings for many languages (C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, .NET, and many others).

-----

[1] http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html

[2] http://ccxvii.net/fitz

[3] http://www.pdflib.com/en/products/tet/
17" screen for driver ... what if the driver is watching YouTube while driving?
I started (what I hope will be) an HN for design a few days ago: http://reddit.com/r/designthought/

Existing design link sites are very low level and amateur. I'm trying to create a place for design links with substance.
Yeah, a good point. For a lot of web services, the security doesn't need to be all that good.

Also, it may be that giving users memorable passwords beats letting them make their own, whereupon many of them choose weak ones.
Top 100 Leadership Blogs
I wasn't being metaphorical -- I was just commenting about TCP.
Are you in the Atlanta area?
My use of the word "quality" refers to their personal qualities that are relevant to relationships. I don't mean that people who do this can't be interesting and worthwhile people, but they're certainly not the type of people you want to marry.
The barrier of switching costs is not a "meme", it's one of the bases of competitive advantage as I'm sure you know. I think there's a much stronger counter-argument in articulating the other competitive advantages that google works on. Market-share just gives you a buffer.

It would take some time for billions to switch, yes; but if there was a search engine that was far superior for what users need, the difficulty of switching would not prevent them. It's the standard pattern of technology adoption.

People get attached to consumer goods (e.g. brands of washing powder, chewing gum), but while they also get attached to technology, it doesn't seem to do the technology much good once it has been superseded (DEC anyone?)

The lack of a "far superior search engine" is the significant barrier, IMHO. And whether such a technology is possible is something I don't claim to know. That's the unpredictable nature of technology/science, and why people like Warren Buffett won't invest in it.
This is one of the biggest reasons I'm afraid of growing old, but I'm sure there are plenty of old people for whom this doesn't happen. My dad (he's 65) seems to do a pretty good job. He's an electrical engineer who's still very attentive to current events and playing with computers, unlike my mom (64), who I'm not sure has figured out how to send an attachment yet.
David Moon's Programming Language for Old Timers
Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product
My statement was a conditional if statement: If someone clones a product or service to the point that it confuses users, that's borderline fraudulent activity and deceptive. This is usually a different kind of issue for material products and geographically-limited services, but the web is global and most web apps are already available in the market, making a carbon copy in another language absolutely no different than a carbon copy in one of the app's supported languages.
ClueMapper - A Trac extension
It's not always that clear cut.

Is "look and feel" copyrightable? - http://blog.pastie.org/2008/05/copyright---des.html
I suspect many adults don't plan ahead either, but rather remember advice for later, once they've personally run up against the problem the advice solves. How many people poured money into the stock market despite their grandparents' warnings that stocks can go down as much as up? Or bought massive houses with no money down despite warnings about taking on too much debt? Or started businesses despite all the common wisdom about how you're basically guaranteed to fail your first time?

Before I started working on my startup, I worked for 2 other ones so I could see how it was done and hopefully avoid their mistakes. Despite carefully taking note of everything my past employers were doing wrong, I made all their mistakes anyway. The difference was that I could recognize it as a mistake in a week instead of spending years going down a dead-end path.

This may even be the smart way to do it. Every time I've blindly taken advice, it hasn't worked out. The situation's always more complex than someone's 5-minute soundbite, and having personally experienced the problem seems to be essential for making sense of the advice and picking out the parts that are relevant to my particular situation.
No, I am currently located in Boca Raton, FL near West Palm Beach.
I think it's a big part of why many young men play for variety and quantity instead of trying to form relationships. No man wants to be significantly less experienced than the woman he ends up marrying; that's just emasculating, and she almost certainly won't respect him.
Google the name of any tech startup and you'll come across oDesk projects titled "[startup] clone", with tons of bids. There are teams actively cloning Twiddla right now (as evidenced by accepted bids to projects like the above). It's just the way it goes.
I recommend watching Sex and the City, you would quickly find that it's not responsible for those things. Sorry.
Logical fallacy. That's not what the quote you used states.

The quote states that "people with quality X tend to not do Y." This does not automatically mean "people without quality X always do Y."
Fast (Nanotech) Takeoff: Introduction
In my experience, relationships seem to be a net negative to productivity.

Then you aren't doing it right. My productivity has shot through the roof since settling down in to a stable relationship. As you get older, relationships can provide true meaning and inspiration. Good relationships are symbiotic.

Of course, you might be under 25 or so, in which case just partake in casual sex until it feels right to pursue a mutually beneficial long term relationship.
What exactly is the problem? The original stack overflow is CC-SA.

I'm not addressing the license aspect of this particular case, I'm addressing the attempt to use language support as a justification for this practice.

Furthermore it freely acknowledges that it is based on stackoverflow... The creation of CNProg are stackoverflow inspiration

There is a huge difference between inspiration and outright cloning, and many additional consequences that result from the latter.

This is the typical view of an English centric person

Just the opposite. This is the view of someone currently in France, whose first company in my 20s was based in both Hong Kong and the US, makes web apps with labels in multiple languages and therefore recognizes the utter ignorance of claiming that language is sufficient justification for outright cloning a product or service.
The name is unfortunate. Haddock is Haskell's documentation generator, which may be familiar to the same techie crowd.

Also - something I learned from working at a big company: For secure memorable passwords, it's better to take a phrase and abbreviate it than to take a couple words and concatenate them together with numbers and symbols. So from "Haddock: Built because I want web apps to make passwords fun", you might get "H:Bb1wwa2mpf", which looks like random noise to any password cracker yet is still reasonably memorable to anyone who remembers the original phrase.

You can get a lot of use out of song lyrics for this, say "Bbmap,dmc2tlbtlwd" from American Pie or "Yccatyl,bycnl" from Hotel California or "Mhfjl2b" from Comfortably Numb. Long, line noise, completely unrecognizable - yet you'll never forget the underlying lyric.
You'd expect that. In the recommendations world that's called "business rules" and includes things from skewing results based on margins to not showing inappropriate recommendations (say, women's clothing to men).

However, I'm pretty sure that Amazon's recommendations don't do that, or don't do it much, anyway. Their "similar product" recommendations seem to be on a very simple (and often mediocre quality) pure counting correlation between two items purchases. It's much harder to guess which algorithms are at work for personalized recommendations.

At the end of the day, profit margins aside, there's a lot that goes into optimizing recommendations that can't be easily measured. How do you measure customer loyalty based on good recommendations? There have been a number of market research studies that indicate that recommendations do drive customer loyalty, but it's hard to say where the sweet spot is between skewing things toward higher margins vs. skewing things towards customer utility. About 80% of Amazon's visitors aren't there to buy stuff -- and that's great for them! They've become an information portal / window shopping location that happens to also sell stuff. Which is a great position to be in when somebody does think of buying stuff.

That Netflix uses RMSE for their contest doesn't bother me. What I think Greg is reacting to (and certainly my sentiment, again, this is really similar to something I'd been writing) is that there's becoming a blurring between stimulus and response here and there's the assumption, if not in this subfield, certainly among those casually tracking recommendations advances, that RMSE is a good way of measuring a recommendations algorithm, not just, "the metric Netflix is using", when in fact, it's really a much more inexact science.
Thanks for sharing the link, I have submitted it.
Ian Bicking talk at PyCon
Discovered via this comment posted on the thread regarding "Hacker News" for other domains: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=537605
How Well Does Diversification Work?
I know many older folks (> 60) who are still vibrant and have curiosity about life. Unfortunately I do tend to agree that a certain rigidity of mind sets in at some point, and it becomes somewhat more difficult to rearrange your neurons to adapt to new ideas. It doesn't mean you cannot accomplish things, but just as it is sometimes important to realize you lack experience when young, it seems important to recognize the changes in your mind as you grow older, and accept them with a degree of grace and a willingness to acknowledge the differences.
yep, there is no case to cry foul here. StackOverflow clearly provided license to copy. Maybe they did no expect something like this China copy to happen. But that's the beauty of a permissive license. I think its great that StackOverflow chose to use Creative Commons.

Crying foul here would be no different than Debian being offended by Ubuntu.
I suggest those voting Amy down check the dictionary:

racism - "the theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race"

"Racism" is a morally neutral term, but modern society has twisted it to have a second definition of "hating or harming people based on their race."
I don't think subreddits count.
It's unfortunate that Haskell's Haddock wasn't Haddoc or Hadoc. "Haddock" made the most sense to me as a name for a blathering password generator (with those nods to the Marx Bros. and Hergé). I've named the command-line utility "ha-gen", though, to avoid collisions.

And "H:Bb1wwa2mpf" may be more secure than a similar-length haddock password, but its pseudo-acrostic nature is much less digestible to your average user. Meanwhile, with a few potential modifications I outlined, haddock would still be more memorable _and_ just as secure:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=537562
No disdain or distrust, I just personally can't stand reading them.
So if I clone your ShellShadow software, design everything to look as identical as possible and the market overwhelmingly chooses my clone, that's OK with you? Somehow I doubt it.
I predict that his prediction is wrong. Facebook already has an asymmetric relationship for "pages". I instead suspect that they may add "fans" for regular people. Changing the semantics of the default "friends" relationship has serious implications on their very carefully crafted (and highly effective!) privacy controls. This is a much smaller change that still yields the four possible relationships and maps more directly to their current privacy model.
Who cares? If they start spamming their feed the followers can quite easily unfollow.
You don't sit down one day with a check list and decide that since this person has X, Y, and Z, I am going to marry him/her. Rather, you marry despite absence of X, Y, and Z.
The title is misleading; the link provides some source-code compatibility tips for alternate Python VMs such as Jython, PyPy.
I am taking a Consumer Happiness class right now, and we spent an hour talking about creativity and sexual release. Expressing yourself creatively (programming, playing music, creating art, designing, etc) is a sexual release and, if done passionately and wholly, can be an alternative to sex. I am a full believer that sex is very healthy for us to have on a regular basis, but I also believe that the next time you are up late and have a huge sexual desire you should direct that towards a creative outlet. Distract yourself and go to bed exhausted, yet relieved.
The point's to remember the phrase, not the password. :-) The password is trivially reconstructible from the phrase.

Actually - since any good programmer won't put a maximum length on their passwords, I wonder if it'd be better to get users into the habit of picking really long phrases as passwords. Type in "Haddock: Built because I want webapps to make passwords fun" in the password prompt. Maybe that'll just take too long to input though, each time you want to login.
RubyFlow ( http://www.rubyflow.com/ ) is vaguely similar in spirit in the Ruby sphere (no voting though).
I definitely like the idea, but without seeing the platform capabilities and design goals, I can't get excited. The idea of distributed p2p applications is simple - seeing the problems you've aimed to solve and how you've solved them is what would convince me to invest time using/evangelizing/developing your platform (and open source is a requirement for the latter two).

I'd say that your early adopters are going to be other technical people that know these kinds of distributed services can be built (otherwise, one wouldn't see the problem with centralized services), and would share similar requirements, but I'm clearly biased.
I'm not going to reply to most of this, but a couple points stick out.

I would love to hear why you think sex is "deviant". It seems natural and healthy to me; after all, we were all born with the equipment built right in.

I think casual sex is deviant, not sex as a whole. The "equipment" may be "built right in", but its purpose is not to be used lightly and indiscriminately. After all, it can make babies.

Look around at the sorts of people who have a lot of casual sex. Do you seriously want them to be highly represented in humanity's genetic future, and the sorts of relationships they would have if bound together for 18 years to comprise the environment in which the next generation is raised?

Being inexperienced in any important skill is good reason to be looked down upon.

You're conflating "inexperienced" with "unskilled". I don't think there's much of a correlation. If anything, people who are overexperienced tend to be shitty lovers, because they've never need to develop any skills. If someone's that good, why would s/he have slept with 20 other people and still not found someone who came back and wanted to make it a relationship?
Use a ThinkPad keyboard with your MacBook
Ask HN: Anyone have success using cold e-mails for B2B sales?
Obviously it depends on the price point, product, target customer etc etc, but I was interested in hearing from startups here that sell software online to business/enterprise customers.

Has cold e-mailing worked at all? Cold-calling? Of course, nothing is as good as a qualified, warm lead, but is it worth spending time on e-mail as a means to getting a meeting?
I have vague memories of acrostics I formed for study in college...and not-so-trivially muddling them ;)

I still agree with you that this kind of phrasal munging is a good method, but I also think haddock has the slight, memorable edge :)
Forget that IBM Model M, another mechanical keyboard
They may not be paying half the price of the car, but if they are investing in the company, well, they are putting in money, so they can expect something in return. Also, targetted ads that are not obtrusive are not so irritating and can be rather helpful at times.
Thanks for submitting the link, the content there is very interesting.
I think what bothers me about your comments in this thread is that you expect a large stock of "decent" women to exist. As if there were some universally acceptable type of women.

It's far more complex than that. A better way to simplify it might be to say that for any given person there is probably 1% of the population (in the right age and gender group) that is suitable for a long term commitment. And it is not the same 1% for everyone.

I don't want to put words into your mouth, but the perception I (and others in this thread) are getting from you is you don't want to find a soul mate, you want to find a wife to 'manage your household' or do fulfill a similar role that has little to do with being your counterpart.
Facial recognition finally hits Facebook
I have to disagree with most of this. My perspective may be unique in that I am a "white" American and have been nurturing programming groups from Shanghai for 9 years now.

Let me begin by saying there is and never has been a promise that the first creator of something on the web has rights to world domination. Its a naive and childish notion of "mine".

The position that an English based community can serve the world shows you do not understand that the Chinese community would never have immersed themselves into the current StackOverflow community. They need their own Mandarin based "community" that is run "within China". It is a great thing to see the Chinese programming community mature. They need their own forums for this to happen. Expecting or demanding they assimilate into the English language community shows a lack of understanding of how communities form and nurture themselves.
Have you thought about how you might redefine what your higher purpose is? I think that is the source of the problem. Your reason for existence is not merely to be productive.
Another thing that I have noticed is that, the better the school's reputation, the more likely it is that people will try to BS their way through, knowing the that name on the paper will be enough to get them where they want to go. A lot of students at "second tier" schools recognize that they need to be on top of their shit because nobody's just going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
we don't need lisp to know the state of the machine -- in the Linux case, we have source code. We can _theoretically_ debug everyone else's code and know exactly what is going on.

"It is theoretically possible for the entire stack to work exactly as expected, and for each element to seem as inevitable and obvious-in-retrospect as Maxwell's equations."

Yes, and it is theoretically possible according to the laws of physics for broken glasses to spontaneously reassemble. But they don't.

This is basically an issue of entropy.
Ask HN: Best way to be able to touch type
I am a programmer and feel very bad that I cannot touch type. The reason probably is that I never picked it up as a kid and in my initial days of programming I got by with looking at the keyboard and typing.

I can type decently fast while looking at the keyboard - but the bad part is that I only use my index fingers and the thumb. I want to move away from this and be able to touch type using all my fingers.

Any suggestions from someone who has faced a similar problem.
Perhaps, but some issues are more important than others, and moral character is a big one. A person's sexual history is evidence of that person's character (or lack thereof). It's the one area of life where people are easily pushed to do awful things to themselves and each other.

Seriously, do you want to marry someone who might cheat because your dick is not as wide as that of a hookup who happened to show up at the college reunion? Do you want your teenage daughters to be raised by a woman who dated the football team, and to learn about respecting themselves from such a person? Is sex with a woman special if it used to be available to any guy with a six-pack and a nice car?

If a person gets into the habit of casual sex when young, that person's almost certain to cheat in a long-term relationship, even if the relationship is otherwise going well. It's not a habit that people break easily.
I don't want to put words into your mouth, but the perception I (and others in this thread) are getting from you is you don't want to find a soul mate, you want to find a wife to 'manage your household' or do fulfill a similar role that has little to do with being your counterpart.

Where do you get that idea? Maybe I'm miscommunicating drastically, but I see a world of difference between being against casual sex and wanting women to be subservient household slaves.

I'm not advocating a slide back into the '50s. I'd much rather go into the future-- a future where people respect themselves and each other, and in which the sexes related as equals. However, casual sex is inherently anti-feminist.