skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am also in the field, and IMHO we are starting to get away from the worst excesses code quality wise i.e. things are getting better.

6 years ago using CVS or something like that was novel. Now not using GIT is. Big improvement!

Problems are still interesting and challenging.
Exactly- It's pointless to counter a misleading graph with another misleading graph.
Sony Launches PlayStation Store Giveaway. 1 FREE Game Every Week
Your comment is typical, but I actually love S1 :)
The main difficulty in porting has less to do with OpenGL itself and more to do with the number of platform-specific issues you encounter when you're trying to port code that is highly optimized for specific platforms.
"Happiness" means so many things.
Almost all of our pursuits are just achieve this nebulous goal: To be happy.

Through meditation I came to the conclusion that what we typically call happiness is just a temporary satisfaction of desires that won't last.

True happiness seems to be accepting what is, without judgment by realizing "emptiness" (a term describing that nothing exists on its own or has a distinct identity, including the self).

Once you see this you'll wonder how you could have missed this all this time, since it is so obviously true.
The problem is remembering this when things go wrong; that is distinguishes people truly at peace from the rest of us.
> It just seems to imagine a world that's unlike the one we live in.

Well… http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Specifically:

> Live in the future, then build what's missing.
Come on, I've got a reasonable point here. People post on forums asking these questions which should have been answered during their educations.

If civil engineers had a forum site and someone asked "how do I calculate the load a simple beam", people would say, what the fuck are you doing in your job if you don't know that? Who is employing you and why? Where did you go to college? Who was your tutor because next time I'm at a dinner at my college I'm going to ask him how the fuck did they pass you.

Our current trend of saying college doesn't matter really starts to be a problem when professional programmers (yeah I'm assuming that the guy in the question is) are asking basic questions like this. This shows that we do need college education for programmers.

It also irritates me - this guy could have taken the time to learn all these basics, but for whatever reason he thought it didn't matter, and now he's paying for it.
Browser-based 3d is all going to be WebGL, which is very OpenGL ES inspired.
It seems strange that they would target a site whose users are exactly the people most likely to detect and understand (and make a fuss about) internet peculiarities.
10 lessons I learned by taking the entrepreneurial Red Pill
Building a CPU in a circuit simulation framework[1] was one of my favorite, and most illuminating, projects I've done.

A great book to learn more: http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspecti...

[1] http://tams-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/applets/hades/webd...
Correlation means how well the points fit on the line. It is unfortunate that the author did not include a regression line or R^2 value but none the less one can tell there is no line which most of the points lie near. That data is absolutely not strongly correlated.

You seem to be confusing correlation and significance. Having lots of data points makes the correlation more significant, it does not make the correlation stronger.
Home vs. Dashboard
It's very difficult to buy a high bandwidth, low latency link from one AWS availability zone to another to ensure that my databases are synced properly such that if one of them goes down the other will stay up, and there will be minimal/no loss of data. But I can buy colo space from two different companies in two different but close cities and gain a lot of redundancy.

Furthermore some kind of systematic problem that affects one of the datacenters run by one organization in one city is very unlikely to affect another datacenter run by another organization in another city. They're very unlikely to both make the exact same mistake and have it bite me in exactly the same way. But the AWS architecture is largely preserved even through availability zones, datacenters, etc. Easier for that to happen.

http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-cloud-down-reddit-github-other-m... That's an example of precisely the kind of problem that I'm referring to that wouldn't happen if you were redundant across multiple independently run datacenters.
I think you're confusing this with Outlook style message recall. The proposal here is about helping the receiver automatically cull out of date email. Of course you should be free to ignore any such flag. The point is that it would allow convenient filtering by some subset of recipients.
In Love with LÖVE
Dell Buyout: Microsoft’s Generosity
Talking about the place of meaning and happiness in life is philosophy, and philosophy is a lot like math in that you can't jump into the middle of something and think you know what "well-ordered" or "compact" or "happiness" mean. It isn't pedantry to dissect the meanings of commonplace words in an article like this, especially since Frankl's understanding of happiness is apparently different from the definition of happiness used in the psychological research the article discusses.
In this case, I don't think a mailbox that can be controlled by the sender of an email is missing.
Typically when someone posts a baiting title like that I know not to trust them. Scholarship and evidence don't need hyperbolic headlines.
Uh, how does the first graph not have a correlation? As a first order guess, that looks like a very strong correlation to me, probably at least .10 R^2 if you fit a regression to it. I'm guessing the author avoided fitting a regression to the original data because it actually is significant.

Not to mention, it's just plain incorrect statistics if you don't do weighted least squares regression (instead of OLS) on the averaged data set.
> it is a rare occasion that we would open source a project

Unless your company is shipping binaries to third parties, I don't think there is a need to open-source your applications.
I don't get it -- couldn't you use something like Angular / etc. to do this? How could I use this to create something more rich than repeated div elements and placeholder text / images? Can you provide more examples?
So? Richard Feynmann's Nobel Prize winning idea was, in his retelling, inspired by some guy throwing a plate in the Cornell cafeteria:

http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/FeynmansWobblingPlate/

The "amazing" part of the OP's discussion is not the immediate topic at hand, but that someone took the time to go past the pat answers ("because Windows has more users, etc") and consider all the other factors that have led to things being the way they are. If only more important fields -- education, medicine, politics, justice -- had more people willing to spend a summer hour examining their deeply-held assumptions.
There are two problems with this article. First is that the "evidence" is from a scatter plot graph, with no statistical measurements attached to it. Stats really aren't something that you can rely on your eyes on. To me, it looks like a weak, positive correlation between previous year's score and current years score. The thing to look for is greater densities in the NE and SW quadrants than the NW and SE. Having a zero-mean "blob" in the data makes it tricky on the eye, but NE and SW points are the ones the model "correctly" predicts, while the NW and SE plots are the ones the models "gets wrong". I think the issue is the eye is looking for a line to process a slope of, but such data doesn't streach into a line. What it should look for is: "given a good score last year, is a good score given this year" or "given a bad score last year, is a bad score given again".

The second issue is that the author does not offer a better solution to the problem. Some information is almost always better than no informantion in decision making. Statistics in human-based samples are always tricky, and its tough to get strong correlations easily. As an aside, this is part of why clinical trials are so tricky and expensive.

(I am not a stats professional, but am a biomedical research scientist with some training in human-population based stats).
> It's his money, so he gets to decide what to do with it. Microsoft Office was his product, so he got to decide what privileges to offer users.

Microsoft Office is only "his" product because Microsoft is holding its source code in secret rather then releasing it to the benefit of the entire world. Since Bill Gates' entire career is based upon secrecy rather then productivity his ownership of billions of dollars is illegitimate.

> the key to all modern economic and technological progress

The main thing holding back technological progress today is secrecy. When corporations develop products in secret this leads to wasteful overlap. We should be using the Internet to facilitate global cooperation on technological projects.
If you think that, you've missed the point of the article.

We know how almost everything we use works -- in that we can connect the initial "shallow" models to more fundamental models of physics. Apparently this one has eluded us so far.
Jobs', Schmidt's, Otellini's shady no-poaching agreements
All the laws about things that tend to be only well-understood by the younger half of the population tend to be written by representatives from the older half.

I'm sure there are politicians who don't know how to check their own e-mail, but who have strong opinions on DMCA-esque legislation because they think piracy === theft and overbearing laws like the DMCA are the only way to prevent theft 2.0.

You have to be immersed in technology to understand the nuanced implications of technology law, and most of our representatives have not spent their lives immersed in technology like most of us have.
Thats because x86 is an insanely complex architecture. Try one of the pseudo RISCs, e.g. ARM.
Perhaps most companies prefer to keep the press positive? Mine certainly does. (And it'll probably stick with MySQL until its dying day despite it causing problems repeatedly.)
It's precisely all the help you need to go and look up your notes on coroutines from college. You did go to college didn't you? Or are you an anti-college hipster, suddenly finding the limitations of that approach.
I'll second pgadmin. I finally woke up to the fact that I should start using Postgres a few months ago, and pgadmin made my initial foray into postgres very straight forward
A Robot With A Chainsaw
I'm curious if home garden farming is big among the "preppers" - but then I think that planning a more self-sufficient food supply is only valuable to non-nuclear/chemical warfare doomsday thinking (such as the author's economic collapse bias).

That leads me to wonder if the kits the article goes over would reveal which scenario is presumed by the owner through deductive reasoning... Does anyone keep a personal seed bank? Or do most people assume the apocalypse will have a relatively brief duration and then the supermarket will have fresh produce again?
What is the problem to begin with? Science is not some epistemologically omnipotent entity. It is an integral part of human culture and can only be expected to evolve and behave as such. The scientific method is a guiding principle agreed on by its practitioners but that is all that sets it apart from the rest of culture.

The scientific method does work for string theory just like it worked for relativity and other 20th century theories that took a while for experimental confirmation. String theory got a lot of people very excited a few decades ago and so it stuck, just like an artistic or fashion style sticks to a generation or civilization. It is still in the very primal stages, like Newton in the time after the apple metaphorically hit his head, as he was using Kepler's laws to derive classical gravity. This time the math is way more complicated and will take way more time (and likely classical/quantum computational resources) to turn into a theory ready for experimental falsification. Whether or not it truly holds promise or is just a "fad" is irrelevant; the only vector for the evolution science is purely human.

"Best page" is purely subjective. If you draw the analogy between recommendation algorithms and scientific theories, then the person would be the equipment. If you calibrate properly, you should be able to switch out equivalent pieces of equipment and get the same experimental conclusion based on the scientific theory. You can't "calibrate" a person so the primary feedback loop on a recommendation algorithm changes with every user. Until you get down to human psychology and neuroscience, there is really no basis for this problem in what we know of as "science."

As for translation, I'm sure our research of the common threads of language have contributed to translation algorithms (although I have not researched this topic).

Your last point about physics and medicine is moot. Our very basis for "fact" in science is the statistical results of a vast number of experiments. You say that statistics is "the best you can have" as though there is some golden standard to which you are comparing the scientific method to. There is no better golden standard than the statistics naturally built into the science. For all of its imperfections, it is the absolute best method we have for knowing (approximate) truth in a nontrivial way (aka, truth not as we see it in our mind but truth that can be experienced and repeated by the vast majority of humanity given the tools).

Not long ago, we didn't even have a concept of molecules that would act as drugs to impact our health, let alone simulate them in live and computational models (which is growing more and more commonplace) to know exactly how a person's unique biochemistry will react. We will probably always have statistical answers, unless there is some mechanism for nature to reveal "truth" to us. The whole point of science is that those models get more and more accurate over time.
Building Firefox OS
Is it common to keep the notes you wrote in college?
Yep, we are better off now.

I remember trying to get bluetooth audio working in the alsa-only days. Or network sound with esd/ssh. Or figuring out how to route audio nicely apps. Or saving my laptop battery. Or many other features that were simply damn difficult to pull off.

People don't seem to remember how crappy the audio situation used to be, for users and for ISVs. I respect Lennart and the current PA maintainers a lot for tackling the problem head on – even if they didn't or couldn't do it perfectly – instead of just complaining about the sad state of Linux audio, especially in the face of all the criticism they got over it.
This is unworkable.

There are people like me which have policy of no byte lost. You have no way to enforce on a system that user has root access deletion of anything. So if you want the mail you send to be deleted - you cannot force it.

It also adds little value to the user - if you want autobot@spam-factory.com messages to be deleted in 3 days it is the job of the client - this is a simple script with simple rules.

But lets take the "classic" example of special offers of the week ... the assumption is that after the expiry it has no value for the consumer. Wrong - the user may collect them to try to find patterns. If something is not on discount now but has been discounted 5 times in the recent year, chances are it will be soon. Think steam sales - we know that Deus Ex: Human Revolution will be 75% off, because it has been on every steam sale so far.
Games are already being ported to other operating systems because of microsoft greed.

MS wants to copy everybody with an app and game store, which will be the only authorized way to download and install anything on to windows 8+

They also want to charge 30% to any vendor that wants to sell in their store. Since game makers like Steam have their own content delivery system which will be blocked by MS they already panicked and announced a new linux client and have claimed to be committed to switching everything over the next few years and dumping windows
This is probably the biggest jackass comment I've seen on HN in a while. Your college experience definitely shows.
Darpa's Plan to Recruit Military Dogs: Scan Their Brains
I think you are mistaken. In today's attention economy even the very best scholarship and the very best evidence-based conclusions will be completely ignored unless there is a hook to get people, preferably lots of people, to read it.

Even here on the allegedly rational Hacker News I've seen item after item sink without trace, whereas others with significantly fewer details and significantly worse evidence get voted up and read by thousands.

Alex Bellos recently passed on to me what his editor told him. It doesn't matter how good your article is, if no one reads it, or if no one gets to the point, it's no use and a waste of your time.

I'd like to think "Scholarship and evidence don't need hyperbolic headlines." Sadly, I think that scholarship and evidence say otherwise.
Bill Gates's position as a famous wealthy guy means he has more of a responsibility than the rest of us to not put out misleading graphs. Even if he is spreading misinformation with his own money.
Ignoring the technical difficulties others have mentioned, the fundamental flaw to me is that other people set the response times.

This is akin to Outlook's priority markers. There's nothing wrong with prioritising, but it needs to be you who sets the priority, not everyone else.

Your "queue" would always be poisoned with people wanting fast respones (And who ever sends an email and hopes for a slow response??)
I watched a couple of episodes of some prepper show on Discovery. One had a family where the child had a hobby of collecting seeds because they were going to be valuable after the end of the world.

The couple stated that they were going to start homesteading but there was no way to tell if they had a garden.
one can tell there is no line which most of the points lie near

No, that's not correct. You can't conclude anything from looking at a big blob because you don't know the density of points at different places in the blob. This is the point the guy you replied to was making.

As an extreme example, imagine a billion data points that fit perfectly on a straight line. Then superimpose a million data points randomly on top of it. What does it look like? A big blob. But almost every point is highly correlated with that straight line.
I should report that from my Shanghai based VPS I don't get this problem.

Perhaps this is localised, or was just a trial for a few hours.

https://gist.github.com/4650029
Nokia will enter the mobile music subscription game with Music+
The utility to me is that it is very easy to understand - I still don't know what Angular.js is, but this takes me seconds to get.

To me, it's basically a for loop for placeholder HTML, which is great.

I guess you could also use it as a kind of unit testing for, unicode support, or to iterate through all conceivable tags to see how the CSS fares, if the author decides to go along with that.
> I realize that I know nothing about assembly / CPUs and should have never started.

Strong disagree! Starting gained you knowledge, if only that you didn't know anything about the subject. Now that you know you know nothing you also know that there is something here for your to learn about.

Before you tackle a subject this complex it might help to tackle similar problems of lesser complexity: a 6502, 6800 or 6809 assembler + emulator, then if you feel brave a 68K one, then maybe a risc chip (ARM, MIPS), and then ,if you still feel like it finally the x86 series starting with the 8086, working your way up to today. You'll be learning all the time and at the end of those exercises you'll be quite knowledgeable about CPU architectures, design pitfalls and so on.

If you should decide to give up halfway you'll be in an excellent position to know what you don't know.

The above circuit will take you a couple of years at least, assuming you are otherwise gainfully employed. It would be fantastic if you did it because we really do need people that have that level of insight and there are ever fewer of them.
I've been putting this off for far too long - thanks for the guide!
I would think the answer is a mix of "because that's where the money is" and "because that is the OS they run themselves"
I'm imagining opening an e-mail... marking it as unread because I'll want to read it later, and when I come back it's no longer there because I forgot to press the "DO NOT SELF DESTRUCT!!!" button. I believe we have the exactly right amount of anoyance with spam, and familly relatives. Self destructing messages would be the last drop. :P
The cost of Microsoft being unfriendly to game devs on Windows 8 is likely to be the cause of other platforms getting better, NOT people running in droves to Win8.

On even days I really wish they'd get this. On odd days I hope they never figure it out.
Neither a college education nor continued employment in the field is a requirement to ask a stackoverflow question. In fact, I'd venture to say that a version of stackoverflow where the default answer to everything was "you should have learned this in college" would not be very useful (or used) at all. If you find the discussion beneath you, I suggest that you not participate and find a better use of your time. Others may be getting value from it and I can't for the life of me understand why you think this is a bad thing.
Interactive art in a new statically typed, gc-less lisp dialect called xtlang
More about extempore and xtlang here:
http://benswift.me/2012-08-07-extempore-philosophy.html
https://github.com/digego/extempore
http://extempore.moso.com.au/
He doesn't actually say what the positive correlation is, which I find disingenuous and suspicious. Because his scatterplot is so non-detailed, it's about as useful as the following scatterplot of SAT scores:

X|X

---

X|X

Where the axes are scores above and below 600 in math on the first and the second time taking the test. There are some individuals who do better or worse - but just because we can draw a detail-obfuscating graph of data doesn't mean there is no detail in the data, or no correlation, or that SAT scores won't help us predict future SAT scores. It just means we can draw a detail-obfuscating graph, and that there's not a perfect correlation.

One point the author does have is that these scores are not perfectly predictive, so bad performance one year shouldn't mean that the teacher gets i.e. fired. OK. He seems to be protesting using information to draw any conclusions at all. Perhaps it would be more effective to show what fallacious or irrational conclusions are being falsely drawn from this data and used to fire teachers, and then object to those specific instances of irrational actions. This value-added measure has not been shown to be intrinsically unreliable or wrongheaded but maybe some applications of it are.
For how long have you been getting 3 nines? Would you be able to survive a data-center outage? A disk crash? A switch malfunction? A failed load balancer? A failed NAS?
"Money" is a lot more of a known quantity than "gun." How would they detect a printer making a gun I'd designed myself?
A bunch of UX feedback/issues:

- after signing in/up, there is no link on any page that actually links you to your portfolio.

- The welcome page is a waste of space right now. It only has a link to give you feedback, while providing the user no useful information.

- If you're making me sign in with github, the projects section shouldn't be empty. It should pull from my github

- Under Theme, I understand it's probably more work than it's worth right now to preview the themes for a weekend project - but the link out to bootswatch should at least go to the preview so I know what I'm choosing: http://bootswatch.com/#gallery
No problem Brian, the deployment side is not as detailed, but should give some indication to how it can be used.