skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can tell good wine from bad, I just can't tell the expensive from the inexpensive.

The expectations game is played by pretty much every single product on the market, but it's only working if the product image is something you choose to care about. Most people do choose to care about it simply because it serves as a reasonable filter and this combined with social proof can reduce the problem of choice with minimum effort. People choose a certain "class" they want to represent and they just go along with whatever is on the menu for it.

But it's also important to notice that, while we all might be doing it to varying degrees, this does not necessarily apply to everything you do. If you can live with the stigma of forceful association to these classes, you can make decisions purely on the personal merits of a product, though that doesn't mean it's always worth the effort.

I live in one of the wine-themed states of Germany, close to France. A significant amount of our agriculture is wine, mostly from small family-based winemakers (oh the cliché). Everybody drinks a lot of wine, and there is an insane amount of variants to choose from. I know what I like when I taste it, but I know this applies to my personal taste only. Like the article says, it's not really possible to tell how expensive a wine is by tasting it. But that doesn't mean it all tastes the same. Wines are hugely diverse and everyone would be well-advised to just decide based on personal preference. However, high-profile wines are often designed to offend the least number of people, so they're an easy choice to serve when you're hosting a dinner - as a common denominator they do have a purpose.
I misunderstood your original concern :S, I meant what you said in your edit.

I don't think there is a nice solution for the other problem =)
A new forcepfly—and a disquisition on insect genitals
This comes across as incredibly ageist. Why do the iOS developers have to be 25?
you can always use google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
How about a 10 year project to pay off the National Debt?

Quit wasting money on science projects that aren't needed (this is already being done).
EA, is that you?

http://i.imgur.com/2SrLf.jpg
Right, and people had been playing with rockets for 30 years before the Apollo project. There is something to be said for large, concerted effort toward a singular goal. There are still enough massive gaps in our understanding of the brain to justify further research.

That said, this press speculation is just fluff and it's unclear to me whether it is possible to define such a focused goal.

As an aside, I don't quite get all the cynicism in this thread.
President: we will spend more money on science!
HN: Meh?
Startups, you’re breaking the law: Simplifying human resource management.
I apologize for being naive, but I don't understand this. Are they putting together the best of the month and publishing them? In that case, why do they charge for digital copy? Also, are they paying any license fee for the content? I mean, I don't get the model.

What difference does it make with Hacker Newsletter?

http://www.hackernewsletter.com/
he asked the experts to rate two different bottles of red wine. One was very expensive, the other was cheap. Again, he tricked them. This time he had put the cheap wine in both bottles.

Funny, these experiments never involve putting expensive wine in both bottles.
Java Weak Reference
Where "enlightened" = agrees with all my views, simplified into dumb animated GIFs?

The "What about the menz" trope is as sexist as the behavior it's pretending to decry. Calling yourself enlightened while stereotyping the opposing gender is sheer hypocrisy.

I'm a male dev who has been subject to some very unpleasant behavior because of my work... I didn't have the privilege of summoning my white knights with a simple retweet, as you see women do over and over again in any online sexism shitstorm. I was expected to justify my choices through logical argument, and just accept the fact that people said I should be shot for publishing a Github repo. There was no outrage over that, no brotherhood to back me up.

See, if women make less money because they ask for less, it's considered a problem that needs to be solved for women. It's the fault of society that women are conditioned to be insecure about their real value!

If men self-select into technical disciplines and don't develop appropriate social skills by being immersed in competitive, meritocratic environments, it's considered a problem that women need to be protected from. The best those men can hope for is a "re-education" from the feminazis, so he knows the leash is not optional.

Isn't it funny how female empowerment seems to require the men to do all the work in making changes?

That's what "What about the menz" is really about. It's a way for women to hold on to the privilege that when both a man and a woman are crossed, it's the woman's needs which are tended to first. Women and children first, it's been around forever, and it was practiced religiously. That's why 80% of the people on board the Titanic were men, and 80% of the survivors were women. Even when faced with a certain icy death, men across all of society agreed that women 'deserved' to be saved more.

The reason it's hard being a female software engineer is because people pay attention to you when you walk into a room. That has its upsides, and its downsides, and it's often not the kind of attention that you want. But you have it anyway. You can't decry the negatives, while continuing to coast on your own privilege of not being called out on your bullshit.
Literate Jenks Natural Breaks and How the Idea of Code is Lost
IIPM, welcome to the Streisand effect :)

Never heard about them before, but guess that this case will get so widespread now that it will be impossible to sue and block all the critics. Maybe this is a case they can analyse at there school?
Aaron Seigo: If You Are Buying Into Ubuntu Phone Claims, You're Being Duped
Djungarian hamsters? Well now you have two problems.
one of my favourite wines is cosino macul's don matias - a reserve cab that costs about $5000 pesos here (chile). they have a vineyard not far from us, that we take visitors to, so i feel it's kind of my "local". and it's an old, established family firm (although what that says in chile isn't necessarily so great).

anyway, they also have don luis, which is similar (and, confusingly, looks very similar), but not aged in oak, and so cheaper (say $3500). one day i was out shopping at the supermarket and saw don luis on offer. so i bought a bottle and, when i got home, cracked it open. it tasted pretty awesome. so awesome, in fact, that i decided to go buy some more.

but before i went out the door i took a second look at the bottle - somehow i had picked up a bottle of don matias (the more expensive reserve). oops. no surprise it tasted so good.

and that, for me, has always been the argument against the idea that you can't taste different wines [edit: more correctly, can't taste the difference between wines and, in this case at least, tell which is more expensive]. despite my expectations, thinking i was drinking a bottle of varietal, i recognised the better quality (or, at least, different taste) of the reserve.

now i'm no expert, and i can't recognise all wines, or the difference between many reserves and "super-reserves". but the difference between a plain and an oaked red (which, legally, is the difference between varietals and reserves in chile) is clear.
This highlights why the right to make a backup of your data is so important.
Meaningful SEO Metrics
Assuming they want to use their skills that way.
Hyperlinking Is Not Copyright Infringement, Scholars Say
I cannot tell a lie... working on Presidents Day is a drag
Because it is javascript, to be used by javascript projects. Not having JS examples is just a problem in the docs, not the library.
Are you sure they had less money in real terms?
If it's a CoreText bug, which is sounds like it is, it's going to impact any iOS or OS X app that uses Core Text for rendering. That's pretty much everyone.
If you live on the wrong side of the digital tracks, you won't even see a credit offer from leading lending institutions, and you won't realize that loans are available to help you with your current personal or professional priorities.

From personal experience and rational consideration, I'd say credit offers are NOT made "to help you". It's like saying bait is to help a fish by getting it firmly prioritized on a hook.
For anyone still curious after watching the TED talk, also see the Almaden Cognitive Computing 2006 series - these presentations are technically intense (cellular biology, beyond-pop neuroscience) but(/and) enjoyable. The second one in the series is a lecture/presentation by the same Henry Markram: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gFI7o69VJM

NB: intros (by those other people at the start of each video) tend to be long (especially for the first presentation (which is by the way very interesting as well)), I'd maybe skip them.

There are a couple of other videos from the series on youtube, but the original collection of twelve was removed from google video once that service became defunct. They are still available via somewhat obscure means from the original source:

webpage (original now gone from the source for some reason) with links to original AVIs and PPTs: http://kostas.mkj.lt/almaden2006/agenda.shtml ; I'm redownloading those AVIs now just in case... (www.almaden.ibm.com/institute/resources/2006/Disk[1-12].avi (replace integer interval with a single integer.))
Adobe faces piracy backlash over Australian pricing
I know about hellbanned, but what are the royals and the plebians?
Suspiciously similar to http://trello.com UI design...
The content is free: http://hackermonthly.com/issue-33.html

What you are paying for, in the digital version, is the formatting and other work.
If I understand the articles and your comment correctly:

The issue here is that you have N routers all with their own estimates of free vs. in-use. Selecting a random free dyno is fine with one router because you can guarantee that it is truly free. With N routers, each will randomly distribute its work amongst the dynos in the pool, so each now has 0-N queued requests. This means that even with fixed-length response times, you get a dyno-queue-time of N*response_time under full load and some potential jitter even at low loads. Add in huge variations of response time and this gets far worse since the queue length in time is unknown. (There's probably a half-decent bufferbloat analogy hiding in this somewhere...)

It sounds like modern Rails is OK with handling multiple requests simultaneously as long as you're I/O bound and using non-blocking database IO. Would it be possible to use Node-like callbacks within Rails to break up CPU-bound tasks? It would not be an ideal solution, but might help work around this without resorting to Go and the like.
So... rich and poor people get served different ads. Who gives a shit? Pricing differences based on user attributes are well-known and (while they offend some) make a lot of sense.

The stuff about political echo chambers at the end seems to be thrown in without any justification whatsoever. Is there any reason to think I'm seeing pages that cater to my political interests (beyond the fact that I may intentionally visit such pages)?
Okay, so here is the question... Why don't wine raters, the magazines and such, insist on blind testing?

They go to the vineyards, eat at selected restaurants, and literally make 'wining and dinning' part of the reviews.
Every day. Tips on how to smoothly transition from full time employment to Freelancing? In Europe, btw.
You can look at the source just like any other js project. It might not look totally clean as a hand-written project, but there are absolutely worse things than looking at compiled coffeescript (cough lodash https://github.com/bestiejs/lodash/blob/master/lodash.js#L38...)
Why the Web Hasn't Birthed a Prettier Craigslist
Indeed. At least from the article it sounds like everybody was given the option to move to other projects, mainly client side mobile and desktop development, but a significant portion of the engineers turned down the offer.
Grsecurity author: "Linux approach to Security is focusing solely on bugfixing."
Here is a curious thing--now that its up, checking http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg times out. And apparently only for PG. Other frequent commenters work fine.
Why I Retired From Apple
They will, once you have a highly responsive single-page site. I think more responsivity can calm down even F5 addicts
Remember that the low unemployment in Norway means that it can make sense to take a severance package, and get another job immediately, and thus get 2x pay for months.
It's worse than the article describes. Those laid off are terrified to say anything publicly. From what I can gather, the total may be double the quoted number. In addition, morale is at rock bottom, with a number of people leaving on their own. Opera as we knew it is gone.

I worked for Opera for seven years, three of them managing the core testing team. I left a year ago. It breaks my heart to see how the current management treats some of the best engineers I've ever met, loyal to the company for a decade, like disposable rubbish. Here's your ten-year watch, now fuck off.

In the 2010 downsizing (described by the HR VP as "rightsizing"), they at least tried to make the decisions look good internally, blaming the economic downturn. The last two rounds they didn't even bother. No explainations, just individual talks - and a wave of fear.

The only good news is that there's plenty of fantastically skilled engineers available. I've hired one myself. If you need anyone, drop me a line, and I'd be happy to recommend someone for your open position. My loyalty is to my old team and the technology - not the current mismanagement. /c:
To people saying "backbone", stop. Backbone is a tiny abstraction that pretty much does nothing; It's the worst of both worlds: You have to use fake getters/setters but the framework is absolutely unhelpful.

Angular is more developer friendly as it avoids crappy string templates and let you program to POJOS; Programming with POJO in Javascript circa 2013 has a big performance cost that might be very noticeable in some cases (Mobile, low spec devices, sites with a lot of interaction/server pushes). Basically Angular simply DOES NOT scale by design, but 90% of websites will still be kind of ok (This gray line is exactly why I don't use Angular :) ).
Virtual servers vs dedicated servers has not much to do with reliability. Both go down. What you want to minimize the risk of downtime is redundancy, e.g. hot fail-over.
Quite so. I had typed up as many or more words in a similar vein before abandoning them.

Wine is a subjective taste, just like all foods. There is no objective ranking of it. Don't worry about prestige or class or appearance of sophistication, find out what you enjoy and ignore all the baggage. I can't guarantee that I can reliably tell you anything about a wine just from tasting it, partly because I just don't care that much, but I can reliably tell you which wines I enjoy more than others.
Same error I'm getting. Nice one HN...
No, but several of them have been working on rendering engines since before Mozilla was founded.
Satnav for the blind: Guiding your every step
Control stations for the smart home, Siri-style web navigation and computer vision tech were just some of the bright ideas on display at the Digital Inclusion Innovation Contest last week in London.

We were particularly intrigued by the satnav for the blind.

“The way it works is you have a smartphone and it matches the images it sees with the Google Street View image and from this we can work out their location and orientation and produce some instructions to guide them to the door.”

http://bit.ly/151e5ij
Six Benefits of Providing Tablets for Sales Teams
I can recognize good wine versus bad wine. The problem is expensive doesn't always equal good. Often the more expensive aged wine doesn't taste very good to someone who doesn't drink much wine because it's generally very dry.

There's also the matter of degrees. Going from the $1 bottle to the $10 bottle is a huge jump in quality and taste. Going from a good $10 bottle to the $50+ and the changes end up very subtle and not worth the money IMHO. I'm not a wine expert and when I had $1000 bottle before I felt it was mostly wasted on me since I have a hard time picking up on all of the subtle flavors.

The goal for all wine drinkers should be to find the least expensive bottle they enjoy drinking. I often come across these very nice bottles in the $7-$10 range that are great. The problem is as the word gets out their price goes up so I have to start the search over.
I liked it - most of them were annotations where the additional context provided let me stay on the page in most cases and still get most of the additional value.
Contest at SXSW will move a startup to Austin
Isn't that glue going to fall apart when you start working with asynchronous methods? I might be suffering from tunnel vision, but IMO this is asking for an evented model:

class Glue
constructor: (@useCase, @gui, @storage)->
@useCase.on
askForName : @gui.showAskForName
nameProvided : @gui.hideAskForName
greetUser : @gui.showGreetMessage
restart : @gui.hideGreetMessage
@gui.on
restartClicked : @useCase.restart
confirmName : @useCase.nameProvided
502...???
Raise hopes then crush them..HN, what is going on with you!!!
isn't this project assuming that there is a 'normative' human brain, and that we all have the same neuron structure?

At a certain resolution the structure of the brain is certainly close to normative, as demonstrated by decades of dissection studies. But when you get down to the axon level, there is a huge variability in connectivity. The open question is: at what level of connectivity (and, importantly, temporal synchronicity) does cognition emerge (or otherwise, depending on your philosophical school).
Bookish adds an iOS e-reader app to its repertoire
Just curious, how do browser-only companies like Opera or Mozilla make money? I know Opera Mini used to be shipped with phones, but what other sources of revenue do they have?
This is quite low quality, but as my "flag" link has gone away now you have suffered it too.

Too Dull; Don't Read: Personalization and targeted advertising show different people different things. Could be titled "Class Orange People See a Different Internet Than Class Teal".
> Note that fractional reserve banking originated on the gold standard

Probably because the ledgers of the bullion vaults were kept secret.

Bitcoin is a global distributed ledger. You cannot claim to hold btc because the fact of the holding is verifiable through the ledger.
It's Git AND Mercurial. Looks nice but i kind of doubt it will be better than TortoiseHg honestly.
It's a positive goal not related to the military. I applaud that.
I think one of the points of the article is that the perceived 'goodness' of the wine comes from whether the wine is expensive or not. I don't remember where I read this, but packaging of a food product apparently has a non-trivial impact on the perceived taste.

I asked a sommelier in Paris once about what makes a good wine. She told me "A good wine is one whose taste you like".
Ancient Teeth Bacteria Record Disease Evolution
Weird and Wonderful JavaScript
First thing that crossed my mind when I clicked the link.

But I guess there's not much you can do to emulate Kanban's workflow.
Paydirt (https://paydirtapp.com) - Time tracking and invoicing.

SerpBook (http://serpbook.com) - Search engine rank tracker.

Mortar (http://mortardata.com) - Hadoop-aaS.
New Whale Species Unearthed in California Highway Dig
Side point, unrelated to the article.. If you like Forth, you could do worse than to have a look at Factor.
Seems kind of awkward.

Thinking about it offhand using some Rails terminology, let's see.

* Naive version: save user information after every request via after_filter or some other hook. Probably slow for sites that get a lot of traffic.

* Slightly less naive version: check to see if current_user.browser_info has changed compared to the current request in an after_filter or other hook. If so, save it in the DB. This way you can not only check what they're using right now, but what they were doing yesterday when they did something that caused your site to go haywire.

* I'm sure the above can be improved on: it'd be nice to package it up as a gem. This is not rocket science.

Looking in the logs is easy enough, but it's data that should be very easily available to support people, and they probably should not have ssh access to the server...
How is that an argument against the idea that you can't taste different wines? It seems to me that in order to make the case you should have recognized that it was Don Matias without looking at the label. As far as I'm concerned you drank a bottle of cheaper wine and thought to yourself, "wow. This was tasty, much tastier than I expected. Instead of wasting money on the fancy label I should buy this from now on."
I don't want to be data-driven
window.name can be read by any domain, that's why it was used for cross-domain messaging before postMessage came along.
I'm not making a moral argument about IP and whether it is good or not. I'm saying that if you've entered into agreements with other nations on the premise that you do something (in this case, protect and not steal IP) then you should honor those agreements. Whether there is some Machiavelian reason to say you're doing one thing while secretly doing something else is a different question. I also don't think that Google should use espionage to steal secrets from Microsoft and vice versa, even if there is something to be gained.

One should also note that China is not some innocent bystander in this since Chinese companies have sought and obtained patents to stifle competition as well. I also think the distinction made between "developed" and "developing" countries is not useful in this case. China has the second largest economy in the world and is very modern by many standards. They have gained great wealth from the "developed" countries least of all because the developed countries are their largest market for trade. China has a net trade surplus of hundreds of billions of dollars. They are not an underdog in this.
For a short list of 3 things, I don't think clothing qualifies to be on there as a priority to simplify. As long as you're not wearing a lot of clothing with special dry cleaning needs, it's not hard at all to have a little bit of variety in your closet.

I probably spend less than 20 seconds 'picking out' my attire for the day. Am I going to shave that down to 5 or 10 because I only have one kind of shirt? The downside of seeming like that guy who wears the same thing every day is worse than the extra 10 seconds spent.
Aren't those free for Y Combinator companies? Also you could just say the entire site is an ad for Y Combinator.
Maker's Mark reverses move to water down whisky
BeamApp lets you beam music, maps and more between iPhone and Mac
Well said! I agree and you are correct that the software used for this stuff pretty much sucks. The thing is that a lot of scientists don't know that the software could be better, and they are reluctant to try new software considering it is so expensive (We just spent $5k on a licence for software that is subpar. I've seen this 91203091283 times and it's disappointing). New software will change the game.

To add to that list, http://www.brain-map.org/ is a reallllllllly nice tool. I love what this company is doing in terms of automating gene expression within the brain and look forward to their software going through some revisions.
Some kind of introduction from the devs would be nice. I'm not going to register just to see how it works.