skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> * Americans interact with more cultures and languages daily because it is a land of immigration*

Only in a few places. You'd be amazed at how many people even in a big, multicultural city can't understand my husband speaking at all due to his (extremely light, perfectly grammatically correct) Austrian accent.

Or how many (vast majority) of Americans assume all Latinos are "Mexicans" -- not Americans of long descent (thanks to our whole, you know, manifest destiny), not Ecuadorans, etc., but Mexican. I used to live in southern MD which had a huge immigrant population and despite the "Viva Ecuador" bumper stickers everywhere, everybody thought they were "Mexicans." Like, the flag is right there. But nope.
My first experience with this concept was in the late nineties called something like Crushmail.

Here are some Hacker News threads about similar implementations:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602033

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908151
Quietly Killing a Consumer Watchdog
I was going to say something about the median being fairly lower, but looking through those stats and seeing only 215 vault robberies versus 4,870 robberies at the counter, I'm less confident that it is significantly lower. I believe I stand corrected. It may have been just my region, or my supervisors may have simply been mistaken.
MOS Technology 6502B
@ 1.79 MHz (NTSC version)
@ 1.77 MHz (PAL version)

It's the code for the Atari 800 version, I believe, so that's the processor.

Some info on the assembly language for the 6502b http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/6502_Assembly
Open-source app encouraging solutions to Government issues
Since tonight is the State of the Union I wanted to post an open-source app I made a bit ago. The goal is to let Politicians know what their constituents think should be done about the things that affect them.

I know there are other apps out there that do similar things, but this is my take. Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback/helped out.
I'd call Excel more declarative than functional.
SlideShare Releases Send Tracker Tool for Better Content Engagement
Vertu Unveils Luxury, Android Smartphone for $10,000
The first supposed benefit of lower prices is a wish, the second is a fantasy. Most SaaS companies with the typical four plan structure will find their highest churn on the cheapest plan. (Get them drunk if you don't believe me.)

It would be an enormously powerful result for SaaS companies if moving from e.g. $20 a month to $5 a month reduced customer acquisition costs by a factor of 10x, but companies that are able to nail customer acquisition at the LTVs implied by $5 a month are very rare. (They tend to be market-leading B2C companies, and they tend to have customer acquisition strategies which make pay-for-one-extra-customer-at-the-margin to not really be a factor.) By comparison, it is much, much easier to do all sorts of fun things when you can spend $100, $500, or $1k to acquire a customer. (Those are all a) numbers which many SaaS companies could trivially justify paying and b) numbers which many SaaS companies actually pay to get marginal customers.)
thanks, I thought it was very representative and fits the image :-)
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Google also makes $100m a day from Adwords. I don't think they're optimizing revenue on basic data..
Not making a whole lot of sense. You gamed the system by having three different browsers place an order (imagine how it must have been like?) and then you complain? Where is ethics of placing an order online? Wouldn't you have been better off following what your single browser screen said the first time?
It seemed like a great offer, so I snagged it. Dropbox has been a bit sketchy for me lately, so I'm ready to consider alternatives.
If you look through the proposed plan, you'll find that I do intend to show Bayesian approaches. But as I get there, I want to explain the trade-offs.

In particular the choice of a Bayesian prior is as arbitrary as anything that I've done so far. And how you do it hides some important implicit assumptions. That said, a Bayesian framework does have substantial conceptual advantages over the frequentist approaches that I've used so far.
This is also true of Rails. That's what the Gemfile is--a list of optional packages that you can swap out. (Almost) all of your configuration happens in that one file where you tell Rails what packages (gems) you want to use with your application.
The internet has been a wild new frontier. Unfortunately All frontiers eventually become littered with the selfish ambitions of man.
That would only work if the learner is so motivated that they spend months poring over medical and biology textbooks to understand enough background, and then learn how to read scientific papers and interpret studies for statistical significance, to get up to date on the latest research. And of course they also must have the aptitude to do all that, to get to the point where they can start meaningfully questioning the doctor's recommended course of action.

Otherwise, they're still just going to have to trust the doctor.
You don't. You start by explaining from a high level, working your way down to lower levels as requested until the client comes to their own conclusion that they can't understand. This takes longer, but keeps you from being the bad guy.
I disagree. Windows is a product, Linux is a project, so they're harder to compare when price is involved.

When you're comparing two businesses, you can safely assume that given the free market, most products with similar features converge to a similar price range. If a product offered by a company appears to be similar in features to another established product but does it at 1/4 the cost, it is completely valid to wonder what costs are being cut to achieve that price. Is it their infrastructure? Their support? Do they pay their team less? These are all valid questions, whether you are able to answer them given the available information or not.
(I'm asking for a friend.)

What if the paperwork in question isn't being used in an investigation, but rather as a way of proving residence in a particular area for the purpose of receiving services provided in that area?
It's interesting to see this discussion of the future of Excel and complaints about its language. The fact of the matter is that the language is an evolved artifact with an incredible history. Spreadsheets started with VisiCalc. Then came Lotus 1-2-3, and Quattro. Finally, we have Excel and Numbers.

The language that Excel uses is odd because it was forged in the fire of competition between vendors. Each of them had to support their predecessors' idiosyncrasies to get adopters. No one was able to make a clean cut at spreadsheet languages and make it stick. I know there have been some attempts. Back in the days of the spreadsheet Cambrian explosion there were even some oddities like 3D and nD spreadsheets. None of them could ditch "the language" that we are left with today.

It's a shame. I think a good "ground up" redesign of the spreadsheet would be incredibly useful if it was done and people bothered to use it.

The thing that makes it hard to revisit the spreadsheet is that it is "the programming model" for non-programmers. Non-programmers just want to get their work done and they bias toward familiarity.
Sure, if your market lets you charge more, go ahead and charge more. But in some markets, real businesses charge $5/mo, because market conditions don't let them charge $10/mo (or at least don't allow them to meet their other goals at that price). Evernote Premium is $5/mo, Google Drive charges $4.99/mo for 100GB of space, etc. Heck, Fastmail charges $1.65/mo for its "Full" plan (billed as $20/yr), or $3.33 for its "Enhanced".
If it helps, I moved a mail server that's been running on a 2GB Linode vm for the last two years over to a 4GB DO vm and so far (~4 weeks in) it's been problem free (in the Amsterdam DC).
"My experience is if you design things right first, it costs much less than if you don't. Plus you see the upside of your efforts quickly."

That's what I said.
"what happens when you insert a row at the beginning or end?"

Excel's documentation clearly explains the rules: "You can insert blank cells above or to the left of the active cell on a worksheet. When you insert blank cells, Excel shifts other cells in the same column down or cells in the same row to the right to accommodate the new cells. Similarly, you can insert rows above a selected row and columns to the left of a selected column. "

So lets say you are looking at the formula =SUM(A3:A5). If you click A3 and hit insert, A3:A5 are shifted down to A4:A6 and the sum formula is =SUM(A4:A6) If you click A5 and hit insert, A5 is shifted down to A6 and the new row is inserted, so the formula does include the new cell and you see that: =SUM(A3:A6).

The rule is fairly defininitve, and the BIFF8 Rk transformation is fairly straightforward
Electromagnetic harvester gathers free electricity from thin air
"And yet inflation is as low or lower than it has been in the past 30 years. Not to mention compared to the high inflation of the '70s."

The problem with this statement is that 'inflation', as a measurement, has changed greatly over 30 years. To use a technical analogy comparing inflation in the 70s is like comparing "lines of code to implement a function" in a RISC assembly language and python. The only thing that is comparable is that they are both programming languages.

There is a particularly telling comment that came out of the fiscal cliff negotiations, where the Senate asked for a change in the way 'inflation' was computed to avoid a big hit with respect to government programs tied to the CPI. (search for "chained CPI fiscal cliff" for various examples). This very explicit mention of managing the CPI to avoid increases aside, my father who is on a military pension (also indexed to the official government "inflation" rate) has a pretty good history of expenses, and their rise, during his retirement which does not correlate at all with the government rate.

There are some pretty tin foil like sites like www.shadowstats.com but you can also use various search metrics to create a 'bundle' of expenses (housing, food, clothing, gas, taxes, and utilities) and create your own view of what the cost of living has done over the last 20 years. Add in the effects of 'unit deflation' where a 16 oz box of breakfast cereal is now 11.2oz and you realize that the cost of living is going up more than your government is sharing with you, even informally. Their motive is pretty simple, they want to avoid killing the budget with huge increases in indexed aid and indexed treasuries (called inflation protected securities).

But it is interesting that you mentioned the 70's because that is where this started. No one except economists and policy wonks "cared" about inflation until it became an election issue. Then voters started "caring" a lot so the congress has helped "clarify" what it means more and more. Its one of the things I would do if elected to congress (not that I'm running) is I would create a steel wall between economic statistics and legislators. Government manipulation of them does more harm than good unfortunately, but nearly every government manipulates them to some extent.
>Either you're some kind of a super-human, or your code bases are really tiny. Yes, you usually can figure out the trigger of a null pointer exception, but not the source that made it happen and with complex software the stack-trace can get a mile long ;-)

Ok even if the stack trace is 10 miles long, you just need to go to the end, right? :P

Anyway, so an exception gets thrown and Scala forces you to explicitely throw an exception, am I right? How does the other case not crash your program unless you catch it?

>Also, people bitching about Exceptions have yet to give us a more reliable way of dealing with runtime errors. The only thing that comes closest to an alternative is Erlang and yet again, the Go language designers took no inspiration from it.

Go uses panic (Go-speak for exceptions) for really bad errors: out of memory, nil pointer dereference... You can catch them like in other well-known languages.

The only difference: your catch blocks aren't cluttered with handling for non-exceptional errors like file doesn't exist etc. You are forced to handle those explicitely. Why is this good? Except for those truly exceptional errors, the state of your programs is much easier to determine.
Um, you want us to wait for a result? Finding the lowest price isn't hard it's called going to Amazon.com. What exactly made you think crowd sourcing lent itself to this type of problem?

I just don't see a need, I don't want to wait, I already know how to find the cheapest price.
"I want you to a build a program to see if there are any bugs in the code I write."
These are orthogonal issues and thus can both effect the value of a report card. Beyond that, I agree with your point.
>> This is unbelievably presumptuous, narcissistic and smacks of technological elitism

> Mayhaps you can apply those labels, but you skipped the crucial part -- is it true?

As to "presumptuous", the author assumes a priori that the client can't understand an issue, not doesn't understand it but might comprehend an offered explanation. That's how presumption is defined -- an assumption in advance of any effort to gather facts.

As to "narcissistic", well, yes, absolutely. The author places himself and his peers in an elite, entitled group, qualified to gauge the limited understanding of lesser beings and pass judgment on them, rather than try to explain something that might help his clients and his business.

As to "elitism", yes again -- the author sees himself and his associates as belonging to an anointed, superior technological priesthood, able to say to the unwashed masses "trust me" with a straight face.

Any questions?
Building a better UI with JSP
I was just curious because your post made me wonder if you had something to benefit by promoting them. No harm intended. :)
There were other OS/2 based FOSS projects that died.

Voyager was one, to rewrite OS/2 using the known OS/2 API calls.

OS2INE was another to try to run OS/2 binaries under Linux like WINE does for Windows binaries.

They seem to have vanished from the Internet.

OSFree stalled because they could not raise enough money to host their web site and continue development. They had the DOS part working as it was based on FreeDOS, and I think it would run some command line based OS/2 apps as well. I had a few ISOs of OSFree but they don't distribute them anymore. It looks like all they have is the source code.

Some of these FOSS operating system recreations just don't go anywhere or stay in the alpha stage. ReactOS, Haiku, AROS, etc are such recreations of Windows XP, BeOS, and AmigaOS. I think AROS is the one that is more polished than the others and more ready for prime time.
Since tonight is the State of the Union I wanted to post an open-source app I made a bit ago. The goal is to let Politicians know what their constituents think should be done about the things that affect them.

I know there are other apps out there that do similar things, but this is my take. Feedback welcome. And thanks again to everyone who has already provided feedback/helped out.
I included the example that I did because betterunix's comment included two trigger phrases for me: "big trouble if they skip class" and "produce compliant people".

I've been teaching CS for more than 15 years; the brilliant but unconventional student is literally who I work with all day. betterunix's choice of language brings to mind many dozens of students I've taught over the years.

It's the "I'm smarter than them and I can see the Game is bullshit but they get rewarded for blindly following orders and I get in trouble if I want to learn" trope.

(Apologies to betterunix if I've misjudged you, but I've seen it SO MANY TIMES I'm probably not wrong.)

The thing is, yes, some of what students are being asked to do in public schools is bullshit. I try to minimize that in my own classroom, and I literally teach seminars to other teachers trying to convert them as well.

But basic compliance is absolutely necessary. Your average public school is not a police state. Asking students to complete a worksheet, even if it utterly lacks value, is not a violation of their fundamental human rights, and you are not a brave free-thinker for "standing up to The Man."

Schools absolutely DO NOT make a goal of "produc[ing] compliant people." It's just that the average student must comply in order for public schools to work at all. And if that's in place, then we can try to actually teach something worthwhile.
Intel plans to launch online TV service this year
Unless I'm missing a paragraph, this pretends charging 3x as much won't ever reduce the number of people who sign up?
Old time telco guy here. That's not even technically challenging much less impossible. I can do that for $50K to $75K of hardware worst case. If the trunks are ISDN PRIs just sniff the D channel(s) using a protocol analyzer, all off the shelf stuff, and watch for certain numbers, either his desk DID or an outgoing call to a customer with a currently open blog. Somewhat more old school stuff E/M or groundstart might be cheaper than a ISDN protocol analyzer. Something that old is not using VOIP which is too bad as a sniffer would be pretty cheap for SIP.

Most old stuff like that had a CDR call detail record serial port intended to feed a line printer. The simplest way might be run a serial connection to the CDR.

It may very well come down to the simplest way to do it is install another phone on the guy's desk. Forward his old extension to his new phone and new phone line. If your PBX vendor isn't willing to discuss simply forwarding a number then you've got serious vendor issues... thats not asking for much...
Agreed, but this factor is reduced for in-person purchases from brick and mortar merchants. Additionally, many online web sites feature merchant reliability scores, e.g. Amazon.

Recent US legislation will make credit card processing fees more visible to consumers, with the consequence that low cost payment processors such as bitcoin will be even more competitive.
Study debunks notion that men and women are psychologically distinct
Yes, but I think you're slightly misunderstanding me. The "asking why" is the breaking-down-the-problem process. I didn't mean literally just asking "Why."
Career advice: Learn COBOL because it will outlive us all
Can you send an email and cc a newsgroup?
Liveblog Pro – Adding a new dimension to live blogging
Damn after seeing your comment went to check its price here in Switzerland, it's 482 CHF (525 USD).

http://en.toppreise.ch/index.php?search=nexus+4&sRes=OK
It really only takes one or two people to flag you to fall down to page 2 after which it is almost impossibly hard to get back onto page 1.

There may be no obvious reason you get flagged.
I don't generally post "blogspam" (it's not my blog) but the paper is behind a paywall and the abstract is opaque jargon, so I thought the blog added some value here.

Edit: The link is the headline and also the same link is the second word of the blog. It goes here http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/104/2/385/

Men and women are from Earth: Examining the latent structure of gender.
Carothers, Bobbi J.; Reis, Harry T.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 104(2), Feb 2013, 385-407. doi: 10.1037/a0030437

Taxometric methods enable determination of whether the latent structure of a construct is dimensional or taxonic (nonarbitrary categories). Although sex as a biological category is taxonic, psychological gender differences have not been examined in this way. The taxometric methods of mean above minus below a cut, maximum eigenvalue, and latent mode were used to investigate whether gender is taxonic or dimensional. Behavioral measures of stereotyped hobbies and physiological characteristics (physical strength, anthropometric measurements) were examined for validation purposes, and were taxonic by sex. Psychological indicators included sexuality and mating (sexual attitudes and behaviors, mate selectivity, sociosexual orientation), interpersonal orientation (empathy, relational-interdependent self-construal), gender-related dispositions (masculinity, femininity, care orientation, unmitigated communion, fear of success, science inclination, Big Five personality), and intimacy (intimacy prototypes and stages, social provisions, intimacy with best friend). Constructs were with few exceptions dimensional, speaking to Spence's (1993) gender identity theory. Average differences between men and women are not under dispute, but the dimensionality of gender indicates that these differences are inappropriate for diagnosing gender-typical psychological variables on the basis of sex. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)
I suspect a marked increase in cheating will be the fallout, rather than a huge increase in clueless students.
Did they ever publish a post-mortem of how their internal customer service portal was "hacked"? A quick search turns up nothing.
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People don't as a practical matter because they simply can't. But a lot of people just haphazardly give up, and have little sense of what kinds of errors they may or may not be making. (But they hope that the errors are not too big.)

The main point of this article is to give people a sense of what a more organized "giving up" curve could look like. And also to give them some much more concrete information about what their potential for serious error is.
Sloppy all around. With a difference in annual deaths of 5.4 -- no thousand, no million, just 5.4 -- we're looking at a natural margin of error that cannot be accounted for without a lot more rigorous study. As this article points out, most grocers switched from plastic to paper bags, which makes the original study authors' statement of it being an immediate and visible effect on infection rate suspicious. Then the author of this "article" says the bag ban should be repealed because people won't wash their reusable bags… then she calls the bag ban a movement of the nanny state… because nanny states never protect people from their basic lack of sanitary practices? What a confused, badly reported, mess.
What about Amazon? I've never talked to anyone on the phone, but I've had them take care of fucked up orders immediately with little question. Dented book? New one is on the way before I even drop the old one off at UPS.

American Express? Quick call and fraudulent charges are immediately removed.

As such, I spend millions of dollars through American Express and virtually all of my retail shopping through Amazon. I've dumped service providers who don't accept American Express and avoid purchasing countless products not offered for sale through Amazon.

My response to inadequate customer service is as follows. In the name of efficiency I'd recommend the following:

1 - Answer about problem being resolved
2 - Problem not resolved (24 hours)
3 - Inadequate answer
4 - I am sorry I will have to issue a charge back for your failure to deliver on services as represented.
5 - Problem solved, either by me or them.
>then there's the new problems they've invented, like enforcing things that don't matter instead of things that do.

Never heard such complaints from users that have used it for a few months. I assume you are talking about unused imports and variables. Actually it helps a lot because it keeps your code clean and clear.
I still subscribe to the RSS feed so no you're wrong. It's not exclusive to Fremont.

And nice that you were alerted of the problem. I often found out hours AFTER their issue was resolved what was happening.
While this is definitely a thought experiment, we found the basic premise to be true when we redesigned our product, pricing plans, and free trial strategy.

We went from:

Free Forever / $29 / $59 / $149

7 Day Trial / $49 / $149 / $249

And we have an overall better customer base (they find more value in our app) and relatively the same signup metrics as we had before.
Chris - habosa commented up top on his experience.