skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This part really confused me as well. The other thing that I was confused with(as someone who played the beta) was if they knew play style could have an effect on server load, why did they have such a restrictive beta? The beta was short and greatly limited what you were able to do, so it seems logical that it would not give a fair representation of how people would play the game. I think if play style was an issue then they made the mistake of using the beta as a marketing tool, rather then as a method of testing the game/system.
Putting aside the technical issues, this is an awesome development, if you're blind or require a screen reader or other alternate input/consumption device to use the Web. Flash sites nearly always had extremely horrible usability for that part of the population.
By the way, what happened to MIT's probe into their handling of Aaron's case? They said it would take a few weeks but it's been almost 2 months now.
Unintentional? I'd say Freudian.
I don't care for magic diets but if it stops people from eating non-nutritional, processed garbage then I'm all for it.
BlackBerry’s Z10 AT&T Debut On March 22 For $199, Pre-Orders Kick Off Tomorrow
Mark's daily apple or Robb Wolf's site are probably more representative.
If a load fails due to network issues, the user won't always appreciate that the fault was down to networking. The site might just look broken.

If the failure wasn't related to a network issue (either bad data, or perhaps a buggy JS interpreter on their device) then refreshing won't help. The site will still be broken.

My point is that we can plan and build in such a way that JavaScript failures don't break the page. It's a little bit more work (doing things well usually is) but a reusable component library is absolutely the right place to focus that effort. Everyone then gets the benefit with no more work required.
Social media needs less shaming, more complaining
Homelessness is an extremely complex issue. As is poverty. This article seems more sensationalist than anything. They lumped several issues together here to create content that sells.

Three key issues raised: homelessness, racial inequality (referring to Hispanic wages), and general income distribution inequality.

General income inequality and the racial flavor touched are likely related to several factors, such as education/line of work and workforce mobility. While you can ensure that people have better jobs through education/training programs, combined with job placements (both extremely non-trivial), people from poor areas will always gravitate to wealthier areas. This has nothing to do with racial/ancestral traits or anything other than people seeking employment in the wealthier areas that are more likely to provide employment opportunities. So, effectively, no matter how good your programs are, you will always have some group that needs help. This is why it's important to focus on a long term, sustainable approach to education and training. There is no silver bullet here, unless you can magically impart that knowledge on every living human.

Homelessness is a completely different can of worms. If you have ever worked with long term homeless you will know that only some actually want to return to "normal" life. I put the word normal in quotes because the perception of what normal shifts. In a conversation that stuck in my mind, one person I spoke to referred to how I live as slavery to money/worldly possessions. I'm sure this is not the sentiment shared by the majority, but it illustrates the complexity of the issue. If we truly pride ourselves in having a free society, we then cannot force a certain way of life on people. What we can and should do is offer support and a way back if people so choose.

Personally, I'd like to see us provide more incentives to wealthy individuals and corporations in supporting educational and other programs to help. An extra tax benefit for keeping the money in US and a solid dose of public support and encouragement. Somehow as a society we love stories of billionaires donating money for causes in Africa or another impoverished place. This public opinion is a strong incentive. If it shifts toward more support at home, the money will follow.
This is the equivalent of saying 'boys will be boys'. Dismissing this kind of sexual coercion and spying as just natural behavior is hugely sexist and insulting to men and boys everywhere, let alone encourages this kind of treatment of women.
> Guns have no useful purpose

Yes they do. Some people enjoy firing them, therefore their useful purpose is to make people happy (which at the end of the day the same end purpose for everything people do). Ditto with pools -- some people like swimming, so they also fulfil the useful purpose of making people happy.
G is 90%
There's a great irony in the liberal/conservative (left and right) dichotomy. On the one hand, you have left-leaning people who build their platform on the premise that they are champions for the poor and lower/middle classes and multiculturalism, while the right-wing is perceived as only looking out for the wealthy white people.

And yet, I can't help but compare one left-wing enclave to a right-wing one.

The Bay Area always shocked me as to how segregated it is, with whites and upper class people living in their suburbs with almost all blacks living in Oakland and the lower-income whites living in suburbs that are oppressively distant from job-centers. And the Bay Area has a housing affordability crisis, while at the same time being surrounded by plenty of land and low-density building that could be built-out to increasing the housing supply and thus affordability. But, this doesn't happen because the local incumbent populations are extreme NIMBYs.

NYC deserves a mention, too, because while they are limited on space on which to build, there's still lots of low-rise stock that can be replaced with much denser development, but gets blocked due to NIMBYs and historical protections. I can sympathize with wanting to preserve the historic aesthetic, but we could at least find a few locations to build a massive development to disrupt the housing supply and bring down prices.

I compare these with the so-called right-wing bastion I grew up in, Houston, TX. In Houston, whites and blacks live in close proximity, they shop at the same stores and malls, they actually interact in daily life. Wealthy neighborhoods are directly across from lower-income neighborhoods. More importantly, housing is affordable. There are almost no restrictions on the housing market: you can tear down and build almost anywhere. Middle class families can afford to buy houses.

I'm not arguing for one philosophy or the other; nor am I saying I'd rather live in one place or the other (I'd live in the Bay if I made $200k, I'd live in TX if I made $50k), I'm only pointing out the irony and that a lot of these political diehards are full of crap.

There are simple solutions to the affordability crisis in SV and SF, but NIMBYs and protectionists would rather see the poor suffer rather than risk a decline in their property values.
Better than the equivalent conversation in our house.

Me: Hey, do you want to learn about a core principle of how the Web works? ;; Her: Huh? ;; Me: You know, the thing Facebook runs on. ;; Her: Oh right. No then.

It's lucky there are more interesting things than technology for us to talk about, thankfully! :-)
Good point about the WOT ratings, will fix that! When it comes to PageSpeed, 81 is pretty low as most other apps are 95+ and the rating is calculated relative to other entries in the directory. It should be easy enough to fix by following the instructions that Google provides though. The scores are updated daily btw.

Edit: It will have the nice side effect of improving performance for your users and your Google search rank as well.
What I meant is that he described the same problem in a more complete way, not that he just said the same thing more nicely. There are infinitely many formal systems and after all we choose only some particular ones, what guides this choice? Isn't the existence of models in the real world one of the most important factors in choosing which formalism is valuable to develop? Courant how I understand him is saying that the tension between the two approaches is vital to the development of mathematics.

There is also a nice lecture [1] from Vladimir Arnold, who was very much on the side of intuition, where he raises an interesting point that is related: in todays mathematics all the praise goes to the people who prove theorems, where perhaps the person who first _stated_ an theorem that is interesting and relevant deserves at least as much credit.

[1] http://www.msri.org/web/msri/online-videos/-/video/showVideo...
There's a better strategy than making bets on particular languages and frameworks: get so good at learning that you can become proficient in any of them in only days, and reach mastery in just months.

The biggest bottleneck I see that prevents people from being able to do this is their code-reading skill.

With practice you can read and understand codebases much, much more quickly than most people (who are so intimidated they never even try). Once you can do this, you can very quickly pick up (1) the rich details about how the system works, (2) the ability to extend the system and fix bugs in it, (3) understanding of what is idiomatic and what is not.
Why Python can be hated
It's 7am PST, and most of the comments here are "I don't understand you silicon valley people, that doesn't make sense". So, I'll share my two cents.

I'm from a modest background in the Midwest. My first tech job was in Seattle (better than SV, but still not "cheap"). I then lived in Beijing, Boston, and Manila before coming to SV. I spent 1 year in Palo Alto, and now 2 years in San Francisco.

I was originally VERY against it. My wife basically dragged me here kicking and screaming. I've always thought of Silicon Valley as this giant bug zapper, where people are lured in by the promise of extreme success, and then get zapped by a culture of 95% failure at startups.

Now I'm a huge fan. Here are the main two reasons:

1) First, a mitigating factor. The salaries are actually pretty well adjusted for cost of living. You're getting a fair deal compared to other tech cities. Market forces are doing just fine.

2) The number of people in tech here is simply unparalleled. Head and shoulders better than any other city on the planet. That might not seem important, but it is surprisingly powerful. You have access to a huge network of people. Whether you're trying to get a job at big co, or doing a startup, access to a network of people turns out to be a significant contributor to success.

PG's essay on SV is spot on. I scoffed when I first read it, but he is right. (http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html)

The main problems as mentioned by the original article:

1) Homelessness – IMO, this is due to lack of proper institutions for mental illness and substance abuse, not housing. SF is a ridiculously liberal city, and there is plenty of low income housing.

2) Real estate prices – If you are buying a home today, it is very painful. However, due to CA's limited growth property taxes, it is quite affordable for the majority of residents who have been living here for life. That results in a clever form of progressive taxation.
I agree that 10,000 years is sufficient time for evolution to affect the human genome. But the "diseases of civilization" that paleo worries about (cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, etc) tend to kick in at 50+, don't they? So it seems like evolution's ability to influence those would be limited, at best.
I don't think it was ever required (even when it was shown), but people still typed it.
How long does it take for an architect to master autocad or a visual designer to master illustrator? Would you expect to hire either if they didn't have mastery of those tools? If not, then why do we expect programmers to master languages and platforms more quickly?
I think you missed my point. You're right about being the connection point. But that doesn't really mean or do anything for you if you're poor or homeless, does it?
Installed. This is pretty nice for the people who uses dozens of tabs as temp bookmarks.

A bit of feedback: I was just typing this comment and hit the button, obviously the comment was lost and had to type it again. Would be great if if checked for focused inputs or textareas or something before closing that tab, or that it restores the tabs them with the content.

Another idea I can think of is to "close" all the tabs that are NOT the one you currently are in, or "close" all the tabs on the right of the current one.

Anyway, thanks
But adwords users get that data - this is hipocrasy on teh part of Google.
Ask HN: Shopify or Magento?
I know there are a ton of other choices for e-commerece platforms but the business in need is a small/local Rock and Roll bar/restaurant that is interested in selling their own merchandise with a collection of other affiliate products that fit 'the vibe'. The store itself will have anywhere between 20-75 products, which is why I thought that Magento (Magento Go, to be more specific) and Shopify would probably be the easiest to get up and running. The Owner isn't very tech savvy himself, which is another reason I chose those two.

Any suggestions and advice is greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.
Can you justify using material implication?

It's possible to create reductio ad absurdum in Coq:

Definition reductioAdAbsurdum (X:Prop) (f : (X -> (X -> False))) (x:X) : False := f x x.

But not the law of the excluded middle.

Edit: It's much clearer in Idris:

reductioAdAbsurdum : (x -> (x -> _|_)) -> (x -> _|_)
reductioAdAbsurdum f x = f x x
This is as much an expectation as it is an expressed preference. Note that I'm not presenting any value judgment on it - as a staunch urbanist I'd like to see raising families in urban centers be more of a thing - but that is the reality as it stands.

In Vancouver, families go into the burbs - whether or not this should be the case or what we can do to change this reality seems orthogonal to the main point: that rent increases are not impacting families as much as singles.

Also, keep in mind that Vancouver's urban core is really, really small - roughly 2.5 sq. mi by my estimation. In this core is the hub of the city's nightlife and a huge attraction for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd - not exactly the most family-friendly environment. There is a substantial lack of urbanism in Vancouver that is separated from the lifestyle of early-mid 20-somethings.
That can totally go away. What about plain text which you just select and copy?

If copying text is hard, I think actually cloning the repository after you've copied it's URL is an insurmountable challenge.
Delighted we jumped in just ahead of blimp, which I'm a huge fan of :)
A bit of an inside joke. The rest of the reviews and categorizations are serious, honest! ;)
This is absolutely incredible to watch. I had no idea that a lightning strike was a 2 stage process. Is this how all lightning occurs? I've been pretty much fascinated by it since it struck a tree in my backyard as a kid. I was probably 20 feet away inside my house. I remember how brightly the house lit up when it hit. Then I remember cutting that tree down the week after and how burnt up it was internally. It blows me away that people can live through a lightning strike.
>It is not mainstream.

Constantly advertised in every free buy&sell paper constitutes mainstream, even if you don't like it.

>but then installing PC games at all ceased to become mainstream.

The number of people installing PC games has steadily increased. Maybe posting "facts" that are the opposite of reality isn't a great base for an argument.
Here's a blog post we wrote a few years ago about it: http://blog.inklingmarkets.com/2008/05/judging-prediction-ma...
I would be curious to know how much of this 20% is for actual content vs. usage for web sockets, copy-to-clipboard, etc.
Retro is back: How Tribute Games is resurrecting the 2D shooter
How many years does it take to ramp up on Linux or windows...I mean the source code?

I hate mangers who think like you, they think developers are basically interchangeable without specialties that took substantial time acquire. As if our investments were always in the six month range!?! How about 5 or 10 years of deep experience?
The 10 rules for web startups
Thanks, it's on the to-do :)
I'm certainly intrigued to see what commercial opportunities the Oculus Rift opens up. It seems like it might finally be the device to kick off the whole immersive-VR-without-feeling-sick market.

Sex will be an interesting one although in the rather digitally stylized forms we can see on this site, the target audience would be rather specific..
I'm not sure why he brought up the Romans. But I think he wanted to illustrate how unintuitive life expectancy is.

According to Wikipedia, which cites brittanica (does anyone have a real source on this?), roman life expectancy was 28!

But if you survived to age 15, your life spam was expected to be much longer.

In this context the HG life expectancy of 33 is better than it sounds.
Shit, why didn't you say something sooner!
I imagine saying a financial institution has lost all of it's customers money (without evidence) would be considered libellous in most countries.
There's a startup idea in here somewhere...

Perhaps an Airbnb exclusively for new startup founders which offers affordable long-term housing in SF/SV in return for a small amount (1~2%) of equity?

Given that this is a huge problem that all of us here face or have at least had to contemplate, and will only continue to get worse, it seems worth trying.
Only in Europe. The US has around 30% between Bing and Yahoo.
From what I've seen, people spend more time mentioning it on every single PL related post on HN than either working or playing with it ;)
Try pinboard.in for this.
The quote is a copy and paste.

I guess what I was trying to say is that Android users and openess advocates are not very relevant to the topic being discussed. Google's monopoly in search and advertising should be considered in relation to those who directly benefit and lose from it as these are the ones who will determine whether it continues or not.
It depends how you burn your wood. If you burn it in a fireplace you'll reject a lot of smoke (aka unburned particles) but if you burn it in a modern woodstove, wood can burn pretty cleanly.
Could you add a cheap procedural function in the rendering pipeline to get more depth variety (past the 255 limit)? You might avoid adding the byte that way, though I'd guess it depends on how much of the pipeline is locked into that limit.
Chrome-style private browsing is coming in a few weeks.

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2013/02/22/firefox-b...
My guess is "play style" is being used more generally to refer to how long they play the game during a session and how frequently their game sessions are.
Chromium Blog: New Asynchronous APIs for Dart
"This is an idea put forward by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, the latter being a member of the team who has carried out this analysis."

Chandra Wickramasinghe is currently the MAIN guy promoting the idea discussed in the article kindly submitted here (as Hoyle has died). Hacker News participants can gain perspective on this idea by reading "Diatoms…iiiiin spaaaaaaaaaaace!"

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/01/16/diatomsiii...

and

"Chandra Wickramasinghe replies…and fails hard"

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/01/18/chandra-wi...

to see comments by a biologist on why the evidence here is completely inadequate for Wickramasinghe's latest claim. Wickramasinghe has been around the block with claims like this before, and he is the editor of the main "journal" that promotes this idea, but none of his specific claims of finding extraterrestrial life have ever been backed up by convincing evidence.

EDIT: I should add the link to a critique of the extraordinary claim here by an astronomer

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/01/15/life_in_...

(this was linked in the links I put in this comment earlier), so you can see his comments on the new claim directly.
This is the first comment I've read so far that I 100% agree with.

I personally see no reason to keep more than 8-10 tabs open at a given time which doesn't affect my CPU performance whatsoever (running a "standard" dev machine of 12GB+ RAM, i7, etc) so I could care less if FF handles 40 tabs better.

And quickly, some reasons I love Chrome (& Google):

- Accessible nightly builds (Canary)

- AngularJS debug extension

- Built-in bookmark/history/search sync (read something at home yesterday - can easily find it in my history at work or on mobile)

- http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/
>Even rich people here in SV often take investment for their new startups after the first.

Yes, in exchange for something. They don't ask for funding from people and offer them nothing in return, forcing them to take all the risk while he stands to make all the profit.
My brother lives in a fairly dense, turn of the century American neighborhood, with lots of old homes with fireplaces. I went running on Christmas Eve, and at first relished the smell of woodsmoke from all of the burning fires. Within a mile I realized that it felt like I was running with a cigar in my mouth. This article is no joke.

Having grown up in a rural home heated by a wood stove, one thing this article says hits home: respiratory problems in small children. My father stopped using the wood stove after installing electric heat, only using the wood stove for the coldest nights.There was an immediate benefit for all 5 of his children.
The art of tidying up: rearranging modern art to look neat.
OT: As per the Hindu calendar, yesterday was Shiva's birthday - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maha_Shivaratri

Great timing!
I can't stand the "blog post as conversation" format. It's fine if you're quoting a conversation for one or two paragraphs, but for something this long you should do me (the reader) the courtesy of speaking directly to me.

Also this is giving way too much credit for the creation of the URL. The format of the URL is not some miracle, genius insight. It is a natural result of network computing, and similar descriptors of how to find a file on a remote system had existed previously for ages.
It seems questionable but...

Even if it was true, couldn't it have been organisms from earth ejected into orbit after a meteor strike and, thousands of years later or more, falling back to earth?

Now if we find a definitive proof of panspermia it would be the biggest discovery ever made by mankind so far...
Strikes and Gutters: The Day-to-Day of an Entrepreneur's Life
Haven't proofed 'em for glitches yet ... but if you want more examples, I've updated some docs:

Backbone.js: http://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html

CoffeeScript: http://coffeescript.org/documentation/docs/scope.html

Underscore.js: http://underscorejs.org/docs/underscore.html

I'm hoping that the new `--layout` flag might be the start of a wider variety of these "themes", contributed by y'all. Even if you're not comfortable with CoffeeScript, and just want to contribute a bit of HTML and CSS, it should be pretty easy to dive right in.
Both YouTube and Vimeo (and I'm sure others) have an "HTML5" opt-in thing that you can set.

Vimeo is more problematic, true. And not all videos have been re-encoded yet but it is getting there.
Lambda Architecture for Big Data, Part 1
You must take the bad with the good
Yup, its pretty hypocritical. It also annoys me as it doesn't give me enough insight into what search terms convert well for the company I work for, which means that I am unable to convince my bosses to buy search terms on Google. So its a net loss for them too.
Slightly ironic that you are warning against fear and panic to retort against statements that this is worse than terrorism, considering that the "Threat of Terrorism" is almost entirely fear and panic.

Antibiotic resistance is a real threat, that will only get worse. It's just harder to sensationalize than the latest middle-eastern bogeyman.