skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
90% can be below average. It depends on how you define 'average.' If you're using the median, then 'below average' can only be 50%. But if you use the mean (or its variants), then you can have 90% of a population be 'below average' if the population is very skewed.
I think there are plenty of really really good programmers who are lousy negotiators. For these people a 15% cut could easily be made up for by a good agent. It's not perfect for everyone, but for people who are better coders than business people it could easily be a win.
Pipe racking system show--szyms22szyms.com (Skype:cnszylsmf)
If you're average, then there are a lot of coders who are objectively less skilled than you, by any reasonable metric. Being humble doesn't require you to claim otherwise.
PC sales plunge as Windows 8 flops
Products should work for you, not the other way around, a horrible Outlook story
Google’s Matt Cutts: Don’t Be The Sucker That Buys The Spammy Domain
My first observation was that it was difficult to discern the notes on my screen. Imagine that on paper farther than arms length away in a darkened room. That's plenty enough to disqualify it.

But yes, classical notation could certainly use some refinements.
Anecdotal data point: No problems. It's been rock stable for a couple of years now. Even though we have 22 databases on our master, the streaming replication overhead is practically zero, and the latency is usually in the order of milliseconds.

We did have a weird replication failure at one point when running pg_repack. It's a tool that reclusters tables by duplicating them (essentially writing a new table sequentially) and then renaming the duplicate back to the original table name. This caused the slave to suddenly try to access a table that had not been created on its end yet. But it's possible that it was due to misconfiguration; we are currently investigating it so we can collect enough to data to maybe submit a bug report.

Postgres-XC looks interesting, but I have not heard of anyone using it in production yet. Would love to hear if anyone has used it for anything serious.
..and this is probably going to look foolish when it goes to $1000 later this year. Your actions looks like someone trying to pat themselves on the back and reassure the "right decision".

I wish online P2P wagers were legal in the US :) I was watching everything during the "crash". It's already back up to 170 in a few hours. Previous crash took months to recover.

I've been around the block and the same tired and worn arguments were being used at $10 then $20 and $100.
The first instrumental that it played for me was "Shook Ones Pt. 2 Instrumental" by Mobb Deep, off of their Infamous album. That's in my personal top 10 list of favorite hip hop albums, and was super excited that this site somehow knew that ;)

On a side note, this is really clever. I love being able to quickly pull a random instrumental. The syllable counts are on point too, and it's nice that it makes you mix up the tempo of your flow.

Great job!

- edit: The landing page is great that it has a huge "Try it" button, but I actually went back to watch the video on the homepage thinking it would show me some examples, but it was some dude rapping instead. He's good, but not really my cup of tea at all. If I didn't click the "Try it" link and only clicked on the video, I would have most likely bounced.
probably just long enough to hang yourself with.
Behind the Scenes of the Paragon Studios Shutdown
The Misunderstood Face of Giftedness
Reading music is the ability to look at a line of music and being able to hear it in your head, or at the very least play it back almost immediately on the instrument of your choice. My buddy's music "reading" ability is more on the order of a kid who doesn't really read but knows a few words. He's effectively illiterate, but he's not stupid and can figure it out with difficulty.
$60K on a $400K project sounds worth it considering that in most other contract broker arrangements the developer is the one getting $60K. FYI, you spelled 'leech' wrong.
In theory, yes. In practice, not so sure. As a little guy I still owe someone money even though I "own" the property. There is also mineral rights and such that make it complicated. Then zoning. At the end of the end of the day someone comes and slaps me for not paying them "rent".
$ python
>>> import numpy as np
>>> data = np.array([2, 1, 3, 2, 100000])
>>> np.mean(data)
20001.599999999999
>>> np.median(data)
2.0
And from a company with such a reputation of truthful public statements!
Has Facebook Quietly Acquired Osmeta, A Stealth Mobile Software Startup?
>The bitcointalk forums and /r/bitcoin are full of paranoia like this.

'The HN forums is full of smug dismissiveness like this'

It's a blip on the radar in the grand scheme of things, and tons of sites were DDOS'd and simultaneously going slow or down (bitcointalk, mtgox, bitcoincharts, bitstamp). The evidence is my own eyes and refreshing browser timeouts. Everything back to normal now.

Highly unlikely that all those sites would be bought down by "panicked" users alone.

Given profiteering DDOS attacks against casino operators are commonplace, I find it a stretch to think these attacks are not happening regularly against bitcoin sites.
All forms of notation are deficient. If you want proof, just listen to a muzak (elevator music) cover of your favorite pop song. It is correct according to a professional transcriber's notation, but it loses nuances and imperfections that classical music notation doesn't cover.

You are right that tablature by nature does not cover rhythm and that is a gap that won't even get you to muzak. However, there is nothing about classical music notation that makes it an ideal form for representing all forms of musical sound. How would you notate a Jay-Z or Skillrex song?
Below average for everyone, slightly but not much above average among php coders.

I can find people who think i'm brilliant, meanwhile I know that plenty of people here wouldn't hire me to bring them coffee. It depends on your perspective I suppose.
You sound like every person who believed in the non-bubbleness of every bubble. What justifies the price of Bitcoins? They have no real value before they're widely accepted, and that won't happen until the price is stable.
Sailfish OS SDK goes live. Developers are a go.
"Or like banning the private buying of gold (which the US had done, from 1933 to mid-seventies"

...which proves my point! This was stupid and ultimately led to all sorts of negative economic consequences, therefore the US reverted the decision in the mid seventies. Now you are arguing that the US would somehow make the same mistake with Bitcoin?!
Ask HN: What are unique differentiating factors of AirBnB from CraigsList
This question over here is mostly for group mulling. I have done fair amount of reading on the subject. Though the question might appear pretty similar, just wanted to know the view point of folks present here.

So how do you think AirBnB is different from CraigsList?
Things to exclude from answer-

ArBnB has taken only one vertical and monetized it.
Google, KPCB And Andreessen Horowitz Team Up To Invest In Glass Ecosystem
Toosell blog | How to Set Up a Xbox 360 Wireless Controller on Your Xbox 360
That seems almost like a scam. Kind of like time shares.
Will a third major platform benefit Android users?
I'm not being humble, or trying to be (or trying to appear to be). That's how I really feel. I suck. I'm not average, either. I actually think I'm the worst guy in the room. How come? It helps me prevail over any obstacle. By understanding that I suck, any problem that makes me stumble is not too small for me to tackle. Doesn't matter your skills or experience, everyone always hits bumps.
No need to be a dick, anyone reading Zotero's homepage comes away with the message that this is a browser-based application only.

There is no mention anywhere of any other way of using it except on the download page.

The first time I went there I didn't click on the download button because I didn't want a browser-based app.
While there are (or at least were) some third-party MySQL add-ons on Heroku, in general Heroku uses postgres instead. I have no idea how/if these issues apply to postgres.
'make it pass the tests' engineering.

I'm not aware of any credible engineering effort that only does that.

1) Your tests are just as likely to have bugs anyway.

Yes, but only with P(test_bug). We see code bugs with P(code_bug), and if there are tests covering all those pieces of code, the final probability of bad things shipping to production is P(test_bug) * P(code_bug)

Obviously, it's an overly optimistic assumption, but tests serve as one additional layer in a "defense in depth".

2) The 'bad' bugs are logic bugs - if your logic is wrong, your tests are wrong, so you are testing the wrong thing.

If your logic is wrong, your architecture is likely to be wrong, too. If your basic assumptions are wrong, your code will be too, no matter what.

3) Users often do things you didn't plan for.

Yes, and architecture isn't going to save you from that either. (It helps, though. Planning to minimize state is a good idea :)

4) [...] will make it so you don't need to spend months re-factoring in the first place.

Which is a great strategy - if you can assume your requirements never change. If you work in a field like that, excellent. Most of us, however, need to deal with a rapidly changing field.

software engineering in general needs more architecture

Good software engineering has architecture. Tests augment it. How much architecture you create up front, how much you create on the fly, and how often it changes depends entirely on the field you work in, and how much resources you can spend on an issue.
How can we measure "better"? LOC, number of tests? Lets define "better"!
Completely agree. It's clear that they found a loophole in order to do something that twitter had no intentions of permitting.

It is very likely that a user would find these cards and inadvertently start a purchase without realizing that this actually not supported by twitter.
A friend once explained his idea of knowledge. If you consider what you know to be the inside of a sphere and what you don't know to be what's touching the outside of the sphere then as you learn what you don't know grows. In reality there is a lot you don't know and will never know. The only way you figure this out is by learning.

I'm convinced that we all eventually learn enough to realize we simply don't know anything :)
We really need this, our css has grown in to a monster over the years.

This may also be of interest:

Dust-Me Selectors is a firefox extension that scans HTML pages to find unused CSS selectors. http://www.brothercake.com/dustmeselectors/
Friend's Facebook Photos Got Posted In An Adult Website
I would pay $60K for a $400K project.
Microsoft Issues Empty Statement on Employee’s Next-Gen Xbox Twitter Tirade
Leading social media site HarvardConnection now valued at $400b
The definition of normal (at least for kids) is becoming dangerously narrow, and we're at risk of correcting behaviors with medications that will do more harm than good. In my view, we're sacrificing a measure of behavioral diversity primarily to make classrooms run more smoothly. This article talks about how gifted children have a particularly high risk factor for misdiagnosis and unnecessary medication.
I added the "seriously though" to clarify the obvious joke. Sorry you took it seriously, though.
By Occam's razor they wouldn't have done it through a 17 year old.
"If you look through the scientific literature, especially on India and China, they irrigate their crops with raw sewage effluent and untreated industrial effluent," he explained."

I guess that gives new meaning to rice that's "organic"
So what happens. Presumably there is a completely parallel market for land. Land owning elites presumably buy and sell land all the time and homes are bought and sold all the time as well. The two rarely intersect? Or maybe those that can buy land can easily buy the house as well? Very confusing. In US effectively the local government and the state "own" and you are just leasing it. There is not parallel land market unless jurisdiction lines get redrawn for some reason or a states secedes from the Union or something like that (you can imagine some negotiations then where the city say, this land with homes brings in $45M in property taxes/year, we wish to sell it for $1.3B cash...) of course this is all hypothetical...just to make a parallel.
Looks great Jess! I'll have to clone this and see how it runs on quantopian...
Disruptive technology is catalyst for change, not the reason
Twitter users speculate Rick Warren’s son was gay, as motive for suicide
"I don't want technology to rule us, I want us, humans, to rule technology"

Personally, I want technology to solve human problems. If technical solutions to problems exist, they should always be preferred over legal solutions. We do not need to increase the size of an already out-of-control legal code, and we do not need more laws that will be selectively enforced (as almost all laws are).

"it breaks lots of workflows and conveniences (e.g full text search of emails)."

That is not an insurmountable problem: get an email client that can do full text searches of your email by automatically decrypting it while the search is performed. If for some reason you need to export your search to some server, cryptographers have developed systems for doing that in a secure way, though their computation cost is a bit high (much more than searching the plaintext).

"I don't want the government, Google, or anybody else to have it be legal to look into my email if they can break the cryptography or find the key. I want it to be illegal even at that case."

I would be cautious about that. It is almost certainly the case that such a law would not be enforced when a government agency or large corporation are breaking it -- see e.g. the warrantless wiretapping program. More likely, such a law would be used when a whistleblower exploits a weakness in a cryptosystem to expose government wrongdoing.

Expanding the legal code is dangerous. We have so many laws that the government has lost track:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230431980457638...

We have seen over and over how this vast legal code is abused to crack down on protesters and dissidents. Adding more laws to it is just asking for more trouble, and doing so when we have technical solutions is a pointless risk.

"while cryptography might be a case were technology can solve this problem (privacy) there are other issues just piling technology cannot be used to solve them -- where legislation is needed."

Sure -- but we are not talking about those problems, we are talking about a specific problems that is well studied and which has been solved for decades.
Ask HN: Is it viable to start of with ads for a listing site
I am trying out a small experiment. Adding features to classifieds, and taking care of several things.
The revenue model that every other listing site does is

1. Paid Listing

2. Ads.

The doubt I had was, do folks at HN think is it a good idea to start of with Ads as the primary revenue stream.

If people can throw in some pointers around what else would be a good approach, it will be helpful for me to think about it.

Thanks!
What if they do sell? Can land owners do whatever they like to the home owners? Like kick them out? Start drilling tunnels through the land, extract oil in the back yard?
I have read "peers" as "people I work with", and "better" as "for a coding task, who will do a better job than me in my company". It has the advantages to be a day to day situation. I may be wrong.
This would be a pain to read for drum music. Especially drum set music.
You can't ever discover anything novel without experimenting a little. Besides I like the strip itself, even if it's inconvenient to follow in real time.
I can't speak for all medallion programs, but NYC medallions were created to solve a surplus of taxis and associated congestion, low wages, and poor service, at least according to the NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/11/nyregion/medallion-limits-...
Adam Orth leaves Microsoft following 'always-on' console controversy
CISPA’s Secret Amends
Resources for Learning Git and GitHub
On that matter, I posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5352969
Another Quarter of Infosec Joblessness?
I don't think this a new problem, its just one that has been hidden exceptionally well in "recent" times.

The obvious example is The Jungle by Sinclair which was essentially publicity of precisely these problems, except in the beginnings of the 20th century. I highly doubt that the situation has been drastically improved, but, really hidden much more thoroughly from the public view.
What’s Behind that QR code?
I've mostly always handwaved away concerns people had about Google and privacy as being overblown, and I think the idea behind Glass is pretty cool and potentially limitlessly useful, but the privacy implications of a world where Glass-users are common and all data goes through a single entity are staggering. Particularly since they will impact you even if you aren't explicitly opted in (just being seen/scanned by someone who is wearing the device potentially involves you in it).

A world with even just a fraction of a percent of people actively wearing the devices but with all that real-world data streaming back to The Goog in real-time would make Batman's little cell-phone network scanning thing in The Dark Knight look absolutely quaint in comparison.
Most of the comments here seem to be about the qualities of the notation itself and whether it is good. I would like to ask why this notation of all possible notations?

Music notations - systems of analogies between visuals and sound - are tools for communication. If you have some new concept to communicate, inventing a suitable notation for it is a great way to gain recognizability for the concept. This holds with music notation as well as mathematics (ex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_notation). If you have no new concepts to communicate, inventing a new notation is like changing all the words in the python language to other words. Some things may be easier and others harder, but overall, the change isn't worth the trouble for most.

If there are no new concepts to communicate but there is a new medium to work with, that needs to be taken info account. Legacy notations were invented with the constraints of the media of the times they were developed in - in this case, paper and ink. There is no need to be bound by old media constraints when you're making something that has to be learned fresh anyway. Notice how hummingbird still does everything in black and white? We've had color displays for ages now (even on paper), so why not map note names to colors? Why map time to space when we've had dynamic displays for ages now and can just map time to time itself, or a mixture of time and space. Why should every instrument player see the same notation? Why can't we adapt the display to suit the instrument?

Guitar Hero, Dance Dance, the Japanese drumming games in arcades all illustrate what "notation" can be using an interactive medium. The would-be-musicians don't read paper notation. Learning the display is so easy that they just pretty much pick up the controller and begin playing. For other kinds of "notation" that can help the fresh ones, check out the iOS apps by Smule (Note: I don't have anything to do with Smule. I just like their work.)
Yeah, my bad. It's been mentioned before, but the landing page video is completely irrelevant, it's really just a placeholder. I don't know what other video to put there, maybe one day I can pay someone to make a tutorial vid.
WordPress.com Adds Two-Factor Authentication
VentureCrowd Challenges
It's interesting that all the #scroogled retweets at the moment appear to be fueled by the $500 Visa gift card offer from Bing. Not exactly viral.
"How do you rate your coding skill against other HN guy that replies? far lower/lower/mid/better/far better" could be interresting :)
REMunx Malware Analysis Distro Updated
We've got a very large app built on Angular, and it has been a real pleasure to work with. The directives are the killer feature for me. There are some definite esoteric bits that can be puzzling at first, but after you crest the hump it is rad. I love it.
It's the ultimate hack.
I doubt you will see anything similar with Postgres, simply because it's too strict and conservative about how it replicates.

Postgres replicates transactions rather than rows or statements. Postgres uses a transaction log, aka xlog (also called the write-ahead log, or WAL), and this is streamed to slaves where the xlog entries are replayed. It's analogous to Oracle's redo log. Each log entry is information about what tuples to update (or insert, or delete), and what to update with.

This means that the replication data flow is basically the same as the data flow that occurs on a single server when clients execute SQL. Something like "update foo set a = 1" will result in a log entry that describes how the physical database files are updated; therefore, replication is a matter of applying the same log entry on the master as on the slaves. (This system is also used to implement streaming backups: You can reconstruct the database at any point in time simply by replaying old transaction logs up to the point in time that you want.)

Everything that involves state change is encapsulated by transaction logging. Postgres has transactional DDL -- in other words, you can do things like "create table", "alter table", "drop table" etc. in transactions -- precisely thanks to this symmetry. It also means that the replication state is unaffected by context: Things like sequences and timestamps are made consistent because they are, by necessity, already calculated by the time the transaction log is written.

So with Postgres' replication it's virtually impossible to end up in a situation like Kickstarter's, where duplicate IDs are replicated. Of course, physical corruption or some weird bug could cause this, but at least the latter is very unlikely, and if it did happen it would very likely hit more than just replication, again because of how the xlog is so central to the entire system. In other words, an xlog bug that only happened to replication would be fairly rare.
Google Glass will bring about an interesting UI challenge for designers. Seeing VCs step forward for a new technology is no surprise, especially when we're talking about Google.
Reasoning under uncertainty: philosopher or scientist?
I've just learned that one of the Samsungers working on Rust has tentative plans to implement C++ interop in the same fashion as D.

http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1c3clf/c_ffi/c9codm1

In any case, I'm not sure that any official Rust source has ever tried to claim "C++ binary compatibility". Perhaps this language is a result of people misinterpreting the fact that Rust lays out structs in memory in the same fashion as C and C++.
Good thing the FDA is funded to appropriate levels to ensure that the rest of our food is safe! Oh wait...

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57572066/sequester-may-l...

The really frightening thing to me is that even before the sequester, the FDA has largely left it up to industry-approved 3rd party food inspectors to validate food safety.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-11/food-sickens-millio...
What happened to the FDA's mission to protect the consumer? Why aren't rice imports tested for heavy metals?

You know why. Because that would be onerous government regulation. Americans are obsessed with the idea that the government overregulates everything. That's why Congress is unwilling to fund enforcement actions.
That's only if the tonic is G. I play tunes all the time with one sharp, but a tonic of D. (ie D mixolydian.)
PC sales worldwide have tumbled, data from IDC shows
I think there's definitely something to this, because land taxes aren't common in Australia, either, and yet almost all houses there are freehold house and land.