skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It saddens me that "anti-semitism" is liberally applied to arguments involving people of Jewish descent. If someone makes a personal decision that they haven't been presented with a convincing argument that Jews were specifically targeted by a genocide campaign, they are labeled "anti-semite". If he chooses to make the argument that establishing and defending by force a Jewish state on another country's land might not be fair, he is labeled "anti-semite". It's liberal use in questionable situations weakens its value when properly used to describe someone whose words and actions are specifically negative to those of Jewish descent.

I agree with Arrington on this one, but as Mr. Wizard used to say, he is right for the wrong reason. He is right because Facebook should censor hate speech just as they censor questionable images. The target of that hate speech is irrelevant.
Of course they are convinced they are telling the truth, but that is not an acceptable excuse. If you go down that road, you can't put anyone in prison anymore: "they were just born and raised that way". A holocaust denier, or General Relativity denier for what that matters, arrives at his conviction through contingent factors that are nigh impossible to trace. Fortunately, that also isn't required. As in the case of the criminal, we still hold them accountable for their convictions and the damage that those convictions do, irrespective of their capacity to understand why it is wrong.

We like to believe that punishment teaches and that even criminals consider their punishments fair. Fact is: they don't consider them fair and they don't learn. Yet we keep punishing them, because locking them away makes life much nicer for the rest of us.
"I even know someone who fell asleep during an MRI."

i did! it was almost like binaural beats in a meditating fashion coming from speakers. I stressd hard to take my mind away from the feeling of claustraphopia...and dozed off!
Designer/CSS guru needed
We are a recently funded YC company. We are a founding team of second time entrepreneurs and hackers. We are looking for our first full time employee to join us this summer in Mountain View, CA.

We need a UI Designer/CSS guru to join our team. In priority order, here are the skills we are looking for.

1. Passion to take on huge challenges and find a way to win

2. UI Design with a huge emphasis on usability

2. CSS/HTML

3. Javascript/jquery/prototpye/scriptaculous

4. Ruby on Rails

Compensation will be paid in the form of equity and if necessary a small salary for June, July and August. At the end of the summer we will revisit compensation based on our success as a team together.

Please send a resume and design portfolio to:

railsycjob@gmail.com

Include in your cover email three interesting things about yourself to give us a little more insight into who you are as a person.

This position requires your presence in Mountain View, CA. Applicants must be in the bay area, or able to relocate there on their own dime.
Disagreement about historical fact is not defamation. If I want to say Ataturk or Hitler or Andrew Jackson are variously guilty or innocent of genocide that is my right.

In fact, I really don't see how it's defamation to claim that someone is innocent of genocide.
Even if it didn't handle commits across subtrees, I would still find this useful.

I would be ok if this (or an addon) tool detected commits that that spanned subprojects and invited me to split that commit.

IMHO, the correct workflow should be: check in modifications to the library subtree and to the library's client in different commits.
Mark this day
its not a new concept. the thing i've always hated about the concept is that it tends to come with multimedia interaction, popups and the like. if you can do it without it being as intrusive/annoying, i wouldn't mind it as a user.
Reminds me of a panel from the Buck Godot comic. An alien's picture is on a billboard advertising his "Earth Style" cafe.

- caeffine
- fat
- sugar
- salt

"We know what you like!"
George Heilmeier was a former DARPA director, for whom the Heilmeier Cathechism is used by DARPA PMs to judge projects. These simple questions are excellent for understanding other projects, and I use them to keep my own projects on track. I also use them as the basic outline for presentations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Heilmeier#Heilmeier.27s_...
Large people seem to feel entitled to sit in 25% of my seat on airplanes. I'm tired of subsidizing their air travel!
Neighbourhood Open Source Type for Immediate Download
Thank you for explaining. Now, what I don't understand is how you'd cover such a case -- a historian who honestly says "Looking at the record, I think the conventional story of the Holocaust overestimates the death toll, and misunderstands the motivations." At least one former denier (can't recall his name right now) is Jewish; the guy who blogs at http://hooverhog.typepad.com/ is a Holocaust denier (among other unusual beliefs) and has also made references to having a Jewish girlfriend, which I think goes beyond even the usual "some of my best friends are..." argument.

Exploring edge cases is generally not mental masturbation. In this situation, there's a genuinely weird argument: "Holocaust denial is synonymous with anti-semitism, and anti-semitism is bad, thus Holocaust denial is bad." If all Holocaust deniers are anti-semites, then this makes as much sense as saying "Anti-semites are more likely to dislike people who celebrate Passover, thus groups opposed to celebrating Passover must be banned." Why the extra mental gymnastics? Why is Holocaust denial even a factor?
We can only hope some sanity will be injected into this process as the case proceeds through the higher courts.
I think the focus on algorithms and data storage is totally misguided. You don't need to count every single word on the Internet. This is a question about statistical inference:

(1) Use Zipf's law (or a more suitable distribution) to identify how many times we expect the 10,000th word to occur in a random distribution of documents. That gives us the maximum interval at which the 10,000th word will repeat itself at any level of statistical confidence.

(2) Don't count every word. Only track the top 10,000 words plus a tail of whatever size is necessary to capture this maximum interval. With Zipf's law this means less than 20,000 words. The exact number can be calculated easily enough.

(3) Store words in a data structure that provides fast access by alphabetical search (tree) and also by frequency of occurrence (list). Bump words up the list as we run into them. When you run into a word that isn't in your tree, grab the entry at the bottom of the frequency list and re-insert it as your new word by repositioning. There is no need to traverse much data

(4) Lower frequency content will naturally drop off the list. Higher frequency content will naturally move up. And we've structured our program so that we can make statistical inferences about the words that are left....

(5) Remember to normalize incoming data with a Porter-Stemmer algorithm or something. Lots of small details like that, but it is really just icing on the cake.

Result? You get a statistically significant test you can run multiple times at whatever level of accuracy you desire. The software doesn't require huge computational muscle power or massive amounts of memory, since we throw out the long tail of statistically irrelevant content on an ongoing basis. That coupled with our elegant data structure - we're mostly swapping pointers - keeps the software small and fast.

Is there a better approach?
What is the tree (trie?) structure and sorting-and-aggregating that you mean?

The tree structure: Put all the unique words into a tree. You could use a trie, but considering how dense the tree is likely to end up, a traditional split-26-ways-on-each-byte tree would probably work just as well.

The sorting-and-aggregating option: Run a traditional mergesort, but attach counters (initialized to 1) to each word; and every time you find yourself comparing two identical words, replace them by a single record with the sum of the counters.
Do you also agree that Google has the same rights to censor their search results in a similar manner? Would you agree with a decision to suppress results which lead to "hate speech" websites?
Real world examples dont work because, as this post points out very well, there are just too many variables and factors to allow anyone to produce a viable solution in the space of an interview.

The problem IS real world though: I can think of several situations in our own company where a programmer would have to manipulate a set of data, find common occurences and order them. Of course each specific problem is complicated by the data and the data source but the fundamental problem stays the same: and so the question IS valid.

The input data doesnt matter (though briefly recognising it is flawed instils confidence).

In terms of your other point about how people write code.. im not 100% sure I agree. As an engineer I break a problem down into I/O machines. Where the input comes from is immaterial so long as it is in a form that is usable. The important consideration is engineering the output.

Your right: he did see the problem with the suggested data set and that is the kind of thing that saves companies money. BUT he hammered that like it was the only issue and (by his own admission) barely considered the actual practical engineering problem. To me that would tell me he is a fairly ok programmer and is bright enough to spot problems - but he is no engineer and I wouldnt hire him :) (that said it is only a small subset of the interview and based on other stuff I have read from the guy I suspect I would find him suitable to hire: he just screwed up the one question)
You weren't the only one.

People tend to forget that every interview is 2-way, not just 1-way.

If I was this candidate, I would have rejected this company and (possibly) sent them a nice form letter later that week.
That's certainly the goal. Big, beautiful, splashy advertising that readers look forward to.

And what's new is taking it local. I've not seen any local news startups doing this just yet. If it works for College Humor, why not Chicago news?
From referring to it as the New Generation, to nearly glossing over that Picard and his brother talked about having a replicator installed in their house at the vinyard, I'm not so sure the author of this piece watched much Star Trek. Like much of science fiction, there are subtle clues scattered throughout the story telling that give more background than any of the individual stories intend do themselves. When trying to pigeon hole the economic and political arrangement of a quadrant of the galaxy, is it best to go with the officially released propaganda from the powers that be, the story arcs, or the cannon as defined by every individual thing that happens and is said?
Google Opening Up Trademarked Keyword Bidding on June 4th
Prism - Bridge the gap between website and desktop application
By your reasoning, it should be illegal to deny that the moon landing ever happened, or to deny that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin of JFK, or even to deny that human beings are the product of biological evolution.

The first two don't need to be illegal, because they don't do much damage. There is little emotional attachment, making the controversy less influential or dangerous.

The last one is trickier: the education of children is certainly impaired by withholding facts from them. Everyone is entitled to every conviction, but no one is entitled to spreading lies about contrary convictions, not even to their own children. If we could reasonably make that illegal, I'd go for it, but I don't think we could write up a law in such a way that it would work. Those are the trade-offs that have to be considered.
The idea of "traps" is ridiculous and shows us how little some companies understand about the interviewing process.

As an interviewer meeting potential candidates YOU are representing your company. If you're acting false and laying little traps etc. and your candidate detects this, you could lose a very smart and productive person simply because acting falsely is a natural turnoff.

On the other side, if the candidate is answering questions in some sort of rehearsed way it'll be a turnoff for the interviewer.

Good interviews are no different than meeting people. As a candidate, be yourself, don't worry about silly traps. Your goal is to show them who you are and find out who they are to see if there's a fit. If you've already decided you want the job before meeting with their representatives then you're potentially making a bad decision and wasting your own and other people's time. If you're egotistical and feel a need to point out that a question is useless, then by all means do so! That way they know what they're getting and can make an informed decision about whether or not they can deal with that. You may want to work on the ego a bit in general, but not specifically for an interview... that would be fake.

Don't try to con your way into a job because there's a very god chance you'll be unhappy if you get it.

Don't be fake and cagey with candidates because ultimately you could scare away some really excellent employees. Intuition is important as an interviewer so you can detect when someone's being fake with you without being a weirdo yourself. Ask questions you actually want answers to instead of trap / fake questions.

The whole fake / fake thing just perpetuates itself and makes it next to impossible to find good fits. It should just be common sense without all this complicated trap nonsense.
Where do you outsource to? How is the QA doing? Are you a startup or bigger company? Were there any growing pains associated with outsourcing the QA?
I managed to when stuck in a classroom.
"Basically you can do two kinds of products: evolutionary and revolutionary. Evolutionary products can start as something simple and evolve into something more complex. They are the ones we usually talk about because they are easy to do, and make up the bulk of all digital products."

That's not true at all. Complexity has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a product is revolutionary or evolutionary, that's just from the idea(s) behind it.

The Apollo program DID launch early and often. In reality, the R&D behind it began long before we decided to send people to the moon.
Title so obvious you'd think it was an Onion article.
There are some significant differences between Facebook and Google. We're not talking about hosting or removing pointers to information, we're talking about hosting discussion.

I would fully support Google's right to remove any discussion they don't like from any forums where they host discussion. I think making something disappear from the search results would be a little more delicate, particularly since Google are currently in a quasi-monopoly situation, but I would, on the whole, support their right to block search results that they want to block, yes.
Do You Know Why Your Customers Want to Solve Their Problem?
My technique for designing software architecture is basically to daydream what it would be like to use the best possible API for the problem, then further daydream about what problems might result. It takes a bit of discipline, but with years of practice it turns out to work pretty well. You never get good enough to never get blindsided by some requirement, but you can cut it down a lot.

Don't skip that problem step; all architectures have tradeoffs and if you can't name the bad things about your choices you don't understand the choices yet.
Human-sized cities: Cutting cars from our urban fabric
"You have an implicit assumption that rapid iteration means poor quality control. It doesn't have to."

I would actually go a step farther and assert that strong quality control facilitates rapid iteration. My 15 years of experience in software bears this out -- the (extremely rare) projects with quality control were far smoother than the ones without. In ones without solid QA, the software become so convoluted and messy that rapid iterations became entirely infeasible. There was no way to change the software without re-writing large chunks of it, or putting in a large collection of hacks that broke as much as they fixed.
Haven't you heard the news? Since John Rawls got popular, you're allowed to bitch at the injustice of the universe if anyone was born with a slight advantage over you.
(disassemble (lambda ()))
"And most people like that kind of writing, but I just find it annoying."

Why do you say that? Might it be that people have gotten accustomed to that style, and while they would prefer something more direct, have come to accept it as just being how magazine articles are? Or have people adapted their reading style to skim past the "color" fluff and pull out the essential details?

Do people take the time and trouble to complain to editors about these things? Are people more inclined to write to praise than to criticize?
Duke Nukem Forever gameplay video
My browser provides an inline PDF viewer (no Acrobat required).
Ask HN: Are there better options than PR Web out there?
I'm trying to increase my SEO so I wanted to start using a PR service that could help and I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts and/or recommendations if whether PR Web is the best way to go or if there are competitor sites out there that are as efficient at a better cost. I know you got to spend money to make money but with their prices ranging from 80 - 360 USD per press release, it could really ad up. Especially because I'm in the ticket domain (www.tickettrunk.com) so I'll need to do it several times.

Thanks!
It's cool for what it is, I was just wondering if it had some advantage over images that I couldn't yet see.
Of course they're proud. They realize they're on the right side: the first amendment's side.

You do NOT have the right to squelch speech simply because it's unpopular, controversial, or distasteful. If Facebook pulls these groups, it should be because of market pressure (advertising boycots and so forth), not some government mandate. That's going in the WRONG direction. What's so hard to understand about that?
And given how knowledgeable the courts are on technology issues, hope and prayer is all we have.
I'm guessing the COBOL tweets are probably from people who primarily code in a different language, but still have that one legacy COBOL app that they still have to maintain.
The query I did was much more complicated.
The Arc equivalent of yours is

((sort (compare > score) stories*) 0)
Flashrom enables BIOS flashing via Linux
Those are all really good points!

A. Unfortunately Amazon's supplying us with those similar results, I can probably get some more smarts out of them. Tracking what shoppers view and buy will help us further get our own similar/recommendation engines in better shape.

B. That would be helpful definitely

C. The sizing of things are definitely being worked on. The design of the site will be going under major work, but thanks for bringing this to our attention!

D. This is a really good idea! We're going to be tackling these issues with our recommendations after we've captured a good amount of trends.

Thanks again!
I posted this because I've lived without a car for seven years, and I never would have realized how relaxing it is not to have to worry about it (though I do use the ZipCar service).

And ultimately, as we reach peak oil and energy costs rise, I would like to think that we will re-evaluate how we build cities and make them more "human-sized", which could counteract many of the negative trends we face today (obesity, lack of social community, etc.). Of course, the alternative is that we find a sufficiently cheap source of energy for our cars beyond petroleum, and we continue on building our merry suburbs -- but maybe, just maybe, it doesn't have to be that way.
I agree with you and don't understand people who argue differently.

The interviewer didn't ask: "Can I find a list of the top 10,000 words usages?" Which is the question the interviewee insisted on answering.

If I am a lead and I need a list of the top 10,000 words and I go to my co-worker and end up in a protracted argument about what that means philosophically I am going to be upset. I want him to say: "Here is how I'd do what I think you want. Oh, and by the way, I'm not sure an exact list of the top 10,000 words is possible .... here is how we can get as close as possible".

Sure, the list is a moving target. That fact is simply a bullet point in the risk assesement. Note it, move on and solve the actual problem that is presented.
It might be interesting to see the results of 15-20 iterations of this experiment, to see how perceptions differ over time.
Careful. There is an inherent difference between "hate speech" and "holocaust denial".

Suggesting all holocaust deniers are anti-semitic and want jews dead is as bad if not worse stereotyping.....

(indeed I would classify it as worse: many Holocaust deniers are simply delusional and historically uneducated, or brainwashed. Branding them anti-semitic and hateful is a considered opinion in the face of reasonable evidence. And, well, hateful.....)
What kind of app are you building that this is a concern?
"for $10k in Cash"

Would be helpful to add that to the title.
Successful Blog Review
"Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it."

Ah, one of my favorite four-letter words: "Just".

You just add a second database to the system. You just write the slow parts in C. You just learn how to control your attention and thoughts.
Free Movies/Software/Porn download
Get links of almost any movie/software from various forums instantly.
Scrolling 2.0 made me think of how convenient it would be to have Exposé (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expos%C3%A9_(Mac_OS_X)) for tabs, allowing you to see the face of all open tabs and being able to click to bring them to the front.

I remember Internet Explorer having a similar function but it was more an "alt-tab" type feature.
oh comon.. this does not fall under news, and anyone actively interested in the subject would find the book with a quick google search

it's kind of getting annoying to see this kind of posting in hn..
IMO, C++ offers no useful compiler safety features. One of the most celebrated "safety features" is const correctness. That's caused more pain in my experience than any possible value that it supports (and it has also resulted in a lot of unnecessary duplicated boilerplate code).

Templates, while useful and (sometimes) fun (as long as you're not having to debug them), aren't as interesting as having a real dynamic language like Python or Ruby.

I'd argue that your statement about "Inherently OOP problems" is incorrect from the first word. IMO, there's no such thing as a problem that's "inherently OOP"; there are problems which may be modeled easier in OO, but there's no problem that OOP solves that can't be solved a different way. (Why does a large simulation require a huge class hierarchy in any case? Maybe you're just Doing It Wrong.) There's also an assumption that C can't do OO, which is patently false; it's just not sugared for you like in C++.

I'd love to see what "required abstractions" you think that C++ provides, because I just simply don't see them. Except maybe namespaces. Overloading is nice, but not a necessary condition. References are just a mess. Templates are overkill for a lot of things. RTTI in C++ is a joke, especially if you're working cross-platform (and dynamic_cast on older versions of g++ just don't work, and sometimes you just can't escape those older versions).

All that said, I write C++ in my day job. A lot of it. But I don't pretend that anything I'm doing in C++ couldn't be done in C, possibly better and cleaner. We're designing a new set of APIs for plug-ins in our product, and we're moving toward a clean set of C-based APIs because they're (a) more portable across platforms and (b) more portable across languages so that we don't force people who want to write plug-ins for our product to use C++.