skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
African-Americans (or blacks, in the context given) certainly exist as a group. The question is whether you can define them as a race.

To top it off, your first example is incredible. Universities usually lump all Asians into one category though most people would consider an Indian and a Japanese person to be of different race. If that is your list, you have done your argument a grievous injury.
This is absolutely amazing... The minimum amount of computation power, memory involved is just staggering.

Isn't it actually more advanced today to a degree, in terms of getting the job done?

How many lines of code would a moon landing guidance system be today? How many modules and dependencies?

Which one wold be more redundant ( I feel the comparison is obvious here if not: simple program whose redundancy is in its simplicity, and a complex program where redundancy is with multiple levels of checks within)
We can only wish authorities would have to invest in fueling and maintaining drones, visible in the sky, to enforce speeding law. The signs could say:

SPEED ENFORCED
BY TRACKING YOUR
MOBILE PHONE

...or even...

SPEED ENFORCED
BY REVIEWING LOGS
OF GOOGLE MAPS
INTERACTIONS

Eventually navigation apps could offer both an "estimated travel time" and a "don't make the trip in less time than this, or we'll have to report you for a speeding citation".
Help Unemployed&Underemployed In Bankrupt Detroit
Alternative: Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo[1] for $99, and rsync[2]. Mirrored disk rsync backup, open source, on basically any OS. Not as cool as BitTorrent and a Raspberry Pi, though.

[1] http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-det...
[2] http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Rsync_-_synchronizes_fil...
This article is based on the assertion that there are people that think Javascript is Scheme with an ugly makeover. But do those people exist? Most people who make the comparison aren't saying they they're equal to each other, but that they share similarities. Maybe some people hear that out of context and take it too far, but I don't think they're the majority.

I think the thing that makes the comparison is more the first class functions than the closures. The closures assist the first class functions, but the functions are the star.

Not a whole lot of non functional programming languages support first class functions with the simplicity and completeness of javascript.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_class_function#Language_s...

In javascript, passing functions as parameters is a day to day thing, and that style of being able to pass around different functions as building blocks is what gets it compared to functional languages. Sure, that's not the only thing that functional languages have going for them, but it's the most important thing, and what they're even named after.
"Look at the people around you, look at different cultures": are you talking about races, or cultures?

By the way, when I was younger and there was very little immigration here in Italy, I looked around me and saw people - whole families - with blond hair, with dark hair, with red hair. I saw people (and families) with blue eyes, green eyes, hazel eyes. I saw very tall people, very short people, very smart people, pretty dumb people. And there were people with very pale skin, medium skin, and pretty dark skin. So, how many "races" where there already?

I'm under the impression that, when you talk about race, you really mean something like breed[1]. But there isn't selective breeding in humans - at least, that I'm aware of.

So, the question is not moot. If you have to define "race" scientifically, how do you go about it?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breed
It's interesting to observe how public attitudes do seem to have changed in response to relatively minor and symbolic changes.

One only has to look at how the UK political landscape has shifted from the massive campaigns around the abolition of an offensive but essentially toothless piece of legislation preventing "the promotion of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship" to being broadly accepting of the logic of gay marriage in less than a decade (interestingly that shift of opinion includes the British Prime Minister). Perhaps it's the benefit of hindsight making the dire warnings of the Right look ridiculous, perhaps the change would have happened regardless of decisions the legislature took in 2003, but either way it's difficult to dismiss the effect of legislative changes that don't make the sky fall in on people's attitudes.

I don't think many people in the UK think "what they did to Turing is OK"; the wider issue is whether a specific pardon is the appropriate response, not least because a pardon implies the recipient is exceptional in deserving it.
> A lot of people would respond that we don't teach children the formal construction

Arguably, the way we teach fractions already follows the natural progression of formally defining numbers pretty much: You start with addition (which is somewhat hardwired into our natural number sense), learn that you can also reverse that to get subtraction. Then the big leap of symbolic faith[1] is subtracting a big number from a smaller one to get negative numbers. After this there's the idea of counting repeated additions and giving that a shortcut, resulting in multiplication, and the reveral of that gives division. The big mental jump then is dividing a small number by a bigger number, giving fractions.

[1] You have to remember that mathematics is basically formalising our limited number intuition into language, so we can manipulate the symbols as we would manipulate real world objects, greatly increasing our capacity to reason about these ideas. "Doing with Images makes Symbols," to quote Alan Kay.
The Difference between Growth and Success for a startup
Assuming you implicitly wanted to add "in roughly the same genre", the books that instantly jump to mind are Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books. The first one really feels like he asked "How can I copy the Harry Potter formula but make it better?" He clones the trio of heroes, but (for example) doesn't force them to sit around school waiting for a plot to show up, sending them out on a cross-country quest as soon as the world is established. For my money it isn't quite as good as the HP books at their best, but all are significantly better than the early HP books and tighter than the late HP books. He's into a second series of them now, and managing to keep me excited after eight books is no mean feat.
How does that work for IMAP access? Do you have an "application-specific password" like Google does, or just your regular password?
Craig Hockenberry: "Just talked to WWDR on the phone: no ETA."

https://twitter.com/chockenberry/status/358315230742331393
6hr Flickr API Outage 7/25
We see that you own an active API key for the Flickr API, and wanted to let you know that Flickr is scheduling a maintenance outage for Thursday, July 25th, from 4 to 10pm PDT. During the outage window, the Flickr API will be unavailable. As such, you may want to adjust your app to gracefully handle the error that will result when it calls our API during the outage. (If your app is not yet public, this will only impact your personal use of the API.)

Specifically, a call to the Flickr API will result in the following error: 105: Service currently unavailable (Site Disabled). Here are example responses to expect:

XML (REST):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <rsp stat="fail"> <err code="105" msg="Service currently unavailable (Site Disabled)" /> </rsp>

JSONP:

jsonFlickrApi({ "stat": "fail", "code": "105", "message": "Service currently unavailable (Site Disabled)" })

JSON:

{ "stat": "fail", "code": "105", "message": "Service currently unavailable (Site Disabled)" }

We hope this helps, and thank you for being a member of our API community,
The Flickreenos
Will the yet-to-be-released iPad version be a Universal app, or a separate purchase?
I thought about starting a company to do exactly this. The near term would be to offer it as an in-person service (consulting), then use that experience to develop an MVP.

There are a few companies doing this already, so not exactly new.
Introduction to Qubits
Yes, it was Tiny Pascal. I still probably have the issue buried in the garage somewhere.

I'm also partial to Creative Computing in the 1970's. It was full of fun artwork and silly games you could type in and run, and unabashedly optimistic editorial content. It's forgotten now, but it was very influential for me.
“You’ll stay in business and license from us, or you’ll go out of business,” he told him over the phone. “Either way is fine with me.”

There are villains in this world. They used to hide beside the road and beat then rob travellers. Later they rode around in rusty pickups with ak's killing and robbing villagers. Their weapons change but their tactics don't. The measure of civilization is how we choose to deal with them. I'm afraid they'll always be with us. It all comes down to where our sense of justice meets our apathy.
Why a conservative Upworthy would never work
SMTP is very seldom encrypted. (by volume, only gmail attempts, yahoo and others don't last time I checked)
I like Information Saturation. The idea that for some people, instead of using the internet as an intelligent, character building resource, the internet uses them with it's strong polarizing and insular force of saturating them with distractions and half-truths.

The individual may think they have choices of what to think, but ultimately the specific forum and/or resource may already be tailored to their biases. We even have our most popular English search engine, google, tailoring your biases at the discovery phase of research.

I can't remember the specific presentation, but I seem to recall an example of the search "Egypt", which displayed revolution in one user window, and vacation opportunities in the other.

If you think this is interesting, try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo1qzjC_5xI
I have an LLC (US), but this is one of the blunders I've made and I plan on dissolving it soon. There are many reasons to my answer, here are some:

The problem with a US based LLC is that you open up free access to thousands of patent trolls waiting to eat your hard earned money. This isn't a problem if you can afford a decent Lawyer for $5000-15000, but for businesses like mine, which are bootstrapped, it's totally unaffordable.

Well funded startups usually have a separate legal department to resolve these issues, but when you're running
a startup totally from your own pocket, it becomes extremely hard and annoying. I was wondering for a solution until a very good friend of mine suggested me something nice.

If you set up a company somewhere in India (or some other popular, Start-up friendly developing country), these patent trolls have little access to you in terms of licensing, etc. Usually a patent troll will send you a legal letter threatening you about violation of some kind of absurd technology patent, etc. But, when you start up elsewhere, these become nulled[1]. Meaning, they can't touch you. Worse-case scenario, even if someone DID sue you, the lawyers are really cheap in such developing countries. We're talking about price ranges of $50-1000. And for $500 bucks you can get some really nice lawyers to get the job done.

There's also a LOT of start-up friendly exemptions for companies in such developing countries simply because they don't have enough of them and they want more people to start up.

So, even though these countries are often referred to as 'third worlds', they are really good places to start up. If you know of anyone wanting to start up from those countries, you should probably team up with them as their co-founder and that should be good enough.

Of course, all this assuming that you aren't interested in seeking funding and you want a bootstrapped start up. But then, if you are seeking funding, you'll probably have enough cash to afford a $5000 lawyer anyway.

One potential issue you may find running a startup from a developing country is the access to decent payment gateways. But then, if you don't mind sharing an extra 1% with the gateway provider, you can probably use someone like skrill.
I'm using git-annex-assistant right now and while it is really nice and promises to replace dropbox for me, it would still use a lot more loving. There seem to be some weird states that you can easily get it into (I've had issues with the files syncing properly but the webapp claiming that the syncing was failing (or rather, that item is colored red, has an "!", and doesn't say anything else), it does not handle very large numbers of small files well (something git by itself does well),and a few other assorted problems).
I agree. This sort of usability testing is valuable - more valuable than simpy A/B testing in a vacuum - but it's important to remember that this is extremely qualitative and unscientific.

Throwing in the webcams, eye-tracking, or what-haves-you IMO incorrect lends an air of specificity and scientific-ness that isn't warranted.

Before we launched our last product update we brought people in to use the app. It was very much as you described - we invited them to come into the office where our PM sat with them, watch them used the app, and asked good questions.

The much more subtle behaviors are IMO not determinable via pseudoscientific things like watching facial expressions, eye movement, heart-rate, or whatever these things are supposed to measure. Best A/B test for the rest.
Then this PhD Cornell Microsoft person should not be throwing around the word 'random' in a highly publicized periodical when it is clearly not the term that suits the situation. Alternative terms would include seemingly random, deterministically chaotic etc... but certainly not random.
The Incredible Shrinking Motorola
Gift to Gittip Users From Catincan
Most of the fun of the original GeoGuessr (for me at least) was doing detective work to find out where I was. A little more difficult to do on an iPhone.
A couple companies ago we did it the CEO's office. Over the course of a day we brought in a half dozen people recruited from Craigslist. That one day alone gave us a lot of useful info.
There's someone in Cincinnati who is doing this in a much, much different fashion -- they're buying drinks in return for 1-5 minutes of interaction with an iPhone app. It's a really unique way of getting instant feedback on his app. I've noticed that he's semi-responsive to his changes -- he'll be back a few days later with a new build, and a sbux gift card, looking for more input on his changes.
That's a lot of blanket statements states as if they were the truth.

>Office 365 and Hosted Exchange are not competitors to Google Apps, they're poor competitors to Office and Exchange.

Uhh, why not?

>Azure is in no way a competitor to AWS/EC2 - it's more a competitor to Digital Ocean in terms of scale, and Digital Ocean is outperforming it completely.

Again, reference?

>You need to try and view the situation objectively if you want to understand why the MS share price is diving

Share price is diving? As compared to what? If you read the "article" you can see that the share price was ~28 just three months ago and today it closed at more than $31.

> ..and all your customers are hopping ship.

I am completely lost with the extreme hyperbole here.
Mail sent. Thanks.
There's an easier way to solve the problem of drivers getting tickets. Lift the speed-limit laws.
NASA used to publish a journal (NASA Tech Briefs) which included excerpts from papers that they had done. All of the spacecraft human factors work has shown up in various journals. A good place to start is scholar.google.com and look for NASA human factors but any good research library should also have the information.
People don't want their products advertised next to porn.
The ability to use your own domain is a big win for fastmail though.
It's actually not a worthless comment. Norwegian ownership makes absolutely no difference to the privacy equation wrt the NSA if Fastmail's servers are colocated in the US.
How to use Dart with Sencha Touch
Maybe she didn't have to put that much weight, I think we can also consider the critics as one 'world' (in the article sense of the term). They influence each other, and if a small number of critics happen to find a novel above the average quality I can see how it could spread through their community, just like a viral novel spreads through the general public. Even more so as there are probably some links between the editors/agents and the critics, which could help bootstrap the critic-local fame (and then even a slight push by Rowling's agent/publisher can be enough to play the role of what would need to be 'luck' for regular unknown authors).
What I mean is that success among the public and the critics share the same luck/quality mechanism, but independently. Of course there is some influence from the critics towards the general public (and vice versa, although less I guess) but not enough, hence the critically praised novels that still fail to sell widely.
How to view the Dell Service Tag from the Command Prompt
Cameras have got to be cheaper than drones though, although cameras are easier to avoid.
Your own experience (or mine) is not a good way to measure the potential of those products. It's all about the average consumers, what they like or not...
I wish rackspace email had 2-factor auth and/or application-specific-passwords. :/
This doesn't scale though. By the time you have FooApp 5 then you have 5 binaries you have to maintain.
"Tumblr! I'll cut your heart out with a spoon!"
Unfortunately the law, or at least the judicial system, is on their side.

Ignore them and they will only win by default.
I know a few people with Windows phones, and they all love them. Apparently it's actually a very nice phone. But every one of them laments the lack of apps, and considers it a reason to move.

The trouble is that "Microsoft" and "Windows" sounds to the consumer like "Monday 9am at the office". For the consumer market, they're tainted brands.
http://foaas.com/off/patent%20trolls/Startups
Note to self: Do this in a state with a "stand your ground" law.

"First, we kill all the lawyers" - Shakespeare, Henry VI
who gets to try to repeat those results? Experiments don't do themselves, and they're not free. Who gets to publish results so they can be peer-reviewed? Who sets the "consensus" about if a "model makes a prediction". Who gets to decide whose opinions are included and disincluded in this consensus? What is the punishment for making an incorrect prediction? Do you get to be disincluded from "consensi" for a spell if you get it wrong?
Well, at one time, not so long ago, there were such animals as moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats (although an argument could be made that the current Democrat party is somewhat more conservative than Nixon was).
Frankly, I consider it a different issue that has more to with history than evolution. I do believe such programs should end, but whether now or later is up for debate.

Of all the injustices in the world, extra scholarships for racial minorities hardly seems like a high priority, though. I'd rather cut through the Gordian Knot with free education for all (not as an entitlement, but rather as an investment).

We're about 1.5 generations away from race not mattering at all; young people simply don't care. Like so many vestiges of the old world, race-based entitlements will eventually disappear.
Time, and the Ribbon, and Metro...
> What tasks can you do with an iPad and not with Surface and vice-versa?

Surface RT is just the worst form factor for use in bed; the iPad is 10 times easier to hold in portrait or landscape, not to mention the high res screen looks much better than the Surface for close up in-bed viewing (RT again, I don't have a Pro). The Surface seems to be useful for Office when on a table where the keyboard can be used, but that is not part of my usage habits.

I see how Surface is cool, but the iPad still provides a better experience for my personal use cases. Haven't tried the Pro, but I already carry a laptop around for coding.

> Flagship Windows Phone 8 (i.e. Lumia 920 or Lumia 928) is better than an iPhone.

My 920 lacks apps :( Even Facebook and Skype are missing from the market my phone is locked too. I keep an old iPhone 4 (bought in the same region, ironically) in my bag for apps. Otherwise, the 920 is a wonderful phone.
You can make a phone call to Apple and they will extend your account for few days if you will explain the situation.
Flagging. Lifting someone else's idea and also their name for that idea seems sketchy.
Well in general (and not specific to this situation) one of the effective ways you can deal with someone like this is to waste as much of their time as possible in whatever way can. The person on the phone has to have a certain amount of productivity and while they are not going to drop their claim against you if you become a nice pain in the ass they will have the motivation to work with you. If you are quick and easy off the phone they have nothing to loose (their time is preserved).

I've done similar things with both government officials (got a penalty reduced in half) as well as attorneys working on behalf of someone else. Once again you can't be threatening you have to be nice. Waste as much time as you legitimately can is the bottom line.
To be fair, Windows XP use is moving to Windows 7 - just so people can have 4GB or 8GB of memory on their work PC.

Not Windows 8, but Windows 7.
So I pay for Cable and I still have to watch endless commercials. Paying for something doesn't guarantee anything.
You are correct that it's hard to judge security when the application is closed source. However the in the model we are suggesting, having the hashed secret would not be sufficient to get access to the files. Although you could use it to find client's IP addresses you would not be able to connect with it. The reason being that the secret key would be the base of any encryption between clients.
I totally agree. This is a qualitative experiment. You try to generate insights, assumptions, hypothesis from it. Then after that you test these insights more scientifically.

Including this, very well put, pseudoscientific things, on the qualitative phase must do more harm than good. Maybe they act as an excuse not to really test the assumptions.
I think you're hitting close to the crux of the problem here. Basically, the early adopters of something like this need to start so far removed from people's normal experience, that only crazy billionaires (and followers willing to sink $1500 into a crazy experiment) are going to be able to start something like this.

I wonder if Sergey now has remote assistants playing Amanda Pays' role in Max Headroom? That would be one (unscalable) way to deliver a truly seamless experience.
The Python Challenge: a way to learn python & improve skills
Show HN: GitHub Popularity Contest
The link says "readability.com", but it immediately forwards to the New York Times and a paywall.
> now they essentially own [the video game business]

Not even close. And it looks like they're about to throw it away.
Thanks for this clarification.

I understood you were using the example of antibacterial drug discovery to defend traditional phylogenetic models (against the parent commenter). I wanted to illustrate that the lack of new results in these fields doesn't offer good evidence that traditional phylogenetic models are adequate for this specific purpose.

Sincere apologies if I went too far and incorrectly put words into your mouth. Sorry.

I also don't work in bioinformatics any more for similar reasons.
Riddle-How do you get a GOP politician indicted and facing…
Things I learned in my 1st year of self employment