skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you ever tried applying to somewhere considered 'low' when you have some questionably spectacular mentions on your resume? Most anywhere will at best consider you a joke and at worst suspect. You really have to dumb down your skills and experience if you're trying to move to a new location or get a temporary job for those with education/experience in a location that does not have the job areas your resume reflects. (against the rebuttal argument, 'you can always move' - no, you can't.)

There is always the charge leveled at the young and educated of being lazy and aloof when in the situation of not having a job yet with a nice resume but, well, it can still be hard. Even dropping items on a resume paints a picture of little experience and usually ends you up with a position that makes it more difficult to find a job elsewhere. Do you know how tired you get after a 16 hour manual labor job? You don't really feel that inclined to brush up on the latest ruby packages.

Yet someone almost always brings up the fact that they heard a story or they themselves found a job through some ingenious idea at marketing themselves or spectacular networking in an area that didn't know they needed their skills until they showed them and found a job. Well that doesn't work for everyone. Most places are just as boring and closed minded in their business practices as every one assumes, and never try something new unless forced (why do you think start-ups succeed so spectacularly otherwise?).

</rant>
Why unit testing is a waste of time
This TED talk about performance enhancing prosthetic legs (including making you taller) covers a lot of these issues:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_...
This operation sounds horrible!
I had no idea. Thanks for pointing it out.
Starting a business during a recession
From Thinkers to Clickers
Awesome!!! Now I can give my laptop to other people without the need to delete my browsing history ever. I wish iPhone add similar feature to mobile safari.
for a non-php developer that article is kind of trivial entry level stuff so no value either.
Heyzap Hiring 4th Team Member (Engineer) [SF YC09/USV]
How many people will buy your iPhone app today? Probably none.
I got suspicious of the article when it blamed obesity on excess sleep. I don't know that there is any clear scientific consensus in this area that proves more sleep is bad for you. The French sleep close to 9 hours:

See eg.

http://www.webinfrance.com/people-in-france-sleep-and-eat-th...

so I don't see a direct correlation there with obesity rates.

Sleep as long as you need. Your body and brain will tell you.
Modern dynamic linking infrastructure for PLT
For an amusing tangent to your amusing tangent, Blizzard's offices have bullet-proof windows and doors to prevent disgruntled World of Warcraft players from going on shooting rampages.

(http://pc.ign.com/articles/662/662143p1.html)
New Dyson vaccum cleaner has "switched reluctance" motor, producing 104,000RPM
No. They might not guarantee the representation, but they do guarantee that the operations (e.g. >> & |) work.
That does make it seem like it will be an improvement. At the very least, it will be more private.

Unfortunately, I don't see how any big media company is going to want to do any major deals with them. I doubt they would sign a contract with someone when they plan on suing the company or customers. But at least hopefully it will help out smaller companies and independent artists.
Memory Glasses: Subliminally prompting glasses display (from 2003)
Quick, someone bring more koolaid!
It could be much more interesting if they told how to fight constant dizinness...
definitely not true. Fulfillment by Amazon enables third-party products to get Amazon Prime and Super Saver Shipping -- my mintsy.com business utilizes this
Par for the course I am afraid. I've had to get ahold of NASA data before for some of the graphics work I've done in the past, and it's always a headache.
The framework he's talking about is mostly guided to education withing the current scientific establishment.

But if you look deeper, he's providing a great framework for all mass education, whenever it is scientific or any other.

Btw, just out of curiosity, what do you mean by "all education"?
To be honest I hadn't even heard of tf-idf before you mentioned it. It is definitely not the case I am stepping beyond the bounds of something like sphinx.

I basically want to lay a bit of foundation before I start mucking around with something I have no idea about.

I have a couple e-books on Data Mining but I didn't think it was applicable. Are Data Mining and Search two things closely intertwined?
Great link! Very thoughtful talk...
This essay completely misses Ayn Rand's point.

Consider your life and the basic problem of deciding how to live it.

Being "selfish" means living your life according to what is most meaningful to you. For some that means heading to Wall Street, for others it means being a doctor, and for others it means working at Burger King.

In modern terminology, Rand's term "selfish" should be substituted accurately with self-actualized. Her term "selfish" was actually chosen as a deliberate synonym for "self-actualized" that didn't sound like psychobabble.

Now the question becomes, under what circumstances would anyone claim that a person should not be self-actualized? One might also wonder what would be the consequences of living one's entire life in a state of self-actualization vs non self-actualization.

It is this sort of question that Rand addresses in the book. She makes the rather bold moral claim that each human should live a self-actualized life, and that to avoid doing so is to commit a moral failing.

Now let's quickly examine the concept from a political perspective. What would it mean to not be selfish?

Suppose you are a young man who is very talented at the Violin. You know in your gut that to create beautiful music with the instrument will bring you tremendous happiness and pride. You want nothing in life other than to experience this happiness every day, so you practice long and hard. That you please others is nice, but it's secondary to your own love of music.

Rand would applaud such a person. Rand's critics would claim that the violinist should have been "selfless" and joined the clergy or perhaps become an orderly at a hospital, helping to clean up vomit and spilled fluids.

By definition, selfishness is doing something you want to do, and selflessness is doing something you don't want to do. So what Rand's critics are advocating is akin to self-flagellation. This is not a new idea, as anyone who has read or watched the DaVinci Code knows -- the wacky priest uses a spiked strap to make sure that he is not enjoying whatever he is doing, since self-sacrifice is his highest value.

So what about people who work for non profits, are they selfless? Not really. They simply enjoy making the world better more than they enjoy earning more money in each paycheck. Selflessness for someone who works at a non profit would be working in a job that was truly meaningless... such as perhaps working as a clerk in a huge corporation.

Political systems like Socialism which attempt to embody the idea of shared self-sacrifice would view the clerical job as every bit as noble as a more meaningful job because someone must do the clerical work for it helps society as a whole.

Rand's value of individual choice and self-actualization -- appreciating and glorifying the occasions when a person truly loves his life's work -- is fortunately not all that foreign to HN readers.
Can we get this account closed? One hour old and at negative 68 karma. Username is inappropriate at best as well.
They've been building a HSPDA network for about a year now:

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/07/21/tech-cellphone...

Rumor has it they are ahead of schedule, and launching in October.

http://www.thestar.com/business/article/656939
He didn't even talk about how to do the left-most bit, which is too bad, because getting the left-most bit is more useful than getting the right-most bit.
He says: "Selecting all columns with the star () operator is expensive, and that's what LINQ to SQL always does by default."

Doing a select is expensive relative to what? Assuming your select * where clause has only the index key in it, then select any column in the leaf of the index has the same cost as selecting all columns in the leaf. The expense is the disk read, if necessary.

Also, If you select the entire object then linq does a select * because it has to populate every value of the object. If you only need an id column, just select the id column.

Then he says: "Now, retrieving 48 individual records one by one is sort of silly, becase you could easily construct a single where Id in (1,2,3..,47,48) query that would grab all 48 posts in one go. But even if we did it in this naive way, the total execution time is still a very reasonable (48 * 3 ms) + 260 ms = 404 ms."

He says he could do an IN list, but he never does it. He assumes that selecting on one id is the worst case and then multiplying it by 48 gives him a total. The true time would depend on whether the index pages were in the cache of the database. It also depends on whether the query being run uses parameter versus literals because now compiling/optimizing time is there too.

Specifically, what point are you referring to that is valid?
Here is the same post on the objectivism forum, and their counter-arguments on the critique !

http://forum.objectivismonline.net/index.php?showtopic=15999
Various therapies and growth factors for cancer (Under "Topics")
On the topic of "The better you make the automation, the more difficult it is to guard against these catastrophic failures in the future, because the automation becomes more and more powerful, and you rely on it more and more." it's instructive to read the last story of Asimov's "I, Robot" called the "Evitable Conflict" in which the machines lead the Earth's progress.
When, given a bit-vector representation of 8 devices, would I want to do something with the "right-most" of those devices?
They can be extremely useful in error handling. They're also great as a substitute for labeled break statements if your language doesn't support them.
Thanks for this rebuttal. I did not have time to read the article.

It's interesting that these same concepts are found in existentialism -- another philosophy that has been given a bad rap by many.
Speaking of strawmen...

Please tell me which desktop you mean. Do you mean the home desktop? Or perhaps the administrative assistant desktop that needs access to the calendar, word, and email, (maybe the web too...). Perhaps you mean the desktops of the engineers, using autocad and a pile of specialized tools. And so on.

Each of the above has different needs (perhaps even vastly different). A smart consultant/company/etc would go ahead and stop trying to use the same tool for every job. Some of those environments could probably switch to linux, and after a couple of months of "getting used to it time" everything would continue on as if nothing happened.

The point is that "the desktop" has always struck me as a strawman to begin with.
Oh, how about almost anyone who needs to work with a commercial printer? And I said Gimp is fine "for the web". Were you listening?

This is not a question of "best" vs. "good enough" for those who need CMYK and color management. It's a question of "works" vs. "doesn't work".
You're XORing 32 into 2, multiplying it by the top word, and adding the bottom word?

Also, you think exponentiation and multiplication is faster than a shift and an OR? I think you're the target audience for this article, and I revise my opinion (thankfully unstated) about whether this is material every developer "must" know.
for example, those 8 devices were 8 LEDs, some of them on, and you'd want to turn the rightmost led off. :)

edit: i'll look into more serious applications when i write that article on bit trick applications.
What Does the SAT Test? (2004)
This is a topic I'm really interested in, and I do sympathize with your situation. I have no advice for you, but here's my experience.

I hold a Masters in EE (control theory). I have never really found studying Mathematics formidably intimidating, probably because I've been at it for some time now.

But I totally suck at the following things:

- Solving problems that require really inspired "crux" moves. Think IMO level problems, lighter versions of Euler's solution to the Basel problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_problem) etc.

- Coming up with abstractions and new Mathematics. Think (again) Euler's invention of graph theory or Cantor's invention of Set theory.

- Recalling what I've learned just months after their immediate use is over. For example, I had to cover quite a bit of math for my BEng. But if you ask me now about real analysis, PDEs, stochastic processes or fourier transforms, I'd be stumped.

I strongly suspect that this is because we haven't analyzed and understood the problem of learning Mathematics well. To give you an example, 200 years ago people were trying to get fit. But it was not until the invention of systematic strength training with free weights and machines, etc., that we could really do a reasonably good job of it efficiently. Early body builders look like sticks compared to monsters of today.

I am hoping that such a revolution happens in education as well. Before we learn, we must really learn how to learn. Our knowledge of that is very limited now.
I don't call it the theory of gravity, I call it the Law of Gravity. Or the Newtonian Laws of Physics.

A theory, in the general sense of the word, is an analytic structure designed to explain a set of observations.

A Law is a generalization that describes recurring facts or events in nature

Laws are predicated on reproducible experiments. An idea is a theory before the experimental evidence is amassed and confirmed.
Your quote does not support your claim that the comments are for interesting and insightful discussion only. in fact, there are some untold guidelines that you must abide by to not be voted into the grey oblivion. One, as the grandparent found out, is that you must only post things that others to deem beneficial. The only yc-sanctioned method of showing support is to vote up. Another strict one is no humor, even if it adds to the conversation.
The kinetic energy in this thing must be fierce. I'd hate to suck up something metallic with it.

More info on switched reluctance motors here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched_Reluctance_Motor
I believe that Rivers Cuomo (Weezer) also travelled to Russia to have one of his legs lengthened (he previously suffered from some pretty severe back problems). So there are reason for lengthening legs beyond wanting to be taller.

http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/bio/index.jsp?pid=149273
Konstantine Othmer on the Valley Advantage
Yahoo's "Computing Coop" Data Center Design
Yes, but a large number of items sold by third parties are not fulfilled by amazon.com. For example if you look at the treadmills in the sports section, only items sold by Amazon.com have prime or super saver.
I understand wave-particle duality, thank you. Irrelevant, really. We're talking separate photons, not the same photon moving across the moon. If it was actually moving across the moon, you would never see it, because it would not be traveling back to your eyes
I think objectivists usually do a pretty poor job of articulating the philosophy... that thread seems to be no exception.
Why would I want to swap the same var with itself?
I love VirtualBox so much. Thanks to Innotek for the free and open-source distribution. I do use the closed source version though.

If only they would support branching snapshopts. For example a main VM and then you could have one work tree and one webbrowsing tree. This would make using it for daily work even more appealing. Well, some day, I am sure.
Correlation =/= causation.
I still haven't seen research that leads me to think that sleeping too long directly effects your health negatively as this article states. It is more likely that unhealthy people sleep longer due to overall health issues, not the other way round.

Having said that, there are some other good, practical points later on in the article.
No, I'm not saying that Linq to SQL will replace the SQL Server plan optimization; I'm merely pointing out that a well-optimized (and perhaps dynamic, using reflection) query provider could probably generate better, more efficient SQL queries than 99% of developers in 99% of use cases. You might miss out on some potential optimizations simply because you're trying to get the code working right instead of spending hours to shave a few milliseconds off of your query's execution time (plus, nobody's perfect!)
Reading such a long article with such a moot point is a waste of time...

More seriously, the point of the article, from a skim, appears to be that "writing too many unit tests is a waste of time". Well, duh. Save 15 minutes of your life and pass on this one, methinks.
Gattaca, anyone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
I considered that solution. And in thinking about why I chose to do bit-shifting, I remembered why: I actually needed to combine two _signed_ 32 bit integers in MySQL, and since I wasn't sure how signed integers are stored in MySQL, I figured that I could just use bit-shifting and move on.
I don't completely agree with the article. I am a firm believer that SAT Score provides some credibility to your thinking ability but calling it an IQ test is not correct. IQ test doesn't require any syllabus, its a general methodology to determine how you intellectually analyze.

We are developing SAT prep apps for iPhone, desktop and web and I believe that people can score higher if they practice a lot which is not true for an IQ test IMO.
Have you (or anyone) compared VirtualBox to a desktop virtualization package, such as VMware Fusion? How does it stack up?
Using crowdsourcing and Django to dig through the expenses of the UK Parliament
The length organisms will go to reproduce is "as far as it takes".
This is a pretty good list of the value judgments typically made by objectivists, and more generally libertarian-capitalists:

'First, in our system "underprivileged" people essentially do not exist. The percentage of people genuinely unable to support themselves is infintesimal. We do have quite a collection of moochers and bums, but that is no one's responsibility but their own.'
'What would stop welfare recipients from becoming working, productive members of society when their taxpayer-looted dole is cut off? Nothing but sheer laziness and a continued desire to remain parasites, in defiance of reality'
etc.
Extrapolating further, once computerized implantable medical devices and/or nanotechnology become more prevalent, his general point will be even scarier.
Deflation may be the "normal state of affairs when the Government isn't inflating the currency", but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem. And that's a flawed description of affairs.

Deflation is more specifically the normal state of affairs when the government enforces a legal tender law on a scarce, slow-growing currency such as gold. It doesn't happen when the currency is fast-growing, like silver was in the late 19th century, or like tobacco was during the colonial period. And it doesn't happen in a barter system. The establishment of the gold standard was a major political effort that was only accomplished by the McKinley administration around the turn of the 20th century (having been preceded with an even less tenable system of bimetallism that finally collapsed due to the Nevada silver rush).

As for whether deflation is a problem, deflation disincents both investment and spending, which means in a very real way that deflation disincents economic growth. The situation you describe would also be possible only with a return to the gold standard, which would effectively price gold out of any kind of industrial use--something that would have negative economic repercussions in itself, and which would likely cause extremely high rates of deflation in the future.
Unfortunately it is not possible to do that efficiently with just a few bit operations because of the following theorem:

Theorem. A function mapping words to words can be implemented with word-parallel add, subtract, and, or, and not instructions if and only if each bit of the result depends only on bits at and to the right of each input operand.

The proof and comments are in the Hacker's Delight book!

That's why it's not in the article.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=671197

Much comment there already.
I agree.

I think his point was pretty clear, but his subsequent conclusion regarding the risk factor just seems completely nonsensical to me -- I mean, you could bet on any not-correlated-to-the-stock-market-event, regardless of its probability or odds factor, and it would have yielded less risk than holding CDOs as per his assessment. He's just talking about diversifying, but with the assumption that a stock market crash / economic crisis is imminent.
Of course, it is easy. When you're already assuming something like RSS feeds for app updates exists, don't you think it's possible to have an application download them once a week and update all apps automatically? For an end-user, there's no difference to APT.

Also, you seem to misunderstand the point. To have a third kind of distribution -- "stable foundation and recent apps" -- doesn't affect your choice of distribution, at all. When you're satisfied with Gentoo, you simply continue using it.
If only she'd heard of high heels and platform shoes before the surgery ...
Very much agreed. The SAT tests knowledge acquired in specific areas. Not the same as functional IQ.
I right-clicked on the video and it says 'Flash 11'.

Is it possible that if Flash isn't present, it shows it natively using Firefox?
Okay okay ... I should have written:

import math; math.pow(2,32)

I tried to use the double star operator, but that is markup for italics in this software, so it was edited out.
I've only used it for servers.
That would make tsally's problem worse, since every significant new feature would have a spot on HN, rather than having all related features grouped under a few spots.
"The simple printed book is much more conducive to promoting thinking than the sophisticated Web. If a book does not provide all the information that one needs, some of the information has to be deduced and some of it has to be imagined."

Not everyone will agree with this, but that point really resonated with me.

Worth the read. I found myself feeling a bit convicted. I may stop by the library later tonight and pick up a book.
Are the new non-SQL databases agile? As my users require new ways to query and glean information from the data, will they grow with it? I'm not sure. What if down the road my users want to perform join-like behavior, aggregates and other things that SQL does so well?
I think that it doesn't matter how much energy it wastes provided you'll only use it for your laptop. 1/(1-.45) * $1 a month is still negligible compared to the pain in the ass it is to get it plugged in every time you want to use it. At this point it's not meant for lighting a house or powering a TV.
Wind Turbines on Power Lines?
i agree. and i really don't like the reliance on SAT scores for college admissions. is it an indicator, sure, but it isn't extremely accurate.
I didn't get a chance to read the parent posting before it was killed. Are we, his parents worried that labeling might do harm? Sure. But, we're a lot more worried that not taking preventative/corrective action would be a lot worse.

Our son is attending our public school's early intervention pre-school program (fantastic, btw), and we're sending him to private speech therapy and are considering other interventions.

Diagnosis wise, I agree with your view. Why not HFA or PDD-Nos? There's definitely something wrong though -- he shows little interest in playing with other children, physically cringes when there's lots of noise/confusion, and does a bunch of other stuff that strongly suggests an autism spectrum disorder.