skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He started measuring the ignorance among students and professors and the surprising results from the so called “Chimpanzee Test” were presented in his first TED-talk in 2006.

In the test question Hans combined 5 pairs of countries. Each pair had one Asian country and one European country. He asked the students to pick the country in each pair which had twice the child mortality of the other country. If the country names had been written on 5 pairs of bananas, on average the chimpanzee would score 2.5 correct answers. To Hans’s great surprise his Global Health Students performed worse than the chimps, i.e. worse than random.
http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/
No. Carbon dating is only reliable back to ~50ka (50,000 years before present), at most ~100ka. For older things, you're typically dating the formation of a mineral grain. Common methods are Potassium/Argon and Uranium/Lead dating.

The ages are based on the stratigraphy that the fossils are in. We can "easily" correlate stratigraphy across wide areas, but most sedimentary rocks are hard to date. For these particular fossils, the stratigraphy happens to contain a lot of volcanic ash units that can be directly dated. In most cases, we use the fossils present (biostratigraphy) to correlate with other units that can be directly dated.

The exact numerical age is based on dating things like feldspar grains in volcanic units that can be dated with K/Ar dating or zircons in volcanics that can be dated with U/Pb, etc, etc.
A New Loyalty Program For Cloud Servers
A neat little toy - but to me flat doesn't just mean a certain color scheme - it also means having a certain elegance to site interactions and a design philosophy that trends closer to minimalistic. None of these sites meet that criteria IMHO.

And that's not a bad thing. Variety is the spice of life. Decisions on design shouldn't be made based on trends - they should be based on usability. Some site benefit from simple interfaces and some benefit from complexity.
Came here to point that out.
I wonder why google's is so far behind.
A more comparable statistic would be how many one year old gas powered vehicles catch on fire each year.
I've got a problem with the way people are implementing this 'flat UI' style and I think it's leading to a disastrous usability nightmare!

Some of the 'design' concepts represented by drop shadows, borders, and text-shadows are about function, not (just) aesthetics and when you remove those functional parts of a layout you are left with a less usable layout.

Personally, I love the minimalism and rationalism in the design approach of Dieter Rams, who is (now) considered the father of the design style that Apple has made popular. I also love colour planar imagery (flat sections of colour) like vector illustrations and iconography.

The problem with how many people are implementing this flat style in UI is that we're letting go of valuable information that makes software and websites usable in the first place. This style works great for static pieces (like print, or screen graphics that don't change) and of course looks clean and gorgeous in non-functioning Photoshop mockups - but when you get this style onto websites and into apps it's often done in a way that just falls flat of its full potential.

There's my 2¢. I've been lusting after minimalism in design approach and dying for when colour planar aesthetic style became popular, but now it's here too many people are doing it all wrong (even the big ones, like Apple with iOS7)
How to Screw Up Your Scrum
Giving money to charity is good. But if you worked less, you'd have more time to volunteer. I'd say that's more valuable.
Twttr 101 (2006)
Does anyone else feel that the recent antics of GCHQ have tarnished the legacy of Bletchley Park's wartime efforts?
New interpretation of Beowulf's first line
Care to expand how? Curious as a Rails developer myself.
5 free Google Helpouts on Tech
The owners of Twitter prior to the flotation have basically sold a chunk of what they owned on the stock market. To do that they needed to put a value on those shares. Determining that price is pretty tricky but through one mechanism or another they settled on $26 a share.

The fact that people are now willing to buy them for $46 a share suggests that they basically sold them at too low a price (arguably $20 a share too low).

In doing so they've lost out on a fair bit of money. Establishing a value ahead of the flotation is difficult and often companies will err on the side of caution (that is sell slightly cheap) to make the sell off look like a success, but I think it's being suggested that this gap is too big to just be that and that some of the previous owners may be unhappy that they've lost out.
It's a 503 error now but would be nice to see Singapore inside!
Based on experience its by far the most cost effective method in a competitive market.
The price movement is based on difference from the previous day's close, not today's open. Those may differ if there was news overnight. In this case, there isn't really a previous day's close, just the price that was set.

Google Finance doesn't seem to show previous close, but Yahoo Finance does:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TWTR
Definitely a long term bull but I agree that my execution could use some refining :) I like your strategy suggestion.
Entrepreneurs as Dissidents and Composers
Well now you are assuming the documentation is telling the truth. The reality is, things still don't go to disk as often as you think.

http://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-mongodb
I read the summary at http://www.arbornetworks.com/asert/2013/11/healthcare-gov-do...

Sorry, I don't buy that anyone would've written a custom application to DDoS a web site by slowly loading two relatively static pages on the site when there are a billion tools out there that will do the same thing far more effectively (see LOIC for just one popular example).

This almost seems like a false flag to make healthcare.gov into an innocent victim of a DDoS attack when as the original article says there is no evidence of an actual DDoS attack.
If you want to index on specific field with PostgreSQL you could use function indexes and bring the index size down
A good question, remember Don Syme and Simon Peyton Jones even work in the same building...
Thanks for the great feedback and the compliment! You're right, the sorting feature is still not functioning well. It's on the to do list (the to dos are pilling up with all the great feedback we're getting here:)). Thanks for letting me know!
There are a number of things you can do to stay focused and on task. Some of them you probably already do.

The first is to simply have a clearly defined goal. While this is obvious, it is also easy to miss. If we don't have a clearly defined task, we don't know whether or not we've completed it.

But even if you have a clearly defined goal, it can still be easy to get distracted. There are two primary reasons for this. The first: If you don't know what the next step is, it can be difficult to stay focused. The next time you get stuck, ask yourself how clearly you know what your next step is. If you're not sure what to do, then make sure you spend the time figuring that out.

But what if you have a clear goal, and you know exactly what you need to do, but you're still not staying focused?

Then you've probably got a motivation problem. The way to deal with this is pretty straight forward. Simply spend time thinking about the reasons it is important to complete the task, or achieve the goal. Don't try to trick yourself here. Be honest. If you can't find any good enough reasons to stay focused, then maybe you should be doing something else.

In summary: Have a clearly defined goal. Make sure you know exactly what you're next step is. And make sure you have the proper motivation.

If you're interested in this stuff, I recommend reading about the "mental contrasting" technique, as well as the book "Succeed" by Heidi Grant Halvorson.
Last year’s Funding leads to New Growth at Miradore
Opening price was $45.01 according to Google Finance, $45.10 according to the WSJ, and $45.10 according to Yahoo finance. Not $26. Insider pre-order price was $26.
Following conventions without good reason is bad design.
How about calling it what it is? "Self-employment" is exactly what he's doing, we need no other name for it.
> starting with our clean protocol implementations (SMTP, POP, IMAP) and does not require external projects.

I'm curious of the reasoning behind your decision to reimplement SMTP instead of just using Postfix, for example. I run mail servers for an ISP (and myself) and take advantage of a lot of the "advanced" functionality that Postfix has acquired in the last 15 years.
A 5 year old genius turns down a Sony tablet on Jimmy Kimmel
Sorry Freddy, I got excited and replied immediately after you. ;)
Runtime code generation doesn't work on Android. This means all the reverse dependencies of cglib, for example. That is huge part of JVM ecosystem.
Twitter's advantage is that companies already use the platform to broadcast things to followers. So "ads" are already inherently in the platform - but now they can pay money to broadcast those tweets to more than just people who follow them.

And it can be more targeted than something like Facebook because they can say "Show this ad to people who follow our competitors" (I have no idea if you can actually do this in the platform now, but I'm sure they are working on something like it). That is very powerful because those people presumably are in your market and since they follow your competitors they are welcome to seeing ad-like tweets in their timeline.
Great read. This sentence sums it up best I think, "Why, why, why would people expect to get great results if they flaunt all the best-practices that have developed over the past 20 years?"
Xctool
Hey tengkahwee, thanks for your feedback. We're moving to Asia next. Just promised another commentator to do India first but after that I'll get Singapore into the database. Can I get back to you when we're ready? Would you like to beta test?
Most of the people I know who use that phrase are being somewhat sarcastic. Most notably the helicopter pilot from Germany I knew who was getting paid absolute shit because until you make a certain number of flight hours, your options are extremely limited and you have to take a second job to make ends meet. Every time I said, "What's up?", he said "Living the dream, man!" then proceed to complain about all the shit he has to put up with. He loves flying, but the "dream" is anything but.
Bitcoin Mining Is A 374+ Million Dollar Per Year Industry, And Growing
IRFCA - EARLY MORNING RAILFANNING AT DASNA (300th UPLOAD)
What's the best way to find Beta testers?
We've built a MVP jotgram.com and looking for Beta testers. Any advice on best approach to get testers?
Legal pot means big changes for state’s drug-sniffing dogs
Even better: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow/2.2.1

(though, it doesn't support py<=2.5)
> Also the 100ms of latency is a limitation of JDBC

Yeah, JDBC has no provision for asynchronous notification. The alternative is to create/use libpq bindings directly.
They definitely paint him as a narcissist. :-) I thought it was a fairly balanced portrayal. That said, nothing in the article convinced me that AOL wouldn't have been better off just mining the AOL subscription revenue and paying it back to shareholders. (2 billion a year in 2008, still 800 million in 2012 according to their most recent 10K http://ir.aol.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=147895&p=irol-10k10q)
This feels like something that is really in line with early ideas of what the internet/www should be.

When reading about some piece of science I often wish I could gauge how certain science is about something and why. Human evolution is always going to be a fascinating topic. It's got a lot of uncertainties, contradictory theories and less-than-certain facts that make it into pop science.

Do we have hundreds of high quality fossils for some homo species or is it just a few skull fragments? It's great to be able to interact with evidence/finds like this directly.
it has huge value to me - as a deep learning person, the data on twitter is very valuable
Google tried to pioneer a Dutch auction IPO when they went public in 2004. Buyers would make bids for an amount of stock, and somewhat bypassing the banks, but it was less than successful.

The idea has never taken off, not yet anyway. It seems the banks still play an important role in marshalling large funds, and there's apparently significant benefit from a "hot" stock gaining on day 1 (albeit irrational).
I suppose it depends on who you are trying to please. If you are Twitter, it's a major loss.

If you give a shit about bankers (most of us do not), then you win.
Long story short, I get put on performance review, threat of termination. Boss gives me exacting standards for project to complete by X date, reviews everything I do and I have to write a progress report every 2 days that's reviewed (usually). Boss asks, "why did your performance improve so much?"

I'd never even seen a project plan before a few months ago...
One of the things that make the JVM so cool is the easy interoperability of most JVM languages. It's good to have languages like Java (or Kotlin), Clojure, Frege and Erjang on the JVM, each with its own strengths. Each can remain relatively simple and consistent, and all interoperate and share libraries. This is far better than that "bastardized travesty" trying to be all languages at once, and ending up an incoherent mess, retaining little of the advantages of those simple languages.
This is incredibly, incredibly exciting for me.

A friend and I actually just finished writing a program that simulates the process of cracking a Geheimschreiber[0] (one of the successors to the Enigma machine), which was cracked at Bletchley Park.

There are several ways to break the encryption today, especially given the available computing power. However, we happened to discover a technique that requires no probabilistic guessing or brute forcing (this is unusual for crypto cracking - usually at least a bit[1] of guessing is required). The technique works as long as a sufficient number of ciphertexts are observed, and this threshold is a very small number.

For me, it'll be exciting to see if there is any more information on the technique that they used. (From digging around so far, I've been able to find a small bit of information about the device itself from a modern perspective, but none about what they actually did at the time).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geheimschreiber

[1] No pun intended
It seems like code reviews are partially for inspecting the product, and partially for teaching and inculcating cultural norms.

Are the managers who don't like this just non-technical? Or are they just not being presented the value in a clear enough way?
I don't think he's using the word "flaunt" correctly. It struck me as off -- sure enough, the definition agrees with me.

"Flaunt: to parade or display... conspicuously. The use of 'flaunt' to mean 'to ignore or treat with disdain' is strongly objected to by many usage guides.'"

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Flaunt
Amazing! We're building a Kayak for Healthcare Services btw. Launching next week :)

Love your product.
I wonder when designers will quit it with the "minimalistic interfaces are better (because I read it on a blog)" trend.
But the bankers come up with those magical "buy/hold/sell" recommendations that everyone else listens to and panic-sells when their advice says so. Or "oops, they missed our magically predicted revenue by one penny per share". It's all part of the game.
An API for developers would be really nice for integrating into personal ecommerce websites. It's a pain dealing with all the couriers individually. Please also consider adding support for Purolator and Canada Post.
Regarding the profitability piece, they closed their mopub acquisition this week - something i believe will make or break the future of TWTR reopvenue... I believe the money is on that piece to perform or the company is dead in the water.
Which one claims that all actors in a market have perfect information?
It's interesting to compare this to CAL - an earlier Haskell-like language on the JVM that was a project of some of my former colleagues at Crystal Decisions/Business Objects back in the 00's: http://openquark.org/Welcome.html

I've worked quite a bit with CAL over the years and it has been used for some serious work. One of my big frustrations with it though has been the clunkiness of the Java interop, especially since this is one of the reasons you might choose to use a language on the JVM.

Looking at the Frege docs, I like the look of the way this has been handled - rather than using an FFI-style approach, things like Int, String etc map directly to Java types and Java classes can be used like ADTs, which would make life way, way easier.

Given the nature of the language calling Frege from Java is always going to be more complicated but it looks like they've done a nice "fluent" Java API for calling into the runtime.

Would be interesting to see how this performs relative to CAL, in terms of both speed and space.
A challenge to the Twitter IPO winners
Systems, systems, systems. Spot on.

Just as in manufacturing, you cannot produce quality by blaming the individual worker. Japanese manufacturers learned this from W. Edwards Deming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming) and it continues to be true to this day, but for some reason the natural human instinct is to blame the individuals instead of the systems.

Improve your individuals and you can improve your quality maybe twofold, threefold at best. You might chance upon a "rockstar," but probably not.

Worse, blame your individuals and you lose productivity, lose trust, lose culture, instill fear, and break ties. Negative reinforcement brings unpredictable negative consequences.

Improve your systems, your culture, your process, your communication, and everything surrounding the production of your product, and you can improve your quality tenfold or more, and more importantly, be better prepared for a 100x or 1000x growth.

Blame your systems and they can only get better.

I can't think of a time when it's incorrect to think from a systems-first perspective.
"Overwork, overweight, and an overgrown beard"

HEY! Them's fightin' words.
Code review ranks just behind design review in value (cost/time savings). In fact code reviews are so beneficial that if I was working on a solo project I would either pay for them to be done or review the code myself after a suitable cooling off period, depending on what I was working on.

On the other hand, I have also witnessed sloppy, lazy code reviews that catch nothing except the occasional typo. This amounts to an unjustifiable waste of time. Fortunately, it is easy to tell a good code reviews from bad by tracking defect discovery and digging into review comments as needed.

One thing that code review catches that nothing else does is code that is poorly written but functional (i.e. passing tests).

The example I always trot out is

for ( int i=0 ; i < this.MyControl.TabPages.Count ; i++ )
{
this.MyControl.TabPages.Remove ( this.MyControl.TabPages[i] );
i--;
}

This code works according to spec, passes all the tests, but is bordering on unmaintainable. At best it's a WTF.

(Written up here: http://cvmountain.com/2011/09/whats-wrong-with-this-code-rea...)
And I can't count the amount of doctors I've gone to who are Asian, Indian or African (most of them).

Being married to a black woman (who's also an immigrant), I get to hear 'the other side' if you will, every single day. My inlaws and wife's family are quite numerous, and are all immigrants. Let's just put it this way - they
don't think the same way white people do.

Most immigrants think going through so much schooling to become a vet is a waste of time. Taking a tech job temporarily en route to something better is at least understandable.

I love how everyone is so quick to jump on the discrimination train. Maybe travel to some non-white countries and hang out with non-white people who aren't in the same industry and you'll realize there ARE cultural differences.

In Canada over half of all small businesses are owned by women, yet most 'tech' start-ups are owned by men. If you break down the numbers further, approx 1/4 of CS graduates are women, yet less than that number are in tech start-ups. Maybe there's a valid reason, beyond discrimination...
"Flout" is the word most likely intended.

flout (verb) 1. openly disregard (a rule, law or convention).
Perfect analogy with the architect.
Consulting has its challenges, but one of the most amazing perks is charging for value, not time. Once I demonstrate the value of the project to the client, and bill by the week, I no longer have to justify unit testing, continuous integration, code reviews, or any other productivity decision as a tech lead. I know these are the best ways to achieve consistent long-term productivity, and so that's what we do.

Learning how to sell results has not only made me more money, but a better technologist.
I feel like there's probably plenty of people outside of tech that fall within the "normals" bucket you're referring to that get value out of Twitter. I think their real problem (besides is it sustainable) is that it's not vital or irreplaceable. If Twitter went away tomorrow the people who would be hurt the most are the ones communicating out with it, not the ones consuming from it. And those are the people they are trying to monetize.

Think of how most of us here who work on SaaS platforms would try to monetize something like Twitter if we just thought it up today and Twitter had never existed. We'd probably put a pricing structure in place along the lines of "$x/mo per million followers" or "$x/mo per $y tweets".

I know plenty of people who like Twitter and use it regularly but it's something they check now and then and if they forget to or miss something it's not a big deal to them.
Application Attack Surface
There are at least two JVM lightweight thread libraries. Kilim [1] and Quasar[2] (written mostly by me).

[1]: http://www.malhar.net/sriram/kilim/

[2]: http://puniverse.github.io/quasar/
Implementing our doc store on Postgres a while ago in lieu of switching to MongoDB suddenly seems like a very good call.

We had nothing against Mongo (frankly haven't gone into deep analysis of how it would turn out). It was simply the db we already had at hand and we knew it well and trusted it.
> what they're being taught is deprecated and not worth a lot.

It's only "not worth a lot" if the only thing they're being taught is the specifics of the language. If they're being taught to program, then that skill is trivially transferrable to other languages.
Hi jamese, the API will be ready next week! Purolator and Canada Post it is. Can I get back in touch with you when we have them integrated? Also, if you can spare some time I'd really like to learn more about what kind of pain you were experiencing with the courier services so we know what not to do!! My email is laura(at)goshippo.com
I totally agree. There's a big reason why "Flat" is in quotes. :)

From my perspective, the idea behind the bookmarklet is more of a way to give people a hint into what their site could look like if they decided to redesign it flat.

Of course there are many functional uses of depth which aren't purely for aesthetics or skeuomorphism. For people who already understand that distinction, it's fair to say this bookmarklet has less value.

But I think there's a pool of people who never considered designing their site flat. This gives them a quick way to see something like that.
Hi mansigandhi, good luck with your launch next week :)
There is no evidence that it's a "false flag" either. We'll just have to wait it out for more information.
"Use of curtains or blinds on windows could be used by pedophiles to hide their activities from their neighbors and police", says a high ranking law enforcement official who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity