skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's quite simple to implement a fair coin from a coin of unknown fairness. So simple, I put it in a children's book.

http://carlos.bueno.org/2011/10/fair-coin.html
Don't be unnecessarily obtuse - of course I meant the first black US president.
I'd take the bet if you'd be willing to take the position that he'll be released in 7 years. Betting hat he'll be paroled somewhere between 7 and 35 years is silly.
I posted about it here before. It may be too dry, but I find it quite entertaining. https://twitter.com/NEWS_XX14
Narcissism. Ooh look at how clever I am! I'm so smart!
Please victim, will you validate my cleverness?
I doubt it this was a weekend project...since the app already has a team of 6. Don't lie HN just because it would be a good marketing strategy for your app.
Some of the worst startup advice I've ever read
Getting nominated is pretty low bar, Joseph Stalin has also been nominated.
It's highly unlikely, but unlikely things happen. There exists people who have won the lottery and have been struck by lightning.
I hope not! My iPod Classic is probably my favourite piece of consumer electronics. It has a function, and it does it incredibly well. I've had all sorts of MP3 players over the past decade, but none of them have been as great as the classic.

I always have a huge library, the battery lasts, the interface is great and it just keeps working. I drop it on a regular basis and it's scratched to shit.

On reflection I can see why the iPod business is slowing down. It's a mature industry.
If you were to be walking down the street and for no particular reason walk into a probability lab and watch two scientists immediately flip 76 heads in a row then, based on observed evidence, you'd be inclined to believe an unfair coin.

But that's very unlikely to happen if you've got a fair coin. Almost certainly you'll flip ungodly zillions of failing sequences first before hitting any particular pre-ordained target. So with a fair coin the story is that you peep in on a probability lab and then wait there until just before the heat death of the universe and suddenly observe 76 heads.

So honestly, in any fair coin situation your Bayesian probabilistic update going on will actually be predicated on very different evidence.
I feel like there's been little adoption of innovative changes to HCI in terms of software development. Most engineers I know still use the same old keyboard/mouse/monitor. I am curious if there will ever be a time when software development resembles something like football.
That is interesting. What would you think if someone applied who had several years C# experience, but had only used python in their spare time on one or two small projects? Assume they have solid understanding of general software development, but they'd need to get used to writing python in your work environment?
Yes! I came in here to recommend that one as well. He does an excellent job of not only talking about the mechanics of the language, but also the system components to which the mechanics directly relate: and he does so in a way that is both easy to understand and thorough. Such a good book.
I agree to an extent. If I'm offered standard market rate then this will be very different to a situation where a developer has factored into the price the assignment of all IP. I agree that in your case, the developer would be well positioned to argue that an attempt by the employer to enforce should be thrown out as a restraint on trade (at least under UK law).

On the second point, the contract isn't unenforceable as a consequence of one party fraudulently/mistakenly attempting to give away something they are not in a position to.

If I'm the company, I take an indemnity from the developer which means I will be covered (well subject to the insurance/assets of the developer) if a previous employer attempts to assert its rights over IP I'm using. In the same way as it's the employee's decision to assign all rights, it's the company's decision to accept the assurances of the employee that the employee is in a position to assign.
I rolled snake eyes in a game of Risk 6 times in a row and I lost because of it. That is about the extent of ridiculous luck I've run into.
you know what?

this is actually something that we should contact our elected officials on

what has to happen here? someone at the State Department has to sign off on it?

that sounds like the sort of thing the right congressman or senator making a phone call could make happen

that also sounds like the sort of thing that many congressmen and senators would enjoy bragging about accomplishing
Being Man of the Year isn't necessarily an honor. From Wikipedia:

Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual
issue of the United States newsmagazine Time that features
and profiles a person, group, idea or object that "for
better or for worse...has done the most to influence the
events of the year."
How do they make money? They buy lots of coffee for themselves?
> I think the point is more for PR purposes

Oh, believe me, I get that ... ;)
Well theoretically all this global spying and bombing targets from remote controlled airplanes piloted half a world away should be making a safer more peaceful world right?
How do you propose to find out?
It looks like Starbucks gift cards sell for a roughly 20% discount on eBay†. The discount seems to be proportionally higher for higher value cards (who really wants a $400 Starbucks card?). So I guess you get a better deal buying cards on Card for Coin at a 30-40% discount to face value but you get a better deal selling them on eBay...

† http://www.ebay.com/sch/Gift-Cards-/172009/i.html?_from=R40&...
> It's not a conflation, it's a difference in perception.

The difference between communitarianism and authoritarianism is not one of perception. It's one of "we decide that this is how we behave" versus "some authority decides how we behave." Whether American Christianity is communitarian or authoritarian may be one of perception, but what perspective do you have as someone who is admittedly unfamiliar with American Christianity?

> It's a strict hierarchy that comes straight down from a deity, branching off to layers of people with power derived and intertwined with that religion. Obedience is seen as a mandatory trait, and those Communitarian properties are only exhibited as long as members don't violate one of the many arbitrary tenets and restrictions on behavior. One of the many restrictions is by necessity the censure of science and knowledge.

This is not actually how religion functions in the U.S., especially among Protestant Christians, which are the largest religious group. I'm not religious, but my wife is, so I attend services about once a month. The message revolves around finding a personal relationship with God, not blind obedience to "many arbitrary tenants and restrictions on behavior." That's the meat and potatoes of mainstream American Christianity. Indeed, there is an anti-authoritarianism built into Protestant Christianity: it is based on a rejection of the authority of the Catholic Church to dictate the meaning of the religion, and elevates individuals seeking a personal, individual connection with God.
Did you guys consider doing something like Simple English Wikipedia instead of a different language? From my experience ( I know, I know, anecdotal evidence) with non-native english speakers using english they seem to be most worried about making mistakes, if they are talking to someone who is also not a native speaker they tend to communicate better simply due to worrying less.
One cannot assume that a system that works for one industry is good for all of them. I'll provide some examples: "six sigma" is useful in manufacturing, but its statistical defect analysis methods are awkward at best when applied to software. Cinnamon works well for flavoring apple cider, but not so much beef gravy.
Care.com raises $91 million in IPO
It doesn't seem quite so ridiculous when you realize that the endemic attitude is that the company should be able to hire someone that can "hit the ground running" and be productive from the hire date.

From that perspective, allowing for a whole month of training seems almost extravagant. That is why people say it. It is to counteract the sheer idiocy of expecting instant productivity.
There's also lots of money to be made in pivoting/combining your career learned lessons to date and applying them to a different area.

For example, you could take all that great knowledge about unit testing you learned in the Ruby space, and jump into Cobol and in all likelihood you will not only be able to share a new thing or two to some Cobol folks, you might contribute to far better maintained Cobol code.

The new ideas tend to congregate to the language-du-jour.

Of course, most of the "new ideas" were done on Smalltalk and Lisp years ago, but I digress.
I'm assuming they're not re-selling anything. They're acting as a data aggregator to simplify the product search process to a single site. They then link to the site and, in the case of Amazon, they get money through affiliate programs. Had a similar idea for shoes. Didn't work very hard on it and only made a few pennies before I shut it down.
I agree with you unless we count 76 heads occurring anywhere within 500 flips, not all contiguously.
Any number of countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. All you need is to operate from a country that doesn't honor the laws of your target's country.

This kind of fraud happens with outsourced manufacturing in China all the time. Not limited to china but it's just the first thing that came to my mind.
Canonical example would be marshelling one type to another, something that typically requires a fair amount of boilerplate in statically typed languages, whereas in Ruby, Grooy et al you just do something like:
complex_object.to_json

and you're done with it (assumes a valid object of course, which can be a rather large assumption on the dynamic side of the fence ;-)).

It's a total PITA in Scala to query your DBMS; marshall a tuple result to a collection of case class(es) and then have to go down boilerplate road again in order to create a a typesafe JSON result.

I basically render everything server-side and use JSON sparingly (e.g. AJAX responses). Until Scala pickling or other cutting edge lib allows me to convert an arbitrarily complex object graph from A to B without the boilerplate, I'll keep to the server-side and leave client-side templating...off to the side.
$50 is reasonable only in relation to how awesome the app is. Only have the fluff on your page to determine that now.

That said, I am interested in learning more and signed up. I don't always have access to a "designer" and this seems like a good idea.
>At the end of the day, csmithuk viewpoint is a solution/enterprise architect's view point which caters more to the overall business needs of a company.

Not really. I've worked as an Enterprise Architect and worked in good as well as bad architectures. If you engineer a system that backs the company into a corner of "we can never upgrade," then you're a crappy architect. Even more so if you can't hire someone to step in and maintain a project or have a drought of hardware suppliers.

>The challenge of changing the status quo once that tech has become embedded in their business processes is twice has hard.

Business process is not synonymous with "tech stack." If it becomes synonymous, you done fucked up.

>And based on my experience, the challenge of getting any new technology in a company that is mature and successful is really hard.

That's because some people do tech-for-tech's-sake. If you open the conversation with "hey, if we switch out IIS for nginx/apache, it will take 8 months, but we'll save money on maintenance and licenses, as well as spending less money on hardware," then you're in better shape than just pitching the new hotness. Of course, it's been my experience that these decisions are usually done on a whim in mature companies (hooray business!).

>There is always a benefit/cost ratio. The cost is not just development - it's training, its documentation, its lost time, etc.

Yes, of course. It's also cost of life management, staffing costs for niche/antiquated skills/getting developers willing to do long-term damage to their skills (imagine becoming an expert in coding for IE9 and lower, how do you think your resume will look in a few years?) for short-term profit.
I've just taken a return back to my nearest convenient Collect+ location. It's a 30 minute walk away, despite me living on a busy shopping road with lots of suitable places.

They really need to expand this a considerable amount. I'm not against the idea of giving keys to Amazon, if done in the right way. More ideally, I'd have an electronic lock that could grant them access for particular orders.
I'm an iPhone user, so take this with a grain of salt, but it is utterly incomprehensible to me that a phone OS would allow an application I install to "monitor my phone calls [and] intercepts them to display ads"

You fucking kidding me? And you paid money for this phone?
this is just a website with affiliate links to buy furniture, I don't understand how this is unique.
That is a great way to make Snowdens life a little safer.
Could be that, but that would indeed be a misinterpretation. Could also be that people who don't agree with a reasoning tend to try to twist other people's words to make their arguments look wrong.

Anyway, I'll try to be stupid and mean next time so there is no ambiguity.
I think combining pgp with tor solves that problem, the issue is main stream usability. Even beyond that a bigger core problem is that many (most?) people communicate outside of email because it's too slow. Facebook chat, google hangouts, iMessage, SMS - these are the real things that matter to secure today.

As much heat as cryptocat has taken - I think they have the right idea and are working on an important problem (whispersys too). Security should be built in and easily adoptable. It should be equivalently usable to what people are already communicating with or they won't use it.
After the aggressiveness of the current administration, you think there is a chance the next administration might come along and say "nope, they need to serve the full 35 years".

The sentence is 35 years. They could legally be forced to serve the full 35 for any reason. As far as I am concerned that is the weight being hung around their neck, not the imaginary eight.

And eight years in prison is an insanely long time, don't forget the terrible health care and dangers from other inmates. You can lose all your teeth and die from infections very easily if someone decides to just let you rot.
I know nothing about Eve, but it seems like the cool parts of Ender's Game come to life. Is that a fair assessment? I love the strategic aspects, but don't appreciate that it seems impossible to enjoy as a casual gamer.
The Anatomy of a Social Engineering Attack
They already have a way of making induced pluripotent stem cells without using embryos. I think it involves using a virus to inject certain genes. My cells were turned into stem cells in this manner and can be ordered online by researchers.

If this new technique is cheaper/easier, that's awesome, but the debate should have already shifted past ebryos.
Of course it depends on your "belief system". It's called morals. And what makes a certain set of moral rules superior to a certain other set? That's a centuries old question that will probably not be settled in this forum, but a good approach is the wideness of its adoption among the population. There's probably much more consensus on murder being wrong, than on providing free education being wrong.

But you're welcome to challenge both in the courts of justice and public opinion.
On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
golfscape - A connected network of worldwide golf courses
On the off-chance this is a serious question;

As a developer, I want to know if my ideas are going to fly, so when a post for a non-existent product hits HN front page I know there's at least some interest.

As a prospective user I want a chance to influence development. When a post hits front-page I get a chance to check out the idea before it is set in stone.

As a HN reader I want to see what others are thinking about and doing. It's inspiring.
I totally agree. And again I don't want to excuse their behavior.

But it being inconsistently easy to find a source and copyright information is also a problem that it would be nice to have solved. That there's a lot of variance in this process is itself a disincentive to engaging in it.

It would be beneficial for everyone if, in general, finding sources was as easy as finding the images to begin with. There's no in principle reason (or is there?) why technology has to make content discovery easy and source discovery difficult, it just is that way right now.
For good companies, laundry lists of skills are more like wish lists than requirements, especially with niche technologies. Use the job description to figure out what general kind of developer they're looking for (low level? database? UI? enterprise? team lead?) and apply if you're interested.

Regarding the idea in your edit, huge companies like Facebook and Google do have coding puzzles and competitions. People who excel in those surely gain confidence to apply to all sorts of job openings.
Sounds like you really like SQLite. WebSQL is dead and never coming back. It doesn't make sense for the Chrome developers to maintain an old API that's not part of the web platform just because some people don't like the alternative. Eventually someone will create a library that lets you do SQL with IndexedDB (if they haven't already) and you'll get the best of both worlds.

By the way, Mozilla was the primary party that objected to WebSQL and it wasn't because of an NoSQL agenda, it's because they didn't want to tie a web API to 1 specific implementation (SQLite).
> Microsoft IIS susceptible to CVE-XXXXXXXX. Recommend applying accordingly patch.

> Another almost good finding - but according to the appendix, this host is a RHEL 5.x box. Those sysadmins - finding ways to run IIS on linux!! Brilliant!

I used to see crap like this all the time coming out of PCI compliance audits. The hosts I dealt with ran Apache on RHEL, too. We'd point this out, and they'd "accept" that "fix."
> Theft plain and simple.

Well, no, not plain and simple. At the worst, it's copyright infringement.

You may think this is a pedantic correction, and from your point of view, maybe it is. But it isn't for people who see intellectual property as unjust.
I really don't want to diss your work, I respect your intentions to bring scientific discoveries to the masses, but...

This is part of a huge problem in science, the "one sentence summaries", or simple interpretations. It might be tempting to think that knowing a one sentence summary is better than not hearing about the research at all, but it's not so obvious to me.

Most (social science, nutrition, environmental science, economics, psychology etc.) research is deeply flawed. That includes study design, statistical analysis and interpretations. Politicians love to through money at scientists that look for simple straightforward causal relationships between such incredibly complex systems as human behaviour, brain chemistry, nutrition, genetics, etc. And that's why there is so little reproducible research. You won't get a right or wrong answer about whether, say, cannabis is harmful without taking into account, a person's genetics, daily stress, the use of coffee, alcohol and other substances, their diet, their level of physical activity, social life, childhood trauma etc. But that would be too hard to interpret. Instead we get headlines like "Teenagers smoking pot are (arbitrary number) more likely to develop schizophrenia" and "Cannabis has been shown to kill cancer cells", which leads absolutely nowhere, because they just delude people to thinking the scientists are answering the original question ("is cannabis harmful?"), which isn't well defined in the first place.

The necessary part of improving the current state of social "sciences" is acknowledging that simple rules rarely govern complex systems, and therefore the public should be incredibly skeptical to any headlines that report that "the scientists proved" some straightforward "law".

Source: I do data analysis for multiple research groups that include psychology research (hormones, behaviour, depression), nursing research (breastfeeding, childbirth complication) and psycho-oncology research (quality of life of cancer patients and their caregivers).
Google plans to dump Adobe CSS tech to make Blink fast, not rich
Exploiting Managed .NET Memory
Please ignore the old posts, they were all posted before I decided to focus on columns. I'm not sure whether I should delete or keep them, though.
I don't really feel I need to provide you with specific examples, they are already a google away. Try: "python vs java" or "why ruby" or similar. Experiment with programming in these languages and see what type of flexibility you can get, especially during prototyping and initial development phases. Their simplicity is to their benefit when comparing to Scala which brings a lot of overhead to enable static checking of certain constructs. Furthermore, I would bet that you can do things in Python or Ruby that are not possible in Scala (for instance see Armin Ronacher's Euro Python 2013 presentation for some interesting tricks https://ep2013.europython.eu/media/conference/slides/5-years...)
But what about 76 different people all over the world flipping coins at about the same time all getting heads? Pretty much the same right?
Custom libraries are magic in the sense the OP used that term. So I agree there is no point in calling it all magic; its got to be there, so deal with it.
2001 title should have gone to OBL then.
Forgive my ignorance, but who is doing the blocking? Is it American sites willingly censoring for legal reasons, or is the Cuban government blocking them for the country's own ISP?
Building Animations with the android.transition Framework
Describing this post is difficult, it's downright stupid of course, but it seems to be sprinkled with "douchy cleverness" and a bit of blowhard. Was the author actively jerking off while thinking he was writing a masterpiece of creativity and intellectual thought?
oh right, i just assumed it happened recently
Gentlemen, gentlemen.

ElasticSearch sits on top of MASSIVE investment money (closed series B). Your worries about developers needing a "second job" are not substantiated. This is not an evening hobby project of a starving developer.

And there's the rub: investors want their money back.

The pace and aggression with which ES pushes its products and services must only increase from now on. Better get used to it.
The Startup Crowd Is Becoming an Actual Cult (2013)
You didn't understand me. It's not about being lazy or not getting enough exercise. It's about being more connected to your work. Maybe it's not the case for you, or even most people, but I am much more connected to what I'm doing if there is a physical component to it (writing down a lecture, even if I'm never going to read it, reading a book on paper that I'm touching, etc.)
LibreOffice Draw is reasonable if you are coming from Linux.

Otherwise there is GIMP too.

+1 to all the other open source solutions mentioned here.
Yes, and this is a feature not a bug. As Larry Wall observed, three cardinal virtues of a good programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris. Laziness is important because I have more things on my to-do list than hours in my lifespan, and more things I need to know than neurons in my brain. I didn't choose Python only or even primarily because it's dynamically typed, but nonetheless, every thought I don't have to think about static types is a thought I can instead think about something I actually care about.
If used with discipline it's fine. But it ends up encouraging people to put complex logic in their build files. I prefer the rigidity of maven, where it's simply impossible to do e.g. conditional dependencies.