skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How can anyone possibly believe this?

I don't know much about Europe, but as I look at the conflicts bubbling up in the U.K. and France over Arab immigration, I am inclined to believe the lower prevalence of racism there is more a function of less racial friction in more homogenous societies than actually lower levels of racism in the culture. As far as historical racism, I don't know if we want to compare scorecards with the continent that invented colonization and the African slave trade...

That said, my point of comparison is Asia, specifically the subcontinent. I'm ethnically Bengali (first generation immigrant), and my wife is Oregonian (her family moved there in the wagon trails), of English/Dutch ancestry. If our situations were reversed, there is no way Bengali society would have accepted my wife in the way American society has accepted me. She could move there and live there for the rest of her life and she'd always be "bideshi" (foreigner).
I think the difference is that Objective-C is dynamically typed from the start, while Go tries to be statically typed first, with the added ability to work with those types dynamically. The latter leads to a lot of additional and arguably ugly code that I expect scares a lot of people off.
Does the word “master” denote masculinity?
The fact that it's a "one toe in the water" approach to SOA is exactly what makes it attractive. It can help you break up the Monorail incrementally without the immediate expensive investment in fully separate apps.

The ease of running integration/acceptance tests in this kind of setup is a huge help, especially if the app already has tests covering the behavior you're trying to maintain while splitting things out.
Noble, but it sounds risky. Don't you need false results to pad your CV to keep up?
If you learn about Bayes from crazy people, what is the likelihood that you will think Bayesian reasoning is always used in crazy ways?

Last week I did some Bayesian (!!) work on finding a pdf for the direction of a certain quantity. My priors were... [0,2*pi).
Beacon (YC W14) Offers A New Approach To Crowdfunding Journalism
Coolest thing i've seen on HN for a while.
Happy to help!

I posted it since NoSQL was a hot topic in the 1.0 thread.

If you're uncovering unknown unknowns, these can also be of interest:

- https://www.found.no/foundation/elasticsearch-in-production/

- https://www.found.no/foundation/elasticsearch-from-the-botto...
Right - but you appreciate the difference between someone

a) disliking all races different from one's own
b) using one's life experience to form opinions about people and grouping them by - age / race / occupation / ethnicity / etc.

I think that using same word is wrong - as they are completely different phenomena.
What do you call a stereotype when it is backed by statistical data? The a priori belief that is most common is that no stereotypes are true. It's the polite thing to believe. But if you are of a certain analytical mindset, you can be argued out of it with enough data and anecdotal evidence from friends.
What's really hard is not mastering the language, but software development. That's the reason top, super-productive coders can jump between langs.
I've got to confirm the troubles of rbenv in production. I highly encourage alternative solutions and I'm furiously examining BrightBox.
Agreed!

It reminds me of advice I commonly get when I started writing: borrow a voice, and grow your own out from that. This is a great way to do that, I think -- it's internalizes the process and makes it a form of muscle memory. That sort of second-nature shit is invaluable to finding yourself. Yum yum yum.
Actually I meant Thinking Fast and Slow but somehow typed Blink, sorry about that.

There are two different kinds of generalization here, I think:

As you state, "Brandon" probably has had to endure many other forms of racist behavior, e.g. taxis not wanting to pick up black clients, so his generalization to the new domain Uber was perhaps justifiable, but how about generalizing to AirBnb. AirBnB host population may be very different than the general population "Brandon was used to deal with" (I don't have data to back this up, hence the "may be", but I think that is a very high probability hypothesis, esp. in SF) yet he was quick to generalize, although the refusals may have been due to other factors. In other words "Brandon" has reliable data from a different population that he is now attaching to a new population.

The OP and greendata, OTOH, are generalizing to various beliefs based on a single data point of "Brandon".
The Clothes We Wear
That doesn't seem like that big of I problem. I've done in-place point upgrades of Ubuntu several times without any issue, and I can't think of anything out of the ordinary that the school would want to do with the laptops that would make an in-place upgrade difficult.
Ask HN: How do you make time?
I'm 33, from the UK (around 30-40miles outside of London), married, two children who I'm sole provider for, work full-time (mixture of development, consultancy and support) and kind of at the top of where I can go without involving massive upheaval to progress in my current company (I work full-time from home, however to move into a pure development/consultancy role I'd have to commute 2hrs each way to the office every day of the week, or move closer to the office which isn't where we'd want to live)

I work primarily in .NET/MSSQL during the day (but love Ruby), and by the time everything is done in the evening (dinner, kids to bed etc.) I've not got the desire/motivation to do anything other than some casual gaming.

Is this common, I'd love to work with Ruby/Rails for a startup, but my professional experience is all .NET based, so the salary cut I'd have to take seems to be massive - any tips/pointers as to what/where I should be doing?
I have only ever used the global spec folder as a place to store top-level app integration specs. I think it is a huge mistake to give up on the separation of engine code for tests.
One dead in violent Venezuela protests: witnesses
An invasion scenario came up far more recently, during the Quebec referendum:

1.Quebec separates from Canada.
2.Northing Quebec (Native) separates from south (French)
3.Protesters interrupt power lines through northern Quebec.
4.New York City goes dark.
5.US Paratroopers land in northern Quebec to restore NY power.
Exactly correct. Additionally, his friend had previously stated that AirBnB didn't work for him, so this "small sample" we're looking at is just Andrew's experience with the issue at this point in time.

It's always disturbing to me how much commentary in threads of this type on HN is devoted to asserting that the individual who's actually experiencing the problem is misinterpreting it. I love data, but demands for data/citations in situations where the problem is experiential are too often used to dismiss people's real, upsetting experiences with privilege and prejudice.
This pie chart -- http://www.youthblog.org/pie%20chart2.jpg -- is accurate and presents the data better than any alternative.

(so no one has to click blindly, it's a photo of a pie showing how much of it was eaten or not)
Since most Canadians live within 30 KMs range of the US-Cdn border, I would say it should take no longer than a day, eh?
Linode under large DoS attack
Good luck getting the warranty honoured ;)
I wonder what the NSA could do to protect the US public and companies from hacking. Public safety is a role the government is supposed to participate in after all. Instead of obsessing over secrets people might have, what sort of counter-measure could they deploy to help in that effort ?
Well, you could simply have multiple instances running on different nodes. It's manual work, but by no means impossible. In my setup, I have a sphinx server running on the same node as my web server (Which is the consumer of the search). So they scale with each other. For more advanced uses, it's probably not adequate, but it's not a big concern of mine.
Step 1: Take issue with the sensational language of the original article, which is actually a collection of links to other news stories

Step 2: Take one news story from said article and offer your own made-up explanation that's even more sensational.

Ok then.
I have a lot of respect for his work, and I also appreciated the tone of the posting. Thank you, Ian, and may your attitude inspire others.
An oxymoron :-), i.e. stereotypes are by definition not backed by reliable data (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stereotype)
I think it is newsworthy, but not for the technical details. It's newsworthy because it's such a huge budget, because it's been neutered, because fusion energy research is pathetically funded, and because NIF is like a mean old dog lying in front of the fireplace, farting from time to time - it creams the resources and makes alternatives unappealing.
Girls, alone this valentines? Meet your new AI boyfriend 'him'
'him' is brought to you by vibease.com
Ok, but your first sentence said something very different.
If anything, shouldn't apps that involve ratings and profiles reduce racism, because they allow you to judge the person by their behavior as opposed to just their appearance? Compare Lyft to taxis, for example.

In the case of taxis the driver only sees appearance-based characteristics when they choose whether to pick someone up. In the case of Lyft the user has a long history of ratings which indicate whether they're a good person to drive around.
Canada isn't a British colony now so it's doubtful the redcoats would burn the White House this time.
I have never bought the party line that learning languages for a new job is difficult, particularly from hiring managers. Multiple times in my career I've taken a job which required a new language, scala most recently. These all involved new frameworks, library stacks, etc. In each of those cases I was reasonably productive after a couple of weeks and productive enough after a month or two.

It's not like I was the world's expert in those languages and at that point and I'd probably flub the sort of interview questions focused on the nitty gritty (heck, I've never been good at those regardless) but I knew what I wanted to do, had a good idea of how to do it and a minute or so with google would fill in the rest.
>a preference that one's neighbors be of the same color, or even a preference for a mixture "up to some limit"

A common term for that is racism. Are you saying that segregation can spring from racism? I'm not sure that anyone was confused about that.
He means JS was forced down our throats.

Hadnt it been for the browser noone would be using the mediocre language.
Saying hello to Python: observations from a newbie
just have a fat person sit on it
Posted this because I can't get at the management page anymore and my NJ server has now gone down too. No word yet from them if it's being affected now or if it's just me.
The two really cool things about it is that it's declarative (you set up some rules in your -viewDidLoad: and you're done) and it's easy to reason about (e.g. how an output will vary based on inputs).

But at the same time it's just crying out for some sort interface-builder-style GUI that lets you wire everything up graphically.

My biggest gripe (beautifully illustrated by OP's post) is how un-Apple-like it is at a code level. If you're familiar with standard Cocoa patterns the second code block is quite a bit more understandable.

Finally, in defense of ReactiveCocoa, that code is probably a bit like writing "99 bottles of beer" recursively: it's useful because it's a (relatively) understandable example, not because it's a good use of that programming style. If you start having multiple interdependent network requests, then something like ReactiveCocoa probably starts to come into its own.
There is Hieronymus Bosch-ian quality to this beautiful, beautiful sacrilege.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard

You forget, part of the NSA's mission is defense of the nation. They have actually contributed major portions of defense to the cyberworld, including SELinux and verification of AES.

NSA expertise was called in on the recent Nasdaq and Google hacks as well. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/nsa-investigates-na...
Why not distribute that as the code in the repo instead of the compressed version?
"... asserting that the individual who's actually experiencing the problem is misinterpreting it"

Note that may main point was about the generalization of the top level comment in this thread, based on this post only, this doesn't mean that the statement in that comment was not correct.
"100 failures for every 1 success"

There aren't a lot of examples of big tech companies dumping money into R&D - with no end goal in mind - and then cashing out big time. Even companies that that have gotten useful discoveries from hiring smart people to sit around and invent (Bell Labs, Xerox Park, Microsoft Research etc.) don't ever seem to end up raking in the big bucks.

The only thing that comes to mind is MS and their Kinect.

Unfortunately the ROI is pretty bad when you just throw money and hope it gives you results. It's cheaper to just buy up startups with interesting ideas
Having same issues as well.

Edit: It is a Dallas instance and we had few minutes of downtime. It is working now normally.
Tempest: Dumping RAM from a distance.
A good interview with Nathan Marz, creator of Storm
"Return on investment" generally means what you get back for what you put in. Both quality and quantity matter and I think this is often recognized, but if you're getting essentially nothing, it doesn't matter what quality of nothing you get.
King apparently bought an earlier (than CandySwipe) trademark they are now using against CandySwipe. They may well get away with it, especially since CandySwipe can't defend itself.
I recommend trying Hill88. It's a third-party iOS (universal) app for Asana and it's fantastic. Mostly wonderful UI, frequently updated, etc. We use Asana at work and this app has made it a lot nicer to use on the mobile.

http://hill88app.com/
> Ah. I'm afraid this is solely a consequence of a lack of clarity on my part. I did not mean "shaky" as in "it would be morally dubious to convict a person", I meant "shaky" as in "it would legally difficult to convict a person".

I don't think so. I took your point to mean precisely what you intended, that is to say that it's of questionable legality to arrest someone simply because of an opinion not immediately exercised as a threat. Morality hadn't entered my mind.

Although now that you mention it, the morality of arresting someone for committing no more harmful an act than simply opening their mouth is another point of interest, but somewhat unrelated to this discussion. The state of affairs abroad in non-Western parts of the world is generally such that arrests made against such horrid perpetrators of free speech are commonplace. It gives me pause for thought to be thankful that we can have this conversation without immediate fear for our lives.

> I'm afraid my expertise is once lacking, but my understanding was that the most common motive for enjoying such comforts as provided by the US taxpayer is a conviction for drug possession.

While that is certainly true, in cases where a suspect is not found with such paraphernalia and they're especially noisome or talkative, you have other amusing tools at your disposal such as "resisting arrest." A skilled DA could contort those into drug charges, I'm sure, but my point was that it can take very little to wind up behind bars if you're in the wrong neighborhood, the wrong color, dressed the wrong way, or simply seen as a belligerent public nuisance.

I count my lucky stars that I live in a predominantly redneck area in the country where law enforcement generally knows all the townsfolk and is quite friendly and helpful.

> We are able to hold a pleasantly well-mannered exchange of view, in part due to the limitation on freedom of speech enforced both by moderation and downvoting. I'd argue that these limits make Hacker News a much more pleasant forum than, say, Youtube.

The hilarious part about this is that I don't completely agree, because we're 1) exercising our freedom of speech and 2) are sufficiently well-disciplined to hold a mutually respectful discourse (therefore, such limitations on speech are not in danger of being invoked). I suspect that if the HN audience were as broad and numerous as Youtube, we'd have the same problem here, so I'd argue that it's not so much limited free speech (or limitations placed thereon) as much as it is the advantage of a niche community that grant us such fortune. Someone on HN made a comment yesterday or the day before relating trends of the sort to the transformation of Reddit from a reasonable place to hold programming-related discussions to one of the biggest sources of cat pictures and memes on the Internet.

Though I do get the point you're raising, and I understand the use of it as an example, even if I am in disagreement. ;)
Cool! If we ever have WWIII, I'm going to drop a well-cooled H-bomb that uses laser-based confinement mechanism to not explode violently on my enemies. In fact, I await their preemptive surrender even now.
It will take its well-deserved place in the range of many other languages available instead of being offered way too often as the only language worth learning here on HN. I hope the JS-madness will calm down in next few years as well. Would be helpful to get some other languages in browser. Maybe Dart/NaCl will help.
Why would I want to use a Physics-based Page Layout instead of the traditional layout? What do I win?
What I'm trying to say is not all racial stereotypes describe a false belief, though it is fashionable to think so.
My point was the sample size was small but the "experiment" here is very similar to one seen with taxi cabs and other older services that are very similar to the new online "sharing economy". The discrimination in the former businesses is well documented and studied. I'm not basing my statement of "it rings true" on the data points alone as you are implying but on the large body of similar work.

"it rings 100% true" does not necessarily imply any conclusion. It just means that the initial data on the new sharing economy are inline with other older experiments which study almost the same thing (taxi cabs, cleaning services, etc).

I'm not sure I trust Malcolm Gladwell as a reliable source any more.
Graphene suitable for quantum computing for high-priority computational tasks
Or even better failed military projects, such as the $25+ billion spent on a spy satellite project before it was killed in 2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office...
To be fair that's also what the US called the Lunar Rover:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Roving_Vehicle
Heh. Pickle is not really sufficient for some edge cases, too. Luckily, there's Dill that can take almost perfect snapshots of the whole interpreter: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/dill
I would generaly agree on that, but considering the fact that the OP has actualky created pip and virtualenv, i would say that for going that deep in a language and its ecosystem one really need some time.
P2P tile-based battle game in the browser
His only evidence of this so-called erosion of status is that anecdotally some non-technical folks got management jobs in tech companies and some journalists were ignorant about programming.

I'm sorry but I don't consider this to be a very compelling argument.

With this level of evidence it would be just as easy to argue that programmers today are given a higher status, and not looked down upon as geeky, despite the fact that it's easier than ever to learn about and become a programmer.
True but that's a rather passive approach (no to dismiss their efforts!). I was thinking what kind of active role they could play for example to help fend of DDoS attacks or intercept ongoing hacking attempt. After all they seem to have the infrastructure in place :p
based on the status updates i suspect that something got out of whack after mitigating the DoS and it's affecting multiple datacenters.
There is a lot of innovation in Javascript, especially since the advent of NodeJS. But compared to Python itself, the language has little to be excited about.
The failure to develop a stable and performant GC is part of the reason. Another part is that such a GC is very difficult for C/Objective-C (one could say impossible or close enough to it as to not make a difference).

However, that's not all of it. The iOS teams wouldn't touch the GC with a 10 foot pole, even had it worked, and with good reason. As the parent poster pointed out, GCs make performance and memory consumption unpredictable, especially on memory-constrained devices.

And yes, phones are memory-constrained, despite the 1/2 - 1GB of memory, because you are also managing some potentially very large assets (retina class images, ...). Especially without virtual memory, where having an unexpected spike in memory consumption can get you killed, having unpredictable memory consumption is a non-starter...and the pain you have to go through on Android to avoid GC problems is significant (for example real-time OCR via the video camera overlaid onto the video stream).

It's interesting that Android appears to be moving away from JIT to AOT with libart, I am very curious as to how that works out. My guess is that at least a subset of developers, those with stringent requirements, would also welcome more predictable memory management solution.
Totally understand and I'm glad you wrote it. I'd like to see someone take on the challenge and come back with some proof. It seems from your account that Brandon had just set up a new AirBnb account - is it possible he was rejected because he had no history?
It seems to me he is just manipulating the DCS of the SMS being sent. This is standard behavior according to the GSM SMS specs.

http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_gts/03/0338/05.00.00_60/gsm...

From section 4, "SMS Data Coding Scheme" can be used to control "Voicemail Message Waiting" among other indicators and to send messages of "Class 0" which instruct the phone to shall "display the message immediately and send an acknowledgement to the SC when the message has successfully reached the MS irrespective of whether there is memory available in the SIM or ME."

Admittedly it has been over a decade since I last played with sending such messages to phones, but it did seem to me like a bug in the spec, giving too much control to anyone with access to an sms-c (or any other mean to change the DCS field). Back then all phones I tested had implemented the spec as described.
Granted, to each their own, but the one thing I concern myself with is readability and learning curve, especially on projects where there's even the remotest possibility that somebody could be inheriting my code. If I toss in a library like ReactiveCocoa, that's an incredibly steep learning curve that a developer will have to master in addition to any other curve presented by Cocoa Touch / Foundation / Core Data / whatever's already there.

The argument could be made for lots of other Objective-C libraries and frameworks, I suppose, but ReactiveCocoa doesn't seem to offer more in benefits than what it costs to learn it.
Oh, so something like Canadian winter. ;)
Depends on if we can get our hands on all that lovely syrup.

Otherwise we really don't have much reason to invade.