skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Clearly there is much more to birth rates than death rates. El Salvador has a higher life expectancy than Russia, yet twice as high fertility rates. That's case when you compare most Latin American countries to the Eastern European countries.

Or we can go back further, to pre-industrial England. The families with the highest incomes (and much lower death rates) had higher fertility rates. Pre-industrial practiced population control to prevent complete demographic disaster (there were strict taboos on extra-marital sex, and young people were limited as to when they could marry by what the community could support). If you actually read the Kevin Myers piece, who as actually been to Ethiopia, you'll see that the Ethiopians do not practice the same kind of control, hence their birth rates are almost twice that of even pre-industrial England.
X.a() then X.b() may be completely different to X.b() then X.a(). This implied ordering is not really expressed anywhere.

Oh noz!

OO is capable of CORRECTLY modeling complicated real life objects like Rubik's Cubes, cars, clothes, and vending machines...

Why is it a failure that depositing $100 to a new checking account, then writing a $90 check does a different thing than writing a $90 check against an empty checking account, then depositing cash after the check has bounced?
"If you really want to know, use sonar to look at the mass graves."

There are no mass graves, apparently.

Edit: thanks for the link, sethg. It only highlights the problem - after a while of reading discussions it get's confusing... Maybe one thing to take away is to avoid public discussions and try to find more reliable sources. In this case of course I believe your link, I am just surprised how the other sources I read could get away with it.
The problem with looking for scientific support is it comes in tiny pieces. Going back 30 years you find the early stuff is looking at the general trends but people don't republish the same report looking at the same data. So if you want to get a solid understanding of what scientists think you really need to read a few hundred technical reports each of which is a tiny slice of the pie. You also need to verify that each of those reports is based on solid science and created by people without significant bias; luckily if you go far enough back the issue is not all that controversial so the age of the publication is a good indicator of quality.

It would be nice to have a reliable way to avoid that much work, but if you try to shortcut this you are going to be faced with summery information that's of questionable quality.
There are more than a "hardly any traces left", you just haven't looked for them.

My great grandfather is still alive today with the numbers on his arm, he didn't tattoo that on for fun.
You should add country of residence, otherwise you might get distorted data. Income varies greatly from country to country.

For example you might have someone with a lot of experience and education but low income in India, and then have someone with not as much education or experience but a lot higher income in the US.
Brought to you by the same guy who invented the Dark Sucker theory: http://home.netcom.com/~rogermw2/square_earth.html

EDIT: he also has a Force Skeptics page that might be relevant to our discussion. http://home.netcom.com/~rogermw2/force_skeptics.html
He's kinda missed the point of simplification you get from encapsulation. Encapsulation makes the API smaller and more manageable. If I want to ride a bike I don't want to have to worry about the internal workings. I just want to use the Pedal() method. Sure, if that throws a FallOffBikeException I might use more of the API to examine the problem. However I don't need an API that tells me everything, such as the chemical composition of the metal used in the frame.
For his gravity he also probably wants to outsource that to some sort of gravitatonal context that is supplied externally as opposed to including the physics in the bicycle. I'm pretty sure that in computer games they don't put the physics in the model code. :D

And btw, points in .NET (omg OOP!) are immutable structs so i'm not sure why he thinks everyone should make them a class.
Huhn. I go there to ask questions, and hope people answer them. Helps me learn. I'm not in school anymore, I don't need 'good grades.' I need to know how to do x with y.
His argument is full of selection bias. So, I will select my own evidence to show that he's a crock of shit.

1. Mexico production has been on a steep decline, and production from the Cantarell facility is steeply falling off.

2. We had an economic collapse and oil held at 33/bbl.

3. The infrastructure that needs to be built in Saudi to extract new oil is getting very complicated and expensive, because you can no longer throw a straw in the ground to pull oil out there.

4. There's a huge difference between the marginal value of a gallon of oil for an American vs. an Indian. A liter of oil is life changing for a Bangladeshi, but won't get me further than the next piggly wiggly in town.

Anyways, that's a couple. As a disclaimer, this isn't my specialty so consider me to be a crock of shit as well. Here's some better sources with real data:

gregor.us

getrealist.com

theoildrum.com

They have actual numbers.
Craigslist is a mess because people like it that way.
It is very interesting to see such a diligent focus on the low-end, small processor side of things. However, I don't think anyone got rich betting that technology wasn't constantly improving.
Can You Run Your Business from an iPhone?
> OneApp’s very minimal on-phone footprint of just 150 KB makes installing it quick and easy. OneApp will launch only the parts of a mobile app that you want to use; that cuts down on additional installation time

Can the OneApp developers please spend some time working on Microsoft Office? Please?
If you research a bit of the Holocaust you will soon learn there is a lot of weird things going on in the story that doesn't really make much scientific sense. Take a look at this documentary that covers 1/3 of the concentration camps: www.onethirdoftheholocaust.com While I do believe the Holocaust happened and it was a terrible thing, I also realize that people tend to exaggerate their stories.

Unfortunately, most people have such an emotional reaction against questioning anything related to the Holocaust they completely give up reason and instead become blind to any scientific argument.
Spoken like a true "business guy". It's technically interesting behavior.
Maybe, just maybe, my comment was meant to be taken lightly.
Or C) Go to the places where it happened and D) Talk to the people still alive that went through it, or E) Go to the museums and look at the massive pile of artifacts. A conspiracy in which there where hundreds of thousands of witnesses, with thousands still alive today, millions of artifacts spread around a dozen museums worldwide and multiple sites left in Europe would be so vast it would make the Truman Show look easy to pull off.
There is nothing inherently dangerous about healthy debate, nobody pushed you into the revisionist camp, you simply made a claim that is - lets put it delicately - not mainstream.

Germany is still coming to terms with their part in all this and that is why they are over reacting, another big factor is that there is a definite surge in the numbers of neo-nazis.

The funniest thing is that some of the extremist rightwing people (notably Wilders) are best friends with Israel, I never really understood that one.

The revisionist bit comes from taking up the position that you think that because it happened before your time must mean that you have to be unsure about it because of a so-called lack of evidence.

The evidence is there for everybody who wants it to see it, no 'belief' is required.

Clever people in the revisionist camp abuse the basic insecurity people have about things that happened before they were born to push their own agenda forward, and with some success. Which is why you get the reactions you are seeing.

My parents and grandparents lived through the war in Europe, one of my grandfathers was sent to a work camp in Germany but fortunately survived, lots of people they knew were less fortunate. I know personally plenty of people where the whole family tree is balanced on a single survivor that made it - miraculously - out of one of the 'death camps'. To me it's all pretty real and very close to home.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce seeks trial on global warming -- latimes.com
It should say children now... I think there is a caching issue with google maybe?
> Who on Earth writes a Bike class?

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/concepts/inheri...

http://www.novio.be/blog/?p=621

http://www.roseindia.net/software-tutorials/detail/9172

The 'Bike' is a very common example used in OOP texts, hence why it was included in this discussion. I agree that it's kinda terrible, but this is the common textbook way that OO is described.
60k or so, enough to actually need a music manager :)
I guess I was trying to imply a huge business with suits and cube farms and offices around the world... think an international bank or similar.
You'd think that tight editing would come naturally after writing within the strictures of the twitter status box.
I think to perform the learning you need to have some property of a hacker that you will learn. Maybe you need also some non-hackers to fill your survey so that you can perform classification.

Directly: How do you plan to use ML on this dataset? What will you learn?
I worked on it for a few hours to get it down to some simple things that might co-relate to a persons income -- I only needed simple data to test on. I think it will still be interesting to analyze nonetheless. Perhaps in a few months we could put together a slightly better survey? My email is in my profile if you have suggestions, but with over 300 responses so far (WOW!) it'd be hard to change this current survey.

I appreciate your feedback!
Not at all. Prism is basically just Firefox without a menu bar running in its own process. I don't know why it gets so much attention.
The data being collected is purely demographic. And I don't think that the data set would be very big either. Around a thousand entries even if most of the HNers take interest?

I am not able to imagine anything significant that can be done by using this data as training set in a machine learning algorithm. Is it possible for you to elaborate a little bit on what you intend to train your algorithms to achieve?
Yes, the data will be available to the general public on my website, and if anyone wants to mirror it they may.

I might hold on to the data overnight just to get a good story together, but other than that, I have every intention of sharing. I have no doubt there are people who could make a lot more of this data than I will. I'm excited to see the results.
Because mutable state is an airy-fairy concept that has no relation to the world, of course.
Paul Graham at Startup School (2008) (video)
"There are enough photographs of near death, emaciates being rescued from the camps to satisfy my curiosity."

That is just emotions though, not science. There are gruesome pictures from any war - I think few POW camps were very pleasant, for example. At the Kosovo war there were also fake pictures from concentration camps distributed by the mainstream press.

Again I don't want to deny the killings, I just feel there are things missing from the story. For example, if all the nazis wanted was to kill, why have concentration camps to begin with. Why were there any survivors at all? I suppose they made the able ones work for the war effort, but then you mention the near death - presumably they were not that able to work anymore.
Same here. Government feels weighty.

Altho I do catch myself hacking something together with figurative duct-tape and grunting "good enough for government work."
I have 16K and I haven't spent 4 hours a day on it. I do spend some time at work on it, usually while I'm trying to distract myself from a problem so I can get a fresh perspective on it. I just answer a couple questions a day and eventually you start to stockpile rep. Old questions/answers get you rep like interest on a savings account.

I have the rep on my blog, because it has some perceived value amongst my professional peers (the .NET community) and there was recently a job I applied for where it actually was a useful number. That's the exception though since it's a unique opportunity. I would never put it directly on my resume, but I wouldn't hide it either.
http://cs.nmu.edu/~mkowalcz/cs495/project1.html

This is the actual assignment. The data set doesn't need to be huge, it's more about the ideas than refining the algorithms (so we can cover more ground). The more entries the better, and so far (in one hour) I've gotten 400. I suspect this may work out for (some) interesting data.
The important question is: What does the demand curve for oil look like?

I think the sane peak oil advocates are asking exactly that. It's not that we are running out of oil, it's that we are running out of cheap oil. And that's going to mess up the world economy. Things don't look good when oil goes above $80 a gallon.

But I've heard that we can synthesis gasoline from air and water using electricity from nuclear power. Anyone know what that costs per gallon?
Did the negative commenters here even read the article? It acknowledges the success of the Craigslist model and evenhandedly states opinions from Craigslist critics and Craigslist insiders. The site's quirkiness makes the author puzzled, not angry. The article is written as an exploration of a mystery, not a Jeremiad. Moreover, it is only part I in a series.

From the comments here, I get the impression that many people just read the title. For shame! Hacker News is supposed to have higher standards.
Top picture shows it running on a Nokia 6300, which is my day-to-day phone...

Come on North American carriers!
I feel it's too late to add an option like that, but I do regret not putting it in. I tried to be as broad as possible, but academia makes sense.

Thanks!
Think of it as (lambda xs . "[This is n]ot altogether surprising[,] I suppose, given" xs).
re: the Holocaust, what part of it is that you're not sure of?

- That 9+ million people were killed?

- That this was done in a methodical and organized fashion?

- That the vast majority of the people killed were Jews, gays, gypsies, and other smaller/marginalized social groups?

I'm all for an organized and civilized debate, but if you want to do that without being called a nutjob, you need to clarify exactly what parts you are questioning, and provide a somewhat sound basis for doing that - i.e. if you have a problem with my first point, then explain why people think that, and why you disagree?

As Truzzi said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." Questioning the Holocaust is a pretty extraordinary claim, so bring it...
Ok, I see that we're not really having a conversation anymore, so I think I'm just about done. Two quick points: one -- if your job is to find bugs, finding lots of bugs is doing your job well. Two -- I'm not saying this behavior is rational; in my first comment in this thread started out "Humans are not rational when it comes to money". However, this behavior is studied and shown to be true. I'm sorry you don't like it.
"People can pick up new languages over a period of a few years, but if you study it immersively, you can do so in a few weeks."

Can you elaborate on this statement? I think a few weeks is a bit of an exaggeration. However, I have known people who have gone from knowing nothing in a language to being able to have normal, everyday conversations in 6 months by being immersed and not being able to talk to anyone in their native language.
People that game the system tend to get bored after awhile and go away. Only those that truly like answering questions and helping people stick around. Overall, most of the time questions are getting answered and that's the primary goal of the site.

If you're getting sniped and then having your content copied, post first or post faster. I have never had my content stolen for another answer.

Also if you want more rep with less games, stay away from the high-profile low-hanging fruit. Avoid basic language syntax lessons that are easy for people to answer quickly. Pick a few tags that you have more specific knowledge in and follow those. That's an easy way to get rep without as much competition.
That's what smileys are for. :)
Tax protesters?
Ok, so you've proven that an OO design can be badly thought out, which is also true of every other programming style.
I actually agree with the Author's issues around hidden mutable state. Luke Galea introduced me to the term "Candy Machine Interface" for this, where you keep pulling levers and pushing buttons and you have no idea how to get the candy you want out of the machine.

I also agree that the "real world" does this some times, but there is a difference between writing simulations of the real world and writing programs. I'm not disturbed by the idea of objects encapsulating hidden state, but rather the idea that objects have static, invariant interfaces.

One of the nicer ideas for dealing with this is to write explicit state machines and where (if your language allows) the interface actually changes as the state changes. If o.a(); o.b(); is different than o.b(); o.a();, you can write a state machine that makes this inspectable and explicit. If o.b() makes no sense until you call o.a(), you can simply not have o.b() be part of o's API/interface until you call o.a().

I won't suggest this is a general programming heuristic, but my experience in the last couple of years is that every business object modeling a real-world business entity ought to be implemented as a state machine until you discover a compelling reason to do something else. Ad-hoc state machines, like having the logic for whether o.b() does x or y based on the contents of fields _a and _b be embedded in the method b() are the stateful equivalent of spaghetti-coding with GOTO.

I credit Pete Forde for shaking me out of the complacent belief that I'm smart enough to embed everything in methods.
Localizations are there.
Coding Horror: That Means It's Working
Also a great example of how to market your app.
> And what is the issue with planted vegetables?

You were claiming that the surroundings required to make that house usable were "natural".

> You were asserting I don't know suburbian America

No. I was pointing out that the required vegetation, vegetation that you claim is "natural", is not natural in much of the world and gave examples.

> My point is you don't need a forest for such a house.

You need dense growth at a low level. That's not natural in much of the world.

> Architecture is not only aesthetics, it's efficiency too.

The original aesthetics is essential to survival claim in this thread was about beauty.

Actually, construction is efficiency.

However, architecture can make certain types of efficient living difficult. This house is an example. Ignoring the privacy problems, it simply doesn't allow for efficient handling of stuff. It's a great place to visit but as a long term working residence, it's a failure. (And no,it's more than being kid hostile; kids are just an easy way to see the problem.)
" That several million people were killed?

That this was done in a methodical and organized fashion?"

I think the actual numbers are what the debate is usually about. Also if the killing was planned from the beginning (I think some say that it was only later that it was decided on the killing - they knew they wanted to get rid of the jews, but no clear idea how). Many might have died from bad conditions (which is also killing them, but different from actively shooting or gassing them).

Edit: I don't really question the HC, I just say I don't know the details. As for the numbers, the criticisms I have heard are that there are no ways to validate them. There are no documents about missing persons that could be counted, and often it is unclear if they might just have fled the country. There are no mass graves, either. The criticism is that required archives are not open to the public (like from the red cross). I don't know if that is true or not.
Unalone - corporations are by nature, by their charters, sociopathic entities. I'm not trying to be a hater, it's just the truth. They exist for very specific purposes, and by design they pursue the highest profit margin possible (publicly-traded companies in particular). There's a real danger in assigning human emotions or anthropomorphic qualities, it unnecessarily confuses policy issues.

Think of someone complaining about their computer or a program, "It doesn't waaaaant to! [do whatever]"
This would certainly work okay with one child sitting at a computer. But,a lot of children do not have computers at home, so they are limited to only viewing it in the classroom setting.

When teachers do reading they usually divide the students into groups. Each child, and the teacher, has a copy of the book. This would be difficult to do on a computer.

In addition, personalized books may be presented as gifts, put in the classroom library, etc.

Other things to consider as well, screens have glare, a lot of school computers cannot be easily positioned for individual eye sight. Most importantly, in my mind though, is the portability, hands on feature, and easy access.

I hope this helps answer your question.
Actually, the article mentions that people aren't pissed off and that Craigslist is a huge success:

>>""I hear this all the time," Buckmaster says. "You guys are so primitive, you are like cavemen. Don't you have any sense of aesthetic? But the people I hear it from are invariably working for firms that want the job of redoing the site. In all the complaints and requests we get from users, this is never one of them. Time spent on the site, the number of people who post—we're the leader. It could be we're doing one or two things right."

>>"The truth is that a lot of people complain about craigslist. Buckmaster is correct that few of them complain about the design. They complain about spam, they complain about fraud, they complain about the posting rules, they complain about the search, they complain about uploading images. They complain about every way a classified transaction can go wrong. They seldom complain about amazing new features they imagine they might possibly want to use, because they are too busy complaining about the simple features they depend on that don't work as well as they'd like. By eliminating marketing, sales, and business development, craigslist's programmers have cut out all the cushioning layers that separate them from the users they serve, and any right they have to teach lessons in public service comes from the odd situation of running a company that is directly subservient only to the public. "
Content beats presentation? Staying close to the customer rules? No meetings a big win? Worthy of contemplation.
This is why microblogging needs layers. The inanity of a post should be machine-readable so users can filter those they follow based on how much they want to know. At the bottommost level would be stream-of-bioinformatics auto-logged by attached devices. At the top level would be something like "[username] was born [timestamp]. [username] died [timestamp]." Anything in-between should be categorized somehow (by the user themself? by a trust network? by NLP?) I like to use the ZUI and LOD metaphor here.
New Jersey is my friend.
What should colleges teach?
> A better example would be if you had a counter hidden somewhere out of sight which counted the number of times you turned the key in your car, and introduced different behaviours for key-turning based upon that value.

Interestingly enough, every car does have something like that. (Think gas, maintenance, and repair.)

The real world does have mutable state.