skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interestingly, neither the original image nor the manipulated one can be called racist. The trouble only comes from realizing we're looking at a before and after.

Microsoft generally goes to great lengths to ensure people are not offended. It has to, because of the sheer size and diversity of its markets. Raymond Chen has blogged about one apparently innocuous issue [http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/22/54679.a...], and there must have been many, many more across Microsoft products.

Marketing works better if you reflect your audience's tastes. Doubtlessly someone calculated that the other image better suited Polish tastes, for which a racially diverse cast only serves as a vivid reminder that the image was marketed for an American audience. This doesn't make either the Poles or the marketing racist. The only thing "racist" was the mistake to clumsily manipulate an existing image instead of using a brand new one. Penny wise, pound foolish.
It is interesting to me because it closes a chapter in American history as the last of the Kennedy brothers. Plus I have already learned a few things I didn't know.
It should have made him unelectable as Senator as well. If his name had been Smith instead of Kennedy then it would have.
Yes, my workplace has representatives of many races and cultures as well. Heck, it's owned and run by an asian woman (who is darned good, by the way).

Was it really necessary to add the parenthetical comment? Is there anyone at HN that would judge a person's abilities by their gender and ethnic background?
Sounds like manic depression to me.

Huh?
Send a Message from Java to Erlang
I find that to be an interesting observation. It will be interesting to see how policy evolves regarding cyber crime in the coming years.
You do have two web services. If you wanted to implement what I described today, you'd have to periodically poll Twitter's API or RSS feed for data. With web hooks, there's no more polling. Twitter calls your web service when there's new data.

Actually, now that I explain it that way, it doesn't seem that revolutionary. It just makes building neat hacks a tiny bit easier.
Speaking for myself, if I was hiring someone to do a website, or a CMS, I couldn't care less if they had a B.Sc. or not. I wouldn't check, and I certainly wouldn't let it change my mind about the price being charged.
Ok, now I see why we should stay away from politics on HN. Too many people are downvoting/upvoting based on their political perceptions of TK. Do you really need to downvote someone into the negative for simply saying they liked the guy?
Gmail - Inbox (40)
Windows 7 Sins - New FSF Campaign
Mandatory XKCD reference: http://xkcd.com/605/
Using TeX to control a Mars rover (see page 5)
Two points:
1) "voluntary, tax deductible, donation" presumably means one can donate charitably to an individual who needs a medical intervention of some sort, eg pay for your brothers kidney operation tax free - what's your objection to this sort of thing? Your vitriol is obscuring your message.
2) "many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted:", they are though aren't they? No where near all of them, but certainly many (I'm in the UK, perhaps people [contrary to all media reports] look after themselves better in the USA?).
The main reason I look at ratios is to try to quickly identify a spammy follow versus somebody generally interested in my tweets (perhaps they're a friend of a friend, or were searching a keyword I recently tweeted about).

If twitter had a better way of preventing spam follows, then I think this would be much less of an issue.
Did the Supreme Court Recognize an Innocent Person's Right Not to Be Executed?
That's a fallacy, addressed by the site -- in short, the benefit gained by minimizing jams more than offsets the increased space between vehicles.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=787194
In IKEAs I have visited in Germany there are usually a few shortcuts. I wonder why there are no shortcuts in Shanghai.
Random suggestions for your landing page:
Don't use something that looks like an Apple, I first thought saying "no" would lead me to a Windows/other program.

Maybe change "Are you using this computer to transmit?" to "Are you using this computer to transmit SlumberVision?" Or even "Do you want to use this computer to transmit SlumberVision".

And "It safely and securely sends live video and audio of your baby from one computer to another." to "It sends live video and audio of your baby from one computer to another safely and securely."

I would recommend investing a couple of bucks to some html/css/graphics genius to spice up the looks. It needs more warmness and less "hey, I am a geek, functionality is god" in my opinion (and I guess it would look the same if I made it, heh ;-) ). Maybe warmer (and closer) colours and round corners etc.

How about a demo (images, video, demo page), an additional "signup" button (I guess you signup by answering "yes" or "no" and then registering on the follow-up page? Very awkward.).
Damn, why do these PDF's always seem to have worthless filenames?

book-fall-07.pdf? Seriously?!

Why not fourier-applications.pdf or something?
My biggest pet peeve about twitter right now is how little useful information they provide when you get a new follower via the notification emails.

How about "people you follow in common" or people "who follow both of you"? How about a digest of their last 10 tweets?. Some of this data you can't even get on the site.

They barely hit the minimum bar for a social network.
Top 5 ways I feel about this article:

1) I

2) Hate

3) Top

4) 10

5) Lists
Ted Kennedy's "Dream Shall Never Die" Speech
I'll end it. I hope you have a wonderful day my dear HN friend.
If you still want to use the (scary) web interface, there is always NoScript.
I find all of this very intriguing. Assuming that both Craigslist and PlentyOfFish are successful for the same underlying reasons, it's worth pointing out similarities between the two. Note that while I've been using Craigslist for years, I have very little real experience with PlentyOfFish, so feel free to correct any invalid assumptions I make:

1. Plain user interfaces. The choices of fonts and colors seems very personal, non-corporate. There's nothing sleek, modern, trendy, creative, or flashy about either of these sites. That's not to say they're particularly simple or efficient.

2. Unchanging user interfaces. When you go to Craigslist, at least, you can be sure to find the exact same site you were using one, two, three years ago. No surprises, no re-learning, and no feeling left-behind.

3. Initial focus on small community, growth through word of mouth. Craigslist had San Francisco, and PoF had Vancouver I believe? There's something to be said about making users feel like they are party of a small, exclusive community. (Look at the beginnings of Facebook.)

4. Content created almost entirely by users. Craigslist does little more than categorize users' posts, and PoF is, well, a dating site.

5. Open: you don't have to know someone or get them to accept a friend request in order to interact with them. Once again, these sites make connecting with others easy and direct. (Although the signup process at PoF is understandably more involved.) When I go to Craigslist Boston I really do feel like the site represents the entire community.

6. Pretty much free.

I'm sure I could add more, but the recurrent theme seems to be getting out of the way and keeping the focus on the people. Neither of these sites rely on revolutionary tools or features or algorithms, and neither seems particularly interested in impressing the tech community.
Sodexho seems to have an exclusive contract to provide lousy, overpriced food at just about every US university I've been to. I've never understood how they keep getting these contracts. But this is, of course, the problem with the quasi-private sector... they don't have to please their customers, they just have to please the university administration once every N years so they get an exclusive monopoly on every outlet within walking distance.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
Or you could just use Groovy.
Umm. Nope.
Why would you think that the motivation for my parenthetical was the fact that she's asian and/or female? I'm actually defending against preconceptions of corporate executives, not of women or asians.

I'm in the habit of making such comments because of what I see as a fairly pervasive anti-corporate prejudiced across our society. It appears to me that many, even most, people assume that corporate executives are money-grubbing scum who care not a whit for their customers, employees, or society at large. I'm trying to say this this is not the case with my employer: she's socially conscious, sensitive to the needs of employees, and tries to do the right thing in business.

The comment may not have been necessary -- that was why it was in parentheses -- but I saw a hint of an implication that my workplace was overly homogeneous, a "good ole boys' club". If such a slight was unintended, I apologize.
What the press publishes and how American's really feel are two completely different ideas.

don't generalize.
Saying "politics is a religion for many who lean left" is deliberately inflammatory. You don't get to blame the topic of conversation for your own bad behaviour.
Yeah, I know the guys that built awe.sm. Pretty sure TechCrunch's url shortener was built on their platform.
The Fibonacci implementation here:

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2008-12-1...

Does a pretty quick job using plain-old-old-ruby (POOR Implementation):

time ruby /Users/raganwald/Desktop/matrix_fib.rb 102334155

real 0m0.012s
user 0m0.007s
sys 0m0.004s

That doesn't mean we shouldn't welcome implementation improvements, but in my lifetime the quest for a "sufficiently smart compiler" that will do away with thinking programmers has enjoyed only modest success.

Append: This is not a criticism of Charles' amazing work dragging Ruby into the 1980s and designing Ruby-like languages for the JVM. If asked to choose between algorithm improvements and implementation improvements, I answer "Yes!"
Of course the Typeclassopedia later in that issue is also worth a look.
"The Semantic Web is the future. And Always will be"
Surprised to see that Michael Jackson's death received far more attention and positive remarks than what is being said here.
> Sorry, I don't understand what you mean. I said energy not
> time. Perhaps you could clarify.

Energy is correlated to time. Powering a computer for 2 hours requires more energy than powering a computer for 1 hour. Ditto for humans.

A good programmer can finish the job in 1 week and eat just as much food as the bad programmer in the same amount of time. The programmer needs 2 weeks to get the job done. Therefore, in the time needed for to finish the job, the bad programmer has eaten twice as much food as the good programmer, and has powered on his work station for twice the amount of time. Therefore a good programmer should be twice as cheap as a bad programmer, according to your reasoning.

I can guarantee you, good programmers are usually twice as expensive as bad programmers.

> How much energy does Britney Spears use compared to an
> average person? So yes, that hair cost a lot of energy to
> make.

Since an average human's hair costs practically nothing, Britney Spears's hair is infinitely more expensive. Therefore, Britney Spears has used infinite more energy to generate her hair. Since human energy comes from food, Britney Spears has eaten an infinite amount of food.

Riiiight.
First iPhone Augmented Reality App Appears Live in App Store
I'm fairly sure that some of these get left alive because people insist on submitting it over and over again if the post gets [dead]ed.
Does fib.py use psyco? If not, that does still seem slow. Standard numerical benchmarks indicate that c or fortran or whatever should have a much larger speed advantage relative to regular python than 40/163. E.g. on the n-body benchmark here:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=nbo...

Python is about 65 times slower than c/c++/java/fortran/scala.
Marketing works better if you reflect your audience's tastes. Doubtlessly someone calculated that the other image better suited Polish tastes, for which a racially diverse cast only serves as a vivid reminder that the image was marketed for an American audience.

Supplementary point of information: Poland's ethnic make-up diverges massively from that of the USA -- according to wikipedia the last census suggested there were a grand total of 4500-odd black people living in Poland (pop. 38 million). They have some Vietnamese, but they're still pretty rare; Poland's ethnic minorities are almost all eastern European. So the original ad would push "exotic foreign company" buttons, which is not what you want to do if you're trying to present yourself as a regular local business.

(On the other hand? "Mindlessly stupid" just about begins to sum up what they did with photoshop ...)
It rings true to me that big corporations tend to be not racist. That doesn’t mean, however, that no one or no group of people working for Microsoft (or any other corporation for that matter) will ever be racist. And if they are doing PR or the ads it is very much possible that their racism becomes visible as something that “Microsoft” is or does.

I don’t, however, think that this is the case here. But it was stupid to doctor with the picture. It’s a generic enough photo, so why not just buy a new one for the Polish ad?
Diversity like that is common in many places. Not Poland, however. The original is tailored to an American audience.

"Pander to diversity" is one way to put it, but I'm sure it probably matters even if just subconsciously, given that there are a substantial number of black customers in the US.
As a black man, I don't find it racist that the picture was cropped. But I do think it was naive of Microsoft to think that people wouldn't notice and cry foul. They should have just used a different picture altogether.
I don't know for certain, but I'd imagine it's everyone over the age of 18.
Wow and I thought Im alone in that!
If you want. But the sad fact is, no one will care about that story.

And if people do care, the story will get a bunch of upvotes. Let the voting and flagging systems work their magic.
That basically uses dynamic programming, which is "cheating". (It is a linear time algorithm instead of exponential!) Different compilers will almost always just give us constant factor improvements. Smarter algorithms will always beat that, but sometimes a smart algorithm with a slow compiler still isn't fast enough.
Maybe I'm alone in this, but if I don't take a 'breather' after a code burst, my quality goes to shit.

And seeing as I find it essentially impossible to turn my brain off from work-problems while I'm not strictly 'on the clock', I have zero guilt about time I might spend not doing work 'on the clock'.

Less than zero guilt, really. At several jobs I've felt my clients/employers didn't nearly appreciate the 'free overtime' they got.
I found this interesting since he doesn't have money as one of his pillars. I thought it would be on there for me, but looking over my 12 year career, I've never left a company because of money. I left my first job because I felt the company was going under (they did 6 months later). The next two companies I worked for were bought out and both were going through major layoffs so I left before that happened. The next company I left because the project and the people pillars started to suck. And my last company I left because the company and project pillars really truly sucked. The company I'm at now has great people, project, and ok company pillars. But the money ain't all that great so I may leave because of that in the future.
There's quite the business lesson here:

Up until recently, the GMAT exam had a virtual monopoly over business school standardized exams. That all changed on Jan. 1, 2006, when GMAC cut its ties with the Educational Testing Service (ETS), with whom it had a decades-long partnership to develop and deliver the GMAT exam, moving instead to a new testing administrator, Pearson VUE. The severing of ties meant that ETS no longer had to abide by a noncompete clause with GMAC, giving it the green light to court business school admissions officers and promote the GRE as an alternative exam. Under the previous agreement between ETS and GMAC, this type of activity was forbidden.

"Once they ended the contract with us, we were able to move into this market," says David Payne, head of the GRE program for ETS.
To anyone with any level of web security experience, the real fix for this (proper escaping) should be obvious.

For every really trivial vulnerability like this that Twitter can't fix, there must be scores of slightly more subtle vulns that go undisclosed.
> Certainly the Ted Kennedy that died today was not the Ted Kennedy that once abandoned a dying woman.

In my experience that is a fallacy. Besides he was a politician - they know all about expected response. I don't think anyone here can make a statement like that.

(I know nothing about him, but it was a pretty sick thing to do. He certainly deserved a worse punishment)
would you accept an asian women, and then caucasian/black men?
This is fantastic news. I have been developing a mobile version of a web site this week and WebKit has been a dream. The BlackBerry version... not so much. It seems like WebKit is becoming the standard for mobile these days.
As a former GMAT and GRE (as well as LSAT and SAT) instructor, I would still recommend taking the GMAT for B-School admission. The GRE is much easier, so the curve is less forgiving, especially in math. A perfect 800 on GRE math is just 87th percentile. It makes it hard to differentiate yourself to admissions committees who value analytical thinking.
Oh please. Yes, some people in the US are hypersensitive to kinds of racism in a manner that tends to be less common in Europe. But Europe has its own issues and claiming it's some example of "what's wrong with the US these days" is just silly.

How sensitive are Poles to anti-semitism? There are almost no Jews in Poland because those that survived the Holocaust were driven out (sometimes violently) in the decades following WW2. This was the same time when Blacks in the US fought for and won their civil rights, incidentally. So the US has some thorny problems that aren't fully resolved that Poland doesn't have.
It shouldn't be, but politics is a religion for many who lean left.

Complete and utter flamebait. Worse, it's tripe ... the comment doesn't even make sense.
If you really want to reduce water use, use a Clivus Multrum composting toilet and recycle your shower water with the reed bed. Put the reed bed inside an airtight greenhouse, with energy recovery ventilation and a dehumidifier. The dehumidifier will recover your shower water after the plants transpire it as vapor. This water will be pure -- basically distilled.

It should be easy to recycle shower water, and the consequences for getting the reed bed system's adjustments wrong is much less than for treating sewage. Clivus Multrum toilets work well. The technology has been around for decades, and is well understood.
It's racist because it's so f'ing lazy. If they wanted to make the 'Polish' version of the ad they should have taken a new picture.
The ads are very intrusive indeed. While glancing at your site, my senses heightened because my "be careful or you will click on a tricky advertisement!" sense was increased to CODE RED. The alternating ad-content-ad scheme is very much NOT friendly.
do people actually use these websites ?

I've seen atleast 2 or 3 different search engine comparison websites, please stop doing them !
In a sense, your motivation is beside the point--we only have your written word, and the comment can be read as some sort of qualifier (since your boss is a female and an Asian).

I'm not insulted, or even upset--I just thought it was odd comment.

And, FWIW, I agree with your parent comment.
I don't think the matrix algorithm is linear, in other words I don't think fib(40) takes exactly twice as long to compute as fib(20). I think it's faster than linear, because it converts the multiplications to exponentiation and then takes advantage of composeability such that fib(40) should require on the order of one more operation than fib(20).

I think that means it's order log 2 n, but perhaps you HN folks can correct my poor math skills.
Kaspersky 2010 Free Genuine Activation Key
90 days free coupon for you.
The "they" in this case have nothing to do with IE.

David just decided to see if he could do it. You know, for the fun of it.

Get a grip.
Privacy Policy / Terms Of Service Generator
what's this ? some kind of hack ??
Not to mention they didn't even bother editing the hand! Lazy Microsoft strikes again.
Hello, I admire your work.
Interesting. IANAL, so correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like the problem is not that the court wants to execute an innocent man, but that the Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction over the case. This would make sense in a way because the Supreme Court doesn't have the time to hear every death row inmates appeal. That is the duty of a lower court.

On a side note that reinforces the financial problem with capital punishment. It often costs more money to execute someone than simply lock them up for life.
I've only used twitter for a few weeks, but I very quickly got to the point that I just delete the notification emails without reading them. They don't have any content at all beyond the notification that there's a new follower, about half a bit of information.
Google Earth finds loch ness monster...
I may skip Digital DUMBO this week to make it. I have one question though: What is the Hackers & Founders Meetup like?

- Are there presentations?
- Are people generally social?
- Is it more than a networking event?

I'm on the nyyc list, but it's so low traffic that I haven't found any answers to these types of questions.
Not sure this is worthy of complaining about.

If OP has said, "but she's darned good" then that would be clear that the OP believed there was a conception that she would be not good because she was female and/or Asian.

But that's not what he said; he said "who is darned good". I don't see giving someone a compliment without a qualifier as being offensive. Can I not say that my black boss is a great manager to work for, or my Indian business partner is really smart?
Also check out the author's "Binary marble adding machine" http://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/index.html
You are most definitely not alone. You probably just spoke for the majority of us.
Indeed. These types of interviews are much more about finding people who "think outside the box... just like me!" than about finding people who can do the job.
Is it possible to send out a note about these things a week or two in advance of the meetup? Each time I find myself wanting to go but being kind of busy but with more advance notice I would be able to make time. It likely does not matter at this point for me- I am in Paris at the moment and I am moving to the west coast in September :-/ ...but maybe this will help other people that would like to attend.
If you're curious how scores from the two exams compare, here's a table (released by ETS - the folks that run the GRE) that converts GRE scores to GMAT scores, and vice versa:

http://www.ets.org/gre/2008/9934/tool.html (Excel Sheet)
It is natural. This is because you take your skill seriously, so you'll always be trying to improve at it. It's true for other walks of life too (music, athletics, etc.)
It's called "Next Posts", but that is just to confuse you.
Some fun floating around the Wordpress Codex documentation.
It's 37signals' Getting Real all over again. It's even got some of their "like me or go to hell" writing style to it.