skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not necessarily the right way to do it.

To formalize the problems, assume that Wikipedia was intended to be subjective and that editors are potentially malicious. So some edits in the middle of a changeset might be malicious, but children edits are legitimate. So you want to delete the malicious edits but preserve the dangling child edit. What is the correct way to reconcile this changeset?

Once you answer the above question, you can soften the intepretation of malicious to: Users that I would rather filter, because their opinions are stupid to me or because I consider them spammers.
80Legs: A Web Crawler as a Service
If your coding style works for your company, then I won't complain about it.

The code I'm talking about was incomprehensible on many levels -- most of the cryptically-named variables were global, and might have a comment explaining their meaning somewhere in the 200,000+ lines of code spread across 200 or so files, but it was often a struggle to find it. Other times, there would be no explanation at all. Even once you'd found out what it meant it was a struggle to keep it in your head and not confuse it with any of another bunch of similarly named variables (woe bedtide anyone who gets confused between nks, nqs and nkqs!)

This is all pretty typical of large scientific codes, though. Scientists are, as a class, the worst programmers on Earth.
On July 26, 1948, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981. At which time he famously said that if anyone had a problem with it he'd '...see their resignation on his desk in the morning.'

EO 9981 was not simply a political move. Our military strategists saw during WWII that it would be decidedly foolish for us to continue fighting wars with one hand tied behind our backs.

Around this same time, a wave of statutes swept the nation that made it illegal for most Americans under the age of 16 to drop out of High School. Do not suppose that these things are coincidental. They are common sense steps that had to be taken to address the new realities that were rapidly developing in the post WWII world.

The world is today, again, undergoing a process of rapid geopolitical and social change. Strategists deep in the bowels of the American Government have looked into the future, and again, they find themselves wanting to change what they see looking back at them.

FACT: China has more high school honors students than the United States has high school students. That's right. If you take every high school student in the US, the poor students and the good students, China has more students than that in ONLY its high honors programs.

Look, the global economy will be the battlefield of choice in the future. We do not intend to charge onto that battlefield with one hand tied behind our backs.

The only thing wrong with this article, in my opinion, is that it excludes the recruitment of white Americans. We SHOULD be making sweeping policy changes to address these issues. Immigration is not going to get us out of it. I work half the time in Ningbo or Paris myself. How long before Indians and Indonesians figure out that the smart CVs are flowing to China not California? They are not blind.

I feel like Truman, if you have a problem with being more aggressive with American students with respect to instilling the disciplines of math and science, feel free to leave the country. It is past time that we dealt with this.
HN Self-defeating Policies: The Username
So, I know this has been proposed several times, though I can't seem to find it at the moment with a simple search on searchyc.com.

Why is it that it's still impossible to change your username on Hacker News?

I understand the need for consistency and the fear of abuse, but I think that the first is a self-defeating reason and the second can be easily avoided.

First, consistency can be better achieved in my opinion by allowing a user to change their username. By not allowing it, you're forcing someone to create a new account which then dissociates all of their past posts, comments, and karma. Essentially, for all anyone knows they are a completely different user. I think this is much more confusing and inconsistent than if you were to allow the person to change their username. If you were to click it, you would still be able to see the karma that person has earned and the comments and posts they have made. You could even include a field on the user's info page that shows "past usernames".

Secondly, to avoid abuse, look at what Facebook has done with their vanity url's. They allowed users to change their name once and only once. This allows you to reconsider once you've had time to think on it, but knowing full well that you can only do it once, you better be sure. Not to mention, most users would never end up even using the one allowance, for fear that they'd want to change it to something else down the road.

Now that my reasoning is out of the way, I'll give you my reasons for wanting to change. I made my username, NoBSWebDesign back in the day (hey, I'm young, 2 years ago is "back in the day" for me), when I was first exploring the world of entrepreneurship by dabbling on the side. It was a shameless attempt to promote my business.

Well, that's not what I'm after here. I don't wnat shameless marketing within the confines of this community. Hell, that business doesn't even exist anymore.

But mainly, I dis-like the first impression it gives of me to anyone in this community. No, I'm not just some guy who can make websites. In fact, I have two BS degrees in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering and graduated top of my class for each. And I now own a successful consultancy and startup. I think I deserve a little more credibility than my naively-chosen username allows.

Alright, that's enough of my rant. I needed a break from work and this is one of those things that's been nagging me for a while. So, I just thought I'd put it out there. And since this may be my last post as NoBSWebDesign, I figured why not :-)
Wish I could upvote this more.

Doesn't matter the color of the student, EVERYONE should be getting pushed right now.

Bravo wsprague
Thanks for the reply. Now what you haven't shown here is whether the actual persons who do score high enough to major in math (by the way, is there any evidence how high that is?) have been exhausted in current practice, or whether some (from whatever ethnic group) are turning to other careers. In other words, even if a decade from now there is still an ethnic score gap at high-school-graduating age, there may be some underutilized talented young people among the highest-scoring individuals in the lowest-scoring groups who could beneficially be encouraged to study math. Answering this question takes actual numbers rather than just mean scores--especially because the distribution of scores may not be the same in each ethnic group.

As the other participant who replied to your comment (the parent to this comment) mentioned, causation of the group score gap is still very unclear. This year, the gap is what it is, and it may not be the best use of societal resources to try to boost college-age participation in math classes among students who leave high school scoring near the median standard score level on the SAT. But it might be very worthwhile to systematically improve math instruction in the elementary grades

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/fall99/ame...

and that could have a lot to do with narrowing the group gap, that is raising the total number of students in various ethnic groups who learn enough math through high school to be ready to thrive in math courses in college.

From the link you kindly shared:

"Mr. Finn, a former education official in the Reagan administration, said he expected the results of the SAT and ACT -- another college entrance exam -- to add fuel to a movement among the nation's governors and school superintendents to come up with consistent national standards for high-school curricula."

And from further on in the same article:

"Noting the gap in achievement between lower-performing minority students and the general population, College Board officials said those who lagged tended to go to school in poorer districts with fewer resources. 'As a country, we must do better providing students of every background access to the best education,' Mr. Caperton said."

Yes, I think there are a currently a lot of laggard high schools--and I shouldn't have to tell any participant familiar with American society what kind of neighborhoods the worst high schools are concentrated in--that do a bad job of teaching math, so it's high time to improve math teaching throughout K-12 schooling in the United States.
Inside Wikimedia's Open-Source Strategic Planning
I agree with you that this is design, often akin to industrial design more than art, which could also be described as art meets practical considerations or too narrowly, art meets commerce. And that's why I'm casting a wide net in my remarks by bringing up pixel alignment considerations, as well as licensing and other considerations. These are critical considerations to typography in practice.

For example the politics and business constraints surrounding the development, licensing, and use of Helvetica in the 90's are way more complex than simply saying, "Microsoft didn't want to pay for Helvetica", which is how many designers put it.

These complaints about licensing also, by the way, give away many of their visceral emotion-based reactions to Arial, rather than objective design purity. Clearly every party is affected in some way by the commerce of design, which often seems to inform designer's reactions too, especially when the licensing question is over-simplified.
Does anyone know how much of that $170m actually went into his pocket? After investors took their share for their equity, taxes, and etc?
Could I propose that what the article saves for last, because it's such a kicker, is that the sample size was tiny and thus the study is fundametally flawed.

And this is almost always the case with these types of studies.
I'm hoping mixing dopplr's well designed site with Nokia's resources will create a powerful site, but this will probably lead to the death of dopplr.
Dopplr's kind of cool, but I'm still looking for the right thing:

I travel occasionally, and in reality, it's not my circle of friends that needs to be informed, it's the people that I could potentially meet somewhere. For instance, I'm part of Debian (although I really ought to officially retire) and the Apache Software Foundation. There are lists where I can mention that I'm going to be somewhere, and more often than not, it turns out there's someone from there who is happy to meet up. Or the other way around: when people visit Padova (or wherever I happen to be living), I'd be happy to go out and chat about whatever topic we have in common. I want something that lets me get in touch, in a casual and no obligations way, with people who I have something in common with. I suppose that it's never going to be perfect because you can't force all the people from various lists to sign up for some service, but I think it could be improved.
I have a somewhat different kind of suggestion for what would most improve math teaching in the United States. See some of my favorite articles on the subject by mathematicians

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/fall99/ame...

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/fall99/ind...

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/math/pdf/0503/0503081v1.pdf

for the idea that proper mathematical education includes learning certain facts by heart through practice, but also includes a lot of flexibility of thinking and making deep connections between seemingly unrelated subjects.
I imagine, as people who travel a lot, they found the service extremely useful. It's also a really classy service, and the founders were well almost certainly known to the investors already.
Not Using IPAddr Should Result In You Being Mauled By A Bear
First, this isn't about affirmative action--this isn't about establishing quotas. It's about funding programs that will help attract and retain minority students in stem majors. If you don't understand that key difference, let me know. And if you don't understand the value of such programs, then you fail to realize what it will take for any company or country to compete globally.

Second, there are too many factors at play to just dismiss a student's abilities to start the next google, for example, by just assessing standardized test scores--especially, to assess his/her potential by how well on average his group/ethnicity performs. parse_tree, go back to my first point.

Such programs, I don't think, are intended to have immediate results. The goal is to retain as many people who are interested in stem majors as possible. Yes, but I think the biggest impact will come as a result of their kids having much more exposure and such people understanding the value of such programs that they reach out to others.

Finally, I think a lot would be best spent at an early age--early in a child's development. If you think a person's abilities are tied solely to genetics, you're wrong. Nurture plays an important role, and I've seen enough evidence to support that. Funding programs that compensate for parents not having an adequate education (and thus have to work multiple jobs, don't read enough to kids, etc) to offer their kids a good start.

Quick poll: of all you hackers here, how many had parents in stem majors? How many had parents who went to secondary school? These are much better indicators as to how well a person will do in life than race or gender. Think about it. Many of you played with legos. Did you ask your parents to buy you legos? Or did they buy them for you?
Isn't it a bit early for the 10.04 release? Like ... 6 months earlier? Where is 9.10?
I agree that this should be inclusive of everybody, regardless of ethnicity or gender. The goal is to just have more stem majors. The more diverse the better.

I won't get into the other topics.
This might explain why the electric conversions coming in 2010 are all passenger models. (I was hoping for a cargo one.)
I'd like to know this as well. It seems like someone could ballpark it pretty well based on the various VC rounds.
Oh, you need to check the article I submitted in the last twenty-four hours, just published by leading researchers on the issue you ask about.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=838534
The US is a very immigrant friendly society in many ways; you're right about that. People are welcoming of foreigners in many ways. The problem is the government, which is really bad at dealing with immigration.
They are just announcing the plans for 10.04 since 9.10 is frozen now and only bug fixes are going in.
MySQL is hardly a threat to Oracle's RDBMS. If you need Oracle enough to pay their asking price, MySQL is not a substitute.
Add to the list of computer languages
Given that it has to record state changes somehow, that makes sense.
This seems to be a very neat idea. How about processing of the crawled data, if someone wants to process the data and show it to the end user in a comprehensive way? We are looking for a solution which is affordable and provide both.
The keypad at an office I worked at about 10 years ago had an electronic display that randomized the key positions. The display's viewing angle was artificially narrowed as well. I thought that all of this was to prevent shoulder-surfing -- the wear and buildup issue never crossed my mind.
My only concern is that we have to come up with a plan that can be explained to the 100,000 or primary school teachers in the USA. Rarefied curriculums are like rarefied programming languages -- they don't "take", or they just distract. We need a Python, not an ML to explain to folks, and, honestly, "drill the crap out of your students and test them regularly" is easy to explain in a staff meeting... and would be a vast improvement over the BS that passes for education these days.
Sharing in a crisis
I was thinking about this today, wondering if it's the start of one of those market pendulum direction changes. We had the vertical "systems" provider in IBM. You bought everything from them, hardware, 3270 terminals, printers, networks, software, everything.

Then we moved into the era where you bought everything from different vendors. Servers from one vendor, networking gear from another, software from everyone and anyone, and people start to realize "gee this is a f-ing mess, can't I just get one company to do all this for me" and that's where Oracle wants to step in and be able to say "yes".
wow how old is this? Dated 2 days ago? Shouldnt it be like 6 months ago?
I've been writing mobile software for a few years and I'd wholeheartedly agree with the first two. The third I would be less religious about... you should always listen to your customers, but you should be driving the buss, not them. Good article, mobile in general is very much not the web, or anything else really. Further, writing software for the iPhone and Android is several orders of magnitude easier than writing Brew or Java ME software for the ability to easily publish updates alone.
That article has a point, but it doesn't serve any purpose other than highlighting a problem we already know about--let's leave the dead horses alone. As a minority (black female), it's nothing new.

> "Attracting students' interest to fields where they have been traditionally underrepresented is a challenge, Ms. Bozeman said."

It's a challenge for reasons the article doesn't even mention. A certain elementary school I volunteered at during college in DC brings to mind why it might be an issue with minorities. The school was predominantly minority--hispanics and blacks--and it seemed like the school system had forgotten about the kids. (Yes, we know many DC schools have serious problems.) Some of them didn't know their ABCs, had trouble with numbers, and couldn't even write their own names. Granted this was a kindergarten class, but it wasn't as if my friends and I showed up to volunteer on the first day of school for them either. We asked some of the kids if their parents helped them with their homework, etc. and most of them said no. The school itself lacked basic supplies (no pencils with erasers for kindergartners??). The problem starts wayyy before we've even gotten the kids to the college level and by then, I tend to think it's a little late to be thinking of how to deal with it.

Kids have to be set up earlier than high school and college for this stuff. And I don't mean pulling a few kids aside from each class for academically gifted enrichment activities. There definitely needs to be a wholesale overhaul of education in such a way that all kids think about those kinds of careers.

With that being said, I think the basic premise of the article is flawed, too. I think we're experiencing a brain-drain all across the board and it just happens to be the case where minorities stand out once again. I grew up in a pretty diverse environment (military brat) and I can't say all of my white, asian, and indian friends were flocking to AP Calculus either! lol. As a matter of fact, most of my non-minority friends from high school who were considered by teachers and students alike to be smart actually didn't even go into fields like math or science--they tended to prefer journalism or law--with the occasional biology major.

This is an issue affecting everybody.
Actually, I am not waiting for the greencard (seeing how it would take me at least 5 more years to get it). I am waiting to get the startup to a stage where it can sponsor an H1B for me which is very hard to do for reasons mentioned in my previous comments.

There is a difference between the permission to stay legally in the country while working full time on a business and free healthcare and dedicated highway lanes. Those comparisons make me think you are just trolling. The former does not cost the government money, arguably, they will make more money from my business on taxes.

You are spouting generalizations about the immigration friendly nature of America without addressing the basic question: what is wrong with having an easier and non dubious way for someone on an H1B to start a startup?

What's more: you implied, quite baselessly, that going from an H1B to a startup is so easy that only the lazy would have problems doing it. You have not yet provided a single justification for that.
Ha! Correct!
You know, I'd try this, but the hard part is that the processing is still on me (and I can't code, so I'm SOL). That, frankly, is the hard part, is it not?
I don't, I think that kind of things are exactly what they should be doing. There are plenty of "100% free" distros like Debian and Fedora; Ubuntu shouldn't mimic them and instead should do whatever is the best for end users.
Also: http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-talk-google/browse_threa...;
And one more thing!!

We always need to remember that there are subtle ways that students get sorted into "smart" and "not-smart", even when we are trying to be objective:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect
Create a new ID and don't worry about it. If you want, you can put each ID in the other's profile, so if anyone wants to track down more about you the information is there.
> due to initial assumptions that are much a matter of faith

Isn't it always the case that science is built on a matter of faith though? I have faith that I'm not in a matrix-like reality, and there's no real way to know if I was in one, so I just set it aside, and instead work within the model of reality I see.

And if you do assume that the this reality does hold consistently (you don't really have much choice to decide otherwise), surely you can learn and know about how stuff works within that reality. Or am I missing something?
Fun article, especially in context of our hypercaffeinated culture. Been meaning to give the -racetams a shot eventually...
Comments at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=839950
Thinking about it, that would be the ultimate hack. If the core file does indeed have all the regions mapped when the core was dumped, you can theoretically load them as before then back-step each instruction since they are fairly well defined.

The huge issue here is, the most probable reason for segfaulting was an unexpected value coming from the environment and it's impossible to know the environment the process was running in post-mortem.
I would love it if it processed, stored, and indexed the data.

http://parselets.com/ + mysql + sphinx
Google Acquisitions And Investments Made Pretty
I am not much of a programmer, and have never understood OO development, despite a fair bit of reading. I was thinking about it earlier today, and I think part of the reason OO seems so difficult is that it does not fit human languages. Languages have separate nouns and verbs and various modifiers (adjectives/adverbs) and connectives. OO with its "unifying" attributes and methods is like a language with preformed phrases rather than words, and which can be modified in only limited, preset ways. This works much better for visual images (since it seems to be closer to how we manipulate images mentally) which makes it a better fit for GUIs.
Nice that they turned out so "well", but I think the real measure isn't their title and this cute story doesn't convey much information about the men. My father came from a large family, at the head of which was a drunk father. All but him followed in the footsteps of their father.

However, having said this, I've often thought that extraordinary people (and you often find the heads of companies are extraordinary) often came from environments that were extraordinarily harsh. I always thought that if the harshness of the childhood didn't break them, it would make them super strong or driven compared to people that had "normal" childhoods.
A Shot in the Arm: How Job Lock Hurts Entrepreneurs
I would like to think this is true, but honestly find it difficult to believe. Do you have any evidence or research on the topic?