skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That would actually be higher caliber.
9. I suspect everything can.
I wonder if the leaderboard should be ranked by karma x average comment score.
What is even more shocking to me are the comments on OK Cupid to this post. Many of the commenters who say they are black/Indian/etc seem to acceptingly resign themselves to saying they're part of "less desirable" or "undesirable" groups, as if as a person they are in fact undesirable. (e.g. "As a member of a particularly undesirable racial group, ..." or "Some of us less desirable types ...")

The real shocker though is who advocates for restricting searches by race! From the comments, it is people who are part of undesirable groups who actually want OKC to be race-aware and allow people to discriminate.

Clearly the data shows that there are biases toward certain races. However, from my experience, finding potential dates online is a roller coaster ride. It has ups and downs, and unfortunately we are always looking for what causes those downs. After all, people just reject you without a reason!

With data like this, many people will just assume that RACE is the reason for rejection -- something they cannot do anything about -- when it is more likely something they can accommodate for. That is the real danger in reading too far into these studies -- dating is all about YOU, while these statistics are all about averages!
Sounds weird. Are there no other flower names that could have been used?
Async communication is key to twitter. It's also cool that you can tweet by any method anyone has ever thought of, from almost any device that can send any sort of data whatsoever. The API has helped them greatly. I'm sure that someone, somewhere has a computer that transcribes short voice messages that can be left by phone. If not they will by the time I hit "reply" ... there should be a rule #34 for twitter.

* e-mail

* sms (key for reaching mobile people w/o smartphones)

* web browsers

* native apps / widgets

And then services like twitpic built around twitter.
I use git every day via Magit (http://zagadka.vm.bytemark.co.uk/magit/), which is a joy to use. But every time I have to fall back to the shell for something nontrivial it just feels so awkward.
Solving Sudoku isn't exactly rocket science. I can understand if you don't have the cleanest, most elegant solution in the world, but if you can't even make a tiny bit of progress toward writing a Sudoku solver in a few hours, then I don't think you have any business holding a programming job, much less telling other programmers how to do their jobs.

I mean, those Ron Jeffries blog posts read like someone who has never solved a non-trivial programming problem in his life. He literally makes no headway on any difficult part of the problem, and he spends what appears to be the better part of several hours working hard to get nowhere on code that does very little. If someone is listening to him about how to approach programming projects, I've got a bridge to sell that man.
I've been in this columnist's shoes, and I can confirm what he says: the score depends on the grader.

At the center where I graded, only 1 in 14 essays were read by a second scorer for verification. "Calibration" consisted of a half-hour of reading pre-scored essays and taking a test that required a passing rate (being within some margin of the "true" score) of only 80%.

There were ridiculous formulas about the number of adjectives, etc., required for a certain score. Imaginative writing suffered the most; cookie-cutter writing was rewarded the most.

Scorers worked eight hour shifts. Sometime after my morning coffee I was the most generous, and in my afternoon lull, when I could hardly keep my eyes open, I'm pretty sure I graded the hardest.

I remember one of my colleagues had, sadly, suffered brain injury in a car wreck. His scores were all over the place, as I could tell when he asked my opinion on the essays he was scoring. Others had modest educational attainments -- people who had maybe gotten a bachelor's degree twenty years before, but not really been engaged in mentally rigorous work in the mean time. Many of them couldn't reliably spot an adjective. They were amazed that I had an "accuracy rate" of 97%, the highest at my table by a good 15 percentage points.

We were grading fourth-graders' tests from Arizona. The previous cohort at my center (that I didn't belong to) had graded high school tests from, if memory serves, Minnesota. (This was late '90s). The tests were "high stakes" -- failure on the test kept the student from high school graduation. It later came to light that some large number of students who had failed the test and been denied graduation, had later challenged their scores and successfully shown that their tests had been severely mis-graded. They were allowed to graduate, half a year too late.

After the grading period ended, I stayed on a mailing list to hear about job openings the next summer in that city. However, some time during the spring I got a letter saying that there wouldn't be a grading center in our city that year. Wonder why.
Action urged on mobiles coverage 
UK mobile operators need to do more to help customers who experience coverage problems, an advisory panel has said.
> Sorry, but your posts come off as really creepy and strange. I hope you realize that no one has a right to sex with anyone else, whether a particular person or a member of any arbitrary group?

So you are going to vote me down for citing a statistic?

I never talked about forcing anyone to date a race they don't like.

The first part of solving a problem is admitting there's a problem. Ignoring racism is part of the problem.
In practice, almost all core code is C++/Java (vast majority is C++, though its slowly shifting), with Python relegated mainly to scripting glue.
It was simple. This is the code he had to use (assuming he used URLConnection)

connection.setRequestProperty ("User-agent", "GoogleBot/0.01");

I had never done this before and found it out by looking at the javadoc. I don't see how switching to Python would have made this easier.
I was writing mostly for the audience of people who already dismiss Krugman as an incorrigible liberal but might consider the opinions of self-trained Austrian economists who post on comment threads. Those of us who dismiss goldbugs on comment threads already should have been convinced by the article to give up on Krugman.

But yes, I am also disappointed in Krugman.
A lot can and will happen between now and 2018. True, Britain will likely be a Euro state, but China's inevitable slowdown over the next decade will likely stall the transition away from the dollar.
Lines of regulation is not a good measure. A lot of banking regulation is related to well, banking. Glass-Steagall is specifically related to investment banking which is a whole other ball game, and to call the repeal of that act insignificant because it isn't that "big" is patently absurd.
It's an interesting threat, and one that we're going to have to keep out eye on. But I have reservations about how effective multinational cooperation on international monetary policy can be.

One of the reasons that the dollar is the global reserve currency is because there is so much of it in circulation. No other currency is as liquid. Moving oil purchases of a bloc of countries to a non-dollar basket of currencies ought to be a significant hit to global demand for the dollar. But those same countries will have to correspondingly increase the amount of their own currency in global circulation, if the basket is to be used for international trade contracts. Despite being a strong currency and having a strong central bank, the EU has not pursued a policy of making the Euro a globally viable reserve currency, precisely because they do not want to have to deal with the problems that stem from creating the massive amounts of currency in circulation necessary for global use.

However, something similar was done in the past in Europe. During the transition to the Euro, the currency was brought into existence for use in financial transactions three years before it was brought into physical circulation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_of_the_euro#Prepar...). So the euro existed really as a reified basket of national currencies fixed against each other in certain proportions. This was possible because of the end goal of bringing into being a fully unified monetary system and because of the close political integration of all the major players, who were subject to the financial constraints necessary to keep their currency locked into a fixed ratio with the others.

It's not clear to me that the Arab nations, Iran, Russia, and China can sustain the level of economic cooperation necessary to make their basket of currencies stick. Further, it's not clear that they can maintain stable financial policies at home, while allowing enough of their currency to be used abroad. Secondary foreign markets for a nation's currency can have difficult-to-predict effects (e.g. the Eurodollar market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurodollar). For a nation like China, who keeps very close control over their currency, won't allow it to float, and doesn't allow full convertibility (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/hkedition/2009-09/18/content_87...), it will be quite difficult for it to seriously play a role in supplanting the dollar.

Having one actor (the Fed) is far less prone to problems than having half a dozen or more actors facing coordination and cooperation problems when faced with currency speculators operating in secondary currency markets. Just look at how Soros was able to tear the Pound Sterling out of the ERM by massively shorting it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Exchange_Rate_Mechanis...).
And with the answer:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/browse_thread/...
RDF was really fucking terrific: An Entity-Attribute-Value tuplespace where all three members can (and should, except for tail values) be references, forming a directed graph.

Unfortunately it was buried under a pile of awful XML syntax, boiling off the cleverness by making its graph nature incredibly non-obvious. The W3C poisoned the well by making it synonymous with their magic semweb bullshit parade (fuck you TimBL, why'd you have to turn into Ted Nelson?).

Then it had the great misfortune of having its first real-world use be in the epic clusterfuck of Netscape's RSS, to be embraced / extended / extinguished by Dave Winer. What a shitty way to die...
Papers for SIGGRAPH & SIGGRAPH Asia are accepted a few months before the conference.

These are the best two conferences in computer graphics, and the bar to get in is extremely high -- reviewers are very very tough and submitted papers have to not only be technically accurate, but also very polished in writing and presentation (and video).

That being said, a lot of these kind of systems have been coming out in the past few years, and it's a little hard to judge how successful they are due to the enormous amount of work required to reproduce results (their releasing a binary is commendable).

My own personal feeling is that this system probably works quite well for "common" things in their database, but there might be many small artifacts in generated images. Also, if you start trying to include stuff that's not well represented in the database, then the artifacts probably become quite severe.
Caveman Science Fiction
Aussie judge wants to see live BitTorrent demo
Looking at some of the apps Adobe are showcasing - it appears they're all around 10mb, which suggests they're including all the runtime bits in there.
My own take on this is that, while it's possible for a bunch of countries to invent a new pseudo-currency, it's probably easier to use an existing pseudo-currency, and I think the IMF's XDR is a likely candidate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Drawing_Rights

This is a weighted average of several currencies, in addition to the USD. I think it's much more likely that, if oil is to be traded in any non-USD currency, it will first be traded in a pseudo-currency that includes the USD.
This is essentially what AVM2 does already, only it's JIT rather than AOT.
I would love a "Ruby on Rails for Django devs" article too, if anyone has something like that.
I've found that it's often worth unit-testing functionality that depends upon complex combinations of GUI state. For example, "Show the menu only when there is a selected bar and the baz list contains at least two items that can be foozled together." These interactions are very often wrong, and even if you code them right, it's nice to have a record of what the spec was so when someone comes along and says "I can make this code much cleaner if I eliminate the check for foozling" (or worse, they change the definition of foozling), the test breaks and you remember there was a reason you put it there in the first place.

I find that it's a waste to test things like appearance, position, labels - basically anything that should be in CSS or other declarative specifications. But UIs often have quite a bit of actual logic in them (ironically, because real humans are often strikingly illogical), and that should all get tested.
maybe look at the amish or the hutterites
Nature is a Brilliant Engineer 
Primates and the success of Internet Social Networking - what's the connection?

Short Answer - Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc are all examples of virtual 'grooming'.

Most mammals only scratch with the back foot, but a monkey or ape can use either back of front. Its front limbs are ideally suited to the cleaning tasks. The nimble fingers can run through the fur and locate specific trouble spots with great accuracy. Compared with claws and hooves,the primate's hands are precision `cleaners'. Even so, two hands are better than one, and this creates something of a problem. The monkey or ape can manage to bring both its hands into play when dealing with its legs, flanks, or front, but cannot really get to grips efficiently in this way with its back, or the arms themselves. Also, lacking a mirror, it cannot see what it is doing when it is concentrating on the head region. Here, it can use both hands, but it must work blind. Obviously, the head, back and arms are going to be less beautifully groomed than the front, sides and legs, unless something special can be done for them.

The solution is social 'grooming', the development of a friendly mutual aid system. This can be seen in a wide range of both bird and mammal species, but it reaches a peak of expression amongst the higher primates.

In other words, social grooming is a co-operative, non-aggressive activity.

If two animals wish to tighten their bond of friendship, they can do so by repeatedly grooming one another, even if the condition of their fur hardly warrants it. Indeed, there seems to be little relationship between the amount of dirt on the coat, and the amount of mutual grooming that takes place. Social grooming activities appear to have become almost independent of their original stimuli. Although they still have the vital task of keeping the fur clean, their motivation now appears to be more social than cosmetic. By enabling two animals to stay close together in a non-aggressive, co-operative mood they help to tie tighter the inter-personal bonds between the individuals in the troop or colony.

Equate that to human activities - we are simply behaving very much as our compelling urges and genes have molded us to be. There's no escape from it - we are simply Naked Apes, acting on our basic instincts, no matter where today's technology takes us.

And the point of this dissertation?

To figure out where Social Networking is next headed, or to develop the next 'internet sensation' - spend a week taking notes in the primate house of your local zoo.

Mike Francis
'Nature is a Brilliant Engineer'
This is probably the closest you'll find:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
I don't know why parent is being modded down. Adobe has some fucking mind-blowing engineers, especially on their core teams. Advanced technology labs is putting out parc-quality work in the field of graphics.
But what applications are there for a low-bitrate-low-latency link?
Requests latest Tarantino film as "my wife insisted we choose Twilight last weekend".
In fact, solving Sudoku puzzles was a programming assignment given in my first year of undergraduate study. We were given input/output specifications, and told to write in C++. That was it.

Seeing as how most of the class passes, I assume almost any joker can write a half-decent sudoku solver if sufficiently motivated.
Men arrested for G-20 Twittering say it's free speech
Why is this a topic on Hacker News?
Not sure what the point of this comment is. Fingerprints are one of the requirements for requesting any law enforcement records (not court documents) so far as I know.

It's not like this is some sort of insidious process where you don't realize they are going to take your fingerprints until it's too late for you to back out because there is a gun against your head. The entire process is basically:

1. Get fingerprints on a card of acceptable format by a 'professional.'

2. Send in fingerprint card, request and payment.

As for me, it's hard to go through the immigration process without proving that you're not a criminal in your country of origin. That, and I have my fingerprints on record anyways. I had a class 3 gaming license in NY state. The NY State Police took my fingerprints for that.
The most important lesson to learn here is that all code, including tests, is a means to an end. A lot of people geek out about new programming languages, object oriented design, automated testing, TDD, XP, and various other methodologies du jour. If those things help you achieve your goal, that's great; but it's important to remember that they're (usually) not your goal in and of themselves.

I don't think jwz would say that unit testing is a bad idea. What he was trying to say when he dismissed them was that they were focused on making a browser, not on making a nice piece of code.

Similarly, Norvig was focused on solving sudokus, not on exploring methodologies that might be used to write the code which solves sudokus.
The repeal is not insignificant. My point was to counter the idea that banking had some sort of massive deregulation in the Bush era. One law repealed + massive growth in other regulations is hardly "deregulation".
This seems unfair. (a) OCaml != Clojure; maybe the former is better for this problem. (b) Uncle Bob writes I’m trying to learn Clojure, i.e., he admits he's brand new to the language and doesn't (yet) know what he's doing. So, maybe cut the guy some slack?
"China's inevitable slowdown" - what is the basis of that prediction?
I don't either. I pretty much always work on master. If I find myself down a deep path that should've been a topic branch, I make one then and reset my master back to origin.

Well, yes, I also kludge my way through it like that. It just always leaves that old sour taste of "it should be easier than that".

You know how it goes, the next pull comes along and you better remember to merge it to all your branches...

I did lose changes to queues because hg doesn't have anything like the wonderful safety net of reflog

This is an absolutely wonderful example, thanks for coming up with that. Yes, I know the reflog exists and you can do magic things with it. It involves commands like 'git reflog show --date=relative HEAD' and refs like 'HEAD@{1}' (I admit I had to look them up).

So, do you know that stuff from the top of your head? Or how much man-page wrestling did you have to do before the safety net actually caught you?

My wet dream of a git porcelaine would be different.
It would include commands like "undo" and "redo" and they would do exactly what one expects and warn explicitly when their little world is not consistent anymore (e.g. an undo can't be performed because an affected file was modified).
So to be clear: Undo would undo absolutely any operation (within git's ability) and same for redo.

Ofcourse there are many horrible corner cases to be worked out for such an truly intuitive command-set to survive reality - but imho a porcelaine grown in such a spirit would eventually do better justice to the elegance of git than the "raw API" interface we have now. Oh and while I'm in dreamland, my dream-porcelaine would ofcourse also max out at 10-12 commands.
Anyone want to place odds on the chances of the speaker actually intending the sentence to mean precisely that?

I'll start them at one in a trillion.
:)
May be older versions of Java didn't support this or didn't document it properly--just saying?
iiNet is pretty much the fall guy for this issue, as a vast array of other ISPs provide a similar "look the other way" service and are never publicly called out for it. It's more so the fact that every time iiNet undermines the Government's wishes, they make a media circus out of it.
Numbers are higher than I thought, but still do nothing to stop traffickers, given their high margins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Assorted_arguments...
They're probably using a similar strategy to Alchemy: map AS3 library calls to a Flash framework implemented in the target language. (In Alchemy's case Scott Petersen implemented a C VM in AS3, linked with the C std lib.) Most likely the entire framework is being bundled with every release, without regard to dependency.
It's fairly certain that "old, ugly, fat, have children" are all characteristics that would lower the match %, therefore you argument of equating these different traits is debunked.

I think you need to look up how their "match %" is computed. It was described in an earlier post on that blog.
People wouldn't speak like this if it weren't for California girls in the 80's.
Can't the teams just decide this by consensus?

There're a bunch of these practices that require total buy-in from a team. Things like "Are we going to use bugtracking software to coordinate who's doing what?" "Are we going to have daily stand-ups?" "What'll the conventions be for X?" etc.

On the projects I've been on lately, the answer has usually been "Fine by me. Let's give it a try and see if it works out." And if it's not working out, we don't do it anymore. But oftentimes they really do help, and we end up introducing the same practices to our next project.
you have to be careful where you try this

your inclination might be to try this on trails. wrong. trails are full of rocks and tree roots. if you run barefoot or in vibram toes, you will have broken toes. any trail runner seriously bonks their toe box once per run. this is why trail shoes have toe boxes that are rock hard

i don't understand what the fascination is with barefoot running, and i say this as someone with 50+ marathons under my belt. its not something that elite runners do and novices aspire to...its more like the token town freak who shows up to the marathon in cutoff jeans. there is always one.
Nanoputians: "organic molecules whose structural formulae appear human"
Enlighten us folks who aren't methodology scenesters. What is wrong this Uncle Bob guy?
"TDD, XP, and various other methodologies du jour. If those things help you achieve your goal, that's great; but it's important to remember that they're (usually) not your goal in and of themselves."

When you are an agile "coach", Scrum Trainer etc, TDD, XP , Scrum etc are your goals!
heel-striking is bad no matter what you run with. you will suffer injury if you continue to heel-strike
Nothing can excuse testing a non-solution, so I won't defend it. But correct code, code that does solve your problem, isn't always pretty: sometimes it's straw instead of gold. And testing is orthogonal: you can write untested gold, untested straw, tested straw, or tested gold. Sometimes you're lucky and untested gold bursts fully-formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. Otherwise, be glad for testing, which lets you turn untested straw into tested straw, and thence, via a refactoring Rumpelstiltskin, to tested gold.
That picture with the weeding, the sunset, the sailboat and the birds is so unnatrual that it makes my soul twist.
Please describe the circumstances for dancing on hard packed dirt for 26 hours in three days.