skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So my view is that he's being overly biased towards theoretical purity above practicality, a tendency that has led many an academic astray.

Not so fast. He contrasts working systems in practice compared to the pure relational technology. He is directly saying relational technology was one of purity backed up by mathematics to make it seem more rigorous and battle tested. Where we have a perfectly practical solution that works well and performs better. I don't see his academic purity leading him away from practicality at all.

I think his academic resume is making you think he must be all about purity, but in fact he's being very practical.
Google Considering Site Speed as a Factor for Pagerank | TechJaws.com
Oh please. Obviously I mean companies that give 2 shits about PR and are trying to hit home runs, not weekend projects.

Techcrunch is the most popular tech blog. If you don't care about it, you don't care about PR. Replace TC with Mashable, Engadget, Gizmodo, or whatever you like better, the point remains.
Most people leave their thinking to the so-called domain experts and ridicule any contrary arguments. It's Pavlovian. Mostly because the humans are pack animals / tribal and we look to the pack leader / chief. Bernays book Propaganda might be review for you but its short and it drives home the point. Relevant quote:

Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.
You don't get bold blunders by sitting on the side lines. And that "we" could be just as well be the company's share holders. Being the captain sitting at the local maximums as the ship is sinking only gets you in the history books as being the guy who went down with the ship.
>Saying "I wrote an awesome program recently" ... makes people think your dishonest.

Not only that, but it's an insult to my intelligence. That's no biggy to me in itself, but it's not a sign of something good either. To me, a self promotional sentence like that implies you think I can't evaluate your work myself. Apparently you thought I had no thought of my own to add.

I want to say subtly and civility is on the decline (particularly online) but I doubt that narrative. But I can't deny that it sometimes feels that that's true.
Twitter Launching Paid Business Accounts
As bad as The Consumerist is, they did teach me what the phrase 'executive customer care' meant. Which has saved me on a few occasions. I wish they'd stick to helping people get just compensation rather than these type of posts.
There are some types of bugs that are hard to track down without a debugger. If you log a "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" message on a typical ASP.Net page it tells you nothing basically and you're stuck trying to figure out why it could have happened with little more information than what page it happened on. The debugger is your friend in that case.

It seems like there are other ways to achieve the same end that the author is seeking.
Why do you consider it a hack? It seems less efficient than money in the end. Money is the cool hack.
We use it to give the recommendations and emails a personal feel (by addressing you by name). Sounds like it's off-putting to you when we ask for it?
When it comes to releasing products, the toughest lesson to learn is to "Go Early, Go Ugly." Most first-time entrepreneurs prefer the opposite because their DNA is to avoid rejection. Their primary focus is to seek validation, from their peers and from their mentors (in time also from their customers). In their mind, rejection is merely an undesirable outcome, which they unfortunately tend to take very personally because they think of it as a failure and a painful reminder to be more prepared the next time around. So they naturally prefer to get their product as perfect as possible. But rejection is NOT a failure. We don’t learn much from positive feedback. We learn a whole lot more from negative feedback. Entrepreneurs who avoid rejection are essentially depriving themselves of important “learning moments”. It's like learning how to sail, you don't start learning until you start to get wet. It seems obvious but for me, it was a tough lesson to learn. Good luck, everyone.
Missed my point. While TC gets on my nerves at times I like the site and they break news pretty well. I subscribe to their RSS - I'm not anti-TC.

My comment was trying to state that people can get too caught up in their own world. For me, that's TC/Mashable/ect. Building a successful business (which I admittedly haven't done yet) does not require being featured on TC (or other) blog. Does it help? Of course. But it's got a finite value which you have to make sure you don't overestimate.
A better principle is ABQ, since few things have a neat single root cause that some magic number of questions converges on:

"5. Why? - I have not been maintaining my car according to the recommended service schedule. (fifth why, a root cause)"

6. Why? - Because I didn't think it a high priority relative to my other activities

7. Why? - Because ...
users have come to expect a lot more from websites. that's how the game changed.
Again, while that's a good lesson, the story doesn't teach it. The story only gives an example of evaluating new information when you're told it will contain a lie.
Yes, she's still relying on "money" in the form of bartering, but what I found most interesting is how little she relies on while still claiming to be happy. Compared to most employed/educated americans, her situation is rather insecure, and many (most?) of us wouldn't tolerate that. I like articles like this that remind me that a) my level of security may be illusory and b) even if I lost it, things might not be so bad.
Thanks for the suggestions -- great ones! We do use the thumbs-up/thumbs-down suggestions for the second set of suggestions... so you shouldn't see games on the second page if you said you didn't like any of the first ones.

Similarly, if you start to like a genre you didn't spell out we try to learn from it and make that one of your interests, but it's behind-the-scenes. I like your suggestion of making it more obvious. Thank you for trying it out and for your suggestions.
Oh, and let's not forget that this is the poker implementation where splitting a pot three ways will generate .33 chips for each person.
Bingo. Access to stats and a "verified" marker would be huge for businesses.

I just hope they don't have "levels" of paid accounts based on followers for example. A single $20-$50 per year would make sense to me. But I imagine whichever route they choose, and no matter what cost, they'll sell anyway.
Ask HN: Please review our NFL stats app, Playerfilter.com
Hi everyone - we've recently released the beta version of our new NFL statistics tool, Playerfilter, and would really appreciate your feedback.

Playerfilter allows you to sort, filter and export all kinds of NFL data, generate statistics for any range of seasons or weeks, and filter for players by min and max stats - all in one place. You can also share your screens by copying and pasting the URL.

We created it after getting sick of navigating the clutter and disparity of existing sports stats sites. We wanted all of the stats in one table that was easy to customize and parse.

Please let us know what you find useful, what you don't find useful, any features or data requests you have via this thread or the 'Submit your feedback' link on our page.

I'm also curious as to what you think of us exposing our API in the URL - is this too much exposure of the inner workings of our product, or is it not really a concern since any dedicated hacker could find it easily anyway? (We are still debating this internally).

Thanks in advance!

http://www.playerfilter.com
Clickable link: http://www.playerfilter.com
How about all the times the e-petitions on number10.gov.org have been reported in the mainstream media?

Now each article which reports on the issue will be able to say "An issue which has seen X sign a petition against it".

Also it's likely to make the news in more places.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAWDYaWAVQQ

"Whatever position I took originally, I would change the position to exactly the opposite and tell the Macintosh people that I was completely wrong and they were completely right all along, and the numbers would go through the ceiling!" -John Dvorak
My friend is an air traffic controller and worked at O'Hare for a while but is now in Grand Forks. He described his work situation, when he first arrived it was chaos, then he slowly learned all the acronyms, he learned the layout of the airport and mapped it to the acronyms. Then later he said that it was as if time slowed down because he perceived all the events simultaneously, basically because he became a domain expert in this regard. It sounds like you are not a domain expert at spatial awareness and maybe body language. There are plenty of theater books (especially improv books) that teach spatial awareness and plenty of books about body language. I think if you read a few of those you would have a different experience in this regard. I think I am very observant because I've read a few of these sorts of books.
Never seen Lucky Louie but the similar scene from Louis C.K. standup is fantastic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u2ZsoYWwJA#t=7m00s
Bartering with people who participate in the normal economy, most importantly. This won't scale.
What have you done? What are you going to do?
More than 100 years after Tesla worked out his prototype, I'd say it's about time!
This is awesome. I'd love a small conversation thread about how to find openings to negotiate things; I'm getting adequate at negotiating when negotiation is expected (like in professional services), but I suck everywhere else.
As soon as I read that comment I thought the exact same thing; however, I thought about it for math. Not above calculus level math (because the students in those classes should be smart enough to call something fishy out immediately), but high school or elementary school math. A simple lie could destroy a students math career. Especially one a day!
Yeah. Seriously weak. I was trying to sell someone at work on Haskell and was put in the (very embarrassing) position of having to say that Haskell is broken on snow leopard right now and ports won't even let you install it.
How to Find Your Most Productive Time of Day
NTFS always supported links, but there was no interface to actually using them from the Win32 subsystem. However the POSIX subsystem could use them since NT 3.5 at least.
What is Learning? (Part 1)
There was a story a while ago when IRS went after someone who was fixing their friends' and neighbours' cars and didn't ask for money in return. He was retired and he liked working on cars and he did it for free. IRS claimed he should have reported it as income.

In respect to money being a measure of wealth, was he "theoretically" becoming wealthy and acruing "good will". Later by changing his mind and asking for favors from his neighbors he could "cash in" his "good will" but avoid paying income and sale taxes on it.
Exactly. Could a startup get VC funding if it wanted to develop something like Dirac, which doesn't do anything groundbreaking?
because it (re-)introduces a social element to the exchange. It may not be for everything and everyone, but it would give me a sense of enjoyment to exchange e.g. some computer-repair services for something else I need in my neighborhood. Nevermind that I would get to actually interact with the people around me. Definitely a feature not inherent in money.
nice new features. the diamond operator looks good. closures will be fun, too! starts to feel like C# (automatic resource management (C#'s IDisposable), language support for collections, strings in switch).
How absurd. The best part of this learning technique is the discussion and the collaboration between students to solve the puzzle - you even learn by pointing out false positives, with someone correcting you and reinforcing that bit of information. A textbook / reference book is entirely different from a classroom - what was that author thinking?
Found on Schneier on Security blog http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/users_rational...
No, the difference is this: extroverts regain energy by being around others, whereas introverts need to be alone.
Negotiate everything - Agreed. Would the OP have any tips on how one would know how to approach this? Pointers to books/articles welcome.
>> It would be disastrous in a foreign language class if you were told the word for "mother" was "banana".

How so? 20 min with a bilingual dictionary(which is more than likely in the back of the textbook) would be enough to verify definitions. Though I don't think it would have the desired effect since it doesn't really promote learning just rote fact checking.
I'm just thinking that for any larger company (think Fortune 500), $20-$25 would be a rounding error. I bet they'll charge their premium accounts significantly more ($hundreds at least). Their "analytics" would have to be pretty kick ass though for any company to take the next step and pay for the service.

I think the key part of it is the "verified" part of the deal.
The problem is that in a recession like we are in now, money can be difficult to come by. But your skills are just fine. And you still have stuff that can be exchanged for other stuff. Bartering clubs were quite popular in the 70's and early 80's when the economy was bad for this very reason. Wouldn't be surprised if they become popular again.
The Dark Side of Social Media Optimization
While I agree with lots of what's being said in this, the initial analogy really leaves something to be desired. Obviously, the concept for the very first hammer went through a design process as what's been charted out in the blog. Man needs to pound one thing into another to hold it in place. Man tries rock. Man asks around to see what might work better. Etc. The process just didn't linger at the initial steps as long as the final step because the physical application of the tool is such an important thing to demonstrate.

In digital, where much of the initial design surrounds process and more abstract concepts, we can hang out around the early steps longer and to greater effect.
== 2. Negotiate everything ==

I've found this to be a very much cultural thing. Bargaining / haggling is quite common in Asian cultures. Since I'm originally from India, I initially was surprised to find that haggling is not an acceptable thing in the american society.

That hasnt stopped me from my efforts at haggling one bit.

My latest conquest - a free shield and case for my iphone when bestbuy made me wait for about 45 minutes to get a new connection. Even before starting with the process, I made it clear that I want freebies thrown in - else,I'll simply take my business elsewhere.
Probably the only opening I know of for negotiating "normal" stuff is, "how much of a discount would we get for a long-term commitment, say, a year up front".
How did the IRS get on this guy's case? There's no paper trail. I find it hard believe that one of his friends or neighbours went to the IRS and said, "This guy fixed my car and didn't charge me! You'd better investigate him."
Just to clarify myself here: I think the owner of the site is allowed to store the data, she is just not allowed to hand it over to any third parties (in this case: Google).
This is a very good idea. I've already noticed small businesses messaging me back when I mention their services and products; clearly, they're taking some time out of their day to manage their Twitter reputation.

Given the breadth of different companies I know have been involved with Twitter (from small local restuarants to boutique culinary appliance manufacturers to Comcast), there must be thousands of companies who would pay for this service, especially if Twitter can lower the barrier to entry for them and provide metrics so that company Twitter advocates can gin up some kind of ROI.
Nice features... Code will now look a lot cleaner and concise.
But how many of those e-petitions with the media traction actually got meaningful results, other than making the news in more places?
They could provide a single PHP+ImageMagick bar chart and if the "analytics" shaved 15 minutes a week off some marcom person's workload, it would be worth thousands of dollars.

#1 rule of startup pricing: CHARGE MORE.
Lisp is difficult to learn
If you want this on the web, email me and I'll put it up. I've temporarily put up a version that you can download, edit and email back to me if you like. You can find it at www.penzba.co.uk (slash) StartupAdvice (dot) html

I won't put anything else on it, I'm not looking for traffic, I've just got a parking space if you want it. I'm sure others could make similar offers in case you're interested.

If I don't hear from you in a few days I'll remove it - the above is obfuscated to avoid having links to something that might disappear.
When I was In a numerical approximations course, one other student in the class and I managed to correct the professor about once a week. He wasn't deliberately lying; actually, it was because he had a very poor textbook to work with and was trusting it too much. We were just in the process of doing this again when he demonstrated that you can legitimately say O(n) when you mean O(n^2).

Come to find out, he was a math prof, and very much not an algorithms guy. There are two versions of big-oh notation: one for algorithmic complexity, and one for accuracy of approximations. They are exact opposites of each other: higher numbers are "better" for approximation accuracy, at least in the sense they were used in the course. He was unaware of the former, but both of us were unaware of the latter.

Not such a great teacher, no. Still, the last mistake was an entirely reasonable one. It's a great example of how even math students need to be on their toes.
Umm... Like Twitter but we wont use twitter in this app.
News Corp. Joined by Rivals Weighing Google Block
Your pivot selection is buggy in your C version. Think about what's likely to happen with p = 90, r = 100.
Tyler J. Logan's TwitWall
I'd hasten the spread of coffee cultivation, production & distribution. Productivity boost!
What Apps Should Twitter Acquire?
if you've loaded the USB or VM version of ChromeOS, hitting Ctrl+Alt+T will get you to the terminal.
I thought atlas was MacOS only?
is this support used by cygwin?
Sure, as long as you keep the page ad and link free, I would certainly appreciate the offer to have it hosted. I want the content to speak for itself. Maybe you can just add a small "credit" link at the bottom to my HN profile. Cheers --
Why Washing Machines Suck
I didn't see anything in the article that suggested the parents were at fault.

It read to me as solely faulting the 'physicians': the ones that we hope and expect to know the difference between snake-oil and medical science; the ones we trust to behave appropriately.
Fair enough. I agree with you, I just thought the comments were a little nitpicky and came across as knee-jerk. Thanks for clearing it up.
Asana Aims to Change the Way We Work
A related (but from a developer point of view) blog post by Jeff Vogel: http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/11/make-your-game-easy-t...

It is really interesting to see these posts come out just days apart - I wonder if there is any cross pollination there.
So let me see if I understand.

You are taking in users and have them look at drawings of your products?

I am not saying you shouldn't do 1-3 I am saying you shouldn't test 1-3 on users. You should test 4
How to Make $55,000 by Giving Away Your Work
You're nitpicking. Humans (and all animals) operate by constructing mental approximations and generalizations. This does in fact teach students not to trust authority.
As a side note, I found this article really interesting in the context of the recently released Demon's Souls. Despite being a fringe title with essentially zero marketing, it's expected to sell 250,000 copies by the end of the year. Why is it so successful? It breaks the conventions set by most console RPGs in that leveling up only helps you a little bit, and you really need to gain skill to advance.

So it's much, much more difficult than just about any modern console game I've played, and yet it's hugely successful. This really seems to suggest that there's a hole in the market for games catering to mastery-oriented gamers.
It's not. How many OOP languages do you know where type-inference works?

I know of none ... Ocaml uses a special syntax for reconciling the type-inference with the inclusion polymorphism that it supports ... (name : sub_type :> super_type). And IMHO it gets ugly.

I'm not really clear about what "type unification" you're referring to, but the actual types in Java aren't known until runtime (you usually only know a parent). To change this behavior an overhaul of the entire architecture is needed.
Added the link. Do feel free to download it and email me an updated or enhanced version. We'll have to do a dance to make sure it's you for real, but that's easy enough.

If you don't want to change it, that's fine and we'll just link to it from here so Google can find it.
Article-Level Metrics and the Evolution of Scientific Impact
He's not blaming the debuggers. He's advocating a step in the build process somewhat akin to dogfooding: encourage he developers to use the tools they've written for support to help find those last few bugs.
It does not take much time to contact them personally and let them know about your site. A bit of courtesy in the startup world is never wrong.
A lot of it just takes experience and practice. There are a few good books available. "The Knack" by Norm Brodsky is very good, and the source of the "You don't ask, you don't get quote". The chapter on negotiation is small, but the rest of the book contains tons of invaluable insight.

Many books stress formulating a "win-win" situation, and "expanding the pie" so that "everybody wins". This is good in theory, but rare in practice. In almost every negotiation someone will have the upper hand.

I think the best approach is to listen carefully and try to understand the other party's need. This may not necessarily be more money. Maybe they want to build a long term relationship. Maybe they are willing to lower the price if you pay upfront, or provide a larger deposit, because they prefer the cashflow now. Maybe business is slow. You never know.

You also need to know your best alternative. If you have options, it is easy to walk away from the deal. If you are informed, you will know the true market price. You can't be afraid to walk away. I think it just takes time and practice to develop this mentality, and the opposing side can typically sense if you're serious about it or not.

A strategy that has worked well for me is to just say something like "I really like your product/service, and would love to start using it, but the price is a bit out of my range. Is there any way you can give me a discount?". It doesn't work for everything, but I've been surprised how often it does work. The worst thing that happens is that they say no. Remember, you have to ask!
Ruby Cheat Gem
Too Fat to Graduate