skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Did you even read the attached article?"

Yes, I read the article, which states that Michael Phelps is clumsy. Anecdotal.

From your earlier post:

"Funny anecdote: a recent olympic swimming team failed to ride to the stadium in Beijing because most of them couldn't ride bikes."

I'm skeptical about this. I've been in Beijing traffic. Also consider the indignity: Olympic swimmers riding bicycles (not their sport) to the stadium, heads bowed over and the risk of falling on their face before thousands of people and getting injured. In contrast compare walking proudly upright, waving with both hands to the crowd. Claiming that one is not able to ride a bicycle seems like an excellent face-saving excuse for all parties involved.

"where you get your info from about "tall" people are stronger"

I got it in first grade on the playground. But it's also been in the literature for decades, if not centuries.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=muscle+strength+vs+height

The conclusion from the first URL
http://jap.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/89/3/1061

"The principal conclusions of this study are that muscle strength and height are related by a common factor and that muscle strength approaches absolute maxima at heights of ~183 cm for men and ~175 cm for women, at least using current training techniques."

a conclusion nicely illustrated by the first graph at
http://jap.physiology.org/content/vol89/issue3/images/large/...
> I still can't believe I was told stating that a cat was an animal would require citation.

[citation needed]
Im more curious about how many bank accounts are out there with 6 figure + sums in them which haven't been touched for years.

Equally makes you wonder how many of the banks are enjoying profits from such accounts when clearly it must be suspected that they are dodgy / tarnished or criminal in some way.
It is talking about digital goods, not physical goods like walmart, oil, netbook, etc.

Also, from what I understand, Masnick does understand that prices in a competitive market will go toward marginal cost.
That is slick...both the device and the purchase process.

My wife and I discussed something similar using EEG measurements but couldn't find a practical way to apply the electrodes in a consumer-grade product. This is a good example of solving that problem obliquely.

Pre-ordered.
Reading through the first 20 or so it looks like forgetting prens is pretty popular as well. As in the following.

>>int runs = (int) Math.random() * 1000000;
Hugh MacLeod on career prospects
This looks like episode 2:

> 2001-09-11 08:21:37 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 92-i was hoping i would have heard from you anyway. please don't be angry.i guess what i need...

> 2001-09-11 08:21:39 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 2...to know is do you really love me? i know you tell me you do and that i am everything you...

> 2001-09-11 08:21:41 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 3...want, but why do i feel as though there is something going on with you? if i am wrong,...

> 2001-09-11 08:21:42 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 4...tell me. if i'm right, then please tell me the truth. there is nothing you can say to me...

> 2001-09-11 08:21:44 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 5...that will change how i feel about you.
Well said. The key is to recognize that daily/weekly re-boots are a temporary band-aid to hold you over until the application vendors/developers can roll out an app that's not quite so badly broken.
Working on an iPhone app? get exposure and a $1500 check before you even start
AppsFire organizes the 1st contest for apps not yet listed in the Appstore. Super simple review process, in partnership with leWeb.net, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and NextWeb. App submissions open now
What I find to be most remarkable about all of this is that Syracuse University continues to sponsor a FC institute, despite the evidence that FC does not work. They might as well have students majoring in phrenology or aura-reading.

If anyone associated with Syracuse is reading this, I have to ask, is this a source of embarrassment to the students and faculty, or does the administration view this "institute" as a revenue source?
This is the norm in many enterprise shops that I've worked with. IT sets a rate that they "charge" their business-side "clients". The rate is set by some formula that takes into account space, equipment, and other administrative overhead.

However I don't see how it follows that they have issues because of it. Why do you think so?
It seems that this article is inaccurate:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/24/dropbox-sequoia-funding...

"Dropbox did close a Series A funding round, but it was for $6 million, and it was back in October 2008. And it was led by Sequoia, not Accel (though Accel did participate in the round)."
Founders Need Rock Hard Abs
The foundation fo Jihad
And - every time you re-boot you loose valuable data that could be used to determine the root cause of whatever is breaking the server OS.

I've got a mantra that I have to repeat pretty often:

"Re-booting is not a valid troubleshooting technique."
Mac vs PC People: Personality Traits & Aesthetic/Media Choices
It can be irrelevant after 8 years, but could be relevant for someone that could act on it at the moment it was captured. Maybe for some social engineering attack.
Here's a good one - assignment inside an if: http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=if\(\w%...

Not always a bug, but quite a few of these look like bugs - the first result is especially suspect!
Only if you know people at those other companies who would be willing to buy what you're trying to do. It's a good idea, engineering-wise, but there may not be a market for it.
I'm guessing some of that is wrapped up in here - they seem to be doing much more than just a simple redesign: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

EDIT: Just noticed you can actually turn on their improvements by clicking the "Try Beta" link in the upper-right corner of the page. Seems really nice, actually.
I don't use debuggers often, but am glad they are available when I actually do.

If a running program is like a lab rat running through a maze in the dark, then using print statements is like placing bells on tripwires in select places in the maze. Using a debugger is like turning on the lights, and watching the rat.
I have a friend who is working on breaking a motorcycle land-speed-record (http://bonnevilleproject.wordpress.com/) who was the first person to explain this to me. It's easy to dismiss drag racing as "build a big engine and step on it" but as he demonstrated (through examples like you have provided) any one thing can be broken down into millions of variables, and to compete you have to be willing and able to tweak at this level to rise above the obvious improvements (which quickly become commodity).
I wonder if relational databases would not be as popular had easy-to-use transactional filesystems been commonly available at an earlier time.

To gain transactional integrity (ACID properties) in that day, one had to either purchase a database management system (usually hierarchical or network) and work within that system or be a heckuva programmer and write it oneself.

Had transactional filesystems been commonly available, then file processing with those filesystems would have been akin to working with a relational database management system (RDBMS).

But that leaves referential integrity (RI) as a programmer task. Unfortunately most sites I've worked at do not seem to believe that RI should be strictly enforced. So maybe it wouldn't make much difference.
How do you know anything on Wikileaks came from a reliable source? Or anything on the web or the news or from your friends?

You basically have trust, first-party confirmations, alternate sources giving consensus, and guilty reactions—none of which can be relied on for accuracy either.
Musicians-Money Is Not Motivation
Interesting, when I went to the Wakemate site I was hoping for a product that looks like a tennis wristband, which I know to be comfortable. I didn't pre-order because I'm not confident the neoprene looking band would be comfortable to sleep with. I'd like to try it on before buying.
Did cancer kill FDR?
$7m to optimise for more referrals?

BTW, my original comment was not 'what idiots' it was, 'I wonder what they need all that money for?' If they are going to spend it all on split testing their 'refer a friend' system, well that is something of a wonder.
"The judge suggests that at least some of the loans were never repaid: "It's difficult to find an appropriate punishment here. On the one hand we have big losses. But on the other hand we have here this altruistic behaviour, which makes the case very different from the norm.""

I'm truly amazed at the selfishness of humans. Yes, there are some people that need money. But taking it from wealthier people without their knowledge is just wrong. This woman is just as bad as bernie madoff.
Stories like this trigger the wanderlust.
Google's Chrome OS Will Attempt to Reinvent the Security Model
Within the context of this research, I guess "gifted" really means "selected to participate in special courses at school", which by itself introduces huge biases. The studies might be measuring the kinds of personalities people expect -- and therefore select -- to be in gifted courses (shy, introspective). Or it might be measuring a personality change brought on by being in such courses, either through the instruction itself or by being surrounded by similar personalities.
I'm either INFJ or INTJ, depending on the test.

As a kid I was identified as gifted-lite (the diet coke of giftedness: just one calorie, not gifted enough :) after taking the CTBS/CCAT tests. Apparently I was at or above giftedness cutoff on two of the parts but below it on the third part.

But I showed them: my assessed quasi-giftedness was no match for my persistent lack of motivation.
Of course re-booting servers or re-starting processes forces app servers to re-cache data, database servers re-parse, re-cache and re-optimize queries and throws away good query plans & replaces them with new versions, some of which will be worse than what you had.

On apps that cache database objects in app server memory, we see a noticeable degrade of response time while the app server re-caches database objects.
Ask HN: What is your policy on IE6 development?
With the release of IE9 it's becoming clear that without a solid up-front discussion with clients about browser compatibility, they may expect their website to work in four versions of Internet Explorer. For some sites this is fairly easy, and a couple of star hacks in the CSS will make it usable in IE6, but for clients who want the latest and greatest, sometimes IE6 compatibility isn't really realistic, or else just very tedious and time consuming.

It seems to me there are a few of ways to deal with this problem, but I'm not totally happy with any approach.

1) List IE6 development as a separate line item, with a cost beside it that the client can opt to go for or not. The problem with this is they could take that estimate to another company who might say "well our websites work in EVERY browser, no extra charge", whether or not that's actually true.

2) Tell clients up front that if they want a website that uses cutting-edge front end technologies, they'll have to live without IE6 support. Offer to install an upgrade banner/alert for no extra charge. A lot of clients don't understand that IE6 is turning 9 next year, or they don't understand that using a 9 year old browser is like driving a 25 year old car.

3) Continue along the same path of just making sure everything works in IE6, even though it slows down development, adds to costs, limits the design and programming departments, and contributes to developer alcoholism and severe workplace swearing.

This problem has to be cropping up at every design/development studio that builds websites using the newest technologies. How do the rest of you deal with it?
How Search Engines, Aggregators & Blogs Use News Content
Re. the voting, that's deliberate, PG is on the record about that. I thought it was a bug and reported it as such, he assured me that it was not, but that he was experimenting with deciding which votes to count.

re. software development:

Agile is great for web development, for projects that have a short life cycle and that are not going to be around 10 years from now in a way that you can relate back to your original design spec.

But not everything is web development (which is more closely related to evolution than to design), not every project has a short life-cycle.

If you are in lets say the banking business, where software routinely outlives its creators you have to have a completely different view of things.

Like everything else, agile is a tool that has its uses but it shouldn't be the only tool that you've got or know how to use.
Myers and Briggs would argue that your personality doesn't change, but you do learn new things about your personality. That said, it would be interesting to see how this works on older adults.
One of our game which we updated with major improvements two weeks before didnt appeared in the release list. But, on the same day as well as till now, i can find many other updated games with version greater than V1 on the release list. It is very frustrating to see the lack of a clear rule here. From the starting there are lot of inconsistencies in Appstore and it sucks.

Meanwhile, just relax and play free games at http://www.veegames.com/
Absolutely, they have a head-start. But given the fact that the future is literally infinite and wikipedia has only been around for a relatively short portion of that I think it is inevitable that at some point they'll be replaced by something better.

If half the editors decide tomorrow to reboot then I don't doubt that given enough time they'll out-perform the infighters and the politicians. They'll have to be on guard against repeating the same mistakes from day 1 though to make it work.
Alternately: fast repetition of trivial operations win.
For my in-the-works site, I'm going with displaying a notification to IE6 users notifying them that the site may not work as intended on their browser and asking them to upgrade to Firefox/Chrome/Safari/IE8.
Ask HN: Story Points or Time Estimates
I run a start-up and I am not a software developer. We use agile development and 30 hour weekly iterations.

It has become very clear over the past 1.5 years that the software developer estimates are very inaccurate. This is based on a number of things, but it has not improved over time - if anything estimates have gotten worse.

We are discussing the possibility of moving to Story Points instead of time estimates. What is your opinion on the two methods? Who uses what and why?

JB
This quote from the article may help:

"However, according to McCauley and Myers, this is not necessarily related to intelligence; rather, it is related to the match between the academic characteristics of IN types and the content of aptitude tests. When gifted adolescents are compared to general high school students according to their preference for intuition, they are more likely to enjoy solving new problems and dislike doing the same thing repeatedly. They also are conclusive, impatient, and interested in complicated situations. They might be more interested in novelty according to the type theory."
Does anyone have a working open source implementation of this?

I saw this video about a week or two ago, and decided to hook up at webcam to python / pygame and try a few things, and I have trouble even checking what colors changed each frame in under 1 second, I wonder what methods they are using.
In the long run competition drives the price down to marginal cost. You sell products for more than their marginal cost by either innovating techniques to keep your costs lower than your competitor's costs (Wal-Mart does a lot of this) or by providing some feature that justifies a price higher than whatever the lower-priced competitors offer. The difference between your price and the marginal cost goes to paying off the investors who subsidized that hundred-million-dollar factory.
I know that, in practice, this doesn't really help any, but employers that find out their employees are looking for another job and fire those employees because of it, are cutting their nose off to spite their face.

If the employee was one they were looking to get rid of, then silently let them find a new job. Otherwise, your employer's concern should be why they are about to lose you, not that you want to leave. It's not like they own you. You agreed to work for them and they agreed to hire you.

If they were smart about it, they would provide you, in writing before you even accepted their job offer, an agreement that they won't penalize you in any way for looking for a better job for yourself. Things change. Jobs get less fun/interesting. Your interests change. If your employer can no longer provide you with the things you're looking for, you have every right to find one who can. They would certainly let you go if you could no longer provide them with the things they're looking for.

Why are workplaces run like prisons? This kind of stuff really bothers me.
In my expreience maintained apps are rarely migrated to newer versions of the runtime, hence this addition won't really benefit maintainers.
Because most commercial applications want accuracy and scale.
So use structured light, background target grids or multiple fixed cameras.

This technique needs fairly simple shapes and assumes that edges are square etc. You couldn't use it to scan a clay model for CGI or a complex shape for cad. You can use it to convert simple 3D objects into CAD but that's a bit pointless compared to just drawing them in CAD.

It's clever, congratulations to Mr Pan, but it's not as earth shattering as the press releases claim.
Not really sure what to make of the article. Some anecdotal evidence of some book smart but not people smart interns. And attacking the very purpose of a university education. The author romanticizes the work office far too much. And while most people go to university to get a cushy office job some things (education) will never make sense in the office.

I've gone to company trainings and the curriculum and atmosphere is more like the university lecture hall than an office. Could you imagine sitting at your desk watching a powerpoint on the greatest programming language ever? His idea of the university is more like a degree mill than a place of higher education.

Highschools are great for this type of thing. The bar is particularly low. And once you've met it you never have to go back again. Colleges aren't designed that way. You go because you are looking for a detailed answer. And you are capable of understanding the answer.

And I know for a fact that professors have no qualms about F's.
Send packages via social networks (without disclosing recipient address)
2001-09-11 08:47:46 Arch [0901509] B ALPHA Someone just told me there was an explosion at

2001-09-11 08:47:48 Arch [0901509] B ALPHA wtc....BR

This appears to be the first transmission about the actual attack.

(Edited to remove garbage in between from other pages)
Mitigating Market Risk with Microsoft Visio
The point is that while it's not too much trouble to do as you did, it is often too much trouble to do it properly. Giving the OP some credit for being a reasonable programmer, your reply is less useful than it might at first appear.

Sure, it isn't too much trouble to instantiate a Random object, but to do it properly can be a right pain, and sometimes just isn't worth it.
FreeBSD 8.0 has been released - Linux Critic
"And in the back of my mind, I’m thin­king the same is star­ting to hap­pen to white collar guys more and more, as well. But it’s not quite out in the open yet. Society’s not quite ready to have that conversation."

This. I wonder how long it's going to take until we're allowed to talk about this. It's pretty clear that five years ago if you graduated from an Ivy but you weren't that smart, you could still get a pretty good job. But today these people are mostly unemployed because they aren't willing to take a menial job, and the thing is that it looks like they'll never get offered anything better than a menial job. How big does this class of people have to get before this is officially a 'thing'?
That is a powerful post. This is the HN moment. The HN community can play a critical role in shaping the next decade.

Personally, as scary as the coming years may be, I've been expecting them, and am excited.
It's unlikely that one of the big operating systems would come forth with a feature that worked with all of the other big operating systems as well.
I don't think that the first one is a bug. First, no programmer with any experience would write (variable == true) instead of (variable). Second, there are a number of lines commented out in that area so it's likely that that particular code was intended as a "temporary hack". I think the intention of the author was definitely assignment in that case, although it is expressed in a hackish, unreadable way. Seeing the previous revisions of the same file would be helpful.

EDIT/TLDR: It looks like it either is intentional, or written by very unexperienced developer.
In Germany, many people don't trust investing their money - even in sure state bonds. Most of this money is inherited money or lifelong hard saved money. Also, many people got rich just because they happened to own land on a now urban area. Criminality is pretty low in Germany. So the case exposed in this article that many people have money seems normal to me.
Excellent article.

Embarrassing deconstruction of Robert Shiller's lecture; few awesome findings, such as:

"Focusing on homework has become much tougher. A modern dorm room has a television, Internet, youtube, instant messaging, email, phone, and video games. The students who get the most out of their four years in college are not those who are most able, but rather those with the best study habits.

No company would rely on this system for getting work done, despite the potential savings in having each employee work from home. Companies spend a fortune in commercial office space rent to create an environment with limited distractions and keep workers there for most of each day."

Highly recommended reading.
This sounds like a great plan, I think you will have an interesting journey! I can confirm that the absence of daily routine triggers facilitates change to let go of undesired behavior. For instance, it was way easier for me to stop smoking and exercise every day when I spent the summer in California.
Well, exactly. It's like your landlord telling you one of their deadbeat friends was crashing on your sofa whether you like it or not.
I've gotten almost that exact txt. Girls really do write like that.
Python:

reduce (operator.add, range(366))
Really? I seem to have to weed through 15-20 Wikipedia ripoff sites just to find what I'm searching for these days. Occasionally they place higher than Wikipedia itself, somehow.
While I'm sure buying online ads will be a large part of their strategy, they may be using this money to start experimenting with other forms of advertising: magazine, radio, etc. I'd assume they are also ramping up to a more aggressive corporate sales strategy.
Somewhere (obvious) to report malfunctions.

My upvotes have stopped working. Up arrow goes away and points increment, but on refresh before-points are back?! Consistently on comments, not always on submissions.
(Downvotes not used yet :-)
Safari 4.0.4, OS X