skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Most African societies do not have a single strong king - I think you are confusing Africa with Europe. Europe and Asia are the societies that have always had a system of very powerful leadership at the top, and a large peasant class.

Africans usually had a strong leader. The size of these societies does however differ. A good example is smaller “family type” groups. These are sometimes called a “kraal” in South Africa (that is why many place names are name of leader + kraal).

At least in the 18th and 19th century there was a lot of consolidation among these groups into larger groups. Probably the best example of this is the Zulu kingdom. Large strongman leaders included Dingaan and Shaka (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Zulu_kings). Even smaller groups have exactly the same pattern.

The governance is also top down. Even today in many rural areas of countries (which are trust or tribal areas with community property) it is usually the chief that controls them. He tells his followers who to vote for as an example. Since all ground is communal and basically controlled by the chief/king, he has significant power.

The power of tribal leaders has significantly decreased with urbanisation though.

> But I guess knowing what you are talking about is not fundamental to your argument.

And what qualifies you as an expert? Either make a good argument or refrain from posting.
Has the hullabaloo left you feeling better or worse about Google?

I would hate it to start a precedent where every takeover goes:

Takeover with intent to open source site, but announce site closure. Lots of fuss and free marketing profile raising. Pretend reversal of intentions and announce site can stay, appear benevolent and wonderful.
The original post asked a question: "Why can't Google [surreptitiously?] rank search results by actual relevancy (e.g. clicks & abandons)?"

The respondent felt that the original post contained the answer to its own question. Therefore, the respondent said, "This," pointing to the answer.
My point is that for stuff coming from G or A people here are ready to walk an extra mile. If stuff is coming from M -- that's it, end of journey right on the headline.
One thing to push this forward would be to have a standard set of visual "atoms". Right now text editors all share the same "atoms", which are characters. If there were a standard set of visual atoms then you would get generic visual editors and there would be more reason to work within this shared visual language.
The date is information. More info = good in this case.
I think you're frustrated. Take a small vacation.
As you can see Mario from all the comments above, don't come to the US, they make everything difficult :-)) LOL
Their problem is a typical build-or-buy. There's likely a price at which it just makes sense to buy you instead of building it out.

Do they have any competitors who might be interested in you? Maybe a smaller game publisher?

Can you leverage your head start in any way?

Can you make your service more 'sticky'? If people have committed lots of time to building up a profile on your site then they'd be less inclined to switch. People still use Yahoo after a decade of Google being around.

One idea could be adding a Facebook app or link up with FB Connect - link deeper into the users life, announce targets, scores, etc.
I'm not an expert, but I think you absolutely should approach them. When you understand the rationality behind acquisitions you can see why I'd say that. Take Google for example, who has been on a tear with acquisitions, along with others. Look at their structure, at their company direction. Acquisitions for them make sense for several reasons: access to the brainpower of the startup, consolidation of power, more favorable reviews in the community. All that and it costs peanuts from their perspective.

Contrast that with the publisher of D&D. How forward thinking, in terms of having strategic technological positioning, is their management? Probably not as much as Google. All they are concerned about is a 1 to 1 correlation with profits. Action A yields profit B. If they see that they can build your functionality in house, they may see a lot of advantages to that. They don't care about the other stuff as Google might. I'd come up with a figure to be happy with, yet highly enticing to them, and then sell it with rationality. Point out all the benefits, of which access to you should be the biggest selling point, as you've successfully built it up.
Any advice on how to change that?

Stop acting like a programmer, start acting like corporate sales. Find a contact within WotC. Ask to be introduced to the product manager of their existing product which is closest to what you have to offer. Contact him and sound him out on the possibility of being acquired. Be prepared to be told "No, we have no intention of doing that at all." Also be prepared to be told the same thing in a non-obvious manner that consumes several months of your life.

Personally I'd be thinking more along the lines of "Take my existing business to the next level" if I were you, since time spent on it will yield predictable results. Start with the low-hanging fruit such as charging more, optimizing conversion to the trial, and (biiiiiig subject coming up) marketing. If you're making (pulling a number) $2,000 a month today with 10k uniques a month then it is highly likely you'll make at least $4,000 a month when you have 20k uniques. That really isn't that far away -- it is only a single factor of two. (Multiplicative improvements make "factor of two" really not that bad in our business.)
It's not an academic point and he's not probably correct.

If you don't understand that it's pass by value of references for non-primitives then you won't understand why your variable x is null after the method call:

Object x = null;
fooMe(x);
//is x null or a Foo?
[...]

void fooMe(Object y){
y = new Foo();
}

That's fundamental knowledge.
> countries which didn't completely recover from colonialism

You have edited your post now. The reason I take issue with your post is because of the “African Renaissance” idea. This idea/ideology (which was mostly promoted by Thabo Mbeki) states that Africa was a wondrous well developed place full of technology, culture, art, industry and peace (it goes hand in hand with strong historic revisionism). The idea was that colonialism destroyed Africa and Africa should just recover from colonialism.

The problem with this is that it does not address the current core issues of African problems. It also lays the blame for all problems on colonialisation – instead of corrupt African governments and systematic problems. It basically absolves current African governments from all responsibility.
I'm very curious about what the effects of mixing blood in children would be, and there's been very little research that I know of.

Actually, there is plenty of research, and most of the research reaches a conclusion consistent with the main point of the submitted article, that people being "mixed" as to "race" doesn't really matter much at the individual level. That's to be expected from Motoo Kimura's now well established theory of neutral molecular evolution,

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

which fits human populations quite as well as it fits other organisms.

I write this as a western man (American by citizenship, with ancestry from various temperate and Arctic zone European countries) who married and has four children by a woman from Taiwan (whose traceable ancestry is south Chinese, tropical rather than temperate zone). My four children are healthy, smart (by IQ test), and arguably good-looking, and very ambiguous to untrained eyes as to their "racial" heritage. (My oldest son has variously been described as Asian in America, western in Taiwan, "black" in America, and "Hispanic" in America, and could pass as "Native American" in America.) Before I met my wife, I met many people in Taiwan, where I was then living, who earnestly urged me to marry a Taiwanese woman because then my children would be "smarter and better-looking," which seems to be a common cultural belief about half-Asian, half-western people over there. But I really don't have the slightest evidence that my children have been advantaged in any way by their rather divergent "racial" heritage, and actually my marriage was quite assortative,

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

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/39494/assortative-...

as most marriages are. My wife and I are similar in height, build, presence of allergies, myopia,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myopia#Epidemiology

skin color, personal recreational habits, IQ, etc., etc., etc.

Any man can gain a lot of perspective on life from his wife, and it's important to cherish the differences that will still show up even though most people marry assortatively. A cross-cultural marriage will include plenty of differences of cultural assumptions that make for thought-provoking conversation and a richer family life for both spouses and all the children. We have enjoyed our twenty-six years together.
If you like what an architect can do, and you hire them for a lot of money, you don't automatically get rights to all the buildings they have designed and power to shut the buildings down and kick the tenants out.

This sort of thing is one reason why desktop software is still superior - our helpdesk software company sold out and closed down years ago and it didn't affect us, for instance.
I believe they probably never needed a captcha before this and for a few extra webpage hits these guys have inconvenienced the rest of the people who otherwise wouldn't have to prove themselves human
A rational person would consider the other direction to be more likely

You're, I think, making that conclusion based off the prevailing knowledge that ESP isn't true. A rational person seeking to learn if it is or isn't would still attempt to consider causality in the direction the op stated and otherwise be guilty of irrationality.

Some individuals will always experience slightly above or below mean (since variance isn't 0)

By my understanding of the standard ESP experiment the observation you state there would be evidence against the null hypothesis, evidence stating that there is some external factor tied to personal identity which changes your ability (for better or worse) to guess the identity of these cards. If the both experiment was perfectly designed and ESP totally impossible you'd expect that over time no one would have an edge on anyone else in their ability to guess these cards.

But people who have a belief tend to cherish and protect it

Much as you're doing now with the counterbelief?

(Disclaimer: I personally strongly don't believe in ESP. I also don't believe it's worth spending my own time on it. Finally, I do believe that if you're going to spend time on it you should do it carefully because it is clear that if there is an effect it's going to be something highly unexpected and subtle because most of the expectable and obvious things have been tested)
What, exactly are you doing? Could you email me (swdunlop at gmail) with an ls -lR of what intermediate files you are seeing? waspc -exe should be doing the following:

* Regenerating precompiled modules as necessary. (These are .mo files, similar to Python .pyc files.)

* Selecting a VM "stub" executable.

* Concatenating the required modules and the stub to produce an executable for the target platform.

The only intermediates you should see are .mo precompiled module files, and they are shared between builds. This is pretty standard for dynamic languages that support partial compilation. With the fix for the dynamic library dependency on libevent submitted by Chris Double last week, the resulting binary should be able to stand alone.
USB wall outlet - new standard for DC plugs?
Two points.

First, there's the distinction between essential complexity and non-essential complexity. What the OP is talking about is trying to reduce the non-essential complexity by using a more appropriate abstraction. Nested if-then-else can introduce non-essential complexity merely by having dead nested cases which are actually obviated by outer cases; looking at a complex version of this code, it can become quite difficult to see where exactly the code is supposed to flow under what circumstances, as there can seem to be conflicting assumptions in different areas.

Secondly, once upon a time I invented a scheme to solve this problem in the best way I thought possible, and called it "matrix inheritance". The problem with inheritance and subclassing is that it only handles a single dimension of customization. Suppose you have two dimensions, genre and type, such as [comedy, drama] and [movie, series]. If you were to try and classify any given thing under a classical type breakdown, you could subclass by one axes or the other, but you would need to duplicate subclassing for the remaining axes. So, you could end up with Programme, Comedy <: Programme, Drama <: Programme, but then you'd need ComedyMovie, ComedySeries, DramaMovie, DramaSeries, duplicating the kind axis in the two different branches.

The matrix inheritance concept basically takes the cartesian product of all option axes, essentially modelling it as an n-dimensional space, and then applies behaviour to sub-spaces of this space. So, you could apply conditions to [drama, ] and [, series], with these two representing slices of the example 2-dimensional space described above. The advantage of modelling things this way is that it is declarative: you can analyse overlaps and identify un-covered space.
He's talking about a traditional radiator system. They are generally hooked up to either no sensor, or to one that's nearby the unit. I think his idea is just to heat the room more quickly.
I think you are extrapolating too far from a simple example and losing sight of the non-essential complexity that a switch and if-statement based approach creates. I've been there; it doesn't work very well, IMHO.
Personally I'd be thinking more along the lines of "Take my existing business to the next level"

Thanks for this advice. That's how we've been operating all along, and it's done well for us. I guess I'm mainly just scared of the increased competition.

Also, your pulling-a-number-from-the-hat estimates are quite good. You should be a fortune teller :)
MTGO3 will be replaced by a web-based version that looks a lot more promising. I think WotC are aware of their weaknesses, and taking steps to correct them.
This is much better handled in languages with pattern matching. And you can match on arbitrary fields.

Erlang:

surf(Channels) ->
lists:foreach(fun process/1, Channels).

process(#channel{genre = "football"} = Channel) ->
record(Channel);

process(#channel{genre = "comedy", repeat = false} = Channel) ->
record(Channel);

process(#channel{genre = "crime", show_title = "Cops"}) ->
skip;

process(#channel{genre = "crime"} = Channel) ->
record(Channel);

process(_) ->
skip.

Full gist: http://gist.github.com/250304
tl;dr

silverlight deepzoom (aka seadragon) from files, db and the web.

citation: http://www.getpivot.com/images/collections/image012.png
Yes. I often find the "context switching" in scrolling around a lot more inhibiting that the density of e.g. Perl syntax.

Perl syntax also builds on a rich heritage. If you are familiar with that heritage, it's a lot more evident. Conversely, as you learn Perl, that heritage is elucidated. (For example, learning Perl in a Windows environment (I know...) and then moving to UNIX.)
Very interesting. When I started using Google as an undergrad (circa 1999), I remember using the "+" character in searches, since that was standard procedure for searching linked strings before the age of Google Empire; I distinctly remember Google popping up warnings: "this '+' character is NOT necessary in searches" . . ..

Weird.
I don't think its about working from home vs working in an office. It should be about 'do what works and results in the highest individual and business productivity'. At the very least, if one of your very good devs wants to work from home, give them an option and try it out. If they are comfortable working at the office, that's fine too.
> Damn if I could study or learn shit if I'm a starving refugee.

You know that most (90%+) Africans are not starving? Africa isn't filled by starving refugees as CNN would like you to believe.

I think the most common comparison with Africans is in the USA.

> Oh, and I can't believe nobody's seen the film "Gattaca."

This is an excellent (and was my favorite) movie and I identify strongly with the main character.

While the movie sends a powerful image, now matter how hard you try, you will not change a person's general intelligence (which is innate).
plus more bandwidth.
you understand python fine; you haven't understood the article. read the article again - it's interesting, self consistent, and disagrees with the comp.lang.python consensus.
Ask HN: Start formal group to peer review climate code?
Wanted to see if some people had interest in forming a formal group to vet algorithms used to calculate climate data. In the wake of the CRU emails that included questionable programs written to interpolate temperature data, I think there will be a need for an independent review by coding experts.

Maybe a wiki style project with everything laid out in the open.

For the record, I'm impartial and agnostic about climate change because I haven't seen the raw data or the programs used to make future predictions. I think this whole "consensus of scientists so its right" is BS and goes against the scientific method. Plus, climatologists may be incentivised to spread FUD b/c it brings fame and more grant money - plus their expertise is not statistics and writing code.

A software engineer reviews CRU source code - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_buKNBrpcM

I'm sure some funding would not be difficult to find, given the magnitude of all this.

ClimateCodeReview.org? ClimateHackers.org? ClimateCrunchers.org?...
If any lessons have emerged so far from the study of human genetics, it's that your genes are not your destiny.

Yes, this is something that the leading researchers on human behavioral genetics increasingly acknowledge.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=838534

(The pay-wall workaround mentioned in that submission is no longer active, but the citation to the very current article is still correct.)
Hey, while you're here, one thing about Duck Duck Go that concerns me is that it can be killed on a per-IP basis by locking on "safe" search.

If I accidentially do this at home, or if I find that I have to use tor too often while in coffee shops to ensure I see all search results, (or if I use tor and some idiot has forced it on for those IPs), that could be a problem.

Also, I wonder how hard it would be to spoof packets to kill IPs one doesn't even have access too? Do you send a nonce back to the user and check it before completing the banning process?
Dispatch tables give you some additional flexibility. For example, say that you want to wrap each function with some statistic-gathering in debug mode. You could implement this easily with:

if(DEBUG) {
for(var key in actions) {
actions[key] = wrapDebug(key, actions[key]);
}
}

In a switch or nested if-else, you would need to include that debug processing inline with each alternative, instead of factoring it out into its own closure-generating function.

Similarly, compilers often use this approach for instruction generation. The set of available machine instructions is stored as a table; if you move to a different architecture, you just replace the table with one appropriate to the new architecture.

This is not a new idea. SICP has a whole section on data-directed programming, and MapReduce and many other internal bits of Google infrastructure use this extensively.
Бесплатно разблокировать телефон, перепрошить, сброс паролей, поменять IMEI
Compete.com + AdWords keyword data + reasonable guesstimations of your conversion rate based on my own experience with a bit of a discount thrown in because of the demographic = +13 attack bonus to guesstimating revenue.
They want to put a random cookie on your browser and link it to your search preferences. Oh my goodness, how horribly bad of them!

Yes, Google knows all your secrets (even if you never went online, they'd probably have enough data from your contact with the rest of the world to reconstruct a profile). No, they have not shown any inclination to misuse this information. Privacy is dead - luckily, it was killed by Google and not MSN. Welcome to the 21st century, learn to cope.
Why would expect it to be available for the ma?. The headline clearly said its from Microsoft.
This is good stuff. If these steps fail though, you're in a dysfunctional software development shop and probably need to leave. I say start looking immediately AND try the above, just so you have more options.

Not every development shop sucks. I've worked in good and bad ones, and bad ones I didn't know were bad until I found a good one.

And turn off your phone (or just stop answering work calls) at close of business Friday. Sounds like you deserve some slacking off.
Where do you live? I didn't know there was a place where a DVD rental costs $20. Market rates now are about $1 for Redbox or a video store, up to $5 from your cable company on demand.
That sounds fascinating. Are you hiring ...
Eh, this isn't new and innovative. For more information, check out SICP: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-17.html...

Also, since the logic is stored in a lookup table, these can always be changed on the fly.
Defense Department developing portable hacking device for soldiers
Keep track of configuration changes using etckeeper
Is It Wrong For Atheists To Convert Believers?
While the movie sends a powerful image, now matter how hard you try, you will not change a person's general intelligence (which is innate).

What is the evidence for this? Most human behavorial genetics researchers talk about a "reaction surface" set for each individual by that individual's genes, but I'm not aware of any researcher who claims to have a proof for an upper limit in how much "general intelligence" (that would be IQ) can change in the case of individuals or in the case of populations. In fact, the existing OBSERVED degree of IQ increases all around the world

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

has been described by N. J. Mackintosh in these terms: "the data are surprising, demolish some long-cherished beliefs, and raise a number of other interesting issues along the way." (Mackintosh 1998, p. 104). You write, "no matter how hard you try," but it's not clear anyone is trying very hard or very systematically to raise anyone's general intellilgence, but it is happening anyway.

I meet weekly with human behavioral genetics researchers

http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall09/mcguem/psy8935/defau...

and have learned from them that the whole field of human behavorial genetics is becoming much more conservative and cautious in its claims about genetic limits on human potential than it was ten years ago. That's what is said explicitly by Tom Bouchard, one of the most cited researchers in the field.

REFERENCE

Mackintosh, N. J. (1998). IQ and Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

P.S. Other good, recent reading on this subject is

Neisser, Ulric (Ed.) (1998). The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Flynn, James R. (2009). What Is Intelligence: Beyond the Flynn Effect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
http://www.medialab.com/sitegrinder seems to do exactly that.

They have client website links in their gallery, and somewhere they claim that they make creating dynamic sites possible as well.
> This code will be a nightmare to debug when there's a few thousand lines of similar redirections. :/

It is. The SConstruct build tool is a prime example of this technique being used so much that it hampers debugging.

Using this pattern successfully requires hard discipline; you have to concentrate to keep your code readable.