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masterzoraon Don't re-elect SOPA supporters on Tuesday

Scattered votes will have very little impact. The most impact we can have as voters in locked states is in concentrating on one party to boost for now. Party status and funding is based in part on percentage of the popular vote, so concentration is necessary for that visibility. While I wish it were more viable to vote in a manner I abhor less, I recognise it would be a better bet to shine light on the viability of third parties by bolstering one first.

masterzoraon Don't re-elect SOPA supporters on Tuesday

If you want to send a proper message, vote Libertarian. Not because you agree with them (I personally abhor the party) but because it is the largest third party in the US. Your vote won't have an impact on the outcome of this election but it's your best chance for actually having impact since a sufficient number of votes for a third party can affect visibility and funding.

masterzoraon The 3n+1 problem

Of course, though it does mean you should examine it further to check.

masterzoraon UberTAXI is arriving in San Francisco

If I understand this properly, it is a gratuity. The way I understand it, the taxi is still a normal taxi in operation but essentially has hooked into Uber to give it a new way to find fares and to have people pay. If this is the case, then the rate is the same with or without Uber and you still need to pay the gratuity and Uber just automatically selects that gratuity to be 20%. It's actually appreciably different from Uber choosing a rate and then adding a 20% automatic gratuity on top of it.

masterzoraon Why I Two-Space

Except that he does. He only argues that two spaces doesn't look ugly in monospaced fonts but should be changed to smaller spacing when presenting variable fonts. No further explanation should be required as to why he doesn't go out of his way to break that.

masterzoraon Ask HN: Learning programming without math?

This isn't answering your question but it seems others are and it's still good to say:

Spend some time learning maths.

I don't mean to say you shouldn't continue advancing in programming and I understand that you're in elementary school which is supposedly teaching you maths on a standard track but you are clearly a self-starter and would do well to advance independently.

Schools teach maths poorly. They generally focus on rote mechanics at a slow pace with very little to keep the interest of anyone and this is a big reason people (a) think they are bad at maths and (b) hate maths.

My elementary school barely advanced beyond arithmetic but, thanks in large part to programming, I independently advanced much faster than that. I still regret not pushing myself to go further but at least I got to spend most of my K-12 education ahead of the mathematics track.

I have no idea where you are in mathematics since "elementary school" is very broad, but BetterExplained (http://betterexplained.com/) is a great place to get some started. It can even give you a better grasp of addition and subtraction, let alone more advanced topics.

masterzoraon Humble eBook Bundle

> First: He didn't say that.

You are technically correct, but it was heavily implied but having a problem with this Bundle in particular when HB's usual is games & music. It could have been a bad assumption, but one that would have been easily cleared and one that I was not attempting to argue with so I feel I was intellectually in the clear in making such an assumption, as well.

As for the rest of your post: thank you for the information. The "European intellectual view" is very much a different way of thinking than I am used to encountering. Follow-up question: your post seems to indicate that the primary villain being fought is American pop culture so what of American books? It seems from this thread that they are given the same protection as European books so are they just not considered "evil" or is it that it's worth overreaching to include them if it means saving "real" culture or is there some other mindset at work?

masterzoraon Humble eBook Bundle

Your first point is confusing to me. How are games, movies, tv shows, music, etc any less culture than books?

masterzoraon Attention Disorder or Not, Pills to Help in School

Superior how? Last I checked there was 0 solid research linking them to pretty much any effect whatsoever.

masterzoraon What number is halfway between 1 and 9?

The $.50 is $.50 regardless of what the voucher is for. It provides exactly $.50 no matter what. Sure, maybe someone with $700 at the ready for a laptop won't be the kind to be clipping $.50 coupons for anything but the same tendency to consider percentages rather than absolute values remains regardless of actual numbers. People will pat themselves on the back for saving $10 on a $50 garment but won't bother going out of their way to save $100 on a $20000 car.

masterzoraon What number is halfway between 1 and 9?

One-time coupon for $.50 off a chocolate bar: probably going to take the time to clip it. One-time coupon for $.50 off a laptop: probably won't bother.

You can find silly faults with individual examples all you want, but studies indicate that people have a tendency to think percentage-based about savings rather than absolute terms.

masterzoraon Things you didn't know about Python

I agree with you for this particular case but you are mistaken if you think that sarcastic and ist are mutually exclusive. Sarcastic comments of a ist form can (and nontrivially often do): mask sincere ism; be a more socially-acceptable-looking way of expressing actual ism; encourage ism, especially of a casual degree; exhibit societal/subconscious/not-actively-malicious ism; or create a generally hostile environment for people of an oppressed class of *.

So, yeah, probably an overreaction for this particular occasion, but it's not so easy as writing it off as "sarcasm".

masterzoraon Paypal policy update: No class-action suits

The US also holds certain rights that cannot be signed away, some of which hold for the whole US and some of which are per state. IANAL, but as I understand it the US does allow you to waive your right to pursuing certain types of claims in court (and that waiver can potentially be overturned on a case-by-case basis) but only by allowing arbitration instead. Arbitration is, in the most basic way of speaking, private court with different rules in effect. This is allowed because the US specifically allows it. In fact, the US has generally been a strong advocate of arbitration.

masterzoraon Hacker's Delight, 2nd Edition

When I was but a poor college student not many years ago I had the first edition constantly checked out from the library. The content is easily worth $39 for interest's sake. If you're looking for usefulness, however, you're not likely to find it unless you're working on some really low level code.

TOC for reference: http://www.hackersdelight.org/hackerTOC.pdf

masterzoraon Patent US6368227 - Method of swinging on a swing

Eww. I suddenly appreciate my elementary school so much more.

masterzoraon Patent US6368227 - Method of swinging on a swing

I got the point from others that some are apparently more creative on swings than I but I must ask who is so forced?

masterzoraon Remove your alarm safety net and fix your sleep

Sleepy, waking-up me is not rational and wants to go back to sleep. Alarm's purpose is to wake up enough of rational me to make this happen. Optimally more-rested me would be more rational. Realistically, longer period of time dealing with annoying noise wakes me up more.

Going to see if I can get myself off the snooze cycle starting tonight.

masterzoraon Small but significant usability sins that websites should never commit

It definitely depends on your audience but the general non-tech audience probably doesn't know what "FAQ" stands for on average. In fact, most of the things you tech for granted among a tech-savvy audience disappear if you are targeting an audience that includes a non-trivial non-tech segment.

Source: Working at a startup with a wide audience. The email consisting only of the subject line "WHAT IS PASSWORD" was not the least-savvy email received.

masterzoraon Small but significant usability sins that websites should never commit

I understand you may be defending the author but maybe think twice before you try to discredit someone so quickly, without any knowledge of their background?

There is nothing wrong with questioning credentials when things get down to a he-said-she-said. Your comment provided no reason to think you had anything more to back up your claims than the usability studies of the OP. If knowledge of your background is going to be important, that might be something you should mention.

masterzoraon Small but significant usability sins that websites should never commit

That sort of highlighting almost never should be relegated to a mouseover event. Besides the issue mentioned in the article, if the only way to reliably read a row of data is for it to be highlighted then highlight-on-mouseover makes it a bitch to read more than one row on a table.

masterzoraon Small but significant usability sins that websites should never commit

A problem is that a number of users also instinctively look for FAQs to answer any questions. However, in theory your solution is far more elegant and correct.

Fortunately, any well-designed (from a back-end perspective) site should have no problem presenting the relevant information both on the relevant page and on a catch-all FAQ document. This would allow the site to elegantly handle everything properly.

masterzoraon Small but significant usability sins that websites should never commit

(there should be a gender neutral singular pronoun in english)

There are a number of attempts at this but I've found Spivak pronouns (specifically the Elverson set) to be a particularly elegant solution. The easiest description is "the 'they'-form pronouns without the 'th'". Thus, your first sentence would become "In the article, OP explains that ey ([...]) are in middle of analyzing data from a certain income group who are used to getting around the web, who handle both desktops and phones."

Anecdotally, I've found most people seem to understand what I'm saying online and offline people either understand me or think I'm saying "they" and understand my point anyway. Plus, this pronoun set sounds more natural than other constructions and is easy to remember since it's keyed to a set you already know.

masterzoraon Patent US6368227 - Method of swinging on a swing

Even ignoring the tree branch I'd be surprised if you found a single one of those 11-year-old boys employing the method described within.

masterzoraon Founder Failure Insurance: Pooling equity

Not that I agree with most of GP's message, but generally pitchers come out ahead if they win a game. If they bet a nontrivial but still small amount against themselves it could be seen as a means of hedging an individual game. And strongly frowned upon.

masterzoraon How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

I hope you don't mind if I'm not interested in spending a few hours tracking down all the sources I've referenced before but to give you a short answer to your first paragraph: for the past decade or so women have held 20-30% of the CS degrees with recent times being somewhat higher. Women also hold less than 20% of the software positions (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/04/science-engineer... ctrl-F for "19 percent"; it cites the Bureau of Labor Statistics but I'm not sure what part). Obviously there's not a perfect correlation between degrees and jobs for a number of obvious reasons but it's evidence against equal chance of CS majors staying jobs. And I've seen separate sources more clearly showing that there is larger fall-off for women than men. Unfortunately, I don't know what the cause is exactly.

However, your second paragraph sort of has things backwards. The current scheme of things strongly signals to women (pretty accurately) "your odds of getting hired are lesser than your equally talented male friend." Such signalling as I described before isn't about saying that their odds are better than their male friend but rather that the company is actively trying to not disadvantage women.

masterzoraon How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

What you want here is that the amount spent on a person is conditionally independent [1] of characteristics that are irrelevant to that persons performance given the characteristics that are relevant to that persons performance.

Why? Just on topic that leaves out two very, very important things:

1. The process is already inherently unfairly biased towards men and it will take a nontrivial investment of resources to counter that.

2. Although it wouldn't affect an individual's performance, diversity (and other things that don't affect individual performance) can affect team performance and thus need to be considered.

masterzoraon How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

Ah, but remember that in this example everyone sees the posting (or, if you prefer, the recruiter only reaches out to women who see the posting) so your scenario is impossible. The recruiter's role isn't to increase visibility but rather to be a signal to women that they wouldn't be wasting their time with this company.

When programs like the one briefly mentioned in the article are done well their net effect is really signalling more than anything. As trivial as it sounds, such signalling can actually have a large impact.

masterzoraon How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

Okay, sure, in your highly-fictional, strangely-exact, not-at-all-representative-of-reality example more mens' colleges will be left out than womens' colleges. In reality, not a single part of your scenario actually holds and even the parts that are close aren't that close. I'd do just as well to assume in your scenario that all candidates are uniform, frictionless spheres in a vaccum where gravity is reversed.

masterzoraon How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

But even resources per candidate isn't a good measure of fairness. Just consider the trivial illustrative possibility of a normal job board posting that every potential candidate sees. In today's world it is likely that more men would respond than women by a nontrivial factor. Everyone who responds receives equal treatment and equal devotion of resources and, in the end, significantly more men are hired than women. Now, imagine that we have the exact same scenario but somebody is hired to stand next to the job board and tell every woman who comes by "you should apply for this!" More resources are now being expended per woman than per man but the proportion of people responding might be different without being unfair to any particular person.

Granted, there are a lot of trivialities in this example, but it's pretty representative of how such programs are supposed to work.

masterzoraon Founder Failure Insurance: Pooling equity

In general, insurance companies derive profit both from taking in more than they pay out and from investing what they take in. Historically speaking the idea is for the insurer to have a positive expected value on the premium alone but some companies (and possibly entire types of insurance? I'm not an expert by any means) these days are willing to lessen underwriting profits in exchange for market share and, therefore, more investment money.