singular

To me it's somewhat disappointing to see how quickly HN jumps on an article like this. With all due respect to the obviously enormous hard work these people put into getting in to an IIT, and their obvious intelligence, isn't this kind of discussion about some test to determine whether or not you're 'smarter' than other people something of a pissing match?

No doubt intelligence to a certain degree is a pre-requisite, but beyond that privilege and wealth contribute a huge amount (emphasised in the article when discussing tutors.)

When I attended university I saw how important it was to strategise in exams, the actual technique of exam taking itself is clearly something you can work on, regardless of intelligence. Any test like this can be, and inevitable is, gamed by its candidates; the exams become more a matter of how good you are at guessing what will come up and being good at the art of answering exam questions rather than what the exams ostensibly examine.

I raise this because I find the whole 'elite universities, passed difficult tests = wonderfully smart people who should be given every opportunity in the world to shine' as suspect, biased towards the privileged, and false beyond a a certain base level which is probably not the 'cream of the crop' levels of intelligence people ascribe to those attending this institutions. It smacks of pomposity and self-serving arrogance.

I say this as somebody who went to an 'elite' or at least well regarded university here in the UK (Imperial College.)

Full Disclaimer: I myself may be somewhat biased as I under-performed at university because of quite horrific family issues which inevitably results in an emotional reaction to this kind of thing, however I don't think that invalidates what I'm saying.

"I am incredibly competent. I make maybe 1 minor mistake a month - if that"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger

Very good point.

The studies that conclude that tasters are no good at differentiating wine seem to presuppose that price is a good indication of quality to begin with, and when an expert picks a cheaper wine over a more expensive one they fail to consider the possibility that the problem is with that assumption rather than the expert's tasting ability.

Edit: TFA (which I didn't R :) makes the point that there seems to be little correlation between price/qual. But it's worth emphasising this point anyway, I think.

Yeah that kind of approach is typically how you resolve this issue, coffeescript even has a neat wrapper around (function([args...]) { ... })([args...]) of do (args...) -> ... to make this less painful.

Interesting how the go syntax makes it easy to explicitly pass in arguments. That is very nice.

After I wrote my reply I played around with some C# and found to my surprise that foreach does in fact provide a new variable to be captured on each iteration, so clearly this is a design decision that varies between languages.

Not sure why you were downvoted! That's interesting. I can see why, this seems a rather common gotcha.

This seems to me to be the same class of error as those that aren't so much a go thing as a very comma gotcha for closures; you're placing x in the scope of the for loop and passing it into a series of anonymous functions, so it gets closed over and referenced as a common variable between each of those functions; thus before each goroutine has a chance to run the loop has completed and x == 3. You'll find this behaviour in any language with closures.

In the second example you're allocating a new local variable on each iteration, so each individual value gets closed over separately. That's probably not what you'd want usually, hence that not being default behaviour.

Interesting, will give that a go when next I notice it happening (it's intermittent for me too which is good + bad... hard to repro :)

Finally! Somebody who shares my pain! :-)

I have had an issue both with my previous mac, a second gen air and a first gen pro retina with sustaining a connection (I am immediately next to the wifi router and get wifi drop outs yet my colleague, a distance away using a PC, has no dropouts whatsoever.)

I also have a curious problem that has affected both of them - if I rest the laptop on my naked chest, the wifi connection degrades to the point that connectivity is significantly affected, and if the signal is not strong enough completely drops out. Seems to me to be related to the aluminium case. Quite frustrating as this is (an arguably not very healthy) common use case for me :)

Public transport is an enormous problem in the UK outside of London - the prices are very high, and the service is often dreadful.

In my home town for instance the local operator regularly cancelled buses without notification, ran late all the time and repeatedly made hugely over the top above-inflation/fuel price fluctuation price rises every year. On more than one occasion they cancelled last buses stranding people.

The company would cheat the monitoring of punctuality by having buses wait at certain points along the route (notably the points at which punctuality measures were made) for sometimes 10 - 15 minutes, whereas wherever you actually wanted to catch a bus from you'd often be left waiting 20-30 minutes for a bus to turn up.

The bottom line is, if you want to live there + have any kind of quality of life, you have to own + run a car. Full stop. This is pretty well true for anywhere outside of London (not sure about other major cities, however.)

A lot of the issue is the monopolistic nature of any bus service, and the lack of teeth of the government regulator. Personally I think it ought to be run as a public service with some means of ensuring quality (ok so that's a tough problem :) or at least improve the regulator's ability to fine companies that fail to provide a decent service + have some oversight over (already subsidised!) fares.

I'm not going to deny that our weather is awful :) but there is a lot of good too - a relatively free democracy (aside from all the questionable stuff listed above that let's face it is likely occurring in every western country, though we might be leading the way on CCTV) which is far, far less infiltrated by religious nuts than many countries, London which alone counts for a HELL of a lot :), lots of history, good cheddar cheese, and most important of all - weather-induced sense of humour! ;-)

   "It's a horrible place to live"

Though we have many problems, please speak for yourself and stay off general comments about the country. Your other points are valid and interesting but you really ruin them with your frankly childish comment - just because you, personally find the entirety of the country horrible doesn't mean that is close to the reality of living here or the experience of everybody else.

Ah fair enough, that made me suspicious in particular as that title seemed unrelated to the bug :-)

I wonder whether my HDMI -> DVI adapter is making a difference somehow?

Not experiencing this with a mid-2012 Mac Book Pro Retina hooked up to an external display via an HDMI/DVI adapter.

I wonder if this is some strange prank designed to get people to look at a screenshot of https://optin.stopwatching.us/, esp. given the '1px reproduction' of this is entitled 'We are watching you!' If so, I really, really don't get it :-S

Fine for me in the UK:-

    $ host algasm.io
    algasm.io has address 176.58.123.62

Interesting. It's still useful to have the data in REDIS so you can easily search through data server-side, but of course that could simply load from static JSON if + when REDIS is restarted/new data is added.

With aggressive disk caching on servers static files are probably near enough in-memory anyhow (+ I'm sure you could configure a modern web server application to cache anyhow), so yeah it's probably pretty fast.

However it's more limiting to simply serve static files - you're limited to what you've generated. With redis you can serve it as json data and use it dynamically for e.g. search or showing all articles with a given tag, in a given date range, etc.

Additionally, I'm not a big fan of a whole bunch of static files sat in a folder somewhere that needs to be regenerated every time I change something. Personal preference, perhaps :-)

Seems interesting, I've always appreciated the simplicity of a Jekyll-type approach.

Apologies for semi-hijacking to mention it but, I take a slightly different approach in my personal blog (custom, messy code) - I rsync markdown documents to my webserver which are compiled into HTML and put into a redis in-memory collection which the server uses to render the blog. That gives you in-memory caching for free and avoids having a whole bunch of static files having to be generated every time. I use node on the backend and angular on the frontend to allow for a single-page website.

Currently the solution involves regenerating all HTML each time files are rsync by a script run remotely via SSH, however I ultimately intend for it to use an inotify-style approach to only import files that have actually changed, running both locally and remotely, so publishing an article need only require you to write some markdown and save it in a particular folder.

Though of course all this (currently) requires you to have a server such as linode to which you can rsync + have a remote serving script watch a folder, I mention it so to ask whether anybody would be interested in me cleaning it up and open sourcing it?

I don't like to waste my life on internet arguments (nicely in alignment with your comments, there), but seriously?

I hate to join the 'hacker news is going downhill' parade, but this is pretty bad. Go read http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :-

    When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g.:-

    "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Note you didn't even respond to my points, you just gave me the minimally informed personal attack bit.

I wrote a fair bit here in response to your 'points', but to be honest your lack of civility doesn't warrant it. Feel free to disagree, but try + do it politely, this isn't reddit.

"I can admit to stating a preference for men over six feet, but have dated men not even an inch taller than my 5'6" self."

QED.

I think it's less of a conscious thing a lot of the time, rather it's an ingredient in sexual attraction + 'chemistry', so naturally you women often feel more attracted to a taller man (if that doesn't sound terribly condescending, I don't mean it to be!), in the same way we men prefer symmetrical faces and a certain hip-to-waist ratio. We usually wouldn't put it that way, but it's inbuilt.

It's only 1 factor of course. I think of it in terms of chemistry prerequisites - once you get through those then the real stuff that matters comes into play, but without it you're never going to advance beyond the friendzone.

Sure, actually this is far better reply than most here, sorry you got downvoted. You at least accept the premise.

I hate to sound like a terrible hypocrite, but I do have to apply filter enough that I'd be able to honestly say I found them attractive. My standards are actually not all that vastly high to sound like a terribly shallow person.

As for women w/children, I wouldn't on the basis of having had a step parent during my upbringing and the various weirdnesses that involves so I'd rather be single than be in that position.

Yes, this is indeed something I've considered :-)

I'd be completely average height in Mexico, say.

Except there is plenty of evidence that women have a massive preference for tall men. Just go round asking some women, seriously. Or check out dating sites/columns. Height is a biiig thing.

How tall are you can I ask compared to your national average? To somebody without this disadvantage it simply doesn't exist.

It's not the only thing, but it's a MASSIVE thing.

I had a very beautiful girlfriend during uni + didn't believe this was a problem at all. Then that ended + it became quite obvious.

Just because you managed to overcome the disadvantage, doesn't make it not a thing. It's not all about the attitude (or rather apparent confidence), it's partly about it.

Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. How tall are you compared to the average in your country? For somebody who doesn't have this disadvantage, it simply doesn't exist.

I refer again to http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/lies/MessagesPerWeek.png - it's not 100% but it's indicative. Also I refer you to walking down the street in your town. If you were correct, then there'd be a big variation (or at least one resembling the normal dist) in male height in couples you see. But in fact what you see is something of a skew...

At last somebody who gets my point.

I've given up because of this and other factors. But I respect your positivity and you're right there is more to it.

Sigh. Sure, if I looked like/were as confident as Tom Cruise I could compensate for the height disadvantage. But it's still a disadvantage.

The interesting point with these sorts of responses is they follow the fallacious logic of 'here is an anecdotal example of somebody with your disadvantage succeeding due to separate advantages, therefore you don't have a disadvantage at all.'

Again, the exception to the rule doesn't make it not (generally) true.

"Men fall in love through their eyes. Women fall in love through their ears."

And people love to tell themselves convenient stories that may or may not be true. If that proverb were really the case you'd expect to see a full variation of height difference in couples but no, you nearly always see a woman ~ 2 - 3" shorter than the man, so it's certainly a factor.

Additionally you see a general increase in height in populations with decent nutrition over time which is arguably due to sexual selection.

Explain to me the 'TALL, dark, handsome' cliche?

There's plenty of evidence that height is a thing. As I said before, it's not 100%, but the fact it's a big factor is undeniable. It's not everything, but it's a massive factor, even if other factors can compensate to some degree.

I never said preventing. It's a massive disadvantage. I could (+ might) write a longer piece about the whole subject as there is more to this than height but it's quite surprising what a difference it makes.

If you can overcome that disadvantage, all power to you, but it doesn't change the state of affairs.

I refer you to this graph - http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/lies/MessagesPerWeek.png

It's a rough analysis but shows a clear female preference based on height. Certainly an indicator.