skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always get confused by this attitude, I use the internet pretty much all day, most days.

When I visit a url, I type it in the "address bar", however I have never typed a tld, so my address bar is actually a google search, its generally always the first link, I click on it, on subsequent visits it auto completes.

Compared to the amount of times I have misspelt a domain, plain forgot it, or got the tld wrong, typing a keyword and clicking on the first result was always the easiest way for me.
You're being amusingly snide, but just plain wrong, sorry. Blocking Google Voice at the app store quite clearly prevents iPhone users from using Google Voice, a service Google wants to provide to them. But for a third party (Apple) those users would be able to use it, so without it they are harmed.

Google doesn't want to provide/support service to WebOS, or other third party clients. These users wouldn't be served anyway, they aren't "harmed" except by reference to a utopian world where we all run free software all the time. It's like demanding that Apple support iTunes on the Linux or Palm Pre; it's a ridiculous argument.
Rails 3: Loading rake tasks from a gem
That's the magic of xkcd's fulfillment center. Without it, we'd probably be using Amazon (or shopping indies). Davean can speak better about just how it works, but there's one facility in Virginia that serves the USA and another in N. Ireland that serves Europe. Unfortunately, shipping to places like Australia (because of theft/loss, which apparently happens very often) requires a significant markup to compensate for shipments that go missing. If you know anyone who works at the Australia mail service and has a disproportionate amount of xkcd schwag - let us know.

Most traditional publishers will broker deals with publishers abroad, who get the rights in exchange for distributing in their territory. We're working on such an agreement right now, so it's fairly reasonable for an upstart to work out such a deal - especially if it's popular in the USA.
[BREAKING] Red Hat Enterprise Linux now supported with Hyper-V
I agree. A guy who says "I just didn’t do my homework because I knew it was bullshit" just doesn't deserve any help.
sorry for the late reply:

yeah, that's even more interesting that because its inside a goroutine, there would be nothing to catch it. in this case, i think erlang got some things right with process linking
I feel like (after looking at examples and so on) this actually makes it harder to read quickly. Maybe a 9th grader can concentrate easier on this stuff but I skim text a lot and this just seems annoying. And don't even get me started on the wasted space, I can't imagine a web app with any amount of copy on it using a style like this.
For the question “How old are my children”, arent a lot of possibilities neglected? eg – Why arent there any children with age 1?
9, 8, 1
24, 3, 1
18, 4, 1
36, 2, 1
12, 6, 1

In this case, in addition to the two cases which add up to 14 (as pointed out in the solution), there is another case wherein the ages add up to 13:
12, 6, 1 (sum=13)
6, 4, 3 (sum=13)

Why is this case ignored? Isnt more data required to “break the tie” and get a unique solution?
Nice, but how many items can it handle without getting choppy? I see 13 items in that demo. Can it do 30? 50?

I worked on a large project that attempted to do this for new cars, which is a slightly larger dataset, and in the end we went with Flex because it had much of the functionality built in, and could do the animations much more smoothly.

Check it out:
http://www.newcars.com/carchooser#6

Try clicking on "Price" in the left hand nav, and then moving the slider.
By English, I mean English. Not American English.
On the topic of grade inflation:

In 1966, 22% of Harvard undergraduate students earned A's. By 1996, that figure rose to 46%. That same year, 82% of Harvard seniors graduated with honors.

In 1973, 31% of all grades at Princeton were A's. By 1997 that rose to 43%. In 1997, only 12% of all grades given at Princeton were below the B range.

(source: Source: American Academy of Arts & Sciences)

One of the best things about MIT is that they have not succumbed to the this trend. There is no such thing as "honors"— An MIT degree is an honor by itself. That attitude is a fundamental basis of the student culture.
I love the "Free Shipping" sticker on the left side of the ebay page.

I can't imagine selling a company on ebay, I wouldnt think that people visit ebay looking for companies to purchase.

That said, if it does work out for them, it probably is at a lower commission than other more standard methods.
Grades don’t reflect your aptitude, intelligence, or
understanding of the subject matter.

I understand the criticism of the current grading system: cheating, focus on memorization, constrained learning system, ...

However this type of complaint requires some suggestion of a viable alternative.
Interesting. I'm definitely able to scan the example text far faster using this mention.

This tool would help me understand some of the over complicated text that's in my school books. I think it would have the opposite effect on any book with a less complicated writing style.
I took a class with Jon Kleinberg called Networks co-taught by an economics professor. Introduced me to power laws, Nash equili riums, and six degrees of separation(or rather the validity thereof) Brilliant class. Brilliant guy.
Totally agree. It's very unfortunately. Truth is that HN might be close to exceeding it's value mass.

In regarding to this read, great article!

I'm never going to buy a Kingston again!
Between my junior and senior years of high school, I did a paid internship along with a few dozen other high schoolers working on CanDo, a module for SchoolTool (an OSS school management platform built on Zope). It was all paid for by a combination of state funds, local school district money, and $10,000 from Mark Shuttleworth.

CanDo is grading software that tracks competency instead of percentages. Each student has a rating on various skills that the class is supposed to teach, something like "Familiar with basics." The top level is being able to teach the skill to others.

Though that project is now stagnating, there's still a mandate to explore that type of grading software from the state of Virginia.

(Incidentally, paying high schoolers to work on something practical is a great way to get them to learn.)
PR is simple enough that "Given this link graph, what is the PR of site C" was a question on a written exam in my introductory AI class (meaning no notes, calculators, computers).
Ah, I see, I counted it as 'profits' in 2008 because it wasn't a cost until 2009 (when we put a downpayment on the books).
I recently watched a friend in his mid 20's try to install some poker software on a new laptop. He's been playing poker online for years.

Anyway, to get the software he clicked IE which brought up the default home page (AOL). In the AOL search box he typed 'google' and selected the first result. Then when google loaded he typed 'poker stars' in the search box to get to the correct site.
Self-evident straw men get votes here on HN, huh.

[Edit:] I guess your (single) point which people may be voting on that's not a straw man there is that the larger green movement is "shifty".

Because your point on "consistent and clear" is based completely on a made up discussion between what sounds like 3rd graders (or politicians)
I think the author of this blog has a view of "society" that is a little myopic.

The premise that the "structure of today's society" is based on facebook and the web is, I think, something several hundred million people in this country would disagree with.

The internet itself is not yet one of the few pieces of technology that is intractably ingrained in our societal DNA. On that list? I don't know. Cars. Telephones. Television. And _facebook_ certainly isn't.
My main goal is to get to that real stuff in effort to demystify the process of getting traction. It's the only reason I'm doing this interview series.

To that end, I'm constantly asking about analytics, metrics and inflection points. I think you'll find the first four interviews I did fall more into the category you seem to be looking for, i.e. contain explanations of particular tactics used.

However, I take Jimmy at his word that they didn't have analytics up and he doesn't know exactly what happened. I'm learning that there are a class of ideas that just take off. It's rare, but it happens--sort of the right place at the right time matched with execution (read not screwing it up). I put reddit in that category as well. I think Hot or Not is another.

Frankly, I don't know what I'm going to get when I do one of these interviews. I'm going for variety, but it's hard to know what category a particular interview will fall into a prori. Personally, I find this category of just taking off fascinating. I think it shows some ideas are very valuable.

Finally I welcome any interviewing advice. I want to make the series as good as possible.
TFS is that bad. Offline access is non-existent. You can't even record a file addition without a connection to the server. I checked it out at Loopt, but for all it offered, I found SVN + Hudson to do everything we needed better.
Maybe Hacker News should try and organize free 2 hour "Introduction to the Internet" classes for the elderly?

I'm sure it's mainly a matter of ignorance and not a matter of intelligence.
Secondary education isn't really comparable to working in a capitalist society. It's more like the old Soviet system, where the expectations were arbitrary and meaningless, and the rewards meaningless and worthless--and everyone of sufficient intelligence knew it, even the bureaucrats. Especially the bureaucrats. The same is true of the typical high school, where either you know how stupid everything is or you're drinking the Kool-aid.

Fortunately I went to a school where there were enough good classes and teachers to make up for it, but apparently this guy didn't.

Anyway, at my job at a big important corporation, busy work and meaningless stuff happens--but it's not common, and the higher ups usually think they have a good reason for it. They're not just going through the motions of "assign work, evaluate performance". And if they are, you are free to--and should--find a job elsewhere.
Notice he said that svn is a good choice. Not necessarily the best choice though.
Sina Microblogging an Alternative to Twitter?
dictionary.reference.com:
Origin:
1870–75, Americanism; burglar + -ize

It's old, it's popular, and it's well understood. It is certainly a valid word.

Saying you were burgled has a Mr. Burns feel to it. It's almost always burglarized or robbed in the United States.
Don't forget PleaseFireMe.com and PleaseDontHireMe.com
As an employer if you are handing out bullshit tasks then no one competent would want to to work for you.

If the tasks actually aren't bullshit, it is up to you to convey the importance of the task to your employees. Same goes with teachers and assignments.
This is going to be quite the odyssey! I'd love a photo of xkcd in Bangalore - bonus points if you can involve naan.
Silicon Valley tops the happy charts
A "Paradox" : Covering the real line with insufficient length
3) Have you ever actually seen a recovery plan work like that?
Yes. (at least mine from three years ago)
I think that's a bit harsh. I agree with the general point that Wikipedia was a right idea at the right time success. However, Wikia was another story entirely. There were tons of wiki startups out there, and they are the ones that got traction. More specifically:

> He doesn't know how he got the attention of the press.

I think Jimmy would say (by inferring from the end of the interview) that his simple vision attracted the attention of the press, i.e. "a free encyclopedia for anyone." He says at the beginning as well that nupedia had a decent amount of press on that vision alone, even though that project wasn't successful.

> He doesn't know why exactly his product succeeded.

I think it's pretty clear from this interview (reading between the lines) that it is a combination of community building and SEO. He says 60-70% of traffic comes from search engines. Maybe it was even higher early on. He built a community interested in his core vision (that would create the articles) and then capitalized on SEO. He mentions how on 9/11 his pages were sought after for their unique content. It's basically a Demand Media strategy before Demand Media.

> He has no tips on any secrets of what got Wikipedia going.

I think he gave actionable advice to wiki creators that they have to focus on getting editors. He thinks you do that by reaching out to people who share your core vision. His case was easier because it was so general, but it has worked for specific subjects a few hundred times on Wikia. I hope to interview Angela from Wikia (who he mentioned) to get more specifics on that.
This has been around for about two years. Any context for submitting the link?
What about light users? Or users who give it a try, but then forget about it? I don't think we should protect people from themselves by banning it but there should be some warnings attached.
Even better than that the 1965 Hubble paper is pretty relevant to the "folklore" algorithms for eigenvector based graph partitioning that keep getting re-discovered (without attribution) again and again.
Run XP Mode on Windows 7 Machines Without Hardware Virtualization
You'd be surprised at how many of the tasks are BS-y when changing the world.
The latest in the series, and probably the last about the real numbers. I've kinda lost track of the items and how they relate, but it all started in response to this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1070604

Here are the postings:

Musings on Math: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071734

Trapping a Transcendental: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086837
The issue is that unlike simply observing someone leaving for their regular job, with Foursquare you know exactly where/how far away someone is. If you're watching a house to rob, there's still a remote chance that they might come home randomly (sickness/forgot something). With these 'check-in' services there's no doubt that the user is X miles away and therefore X minutes away from returning.
Has this actually happened? If so, it's the toaster company's fault for not wrapping the toaster box in a EULA that explicitly absolves the manufacturer of any damage caused by use of the toaster, proper or not.
I don't get how they can win a civil case. Maybe if the homeowner broke a law and get criminal charges, but why did the burglar win for having no good intentions being in the house?

Same thing for the burglar school case. If the roofs weren't safe for hvac technicians, why does the burglar win the case? They should at least be able to defend their reason to be there, and the school should be charged seperatley for shifty construction.
I'm skeptical anyone would buy a company the founders just want to ditch. Why aren't they saying they'll work for the acquirer for a year? Without that, figuring out how all the code works and how the infrastructure is arranged will be very very difficult if possible at all.

$500k is a lot of money for something with no support and no guarantee it will work without the people who put it together.
Of note: the only language mentioned by name is PHP.
If only software bugs could be isolated down to something simple like "don't forget to include a fuse".
Really, I don't believe they install dod root certificates by default. In fact, Firefox has an addon to install the certificates and keep them up to date:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3182

One of the things I've had to do when dealing with DoD networks on the client side is install the root certificates from a site, like:

http://dodpki.c3pki.chamb.disa.mil/rootca.html
If I remember, converging that matrix to a steady state by hand took lots of paper and time.
It is strange that the magistrate ruled it under the "First amendment". The first amendment applies to the congress, not to private parties.
Slicehost adds more sizes, more bandwidth, and "Professional Services"
Zing!
Take it even further. Scout the location, observe the 'regular' schedule (of leaving for work/school) and then use Twitter to make certain they are not close to home.
The truth behind elephant brainpower
My college didn't do grade inflation either. If you do an average job, you get a C. At the beginning of each year, they call the parents of incoming students and tell them not to be worried if the students get Cs - most people in the college get Cs. The on-campus bookstore sold t-shirts with "C+ Better than average!" on them.
So this was the big February annoucement... color me unimpressed.

Also... the new site design is absurdly bad.
it'll probably take more than a week to switch to a new video vault. You have to update links and move a lot of stuff. Depending on how locked-in the customers are, it could take quite a bit longer than a week to move.

But yes, you're right. This company is dead and no one is going to pay $500k for it. They may get $25k for the patents, but the servers, development environment and a rad pool table are not worth $475k.
Ah, UK English.

Not sure why UK English vocabulary should apply to this site; it does not appear to be based there, and the people who make it appear to be from the Netherlands.
I volunteered for one of these before (it was a series of one-on-one sessions). I patiently walked an elderly gent through the absolute bone basics: starting a browser, using the address bar, using Yahoo mail. It was quite slow at times, but he was a pleasant old guy, and at the end of it, I think he really was ready to correspond with his grandkids on his own. It was definitely rewarding, and I'd recommend it to anyone.
Google Docs gets cloud clipboard, copy/paste between computers
I think the reflexive not-doing-homework attitude is moronic and ultimately more useless than doing everything assigned without introspection.

I tended to do the assignments in school. They were easy compared to the things I would do on my own, and the silly ones tended not to be time-consuming.

If you never do homework, how do you know that the homework is bullshit? Some teachers actually know what they're doing, after all.
The problem here is Google's inline news feature.
It looks like they've actually special cased searching for 'facebook login' as the news results for that search are no longer the top hit. I think this is the wrong fix.

The real problem here is how news articles on a topic are automatically the top result on Google, which you can be sure the SEO/phishing crowd is frantically trying to take advantage of.

Unfortunately, for Google, they're trying to expand and be more than a search engine company under that name. So the powers-that-be want to keep news results where they are without changing the formatting, when really that's the better solution. Stick all the news results into a light-blue div with rounded corners so that it's more visually distinct from 'normal' search results. Saying "News results for" doesn't change the fact that it's Google, and it's the top hit, so in many users's minds "it's gotta be (close enough to) right".
Yet another helpful individual mistaking university for some kind of career training centre...

Universities are not there to get you a career, a high paying job, etc. I'll grant you that they've been mis-represented to many people, often by greedy people who wanted to boost the ranks of students to make money (another good reason why universities shouldn't be for-profit).

There are many purposes served by universities, and one of them may occasionally, as an added bonus, to help you in landing a great job. But the primary purposes of universities, and degrees, are:

- Research/Academic study

- To train the next generation of researchers/academics

- To give people who want to study a subject in a formal setting the opportunity to do so

- Allow 18-ish teenagers to mature into quasi-adults in an environment, surrounded by smart people, that will expand their minds and make them better people.

"Getting you a job" is not, and should not be, an objective of university. Most jobs should not require a degree, either. The fact that unrelated degrees are being used as a front-line filtering system is tragic. If universities themselves are to blame for this failure of perception management, it is doubly tragic - it may destroy their primary reasons for existence in the end.
Caveat emptor. If the customer wants the vendor to be legally liable for defects then the customer should insist that be included in the contract. No one is stopping them from doing this right now. It doesn't require changing any laws or regulations.
But a job offer is open to the public.

And it's at the hiring time that members from the general public are allowed to compete for jobs.
There's an equivalent program in WA called "Running Start" where high school students can nominally attend high school while actually attending a local community college. They get college credits and everything. Often it's possible for them to get their associates' degree and high school diploma concurrently.
Yeah, that's a nice thought, but not really reflective of reality.

First, the guy already has a job, which he clearly states in the essay.

Second, the majority of people who change the world have jobs at different points in their career. People like Gates, Jobs, and Dell who never really had jobs and just did their own thing from day 1 are so far an exception that they're probably worthless as role models in that sense.

Finally, the majority of people who bullshit their way through school and deliberately slack off because they're cynical about the system do not change the world. Some do, but so do some people who work hard, apply themselves, and get as much as they can out of the broken system. In fact, I'm betting that more of the latter do, but that's just my opinion.
Get this: Most people are not hypersmart creative individuals. They are normal people who need to learn some basic material about the world that they likely will never use because they don't care.

The grading system caters to them, and it's a pretty good indicator of which of those people is going to be able to successfully do a standard job placed in front of him.

School was made for average people, if you are so much above the average, then you can surely figure out a way to be the best in a system that is so much below you. If you failed a test designed for average people, then by that criteria, you are below average.

People that are very much above average do not need the grades, because they will have a lot to show for themselves anyways. People who are average need the grades, because they need a way of showing their ability to do work in comparison to their peers.

So the logic of the writer is fundamentally flawed, because assuming he is indeed above average, he cannot use the failure of the system on him to mean that the system fails for the average person.
I acknowledge there's a problem with the current grading system, yet I am still convinced that grades are correlated with one's aptitude/intelligence.

In my personal experience though, I only noticed the inflated grades problem in the US. While I was an undergrad engineering student in Spain there were some classes where not even 50% of the students passed, and overall, only 5% of them graduated with the minimum amount of time (5 years).

On the other hand, when pursuing graduate studies in the US, not only were the classes easier, but in many of them most people got A's. In my opinion, that defeats the purpose of grading.
Among the people I knew in school, grades certainly were correlated with intelligence. There were some counter examples, me among them, but I don't blame anyone for weighting grades heavily when it filters out a big section of people who lack either the discipline or the intelligence to do well in school.
I might tweet that I left the house - but my rather large dog stays home :)