skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They did a very good job attracting core early contributors who wrote unique great content and then it snowballed. Reading answers posted by the top 10 contributors is just fun. All content is SEO-friendly. Much of it is authoritative and Google loves authoritative content. There is a setting to make my content appear as anonymous to search engines, but many of us associate our names with our content.

Most of Quora's content is evergreen. They improved question merging recently and that resulted in a high concentration of high quality answers to popular questions. Quora's management calls them canonical questions. The ask2answer flow also improved. You can now find people who can answer your questions. That feature was previously under-developed and didn't work very well.

Quora's top contributors enjoy the virtuous cycle. We write answers and people upvote them, which introduces other readers to us. Our audiences are massive. I only have about 250,000 views per month and about 5500 followers, but some other writers have several million per month and more than 20,000 followers.

Quora will collapse answers that are highly upvoted but incorrect. This helps with site quality and likely pleases Google.

I am one of about 800 Quora's Top Writers ( http://quora.com/Leonid-S.-Knyshov ) if you have any specific questions.
He might have been 5 too late, instead. Herbalife's business model depends on getting new suckers into the mix. Herbalife is now branching out into essentially 3rd world countries, because the market is drying up for them in the developed world. Eventually (I hope) the whole thing will come crashing down, even without FTC intervention. Timing it is difficult, though, and even if Ackman is right, he can still lose money if he calls it too early.
Now Get More for Every Dollar Spent
> There are very real and very severe physical effects of alcohol addiction, so the two are in no way comparable.

I didn't name any physical effects. I did compare emotional and interpersonal effects of Candy Crush/gambling to those of alcoholism, so unless you disagree with those specific comparisons, gaming addiction is by definition comparable, in at least a few ways.

I get your point, but I reject the GP's and your implication that gaming addiction is almost benign because it has no physical effects, or that we have to choose between two evils here, or that malicious marketers of alcohol (maybe tobacco would be a better one here) and deliberate designers of addictive games aren't both morally culpable for hurting people.

(And on the physical effects, I wonder if gaming can alter brain chemistry enough that there actually could be physical effects... I don't know enough about it. Here's something from the article along those lines: "According to Eyal, checking in delivers a hit of dopamine to the brain, along with the craving for another hit.")
Fortunately the gamers will make excellent drone pilots and the computer nerds will build interesting weapons systems.

I highly doubt WWIII is going to hinge on the personalities of the infantry, if it even has infantry.
Me neither. My understanding is that this is the rule, not the exception.
It wasn't a personality evaluation, it was a critique of your teaching methodology.

Responsible engineering isn't targeting the minimum thing that works. That's short sighted thinking that involves taking on way too much technical debt up front to pay for a faster initial release. This method might work if you're writing one-off tiny projects, but it will slam you if the project needs to adapt to new requirements in the future.

That's the difference between writing software and building a bridge. Three weeks before a bridge is completed, nobody can say, "oh BTW, this needs to also carry two trains." With software major requirements can change last minute and you better have written your code to deal with that possibility.
I disagree about the git part. Or at least mine is not configured as it should.
Lyx, by default at least, wrap the line to the 80-char limits which make a change (of a removed -or added- coma -or word-) several breakline due to the shift. Which makes the `git diff` almost unreadable and the change hard to find.
Ackman is trying to make more money. If he does good in destroying a bad company all the better, but that's not his primary mission.
Couple that with Phoenix (which looks and acts like most other MVC frameworks [and has good docs]), and we have a win I think.

And yes, it's quite fun (and mind-bending at the same time, in a good way).
I really wish the restrictions can be reduced or removed so @pmarca etc can tweet more on the companies of which they are on the board of. Same for the CEOs itself, and CEOs and other executives should be allowed to tweet at board members and vice versa.
My primary issue with Vi and Emacs isn't really about lack. They are quite powerful tools. The primary problem is that they impose a certain amount of mental overhead. Emacs was a bit worse in that regard since many of its key bindings are actually sequences. Sublime Text is rather powerful but in terms of features it's probably the one that is lacking of the 3. The win was in unloading the overhead from my normal work patterns.
I think that the best default approach would be to start as a normal emacs process but revert to emacsclient behaviour (i.e. just open a new frame) if a running instance of emacs is detected.
This is what web browsers do, for example.
How dare someone who made a game, is giving it away for free, and someone else is paying for bandwidth decide not to pick the optimal file format for all downloaders?

How selfish of them.
I built a large social networking mlm for a client. The coding was fun but it left me feeling bad. It is catching people when they are desperate. I do not really believe in limiting a lot by law but people cannot protect themselves when they are down.
Well, I've done lots of TDD in both Python/PHP/JS _and_ Haskell and C++, and I don't agree at all. I was the advocate for TDD at IMVU and built many of the test frameworks and core systems across all languages.

You can definitely TDD Haskell, for example, with liberal use of "undefined" or "error". Same with C++: just throw an exception in code paths you haven't "explored" with tests yet.

Also, the notion that because Haskell has a strong type system you don't need tests is a persistent myth. It's nice to have types to prove certain aspects of your program, but you still need a test suite in any significant project.
Companies engaging in MLM strategies often offers superior quality, beneficial products.
I personally use one on occasions just because I know it works really well for what I need.

However MLM as a marketing strategy especially sprinkled with "business opportunity" hype is as close to scam as it can be without crossing the barrier.

Tons of people are misleaded into false expectations of making living just by finding candidates and signing them up.

While I see mr. Ackman's efforts nothing more than ego- [and possibly boredom] driven personal quest, the MLM industry needs to be forced into full and very clear disclosure of "business opportunity" fragment. These promises are clearly misleading and grossly overhyped.
Wow, this got more downvoted than I've had in a long time!

I'm pretty sure that this is an uncontroversial view so I'm a little surprised, especially since I work in this field.

Enlighten me, Julia fans?
This post inspired me to re-read my thesis (well browse through it). Although it has been 16 years since I last looked at it, I didn’t have any problem understanding it and I didn’t even really cringe reading it. I guess it depends on your field how bad this effect is.
Spotify used to use a peer-to-peer architecture: https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-a-massive-p2p-network-bless...

I'd be interested in knowing why they switched away from it.
The same is true of creative writing in general. I've found pieces from my years as a student, which seem to have been written by an alien.
At least the NSA hasn't used the data to conduct large-scale campaigns of imprisonment and murder (so far). In an investigation of the sort the GP describes, it would make sense to start with the worst abuses of the data; though less-bad abuses should also be included.
I have a dream ... that some day there will be a standard structured document format for publishing. And ePub is very, very, very nearly it. May well be, I've only been kinda keeping tabs. And yes, I'm a huge fan.

My one biggest frustration (noted earlier here) is that the Linux ePub client, fbreader, doesn't have a way to specify a maximum content line length. Margins, sure, but not content. Result is that reading full-screen on a 16:9 display is ... kinda pessimal. Small issue, but one of those "pay attention to details" items that matters.

From the preso (nice layout there, by the way), Metadata: I'm in love. This is something that I'm familiar with via hNews and Readability. Structured information in documents would be really, really peachy.

I've got a long-standing rant on the browser world, which is entirely flipping falling down as a content presentation tool, for numerous reasons. Among the reasons for tab proliferation, I'm realising, is really piss-poor content management tools. As I'm in the midst of a large research project, with some 1800 articles curated and another thousand-plus books and documents (mostly PDF, but a mix of other styles), being able to reliably extract title, author, publisher, date, etc., information would be quite valuable.

https://redd.it/256lxu

Some things HTML is rather pointedly missing:

1. A footnote / endnote / sidenote native capability. I've mucked around creating a sidenote implementation, but as a native element it'd be useful.

2. A native hierarchical threaded discussion structure. The fact that every last online Web forum (HN included) is re-implementing tin / mutt (and doing it wrong) is ... depressing.

3. A hell of a lot more thought to accessibility. From font/colour/size choices to support for text-to-speech and speech-control systems, I'm developing a growing awareness through the community I'm currently supporting. ePub with its simplified presentation may be a win here.

4. Equations. Not always needed, but support for something at least as powerful as LaTeX would be quite useful.

5. Annotations. A lightweight mode of interacting with content would also be helpful.

That said, very happy to see progress.
I think the claims the parent post meant are political suicide are admitting to being human and that the candidate is "susceptible to conflicts of interest."

Saying "how dare you even question that," as Hillary does, has turned out quite well, and she's never had to admit her human frailties that way.

I think a good question: do people like to vote for someone who admits to having limitations and weaknesses, even though they are running for one of the most powerful positions in the world?
I've never liked LyX, it removes the benefit of not worrying about formatting that LaTeX is made for, while still being significantly harder to use than Word. It fills an awkward space between WYSIWYG and markup without the benefits of either.

I eventually settled on Texmaker as it incorporates all the features to allow me to write documents quickly, while still maintaining the LaTeX way of doing things.
Weird; they have anual drives to raise money to keep the site running; would not expect that the'd have 2.5m lying around to do pet projects like this...
Snapdeal raises $200 mn more; valuation sees nearly $2 bn jump in just 7 months
it also leads to proof by intimidation which often masks errors.
Is Apple Reverse Migrating from AWS?
I use an approach similar to this [1] to automatically install missing packages on startup. This means that when I move to a new machine I just have to clone the repo with my emacs configuration to have everything ready, settings _and_ extra packages.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10092322/how-to-automatic...
I was about to write much the same thing... Last year, I found a hard copy of my dissertation (which I defended in 2004). I skimmed through it and had absolutely no problem whatsoever understanding what I had written 11 years prior. And I've been out of academia since 2008.
Despite fall in global business confidence, investment appetite grows in India
the point is to remove the barrier of buying bitcoins and instead give these new users a bitcoin generator so they can try out bitcoins.. its less about being profitable and more about providing a platform to participate in the bitcoin ecosystem.
Clearly it should be a cpio archive.
That article is outdated. Its basing figures on an older technology in lead-acid versus Lithium and battery manufacturing has started exploding since then.

He also assumes the same level of inefficiency. With the technologies and policies in my plan, the U.S. can easily be 8 times more efficient.
That day was 15+ yrs ago. Back in the IE4/5 days with ActivePerl and/or ActivePython installed you could do just that (along with VBScript). It also allowed you to use them in ASP pages too.

eg: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms974552.aspx

http://www.icodeguru.com/WebServer/Python-Programming-on-Win...

Apparently Perl tended to work better than Python though due to not being as picky about whitespace in an HTML script element :)
Great article if you want to ignore all the facts. 'Actual usage of Apple’s products and services continues unabated', though this may be true of iPhone sales, it is not true of Mac sales, which I believe the target of the software complaints are mostly targetted at.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-apple-mac...

Or maybe the post is suggesting that Apple software quality hasn't declined because it has always been poor.

My personal take is that Apple is learning what it's like to server a huge number of customers. It's incredibly challenging, and more bugs, UX issues, etc are experienced as more and more different use cases are experienced by more and more users.

So, in some ways, I agree, it may be a perception issue, though that doesn't mean the level of quality is acceptable.
Facebook's #FreeBasicsMustFall
Drone Deploy captures printable 3D models
$250000 != $2.5M
They did mention the Penthouse magazine subscription.

"The bet was very nonpolitically correct: He gave me a subscription to Penthouse magazine when I won."
Verizon is one of the bigger scala shops (a few hundred scala programmers on a "project") and is much closer to the functional side than a better Java. However, micro services and good library support mean some of the less experienced teams (in FP) use it more of Java++. Both are very pleasant to maintain/work on though.
The size difference is trivial so there's no real benefit to .7z files.

However it's a non standard format so I have to hunt around for what the CLI tool is called, then install it, the look up the options...

Sure that's not a huge amount of work, but it just seems preposterous. Like using some 'gopher 2.0' protocol instead of http.
I very much like the related point Paul Lockhart makes in "A Mathematician's Lament"[1]: that mathematics is an art form and ought to be taught like one.

[1]: http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pdf
Cynical, no doubt. But unwarranted?
In lthread-cpp (wrapper around lthread) it's even easier because of RAII. Example:

http://lthread-cpp.readthedocs.org/en/latest/listener.html#e...

TCPListener closes the socket once its done and cleans up. And it also allows you to pass instance methods as the coroutine which has the advantage of accessing the instance context.
'Preposterous'
I've read a log of the inside wikimedia links here, and I'm confused about all the talk of gnashing of teeth and rending of cloth. This is controversial because some want to pay down technical debt rather than have a small team do knowledge graph search?

Okay...
I didn't ask for it both ways. However, as I said, I don't believe the earlier events rise to the level of what the GOP has done recently. If they block a Supreme Court appointment for 11 months it certainly will be unprecendented.
That's obviously not true. An easy example:

"I will never vote for a person who supports general warrants"

I can apply that to the candidates, and it's extremely helpful in filtering out the really bad ones. That one issue - being in favor of general warrants - is more than enough to disqualify a candidate as being worthy of the presidency.

As with any filter and context, it depends on what filter you choose to you apply, and sometimes how many filters.
How many countries donated to the Clinton Foundation? Doesn't seem a particularly incriminating detail considering the scope and breadth of the foundation.

Let's call this one irrelevant?
Of course it is. That's all Clinton attackers have to go on. Constant attacks that she's corrupt and untrustworthy.

Meanwhile her policies and stances are nearly identical to Sanders except with a dose of reality when it comes to implementation.
In addition to wiseleo's comment, the key thing I think they got right was the weekly digest. It's never too frequent, it's relative, interesting, and fresh.

It was important to get the digest right because it granted Quora permission to keep getting user's attention even when away from the site (push vs pull) and also gave users a 'takeaway' - either information or topics of discussion to debate with friends through real conversation or an email forward.

This feature lets them have high retention rates and increases word-of-mouth to gain new users.
I'm sure this will have an age range of like 8 years old and up where chewing on random things is less of a problem.
Obligatory reply: http://qntm.org/abolish
Build something people want. When was the last time Yahoo did that?

I briefly used Yahoo Weather until they introduced huge ads and then deleted it. Prior to that I used Flickr and Yahoo Mail in 2004/2005.
> This feels like a very out of date sentiment to me.

Yes! It's as if these sentiments were not actually experienced by those who propagate them. It's cultural baggage.
I believe this question will get insightful answers on Quora itself. You thought of posting it there as well?
Windows has a GUI client.

OS X and Linux have p7zip. And package managers.

It's not rocket science.
As a physicist and programmer I just love that Python was used both for controlling the actual experiment and for analyzing the data! Six years ago when I started my PhD I also moved all the code for my experiment from proprietary software (Matlab/Mathematica/Labview) to Python (+matplotlob, pyvisa, PyQt/PySide). Many of my colleagues and supervisors were rather skeptical about this back then as Python was still considered quite new and the tooling was not as good as it is today. It seems though that Python is finally becoming the de facto standard for experiment control and data analysis, especially for more complex use cases that require a good software architecture (which is hard to implement e.g. with Labview). This is really great news for me as it makes sharing code and data much easier (if they had done their analysis in Matlab it would be hard to reproduce for people that don't have access to that software, but with the iPython notebook everything you need to reproduce the results is open-source). Great stuff, let's keep pushing Python forward :)
Unfortunately, imaging systems co-evolved with humans, thus they tend to hack things so that they are sensitive to light in the exact way the human eye is. (Your monitor isn't emitting orange light, it's fooling your eyes by making it think the light is orange by activating red/green/blue-sensitive chemicals in your eyes the same way orange things do.)

Digital cameras can be pretty sensitive to IR, but there is typically an IR filter over the sensor to prevent detection.

Your best bet is to wear one of these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balaclava_(clothing)#/media/Fi...

Given that it's -10 C outside today... nobody will even think you're weird.
This won't happen because there is still a need for a local time reference.
Fits Like Lego – Deploying Guest Networks Over OpenStack Neutron
I've only been using Python for 2 months now. I'm coming from a Ruby, Java, Node background. The things I don't understand about Python and what I miss the most from those other languages is a solid tool chain. From package management down to the test runners. I miss Ruby gems, Bundler, Rack, and Gaurd tools. I miss Maven and the plethora of plugins. I miss NPM.

Pip is just OK. It feels like it's missing something. Could be a simple lack of experience still. I haven't found anything like Gaurd yet and yet to find a replacement for rack and NPM 's simple package.json. There is setup.py but it feels harder and wrapped in mystery still and doesn't work universally the same for Python 2 and 3 which I have been causing some road blocks and extra cycles being wasted.

Most of all I hate the backward compatibility issues of Python 2 to 3. I rarely have issues running older Ruby or Java code in newer versions of the language. It seems ridiculous that it's been a little over 7 years and people are still fighting with issues between Python 2 and 3 and you still need to pick a version to use. Sure you can code around it, but why the interpreter doesn't handle backward compatibility with deprecation statements is just amazing to me. This isn't a new thing. Languages like Java and Ruby do it as do plenty of others I'm sure if you wanted to make a syntax change you can handle the code in the interpreter and issue warnings to uograde them without breaking all old code bases.

But any ways, I digress, I don't think Python is going anywhere. Too many people and companies use it. It's got a lot of good libraries and and if you just start with Python 3 it's language is just like any other programming language. It's got some things you have to get used to that are unique to it but in the end, you can make it do what you need.

I personally think Ruby allows for nicer looking code and readability, and NodeJS has a far better Eco system. Hell, Languages like Elixir feel like a nice mixture of both with the huge added benefits of being highly parallel at the VM layer.

PyPy seems like a better place to invest resources since the JIT can really speed things up.

That's my 2 cents.
Most non-profits, especially the ones that are always asking, usually have a lot of funds.

Before I give, I go to guidestar, hit free preview(they try to trick you into a paying membership), download last few years of 1040's, and see if everything looks copacetic. I look at who is making the most money. Their is usually one person making a very good living. California non-profits are much easier to scrutinize than Deleware non-profits.
Swatch experimentend, not really seriously tho:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I absolutely agree with the idea of rewriting to learn, so I suppose that was an oversight in my original post. Keep it up, and nice work on tEmbO.
I just got into Python, as a biologist. I'm happy I did it because now the entire large healthcare company I work for (or at least the research department) is switching from Matlab to Python. I have never heard the name Julia before here. Could be because I'm a biologist.
Assuming no accretion disks, there wouldn't be any em radiation as far as I know. Where would it come from?
Object-oriented languages are Dead Men Walking due to the problem of global mutable state management in any medium- to large-sized codebase, coupled with dependency/inheritance hell, leading to complexity hell, leading to geometric progression of tech debt. Compounding this is the lack of good unit test suites across the board, meaning that even if you write absolutely perfectly tested and maintainable Python (or Ruby, or Java, etc.) code, you still are stuck using libraries that have not been written with that in mind.

And yes, I'm talking broadly about the rise of FP.