skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this one is good generalized advice for anyone, not just writers:

> Ask yourself frequently, "Am I having fun?" The answer needn't always be yes. But if it's always no, it's time for a new project or a new career.
I agree that there should be more explicit citation for this article.

The original source is IDC [1], who says the mobile phone market is:

1. Nokia, 32.4%
2. Samsung, 21.0%
3. LG Electronics, 8.3%
4. Apple, 4.1%
5. R.I.M., 3.6%
6. Others, 30.5%

The IDC press release is referenced by Horace Dediu in his first post on the matter [2]. A later post of his [3], is the one referenced by CNN, only linked from the chart images.

[1] http://www.idc.com/about/viewpressrelease.jsp?containerId=pr...

[2] http://www.asymco.com/2010/10/30/last-quarter-apple-gained-4...

[3] http://www.asymco.com/2010/10/29/iphone-share-of-all-phones-...
From an interviewees standpoint, the point of the an interview is to introduce a narrative about your self. So, first decide how you want your self to be portrayed and work backwards. Are you a rags to riches golden boy, are you Mr. Accomplishment. Are you Mr. I bring Diversity. Once you know what you're going to sell them on, then the "Tell me about your self" point gets easier. Tell them a narrative that highlights whatever your story is. Also, throughout the interview reflect back on the narrative you're telling.

At the end of the "Tell me about your self" question don't say, "That's all" or something lame like that. Say, "Does that answer your question?"
Rails Magazine Issue 7 released and is available both in print and as a free pdf
Read the digital edition free at http://pdf.railsmagazine.com/rails-magazine-issue7.pdf

28 pages, full-color. Inside:

Editorial by Rupak Ganguly
An Overview of Refinery – a Rails CMS by David Jones
Converting A Rails Site to Refinery CMS by Christopher W. Lehman
Auditing plugin by Mihai Târnovan and Gabriel Târnovan
Hobo – Making Application Development on Rails Even Faster by Dave Reynolds
Installing Ruby on Rails on Windows by Victor Thiago
Simple Unobtrusive Ruby/Rails Debugging by Stephen Rycyk
A Well Kept Secret, Ruby and Cryptography by Richard Penwell
Write words. Not too many. Mostly verbs.
It is underneath the charts:
"Source: Asymco"

http://www.asymco.com/2010/09/21/can-android-change-the-prof...
Here's how to divide by 3: http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~doyle/docs/three/three.pdf
Yes, but that's such a special case. I'd rather go with base 11 than decimal.
Should I just stop complaining?

Just to say, in general, answer to this question is almost always yes.
There are still people who think GNU/Linux is for "techies" and if you don't know C++ and a half a dozen other languages, your computer will explode.

GNU/Linux is gaining popularity, but it will take awhile for it to be on most computers.
432 = (7 * 60)+12

So 12 isn't divisible by 7.

8631 = (7 * 1000)+(7 * 200)+(7 * 30)+(7 * 3)

So 8631 is divisible by 7.

Just keep guessing numbers that get you close and lopping off chunks.
As a very special case of this advice, climbing is hacker-compatible and it's easy to get to know people this way.
I consciously avoided that because FORMAT and LOOP mastery is something that should wait until one knows Lisp well. Introduced too early, they can either scare someone (in the case of format) or tempt one to start writing Pascal (in the case of loop; which is why deliberately used it for its collected result, and not its side-effect, as more common.)

FWIW, my first Lisp programs where board-games and I learned quite a bit about recursion trying to format ASCII art in curses. If I knew FORMAT had control, I wouldn't have learned much lisp so quickly, since quirky little DSLs are fascinating.
I've also gone to counseling and thought it was great. Tough situations affect people and makes it hard to think rational. All the social stigma is pretty much bullshit. People need to swallow some of their irrational pride and focus on what's important i.e. getting better.
Startup Quote: Walt Disney, co-founder, Disney
The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.

- Walt Disney
The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.

- Walt Disney
The rule in the article can be written as a regular expression.

And in general for every number m and base b you can build a finite automata that gives you x mod m for numbers x expressed as a string of digits in base b. The accepting automaton that accepts in case of x mod 7 = 0 for base 10 is just a special case and gives you the regular expression mentioned above.

I am working on the regular expression for 7. In the meantime, look at this regular expression for divisibility by 3 (http://blog.vkistudios.com/index.cfm/2008/12/30/Regular-Expr...). The author shows his work.
I'm always amazed by the Egyptians. They cut enormous obelisques(sp?) out of solid rock, rolled them onto enormous barges, floated them down the Nile, then erected them (pun intended) with nothing more than rope, sweat, logs and dirt. Pretty awesome stuff really.

Just goes to show you how powerful bread is. Egypt had great harvests on a regular basis, something few other places could accomplish, so they were able to spend more time developing knowledge. "Western Civilization" was born in Egypt, don't let anyone tell you different.
PHP Woes
A lot of people are recommending you learn emacs. I do too but I want to add that emacs is very hard to learn since it feels so foreign at first so don't get discouraged, take it a little bit at a time.

I used to use vim and tried switching to emacs to see what it was about. On my first try I despised it. After my second, I fell in love and can't stand to use anything else anymore.

ps: Control-x-c is to quit ;-)
Interviwer: Ev, I've read that Twitter is being used by dissidents abroad to drum up support for their causes and bring them together, giving us yet another example of social media being used for guerilla political purposes. Is this true?

Ev: I think so.

And on and on and on...
I never knew there were so many Linux distros whose names referenced Cryptonomicon.
Here's a solution for those actually using Office and wanting the smiley to degrade gracefully into a :) instead of a J

http://chris.pirillo.com/j-smiley-outlook-email-problem-and-...
I have ADHD and hyperfocus. Sometimes I go for hours and forget to eat or drink anything. Two things:

1. The DSM only defines mental illness so that it can be diagnosed. For instance, it doesn't say "prescribe drugs x, y, and z for ADHD". If the DSM doesn't include hyperfocus, it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It just means it isn't a diagnostic criteria.

2. How much research can you find proving that depression makes people sad or that ADHD makes people unable to pay attention? Do chemists do research on how wet water is? Remember, ADHD is one of the most well-known mental disorders out there. Doctors have been treating it with stimulants for over 70 years. If you can't find research on the subject, it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just means that there's not really any new ground to be broken in the area.

That said, hyperfocus is well known among Psychiatrists and Psychologists. It's just like the other symptoms: pathological versions of normal behaviors. A normal person can put down video games long enough to go to school or work. I can't without medication.
As many famous screenwriters have been at pains to point out, a movie is a very, very large collaborative enterprise by at least a dozen departments full of people, the leader of any one of which can make or break the results.

What this means is: There are a lot of bad movies made from good scripts. Don't assume that the quality of the average finished film is representative of the quality of the average script, let alone of the skill of the average writer (who is, after all, operating under many, many constraints).
I use Ubuntu on a daily basis, but I've tried Gentoo, Linux from Scratch and FreeBSD on VirtualBox.

In those, I was looking for the experience of building all these layers of software, one on top of the other, like a set of dominoes falling backwards in time. After a few hours, you get a giant, baroque, colorful picture of software tools which built itself, and it's for you to use. I can't think of any other professional discipline which allows you to do so.
you bet!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver#Regeneration
[2]'s only example is a case where women were brought to the Netherlands then sent to neighbouring countries for prostitution. If this is the norm, then it's not unreasonable to think the liberal laws are merely a low-risk funnel for traffickers rather than increasing demand for sex workers.
Very cool post here - thx for this

I don't like the word "intuition" though because it insinuates that there's no logical reasoning behind the thought process.

Intuition to me is inductive thinking based on impartial information, rather than deductive thinking on complete information, which is often the case in many situations in life and in business.

It's one of the key differences between bridge/poker (logic + "intuition/feel") and chess (complete information + purely deductive reasoning).

I think of intuition more like a data bank you have in your mind, which only gets more accurate in a field that you apply yourself to over time. Accumulate a lot of data through hard-earned experience and your thinking starts functioning like a monte carlo simulation with all these reference points.

It's also why one of my most favorite tweets of all time was by PG about how studying history refines this sort of judgment or "intuition" in your thinking: http://twitter.com/paulg/status/23203210182
-n = -10a-b ~ -3a -b ~ -6a -2b ~ a - 2b mod 7
Sure, usually people that sell things like vending machines will sell the types of ATMs you see at convenience stores. They aren't quite the same as the ones the banks use, but they still hold cash.
Apple iPad MC497LL/A Tablet (64GB, Wifi + 3G)
Here's what I generally do: Add or subtract multiples of 7 so that the final digit will be 0, drop the final 0 (i.e. divide by 10), and repeat. To illustrate:

37289 -> subtract 49 -> 37240 -> divide by 10 -> 3724 -> subtract 14 -> 3710 -> 371 -> subtract 21 -> 350 -> this is 35 * 10, and 35 is a multiple of 7.

The method described in the article is equivalent to my method, with the stipulation that one always subtracts, and that there is a mechanical process for picking the number to subtract (i.e. you multiply the number by 21).

37289 -> drop 9 from the end and subtract 18, which is equivalent to subtracting 189 and dividing by 10 -> 37289 - 189 / 10 -> 37100 / 10 -> 3710 -> drop 0 from end and subtract 0 -> 371 -> drop 1 from end, subtract 2, equivalent to subtracting 21 and dividing by 10 -> 371 - 21 / 10 -> 350 / 10 -> 35.

Advantages of my method:

a) This works with divisibility by any number at all (except for the factors of 2 and 5, which can be dealt with easily). For example, divisibility by 13:

594875 -> subtract 65 -> 594810 -> divide by 10 -> 59481 -> add 39 -> 59520 -> 5952 -> subtract 52 -> 5900 -> 59 -> not multiple of 13.

b) You don't need to remember any magic number to do it--in this case, you take the last digit, multiply it by the magic number -2, and add it to the remainder of the number. (For divisibility by a general m (coprime to 10), a magic number is any x such that x * 10 ≡ 1 (mod m). We see that adding 5 times the last digit would also work for divisibility by 7.)

c) It is quite elementary. It's based on the facts that 1) adding a multiple of 7 (or whatever your number is) won't change the divisibility, and 2) dividing by 10 won't change the divisibility.
With the ease of learning due to the unlimited resources we have these days more and more people are labeling themselves "techies" and running Linux. I think Linux will gain some ground as more people run it with the notion that it will make them a better programmer, when the reality is that they will still work a day job at Futureshop for the next 10 years (that is if large tech stores exist in 10 years).
what the bay area does have is a lot of people that believe changing the world is possible. and they know how to get things done. and its still free enough to innovate

good luck with your business.
Five Beliefs that Inhibit Good Design
Calling All Startups: We Want Your Two-Minute Pitch
Not in the field of medicine. However, I wouldn't advise mentioning that gene patents aren't a problem to any farmers unless you want to hear a long spiel. The big agricultural companies go to great lengths to enforce their patents on certain strains of seed (including hiring PIs to spy on farmers, blacklisting farmers, and suing them for saving seeds).
Couldn't disagree more. The clunky car is memorable.

If they drove a late model sedan, people will say they look like any other crappy business car. Real estate agents often drive new cars plastered with their logos, and they look tacky as. And good luck giving a personality to a Hyundai Elantra.

If they drove a fancy sports or antique car, people will say they're just another over hyped dotcom with cash to burn. Or they will think Carwoo is for rich people buying toys.

Sometimes, marketing props that look tacky and "average" are the best ones. Advertising moved from creating high expectations or promising fantasies decades ago. Now it's all about identifying with the consumer, having a folksy charm and being "approachable".
When Cisco started to do this many acquisitions their competitors begin to bid against them, increasing the price and lowering Cisco's ability to buy products and talent below market. That does not seem to be happening yet.
"This fits with evolutionary perspectives that examine social pressures on the emergence of intelligence, and research showing a neural overlap between social-cognitive and executive brain functions."

___________________________________

OK, so research shows a link between being successful socially and developing higher level brain functioning. This reminds me of a lot of training I've had since I've been working in education. The brain is like a muscle and there are ways to make it stronger.

I heard a professor give a great talk about the brain and the connection between our emotions and our ability to learn. Basically, stressful/negative emotions trigger our lower brain (our "alligator" brain controlling fight or flight) and keep us from operating at a high level of executive functioning like reasoning.

He had a great illustration for what happens to our brains when we feel emotionally safe and we begin to operate in our frontal lobe. He called it "flow" and described the feeling as when we get lost in something and forget what time it is and we stop paying attention to what's going on outside our immediate vicinity. It's a feeling I think we all recognize and enjoy.

This prof also said it could take somewhere around 3 hours for a student to be emotionally ready to "flow" after his/her lower brain has been triggered due to an alarming stimulus.

Our brains are constantly creating and destroying neurological connections. By understanding how our brain works best, we can strengthen our ability to access that "flow" which allows us to operate most effectively.

On a lighter note, I wonder how much smarter Americans would be on a national level if they watched fewer "gripping/exciting/scary" TV shows where they're constantly being bombarded with alarming stimuli?
Continuous Integration 2.0 : Taking care of the people, prevent burnout
One thing you will learn is that it's drive that pays off. If you feel like quiting in the bad times during startup you're going to have a hard time when your company runs into hard times in the future once you've invested more into it. Look at the guys form airbnb, they lived of cereal and were broke but they never lost hope. Like bradly said find some like minded roommates. Also congrats on having investors contact you, thats a good sign. Keep it up.
Forget about being seen naked. The bigger issue is that it's all security theater and does little to actually make us safer, yet it costs us an extraordinary amount in cost and lost time.
Octopus that mimics other animals for defence (youtube)
I really don't get it. Can someone explain what is wrong with body scanners?

I just see people embarrassed at having body parts, which is absurd. Everyone looks approximately the same, and it's not like photos of your junk are being sent to your coworkers.
11 = add the first, third, fifth, etc.. digits, if the sum matches that for the second, fourth, sixth, etc.. then the number is divisible by 11.
No, you wouldn't have to assume that. All the alternative factors you mention can tear down a sound building, but none of them can help an unsound one survive 2000 years.

A building that lasts that long is robust almost by definition. So, as long as any buildings do survive, we have fertile soil for survivorship bias.
Thanks for your thoughts!

> It's hard to determine benchmarks for performance when the kids are operating at such different stages of development.

Agreed - the point I'm striving for is an incentive conceived from shared gains (you benefit directly from creating value) rather than evaluation by proxy (performance evaluation). It's possibly too theoretical a point to be of much value though, I see that :)
I've never met one, but I think octopi are the coolest.
Soy tu duena capitulo 141
Programa de televisión del mexicano del tu Dueña Capitulo 141 de la soja”
El dueña del tu de la soja es un programa de televisión mexicano que, cuando están traducidos al inglés, los medios yo son su señora. Sigue la historia dramáticamente complicada de Valentina (jugada por Lucero)
does little to actually make us safer

Evidence? (or reasoning)
I've read a lot of articles that have given me the impression that octopi are really intelligent, and could be our replacements in the far future.

The sci-fi fan in me is hoping that there's a race of superintelligent octopi deep within the ocean that we just haven't found yet.
Second Komodo Edit. It even has Vi emulation if you want that :)
This non-referenced answer http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081220144240AA... says locomotives weigh roughly 130 tons, and each carriage weighs 65 tons. That's a lot more than a one ton car.
Its not dull, inspiring for me atleast. I am also travelling in a similar path. Sometimes feel awkward explaining about my company to ordinary folks. (Their strange, doubtful look..)
Ahhhhh

Back in the late 90s, I used to read comp.compilers heavily (I think I might have read it all on deja, to is beginnings) and cc'ers had a habit of saying something in their messages, then answering themselves in their signature, worded as a quote by some "john". For example

Hi, I am looking for a BLISS-16 compiler for DEC Alpha.

- russ
[I don't think there is a bliss-16 compiler for the alpha. -john]

I found the practice humorous and meta, so I started using it in email.

Years later, I discovered it was no ironic humor, but the messages where actually edited by the moderator, John Levine, who signed his own changes. I can recall at least two people who I have sent such "ironic" messages who would have been quite confused by it, both of them famous compiler hackers and cc readers. One of them was John Levine :-P
It's a placeholder for missing thoughts. The person is using your inbox as a drawer for their drafts.
Did you first approach him about the fact that you viewed the content as unfit for the site? If not that should have been your first avenue to deal with the issue. If you did and he persisted, then you did the correct thing. If he continues to call you out in public then I would release a detailed chronology of the events that transpired and let the users be the judge. If you did not approach him before hand, I would extend an olive branch offering his account back with an apology that you may not have pursued the best means to find a common ground along with the understanding that he agrees to not post such content.
Ok so I don't "live an upper class American lifestyle" (kind of sounds a tad boring) but I do travel the world living what I believe to be a pretty cool lifestyle.

And yes, getting here was very boring - I build Task.fm and a number of other apps. Bootstrapped them and worked with a virtual team to keep costs really low. I built my first site when I was 11 and I'm now just 22 so it took around 9-10 years of failures (aka really good learning experiences) to build a good app.

One thing I've discovered is Time is your friend. If you keep plugging away, moving forward, things do eventually become clearer and easier.
Gmail: Email from Google
I can't believe you've played much chess if you think that it's purely about deductive reasoning. Humans can't calculate even the least part of all the possibilities in most positions. Knowing where to look -- which is just one role intuition plays -- is indispensable for a chess player.
Link to the non-mobile version of Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocus
Cargo Cult humor.
The writing King is talking about is commercial fiction. You can certainly be a good programmer, a good artist, or even a good writer of other stuff and still be hopeless at writing commercial fiction.
I get it. You, like too many, think genitals are 'junk'. I am not ashamed of my body. I value my body and want to share it only with those I choose, not indiscriminately, and certainly not as a condition for flying.

Forced or coerced nudity has been used as a weapon because it represents a one-way power transfer.
Part of me says, "Teacher evaluations come down to tests, and tests are b.s.", but another part of me thinks there has to be some way to evaluate whether students make progress. Our district tries to collect data on this but I'm not sure if it works all that great.
hehe - I am getting a coffee chemistry course now! I don't even drink coffee ;-) you would have done much better not replying at all.
Why are trains so fascinating to us? Every time I read a new article on new high-speed rail projects or even sometimes while riding on the trains, I find myself spending hours on Wikipedia looking up random facts about rail lines and locomotives.
Classic not clunky.
If you're interested in deterministic finite automata, you might enjoy the game Manufactoria:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/PleasingFungus/manufactoria

In the game, you deal with robots that come with a tape of binary digits (red and blue dots), and you can build a maze using conveyer belts, branch points (which read a dot from the front of the robot's tape), and things that write dots to the end of the tape. You have tasks to fulfill; they start with easy things like "Accept robots with no red dots", then "Accept robots with the same number of red and blue dots", then "Reverse the input string" (that one is unpleasantly hard), and so on.

In particular, there are some user-submitted levels, and one asks, "Accept if the input number is congruent to 3 mod 7." (Input string is interpreted as a binary number, read left-to-right normally, with blue = 1 and red = 0.) I have a pretty nice solution to that one.
It would be hard to fight a creature with 8 arms and no bones. They would grab all of our extremities and still have four arms left to beat us up.

To quote the esteemed Thomas Callahan the Third: "Run for your lives!!! Your weapons are useless against them!!!"