skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am chinese and grew up in a strict household when it came to academics, but what a bunch of ego-stroking crap written in that article. I am thankful that my mother would push me and for not letting me always take the easy way out, but there are many times when it was overboard in an unhealthy way.

For one, it creates a limited view of what "success" is and the means to achieve it. My parents had a big fixation on "financial stability" and pushed that on my sister and me. That meant a lot of careers weren't even considered, and music and any other extra-curricular activities were just to make you seem more "rounded".

Growing up I would always be compared to other people. To my sister (she was more the straight-A student, I was the "if this doesn't interest me who cares" type), to other chinese friends. I think it's interesting to fast forward 10 years later and see what effect if any it had on us. The funny thing is that we are all across the board.

The "straight-A, 1600 SAT score student that went to Harvard" that we were always compared to? Most just ended up in successful professions like doctor or lawyer (and I became an engineer haha). Just like their less strict, "western" counter-parts. Nothing against hard work and success, but the way my mom would go on about it back then it was like they were about to win the nobel prize or something and I was gonna be a deadbeat in the streets. The funny thing is my mom looks at it now and realizes how absurd it kind of was.

Some of my friends were not as lucky, and I had a few completely shutdown/rebel in college because they realized they didn't want to live their life dictated by parents or took advantage of their freedom in an unhealthy way. I think there are some good things to take away from this, but "superior"? Please.

Wow, I wrote a lot haha.
Like the history of seat belt laws in the US.
Yes, but whether someone is brilliant or not is usually an opinion, and as such should not be stated as fact in news to the general public with almost no exceptions.

People like Einstein are the only ones who get the exceptions, and I don't mean any disrespect but this guy was simply not Einstein.
I think some compilers give a warning on while(foo = read()) but not on while((foo = read())).
Wow. That patent that they use: 6,988,138 - "Internet Based Education Support System and Methods" reads like "If anyone uses a web app using industry standard design patterns in the sphere of education they owe us money."

It seems like you can use that patent as a template and just replace 'education' with the human interaction of your choice and have just as 'valid' a patent.
Earthquake San Francisco 2011
No, if everyone acted that way then there would be HUGE arbitrage opportunities. In the process of people arbitraging those inefficiencies, the prices would be corrected.
I'm getting "You need permission to access this item"
This document was an unfinished working draft.
cwan, why editorialize by changing the title to something more comfortable than what WSJ has chosen?

"Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior"

When you submit racist, provocative articles (regardless of the source), you foster a racist, provocative discussion.
If you look at about half the comments in this subthread (including the grandparent of yours), you would see that these are not scare quotes — they're the normal kind of quotes, which indicate a quotation.
Agreed. W3Schools gives really good examples.
Horrible software, us UofToronto students have to use this despite having had our own univ server CCNet in the past that worked flawlessly and blazingly fast.
I'm really not sure we are at the point where we should be picking. We are still very early and e-commerce seems to be doing fine without it.
In C++ flag==0 and !flag are not always the same, but depending on the type of flag, and if that type(or any its parents) has either or both of == or ! operators overloaded.
Borders leases all its stores. It has about $1.3 billion in liabilities ($350 million in debt, $620 million in payables and another $350 million in other long-term liabilities). In the most recent quarter for which it reported results, it lost $74 million. Ouch.
Well, on the one hand, a legally-protected monopoly is not the same thing as mandatory. Anyway, UPS/Fedex/DHL may be operating under a loophole, but the loophole exists: it's easy to send a sheet of paper through services like those.

The kind of regulatory problems ("classified differently") you describe are unfortunate, but those affect all major industries and are not specifically relevant to whether using the postal service is being protected. In other words, either UPS or FedEx having regulatory advantages doesn't mean that the overall tax/regulation regime is constructed so as to give the Postal Service a market advantage.

edit: see protomyth's comment; the Postal Service is unionized, so if anything FedEx seems to have the market advantage here.
as someone else has mentioned they have been coined yoda conditions, which I love as a name.
Quora Exposes JSON API
I didn't realize that to be legitimate, a certification had to be associated with an educational institution. Now I'm curious. What educational institutions are Red Hat, Cisco, and Microsoft certifications associated with?
I'm sort of stunned that people would think that it is. I certainly never got that impression and I've used the site many times.

It seems to me that those with the most to learn from such a resource would also be those least likely to know what the W3C is.

If you stopped me on the street and asked me yesterday what W3schools was, I could have told you exactly. not so sure I'd know what W3C is without context. I guess this places me on the low end of the spectrum. :-)
I'll probably be downvoted, but...

The Mozilla docs are not a good alternative. They are not well organized, and they are opaque to anybody new to a technology.

I have no doubt the content is complete and accurate, but it is painful to use.
Well, I violate that one on a regular basis...
Top Business Models of 2010
Verizon already supports the iPad.
The beginning of the article was like that, but I thought the rest was pretty good?

At around 11 a.m., Mayer went into the company kitchen for a snack. Peering into the fridge, she sensed she wasn’t alone. She turned around and saw Page standing in a small nook. Startled, she asked what he was doing. “I’m hiding,” he said. “The site is down. It’s all gone horribly awry.”

She made it home that night at around 3 a.m., typical for the hours she would keep. As she climbed into bed, she thought, “It’s not exactly confidence building to see the CEO hiding in the kitchen, saying everything has gone horribly awry.” She gave the company a 2 percent chance of succeeding.

I mean, that's pretty good content, really.
Tell HN: I'm going to ship. Friday the 14th. No matter what.
Hey HN. I've been getting really distracted recently, so I've decided I need a crazy but doable deadline. My most recent plan was to ship an iOS game by end of March. Unfortunately this deadline seems so far aways as to be useless in terms of focusing.

So -- I'm going to ship an iOS game for iPhone and iPod Touch next Friday (the 14th). Shipping is defined as submitting it to the App Store.

Essentially, I'm aiming for a Game-Jam style experience.

Okay, time to sleep.
Yes, but put an authority figure behind the majority (60%) of people and they'll commit murder. Given the right manipulation virtually everyone will commit murder (certain variations of Milgram's experiment got up to 90% in NA, whilst the Standard test got 92% in the Netherlands - so I can't imagine what the manipulative variations would achieve there).

I don't find becoming an SS commandant to be a particularly appealing way to raise my children. Sure, it might get them a high paying job, but it won't get them happiness because that's a self-fulfilling need.

I'm happy because I'm married, I have stable financials and I get to spend my leisure time doing things that I enjoy like writing. None of which my parents had a hand in achieving, and somehow I don't think I would enjoy them if my parents did have a hand in it. I wouldn't be happy if my parents handed me cash, in fact right now I'm in a huge conundrum because my parents said they're buying me and my wife plane tickets. They had no hand in me getting married (I would actually join a religion to simply thank a deity for this one) aside from well wishes. And they had no hand in my enjoying to write.
It's unfair to men that the technical press ignores our sex appeal, bulging crotches and foresting chest-hair, and focuses instead on the tiresome minutia of our work and accomplishments.
> He might have been clever in class and books but smart and brilliant people don't take their own lives.

Honestly: How do you know? Should I invoke Alan Turing or look up suicides on Wikipedia?

I think we, who are not going through these kind of things, tend to underestimate just how damaged people can be. I'm not saying he made the right choice, but I'm definitely saying that it's not as clear cut as you imply.
Personally I'm more against "=" being the assignment operator, which should be ":=". But I have no problems with the actual syntax so long as it's clearly defined what (x = y) returns. (Does it return y? x? true if assignment was successful? Does it call a operator=() function that blows up the moon?) In languages where the line between statement and expression is nil it would be especially odd to flag this as illegal.

Flash Builder's Actionscript compiler has saved me from that a couple times in memory, though, so I agree it should be a warning if you don't wrap it in extra parens. gcc also will complain.
...and the 'Lightweight' in LDAP ;-)
Show HN: my holiday break project Dilemma Roulette
I think they discuss her clothing because it's cool and interesting. I mean, almost every article about Page & Brin mentions their clothing, it just doesn't take as long to communicate "Short-shorts and a t-shirt." Also, the article makes a case that her appearance is relevant:

“Marissa is surprisingly pretty in person,” says Valleywag blogger and editor Owen Thomas. “That in itself is a rarity in Silicon Valley, and you’d have to be naïve to think that doesn’t color people’s views of her.”
Barnes & Noble is doing better than Borders, but I don't think it is doing "just fine." B&N has been losing money in recent quarters and, while its Nook is a more successful e-reader than the Borders Kobo, it is still far behind the Kindle. If Borders dies, B&N will benefit in the short-term, but I am not sure how well it will do over the long-term.
Techniques for probability estimates
How to Doubt
I'm as put off as anyone by all the excess publicity she gets, but your comment doesn't really do her justice.

Marissa is very, very sharp. She can rub many people the wrong way (including myself) because she's almost always completely certain that she's right. However, she is right a good portion of that time, certainly more than most people I've met. And when she's wrong, she'll always listen to data that proves her wrong, and the issue gets dropped. I can respect that.
Agreed again. I always go back to w3schools as a quick hit reference for little things I may forget.
It's still hard to read.
iPhone on Verizon is just a business deal for Apple. The iPhone is already available on multiple carriers outside the US.

The Steve would have nothing new to show off: "Here's an iPhone but the word 'AT&T' has been replaced with 'Verizon'."
GitHub has an amazing new 404 page HTML5 + Star Wars
Toolbar Development Company, Hire Toolbar Developers
Get effective and custom toolbar development services at CustomToolbarDevelopment.com. Hire xul programmer for custom Firefox / IE / Chrome Toolbar development, browser Plugins development and Firefox extension development as per requirement.
Yes.

But you can not crowd-review a patent, since it sometimes gives hints about whole business models, and getting others to know your inventions is dangerous (small differences are easily defensible in patent claims). Therefore you can not have (> reviewing applying).
Yeah, it's pretty damned discouraging.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=Szh4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...
Note: the article is from 2008. I thought it was more recent. Still doesn't take away from the content though.
No, even then you're doing it wrong. Either: your compiler should optimize it properly and you shouldn't be worrying about it, or you shouldn't be doing it in C anyway.

If the difference between the two is actually important, then chances are your compiler is doing a myriad of other things significantly sub-optimally as well. Most likely far more sub-optimally than the difference between either of those.
You'd be able to decrypt updates signed for old hardware, yes. You wouldn't be able to directly reflash new PS3s, though, which is a huge improvement for them.
I started learning how to program around a year ago, and one of my first and best resources was W3Schools.

I think the authors of this document are missing the point of the site entirely, it's not about being 100% correct on all issues, it's about teaching people that have never seen code before what HTML JS and PHP is all about. They do that very very well - take it from someone that started from scratch primarily using W3Schools.

For people who use this site it doesn't much matter that all edge cases aren't covered, and that everything isn't entirely correct in the literal sense. What matters is that the content is accessible for Noobs. Here's an example from the linked Google doc:
"If you declare a variable within a function, the variable can only be accessed within that function. When you exit the function, the variable is destroyed.

The whole concept of closures doesn’t exist at w3schools..."

when you're trying to figure out how to write your name on the screen 100 times using a loop closures aren't really that important... The general gist I get from it is that the people who wrote it don't really know what starting programming is like for normal people. It took me ages to figure out how to get javascript to execute in my HTML since all the documentation I could find was way above my level. W3Schools taught me. W3.org isn't a resource for beginners. "html5 Conformance Checker (alpha)", and "Game Development with JavaScript and the Canvas element" isn't really going to help people that are trying to make sense of the <P> tag.

W3Schools might be out of date, might have inaccuracies, and might not explain things fully, but it's exactly the right thing for absolute beginners.

Pease respect that.
Existing solutions already exist, but unfortunately search results are dominated by W3schools. Poor code examples and wrong information is why http://promotejs.com/ started. This is nothing new, the web needs nothing new. Learning about any modern web technology can be found online, but unfortunately people still venture into w3schools since it's top ranking.

Also their exams are unethical and should be treated as fraud. If you know anything about any of the topics, take their pre-exam and see for yourself.
My parents didn't let me smoke pot or drink alcohol at 14... still happened though.

> The more you try to grasp, the more falls through your fingers. - Lao Tzu

The more you restrict your children, the more destructively they will rebel.
A bunch of these performance tips are equally applicable to any SQL database. MySQL doesn't have partial indexes or GiST, for instance, and it uses ANALYZE TABLE instead of VACUUM ANALYZE, but the rest of the tips apply to it too.
How can you patent something that exists in two separate forms:

1. playing with cat
2. flashing a laser around

Or is that like mixing chocolate with peanut butter and making a new candy to patent?

There has to be prior art before 1995 no? (look how large that laser is! mine is the size of a AAA battery)

So can I patent making a ball out of tin-foil and throwing it around with my cat (she chases it like crazy).
Well - I just lodged a patent:

Method of entertaining a human with a cat.

PISS OFF IT'S MINE!
Parkinson’s disease can be diagnosed by bike riding
Don't finish it.
What you said is exactly the problem. It isn't for you to decide what is a big or small secret. If a person wants something kept quiet, that should be enough. The receiver's own view of what should be spread is immaterial.
Interesting. Thanks for linking to this. At the moment, I have 490 karma :)
Argh. Really?

More often than not, the only thing W3Schools gives "really good examples" of is how you should NEVER write code.

I can sympathize a bit with those who say that MDC has somewhat of a barrier-to-entry, but at the same time, learning stuff the WRONG way first is just as bad if not worse than not learning it at all. It's hard to break bad habits once they're in-grained, and w3schools tends to in-grain a lot of them in such a way that "students" have no idea that the code is horrible and that there is much more to JavaScript, and better ways to get the task done, than how it is presented on W3Schools.

I'll fully admit that JavaScript isn't the most straightforward language to learn - it's further hampered by the fact that it really is so easy to just jump right into it without knowing where to start, and then end up starting on the wrong foot. Perhaps the comments about MDC being hard to "get started" with are onto something, and perhaps we should strive to fix that as well (MDC is a wiki after all). But on the other end of the spectrum, we also need to make it harder to learn stuff that's horribly ill-advised or just plain wrong.
AT&T's reception problems seem to be mostly concentrated in a few large cities -- most notably NY and SV/San Fransisco.

I'm a longtime AT&T customer and recent iPhone owner. I've lived in Milwaukee and Phoenix, and their reception is on par with the other carriers in those cities. NY and SV are, in my opinion, the last places you'd want poor service (because it will be discussed nationwide), but I don't think that their reception is so terrible generally nationwide.

I agree that their customer service is pretty lackluster -- then again, I've heard plenty of Verizon customer service horror stories.

(Please chime if you're in another city and have unusual reception woes, my limited experience is not necessarily representative)
...and ended up with about 18 ultra rare forms of cancer
I love this. It's an honest and unapologetic explanation of a parenting style that is not dominant in the US but has some real advantages. It teaches discipline and hard work, and it gets kids to acquire useful skills. Sure, it has its disadvantages, as noted by some commenters here. Let's not deny the obvious, though. It's no coincidence that they author was pushed insanely hard by her mother and ended up a professor at the top law school in the country.
Quora Extension API released
Awww. you hurt my feelings. :(
I imagine that being conditioned from young to solely work hard and do what you're told will on average not produce independent, creative, and self-motivating people who are strong decision makers (i.e. leaders).

While I'm sure the parents have good intentions, extreme parenting is in most cases probably not healthy or optimal, including the opposite extreme where kids are given no structure or rules of any kind. Rules and expectations should be established, but give some degree of freedom so that they can discover things on their own, and yes, even make mistakes. How are they supposed to grow if they aren't ever allowed to make their own choices and are terrified of failure?
You will never find a above average programmer that isn't in some way passionate about what they do.

And really, "average" isn't really a good word to use here. People are idiots, but technically speaking your average person is of average intelligence. Those of us who consider ourselves to be in a higher tier generally consider "average" to be very sub-par.
This is great. Bought, downloaded, and have some initial impressions. My background is that I do a metric crap load of arranging, primarily for the New York Holiday Singers ( http://newyorkholidaysingers.com ) in Sibelius, using the keyboard and keypad rather than MIDI input.

* First thing I did was export a PDF to see the engraving. Some quirks around that:
- No title or composer showed up.
- Measures of 8th notes in V2 were beamed all together rather than broken up. Kind of awkward looking.
- I had four staves, all with treble clef, even though I'd kept the default piano layout with bass & treble.

* When adjusting an existing note's pitch, it would be nice to get the targeting lines that you get when adding a new note. Also, consider adding a zoom reticle off to the side of the finger location, please! :)

* I love the d-pad; what a great approach. I love the UI. I love the drag-area eraser. Great work. The UI is very concise, discoverable, and intuitive. I loved the text tool, and wish it could follow notes so I could do lyrics. I don't love that there was no obviously discoverable way to delete or add bars, though like i said it was only a brief run-through and i may have missed it.

* I wish there was a two hand mode when in landscape with the keyboard running vertically along the right edge so I could do rapid input with my left thumb choosing note lengths & the like and my right inputting the pitches.

* I also wish I could jump to a location in the score with a tap in the slider at the top instead of having to drag the handle. If it's possible, the hit targets may need adjustment.

These initial, few issues aside, I would /already/ use this app nearly full-time in a heartbeat if it had lyrics support. I'm sure you'll get a thousand feature requests! I always had a sneaking suspicion that editing sheet music on the iPad would be fantastic, and in the few minutes I used this app the incredible tactile connection to the music was already established. This far exceeds a MVP release, and was already worth my money. I can't wait to see where you take it next. Congrats!
maybe its a how-to disguised as a news/fake article? others have commented that it seems technically possible whats being described.
It may bother his friends. It would bother me immensely if it was my friend it looked like they were trashing.
DOJ subpoeans Twitter records of several WikiLeaks volunteers
Ah, geek celebrity. While publicly Google is viewed as a meritocracy, working there you quickly realize that it's very much a hierarchy of intimidation and arrogance. You may have great ideas, but if you really want to be successful you need one of the Google engineering celebrities to back your play. These "chosen ones" aren't in their position because they necessarily have the best ideas; in fact, many of the good ideas at Google are never explored because folks with social influence express doubt. Marissa Mayer isn't the only one in engineering, she's just the most famous.

As the company increases in size, the meritocracy of ideas fades and being a good politician becomes more important. While it's not the primary reason I left after five years, it was certainly a consideration.
We are "very early" in the sense that we're in the same place as 1996: usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and SSL. (Or maybe we're worse off, since we didn't have much phishing in 1996.) What is it going to take to get some progress here?
Clearly Microsoft and Nintendo should start buying up all the PS3's they can find, and dumping them in the ocean.

If it's really as simple as "purchased console without purchased games == bad for business", then that'd be a killer business strategy.
Personally I'm more against "=" being the assignment operator, which should be ":=".

The problem with := is that you run the risk of the Pascal trap, in that no language which uses := for assignment has ever become more popular than Pascal.
How Does Mass Leave the Body When you Lose Weight?
It doesn't look like the scan linked includes a list of the accounts served, but Wikileaks says it's a lot: http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/23583311813156865