skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First time I saw this I laughed so hard I cried
Am i the only one here who finds this post a bit immature?

Any fairly serious startup needs a good business culture for it to grow and mature, and not just a reliance on technology alone. There have been a lot of tech organizations which crash and burn not because they don't have a good tech team, but because of their lack of business acumen. A look at the US DotCom Bubble should help in this regard.

1. When the author starts off with "Indian Startups need to get off their asses and learn to program" he indirectly implies that they don't - without providing any real evidence to back up his assertion.

2. The author of the post just bases his generalizations on getting a lot of emails from potential entrepreneurs. Hell, he should just check out craigslist to find a lot of folks with get-rich quick schemes with little to no technical background. The phenomenon of get-rich-quick entrepreneurs in not unique to any one culture.

If the author and his team does not want to be shocked by such emails, they should investigate something called a spam filter. It might reduce their shock reactions.

3. He draws conclusions like "these folks have no tech capability whatsoever and feel that technology is trivial and can be outsourced."

Maybe they do, maybe they don't. One cannot generalize an entire country's tech culture based on a few half-assed emails. I don't consider every nigerian i meet as a scammer.

4. If he has just resorted to gross exaggerations, that would be OK. It's his opinion, and he has every right to it. When he starts by condescendingly suggesting that potential entrepreneurs learn programming and being lazy and wondering why such folks get VC-funding, he seems to come across arrogantly.

5. Outsourcing is a part of the global IT landscape, and India, more than any other nation, has benefited enormously from it. Every major IT vendor, from Microsoft to Oracle to Sun to Google has opened indian operations and has hired programmers by the thousands. Does the author imply that these organizations lack a tech culture, since they take advantage of indian outsourcing in a big way? His suggestions seem to suggest that the article's focus is on internet startups, but he does not mention that. He also seems to lump product development with internet-based services.

The irony is that the few valid points he makes regarding usability, Simplicity and performance is completely masked by his condescending tone.
Patent attorney at link below explains why this stick patent is useless in addition to being silly. He also notes that it is no longer held because the "inventor" failed failed to pay a fee.

http://ipwatchdog.com/2010/10/06/animal-toy-patent/id=12711/
Emphasising the good parts - an intro to Coffee Script
This reminds me of the old adage: "A jack of all trades is a master of none".

I totally agree that learning new programming languages is great, and can help someone get a lot of new concepts. It certainly is fantastic for learning to separate syntax from algorithms from styles of thought. However I have found that there is a point of diminishing returns.

There is only so much you can get from learning e.g. 5 different object models, at some point it is no longer new, just annoying and different.

This is doubly true and noticeable if your previous languages were all over the map -- say js, python, haskell, c, prolog and so on.

At some point, it becomes more useful to dive deep into other things. Are you a systems guy? Attack a kernel bug. Are you a network guy? Make a traffic classifier. (or want to learn them well...) Trying to learn a new language and a new problem is prohibitively expensive sometimes.

My general rule of thumb is: if there is nothing about the new language that excites me, find a different problem that does. If I have to learn that language I will, but I don't need to force it.
My compulsive frequent jumps to new programming languages have also settled down after learning Clojure, for pretty much the same reasons. I never really felt comfortable with any languages I've messed with, even as a novice programmer. I just feel so at home with Clojure and yet there is so much to learn and improve on that I should be busy with it for awhile. It really is a masterful blend of beauty and practicality.
If we define a functional language as a language based on the lambda calculus, then whether it has first-class functions or not is not completely orthogonal since functions are values in the lambda calculus.
another interesting thing to notice is that Google instant comes with the right result (cakecentral.com). Only when I press enter (or the search button) I get to the beerby.com result.
Google instant does however claim that it's showing results for cake central magazine and I can search instead for "cake central".

EDIT: even better - searching for cakecentral.com also leads to the same error page on beerby.com
I don't think it's the markup. I think it's the folks that revert any and all changes, the deletionists, and the bureaucracy in general.
In the name of faith
So we have to engineer the bacteria ourself and make it defend our precious silicon coating.
He's amusingly wrong in his certainty that everybody else is wrong.

Two spaces grew out of a typographic convention of using a 1.5-width space that was favored by typesetters for proportional typefaces because typewriters didn't have half-width spaces represented on their keyboards. The actually "correct" approach would be 1.5-character width spaces, because even in proportional typefaces a little extra space serves as a useful visual cue that aids in quicker text scanning by eye.

The modern convention of using a single space is the result of journalistic publishers' desire for economy of printing paper. It costs more -- either money for extra pages or characters that won't fit on a page -- to have two (or even 1.5) spaces between sentences. For that reason, a new convention for non-personal correspondence arose, not out of "correctness" or readability concerns, but out of the miserliness of accountants.

As for the lack of studies, that's because it's pretty difficult to come up with a meaningful set of criteria that can be (relatively) easily measured in such a study. Worse, the people with both the resources and interest necessary to fund such studies are for the most part not interested in finding out their cost-saving measures make it harder to read their publications. People I know who read a lot -- who enjoy reading -- including myself all agree, though: having more than a single (proportional or otherwise) character width of space between sentences helps with making it easier to read quickly without having to backtrack and without missing things. In fact, if anything proportional typefaces makes the problem worse, because the spacing between sentences tends to end up smaller than it would otherwise be.

For all his annoying certainty that people who are certain of their disagreement with him are annoyingly wrong, Farhad Manjoo is pretty laughably lacking in the proud correctness he claims.
I'm pretty sure the web crawl Google does to figure out your rankings is separate from the one that saves the cached version and probably that snippet.

That said, I have no idea why that page would rank on those terms, error or not.
Only some UK universities have a collegiate system (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, St. Andrews(?)). Most do not (I believe) and I imagine are roughly similar to US universities. At collegiate universities there is a split between what a college is responsible for, and what the university is responsible for. Lectures are university-wide, exams also are (you get your degree from the university not the college), departments belong to the university (so if the Enlgish department needs a new building then the university pays for that). All students (and staff) are affiliated to a college (you choose which college to apply to when you apply to the university, and the college decides whether to admit you). The college is responsible for their students accommodation needs, will usually provide a dining option, common room etc. The college provides teaching (so you go to the same lectures as everyone else, but your small group teaching, feedback on work etc. is organised by the college). I think those are the main distinctions.

Given that the colleges are different, this can mean it's important to choose the right one for you. For example, at Cambridge, Trinity College has an illustrious history in mathematics, and attracts excellent staff, so if you're accepted there then you might end up being taught one-on-two by a world renowned mathematician (Fields Medal winning Timothy Gowers for example). Other colleges with less of a reputation might have more trouble attracting the same type of staff. (this isn't to say that being an expert in your field makes you an excellent teacher of course...)
Abinash,

What will qualify as a great company? Is the deciding factor that it does decent revenue or that it uses a pretty nifty technology stack or is it that it does decent revenue in which the technology stack is an enabler?

Zimbra - Well, the point is that Indiatimes did outsource it. Guess I gave you an example that you asked for there. Same is the case with NDTV and Tekriti. They may not be to your liking, nor am I sitting in judgement whether they are 'great' or not, but the fact is that you can build good companies and businesses either way - build or buy/lease.

Coming to what you have said, " As for failed startups, you will never know as a lot of those stories just die with the companies," this is precisely what I am trying to address. That, you just don't know what their reasons are. Just like I would not be able to tell you what is best for Infinitely Beta.
There is nothing mysterious about it. This is what I call "legal corruption". Lobbying is fully within the law of the land. It may not be right but it is legal.

Unfortunately I don't see a way of changing this. Not within a republic with a representative government. And I don't see America switching to Swiss style direct democracy either.

(Americans seem to have a reflex to Goodwin any thread as soon as someone mentions "direct democracy", please don't today. And please do read up on how a certain someone actually got to power.)

The only hope I see is technology (Pirate Bay!) not to "fix" copyright and patent law, but simply to make their enforcement less effective.
I'm inclined to think you're right -- except that two spaces between sentences should still be the norm when typing, until AI sufficient to correctly guess what kind of period you are using is invented, so that the software has the cues necessary to recognize what type of period you used.
Gritty Technical Info on Windows Azure Web Roles
This is a follow up to the previous blog entry I wrote pertaining to Windows Azure Roles. I wanted to cover the bases on the various technical aspects of creating a Windows Azure Web Role & Worker Role in Visual Studio 2010. Without interruption let’s just dive right in. Start Visual Studio 2010 and initiate a new project. File, new, and then project will open the new project dialog.

Windows Azure Project
Select a cloud template type and name your project. Click OK and the New Windows Azure Project Dialog will appear to select the role types you can choose from.

Windows Azure Project Templates
Select an ASP.NET MVC Web Application, name it appropriately, and then click OK. When prompted for a test project select yes and click OK. When the solution is finished generating from the chosen templates there will be a SampleWebRole ASP.NET MVC Web Application, the test projec
http://www.zuupy.com/ilikeon/entry/717002/
I remember someone recommending Steve to me a few years ago, and I found most of his early writing very inspirational and grounded in reality.

However, at some point something changed in his writing. I started seeing some "glitches in the matrix" Steve was projecting and soon the esoteric articles overtook the normal, logical ones and I could bear to read no more.

Notice, that the main reason he is releasing copyrights is because he feels, we are all the same (that is you are Steve, I am Steve, we are all Steve...no joke) and he has created content by channelling some cosmic energy..

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2010/08/moving-beyond-copyr...

On one hand it could be it is a highly advanced form of pantheism, on the other hand it just sounds crazy to me.
I am a two-spacer too.
Uhh...you realize this is actually a joke show? This is not a serious documentary. You can certainly still object to it being on HN, I just thought you should realize this is not actually intended to teach maths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_around_you
30 Most Influential Under30CEOs of 2010
Looking at the Google cache page I see this:

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: cake central

Looks like the good old Google bombs still work :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
ebay / paypal?
It isn't a bachelor's equivalency exam but if you take enough credits you can get a degree entirely by examination.

http://www.excelsior.edu/ecapps/exams/creditByExam.jsf
So it's you who has been submitting posts of this nature?
Not that long, great comment above, read it!
It seems that the reason it's wrong is that typographers say it is. The author has not given an actual reason, other than appeal to authority.

I will continue to double-space until I'm dead.
This is a myth that needs to die.

Having started with a film SLR in the digital age, based on my personal experience I can say that it does not take $5000 of film or developer fees to learn f-stops or ISO settings on your camera, unless you have a spastic trigger finger. I learned the above, as well as the zone system, shutter speed, push/pull processing, metering, and night shooting using about 5-6 rolls of film. I did this on a camera I got for $50 off of eBay. Development time is about an hour (Take it to a lab! Why bring up darkroom costs if you wish to lower your costs?), so you can have feedback in the same day. The fundamentals don't take that long to learn.

Now, learning to color balance is levels harder, but that's something you have to do whether you're on film or digital.

I have since switched to a digital SLR for the reason that it's a pain to get film scanned. But if it wasn't for that, I'd keep on shooting film; my prints from film have been more gorgeous, with more dynamic range and detail, than images from my SLR. I also picked up an old TLR from eBay for $50 that lets me use 120 film. Digital cameras with that kind of resolution still costs $10,000 (e.g. Mamiya).

Finally, there's a certain joy one gets from crafting your print by hand in the darkroom, the sense of mystery as the print develops, that I now miss when I sit in front of my computer and click-click dodge-and-burn my images. Like you, I cannot justify the costs of setting up my own darkroom (although I believe a black-and-white darkroom is relatively inexpensive, depending on how good of a deal you can get on your enlarger, maybe $1000-$2000?), and even darkroom rental locations are fast disappearing. For that I feel a little sadness, like watching whales go extinct.
Evidence against this hypothesis; Charles went to Oxford, William to St. Andrews.
Six Idea Validation Tests to Pass Before Startup
It did! I see parking attendents on segways every single day. Segway is directly responsible for a rise in parking tickets. Wonderful product!
WebM Decoder in Flash using Alchemy
He does link to the Chicago Manual of Style Q&A on the matter:
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/CMS_FAQ/OneSpaceorTwo/On...

The view at CMOS is that there is no reason for two spaces after a period in published work. [...] So, in our efficient, modern world, I think there is no room for two spaces after a period.
While I suspect a lot of this probably does have to do with selecting "people like us" I've also had the experience to compare my privately educated son with my own experiences in state education (at a pretty rough school).

What private schools seem particularly good at is instilling a rather outgoing self-confidence that seems pretty uncommon amongst state educated kids. Note that this is effectively orthogonal to actual capabilities - but the end result is that I suspect that a lot of privately educated kids will come across a lot better in these situations than people from state schools.

It's not fair - but to be honest that's why you pay the considerable amounts of money for private education - to give your kids an advantage.
I don't really see what you mean ("3 segments" suggests asking for f(1/3) and f(2/3) to me, but that's not enough data to know anything). I'll type what I thought, which may be the same thing.

If a < b < c, f(a) <= f(b) and f(b) >= f(c) then a <= m <= c; choosing e.g. 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 [EDIT: was 1/3, 1/2, 2/3, which is not optimal - see reply by jacobolus] allows you to find out in which 1/2 [EDIT: was 1/3] of the range you should look with three measurements.

You could recurse on the above, e.g. by measuring 1/4 + 1/8 and 1/4 + 3/8 if 1/4 <= m <= 3/4 [EDIT: match above corrections.]

Another interesting trick is measuring 1/2 + epsilon, which (almost) bisects the range with only two measurements. [EDIT^2: removed "(with negligible probability of m being in [1/2, 1/2 + epsilon] - we just hope that doesn't happen, so this doesn't work for adversarial input!). [EDIT: this actually works pretty well for non-adversarial input.]"].

[EDIT^2: I should've paid a bit more attention when writing this, thanks for the (many) corrections jacobolus!]
"I suspect that what want they’re really pursuing is recognition, either from Facebook or in court, that they were the brains behind Facebook."

In my mind, these twins will never be the reason why Facebook was successful, no matter what some court decides. The value of a new website is not the idea behind it, it is the hard work of adding some kind of value and the tough task of getting people to use it. The idea that Connect U could be a "website that connects college friends" is not what made Facebook successful; it was the hard work of Zuckerberg and those around him.

I hope the twins are granted their chance to appeal and lose everything. I also hope they're never mentioned by any news story again.
Basically, any field that requires any rigor tends to deal a lot in monospace fonts. Writing for Slate is not one of those fields.
That was the idea, and why MIT were surprised that most people were using it on their own.

What I meant was that there was no market for a small college selling lectures online for $100s when you could get MIT for free. It won't change the economics of people going to college
Charles did not go to Oxford. In fact, I'm pretty sure none of the current British royal family attended Oxford.
Anyone have any idea how much it would cost? I'm in for $100 or more
History tends to repeat itself. What will happen when MPEG-LA will establish a WebM Pool of Patents as they did with VC-1, making sure EVERYBODY knows the royalties for WebM will be at least as high as for H.264 FOR LICENSEES. For users infringing H.264 patents there will be no cap, of course. Google will never shield any WebM user, just as Micro$oft did not with VC-1. And mind you, WebM includes obvious (like the Intra mode coding) infringing of H.264 patents.
ok, could it be that they both have the same server hosting company?

because here we see a beerby page with a cakecentral URL http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acakecentral.com+beerby...

i would guess it was either a server (housing) accident or a DNS f*ckup that let beerby and cakecentral switch places (in an erroneous state) for a short time, bad thing google picked u the cakecentral home page URL in that moment. it saw it as either a redirect or a direct douplicate of the beerby site and decided to show the older indexed page with the same content (the beerby error page).

yeah, either this or google screwed up.

update: why i guess this is because i have seen similar errors when sombody screws up redirects from the home page. (makes HTTP 302 redirects from the home page to another page, and that page (or the redirect) is then changed to something else...) but this is the first time i ever see such an error between two unrelated sites.
Software Craftsmanship: More than just a manifesto
Have you done any research on this?

Assume for a moment that the exam results of students follow a bell shaped curve and that the mean and standard deviation of exam results in the state and private sector are the same, then you would expect the proportion of state school pupils accepted by Oxbridge to be the same as the proportion in the general school system. If instead we assume that the mean in the private sector is higher then you would no longer expect the same proportion to be accepted, and indeed that disproportionately many private sector students would get in.

I'm not saying this is the case (although private school students probably do do better in exams on average), but without knowing anything about the situation how can you accuse them of discrimination? The 'oh, I saw a really good person get turned away' argument is silly. Some colleges only offer a few places for some subjects but are presented with 20+ students who all have predicted straight As, good UCAS forms etc. It's inevitable that some good students will not get in, and it doesn't imply discrimination.
There's no statistical evidence showing this is the case. Students from high performing schools are disproportionately likely to apply to Oxbridge, but adjusting for academic performance there's no indication that Oxbridge discriminates.

Pretty much everyone applying to Oxbridge is applying with top grades, plenty of exceptional candidates from both state and private sector schools get rejected.

If you want to understand the real issues in social mobility I suggest reading the Milburn report which I think is one of the best reports I've ever seen a government produce: http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/migratedd/pub...
01010100011011110010000001100111011001010111010000100000011101000110111100100000011101000110100001100101001000000110111101110100011010000110010101110010001000000111001101101001011001000110010100101110
Right, but you'll also disincentivize legitimate websites that happen to make their money through such ads or affiliate links. Where do you draw the line?
Indeed, Charles attended Trinity College, Cambridge.
OK, this really helps; thanks! Let's say that you really wanted to study CS at Oxford; if you pick the wrong college to apply to, are you shut out from the university entirely? Or can you apply to multiple colleges at the same university at once?
My son saw this and wants to patent bricks now. I'm so proud :)
Google bombing ? ;)

In popular french "cake traces" refers to brown marks in underpants. I guess the french expression "cake face" is a subsequent derivation from it. So I'm trying to guess what "cake central" might mean ...
This is not kryptonite. This is practice kryptonite.
I love the inherent fact that they're essentially making a more solid and lucrative "exit" on an idea they probably only discussed at length and put no actual work into. Realistically they probably make out better from this (all things like time, effort etc considered) than if Zuckerberg never does Facebook.

I take that $20 mil in cash and $150 mil in stock, and if it's really not about the money like they say, I use it to be an angel investor or start other companies. This whole thing is getting tiresome.
They'd be right to, there are significant health risks to regular glass. People cut arteries while accidentally sticking their hands through panes of it all the time.
Coming up to a deadline, sometimes these really help (code marathons) when used sparingly.

After working on a few deadline-centric projects (based around the college school year), We've certainly found this to be the case.
To those who pointed out that a codec is not a part of the browser standards, you are correct. I misspoke. I don't know why since I remember that Mozilla also took this stand a while back. Apologies. :)