skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does your browsing use-case typify how the average user is consuming the wikipedia? I find far often more than I'm hitting something because I searched for it directly (in which case, I find it notable to my own interests automatically since it is what I was explicitly searching for), or indirectly via a link on another page (and if such does not exist, then there is no distraction or loss).
No strategy yet. Just solving a problem and it doesn't cost me anything yet.
Ask HN: High school spent working and building startups, college?
I'm a senior in high school looking at colleges for next year. I'm started programming at 7 and have been working professionally since 13 for major companies(Google, Microsoft, Mozilla) and universities(Harvard, Stanford), working remotely for obvious reasons. I've also created a few web businesses, one of which has gotten about 100 million views. However, I've let my grades slack, and I'm coming out of highschool with a 3.1 GPA(2000 SAT - all 3 subjects similar in score).

I've interviewed at a few schools, and although the professors seemed really impressed, their input really didn't influence admissions much. I would rather not go to college than go somewhere bad, so I'm asking you HN, what are some good CS colleges that care a great deal about interviews and can make exceptions for unique cases?
Whoa, hold the phone: List of animals in The Simpsons is notable but Nemerle isn't? How does that remotely make sense? The man hours undoubtedly expended in maintaining that list boggle my mind.
That idea has crossed my mind but you need a lot of users to make it viable.
Ask HN: Blogs... how many?
I'm starting a new company now and have always wondered what I should do as far as blogging goes. We are going under the name UpOut.com and I'm not sure if I should also start blogging at another domain I purchased, martinizer.com (my name is Martin). What is appropriate to put on our company blog vs. what should I write on my own (or should I have my own?).

On a side note, great idea: toothbrushes with expiration dates to let people know when to buy a new one (aka every 3-5 months) which will also increase toothbrush sales!
What I find most interesting about this is that you are "cleaning up" Wikipedia so that you can better find new programming languages. You've mentioned this a couple of times.

Do you assume that everyone uses it for the same purpose?

What makes you think that is a valid reason for "cleaning" up the articles?
Depending on the area, both...
Some things, like solving simple algebra and simultaneous equations are done to death, get the students to understand the concept, do a few different examples and move on. I hate when students are given say 20 equations to do which are all the same rules with different numbers.

Something like differential equations, if you are plugging these into a calculator at first, you probably won't really get exactly what is going on. It requires more examples and exercises (there are a lot more different cases to give to) before a student could plug it into a calculator rather than going through the repetition of doing it by hand.

I just missed some of the newer calculator heavy course at the end of high school, my brother got it the year after I left I guess, wasn't a big fan of it by the looks of it though.
NYC Early-Stage Angel and Venture Capital
Why bother with CS at this point especially if you're primarily web focused? Maybe look at heading to a school of like-minded individuals. I'm part of a student entrepreneurship community at Babson College and it rocks. I think the best education comes from also actively pursuing a business in college.

Ask me anything about Babson at martincshen at gmail
Dual Uprisings Show Potent New Threats to Arab States
My comment supposed you need to compile the templates once. In that case the whole app is compiled once in the tens msec. Not at each rendering.
10 * 10 you mean?

However I do agree with you - I learned math not only by doing it by hand, but also by brute forcing it into my brain. I memorized my times tables from third through fifth grade until I knew them up to 25. I did the quadratic formula by hand until I knew the first five Pythagorean Triples.

These aren't necessarily the "right" ways to learn math - but it certainly made me more curious to find a deeper meaning of why mathematics works the way it does.
More naval-gazing from TC by their best in the field, Lacy. Tries to act "edgy" and keeps name-dropping from the same incestous SV-cocktail pool. Curious what those who actually live-in/work out of this area think about the environment there..is it as clique-ish as it seems, or is everyone there too myopic to look beyond?

I don't mean to detract from successful companies btw...it just seems those with Scoble and Arrington on speed dial but no revenue model or any redeeming trait other than the celeb status of the founders get portrayed as innovative or special in some way. The circlejerking is getting just really tiresome.
Except it doesn't look the same does it ;)
I don't think there's such a dichotomy. I certainly believe more focus should be placed on "higher order" thinking but the calculation should still be covered in depth in order to solve those problems.

Essentially teaching in the form "have a problem, learn some techniques" instead of "learn a technique, get some problems that will use it." The latter is how my math education went and it doesn't teach students how to choose the right techniques to use in the first place.
The point is, we can and should take the money from somewhere else. Instead of a 20% DOE cut now, how about a 0.1% cut to defense, or another cut somewhere else, and a 0% cut to the DOE.

Politicians refuse to cut defense spending because it's not politically viable and they're more worried about getting reelected than making a difference. "Elite" research scientists make an easy scapegoat.
Yeah it's all about getting the understanding of how something is working, then looking to move onto something that makes the repetition easy. It's the same in programming, it's great to learn how your code is compiled to assembly but once you have that understanding you can take it back up to a high level language which helps remove repetition.
computer science != programming

Why does this very basic fact elude so many?
> Global warming pisses me off because it isn't so much
> science as it is religion.

I agree that there's a lot of problems with the way people talk and argue about it, but I think it needs to be clearer that this is a separate issue from whether human-made global warming is happening or not, and if it is, how severe a problem it is.

People could be arguing for it in very dodgy ways, and it could still be true.

> They way I see it, the pro-AGW crowd need to: [...]
> 3. That warming is bad. It'd be bad for some but I
> guarantee you it'd be good for others.

You're implying that any good effects balance out any bad ones, but of course they're unlikely to be equal in magnitude. Maybe the bad effects will be far greater than the good effects, or maybe the good effects will be greater than the bad ones - either way, it's the overall consequences that matter.

Also, I don't think the requirement should be for people to prove these things, in the sense of some absolute proof, whereby if we can't prove it definitely is happening we should act as if it is definitely not happening. In reality we always have to act in terms of our degrees of confidence about what is probably going on.
Haha, I love the edit war on his profile regarding his "non-notable" website: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Christopher_M...

Which is making him a little handful of money daily: http://w3spy.net/site/smogon.com

Chris, I suggest you pay GoDaddy the extra $10/year and hide your address.
This article includes astounding details about how Arab democracy movement activists used new technologies to organize their movement internationally. It also mentions little-known connections to writers and movements in other, non-Arab countries. The phenomena described could sweep the world.
Of course I've done a Google Scholar search for Alice ML. There is roughly one admissible source -- "Through the looking glass" in Trends in Functional Programming. Small workshop paper, 12 citations according to CiteSeer. Doesn't show up in the ACM Digital Library. There are a number of other papers on Saarland University's website, but they are either 1) not peer reviewed (tech reports) 2) not cited or 3) not actually about Alice ML. To illustrate #3, consider "A concurrent lambda-calculus with Futures". This is a relatively well-cited paper, and it mentions Alice ML (a sentence or two?), but it isn't actually about Alice ML! It describes a new language construct and models the semantics in the lambda-calculus. In this case, wouldn't it be the construct, not the language that is notable?

I gave the following example in my Wikipedia talk page: the first paper on functional reactive programming is very famous. It describes a DSL called Fran. However, Fran could have not been given a name and the paper still would have been influential, because it wasn't the language itself that had the impact, it was the idea of functional reactive programming that had an impact.

(For the record, I got an A in PL! We used Coq. And proved a lot of theorems, mechanically.)
I've confirmed my geekiness. I didn't even consider it could have been 10 * 10.. I assumed it was binary! :-)
Wikipedia's rules are all non-rules, except when they aren't.
Agreed, I don't think people realize just how broke the US is. In 9 years, the interest alone will consume 50% of the US budget. That doesn't leave enough to cover social security and medicare -- let alone anything else that the federal government does.

Hopefully people will start demanding cuts in other places too, for instance the DEA, DOE, DOD, etc. There just isn't enough money. The DOD budget has increased 100% in the past 10 years. We've seen massive new entitlement programs passed, these will not be able to be funded.
And how does cutting $100 billion in government spending “help our economy grow and create jobs”? The immediate result will be the loss of something like a million jobs.

Those people will finally get to move on helping "make things that people want" instead of squandering stolen money.
1. The tabs are like that because I will be adding more tabs to the left (e.g. "Owed by you" as a way to send IOUs to people, etc.)

2. Thanks will fix.

3. I'm trying to keep it as simple as possible so avoiding signup and login. Which just leaves me with the email to work with.
http://railstutorial.org is the best Rails 3 intro book I've found. The HTML version is free or you can buy the print edition + screencasts.

Agile Web Development With Rails by Sam Ruby et al. is also good.
I am aware of this, but still, thank you for bringing it up as it is an important issue. The software engineers and people who have to interact with more calculations than everyone else would at sometime need to learn them - as you said.

I think speleding is onto something, though: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2213985

We all believe that calculations need to be taught first, but maybe it is not necessary. Learning the calculations after the bigger concepts has its own advantages. Everyone could start with general education, and those that need it could be taught the more advanced (or one might say, basic) calculations.
Thanks! You're actually the second person that has tried to talk to me about Babson. I've considered the idea, but I feel like I'd always want to do CS while I was there.

I'll definitely think more about it though.
Because so often, computer science education boils down to "code this, now here's your degree" without requiring any of the mathier stuff.
Ironically - I spent the day letting my 8 year old niece attempt to write a game in Game Maker. While it's not programming, I knew she wanted to make her own game and simply told her to do the tutorial and go from there. 6 hours later she had the basic tutorial finished and was hard at work on her own game. She figured out how actions worked, started reading about the scripting and designed her own characters. She loves it and I am glad to offer any advice along the way, however if she stops playing with it, that will be fine too.
Programming languages are like Pokemon. Only a few of them are strictly notable in isolation (Pikachu). But there are hundreds of others that small communities are interested in, and the metavalue of having all of them described on Wikipedia is high.

I don't understand what the cost is. Why don't you make a list of "notable" programming languages so that people who want to browse around can skip the less influential / new ones like Nemerle. But to delete hundreds of languages (and if you apply these rules, you need to delete hundreds of languages, you've missed lots of them) is a travesty.
If you seriously have any questions about Babo... email me. It has its serious downs and a few ups. Business wise.. all the professors have actual business experience. Most teach because they want to not because they need to. (aka. worth over 10mm, one over 800mm)
Ironically it was the result of the very R&D that McNealy was so excited about.
someone once described the different areas of study as a wheel. You've got

The Arts -> The Humanities -> Life Sciences -> Physical Sciences -> Mathematics -> The Arts

We often view The Arts and Mathematics on opposite ends of the spectrum, but as I've gone deeper into mathematics, I've learned that an elegant proof is far more similar to Poetry than to the sciences.

If you approach mathematics from an engineering/applied science angle, it seems like doing it by hand is useless.

Another great analogy I've heard is that the language of mathematics requires about 12 years of "spelling and grammar tests". Most students then stop, considering themselves savvy enough. After those twelve years, those who go on experience the poetry of proof, where the basic building blocks are twisted and interwoven in new and creative ways. Math at this level is often more like creative writing, exploring new areas and explaining exciting things.

I really feel that most students get so turned off by the calculations that they never get to see how creative and elegant math can be.
StartupBus community is about to explode
Did your boss offer stock options?
The main problem with deletionism in WP is the fact that the notion of notability is very subjective in some cases. There are situations that are very clear (people who have competed in Olympics are a shoe-in, garage bands that have never charted are not). Then there are cases like these where notability might be tied to a research or theoretical niche for example, and is hard to establish with enough solidity to break through the wikilawyering crud. And believe me, if they can out-lawyer you with WP:THIS and WP:THAT, the article you're trying to preserve will be deleted. Worse, the avenues for recourse are thin and usually controlled or influenced by the same people that you went against to begin with.
How Can Programming Ability Be Used to Help People in Poverty
Would be interesting to know what your last business was about. Must have had a happy ending for you to have spent the last 8 years vacationing?
Cool app idea! You should integrate with the WePay API so that when you remind people, they actually have the ability to pay.

https://www.wepay.com/developer/reference

Feel free to email me if you have any questions about the API.
If we expand beyond VCs, the prototypical example is "Colonel" Harland Sanders and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

> But by not knowing that Harland David Sanders was an actual man, who lived an actual life, people miss out on more than they might imagine. For one thing, the Colonel wasn't just a fast-food baron who represented his company on TV, the way Dave Thomas (a Sanders protégé) later did. Sanders was the living embodiment of what his food supposedly stood for.

His white suit wasn't the invention of a marketing committee; he wore it every day and was never seen in public for the last 20 years of his life in anything else. (He had a heavy wool one for winter and a lighter cotton one for summer.)

He was a failure who got fired from a dozen jobs before starting his restaurant, and then failed at that when he went out of business and found himself broke at the age of 65. He drove around in a Cadillac with his face painted on the side before anybody knew who he was, pleading with the owners of run-down diners to use his recipe and give him a nickel commission on each chicken. He slept in the back of the car and made handshake deals.

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2019218,00.html
Japanese satellite discovers two huge holes in sun's magnetic field
Huge collection of programming resources
I'm well aware of the difficulties with doing business internationally - over 90% of my income comes from outside my borders. I've gotten fraudulent chargebacks and grit my teeth and move on. Sure, selling a $1000 laptop to someone in Nigeria is asking for trouble, but for other countries with strong legal systems and a low incidence of fraud I would seriously question the accepted wisdom of international sales == higher fraud.

So if you don't want to deal out of the country, say you don't. Putting some fine print buried in your website saying 'we only accept wire transfer for international orders above x' but still accepting CC in the cart is bad customer service. It's a crappy experience for the customer and it wastes time for everyone, merchant included. This is my point. Statistically, I bet for delivery to certain countries, the chargebacks would be no different to domestic deliveries in terms of fraud per 1000 sales. The credit cards are there to protect the customer from fraudulent merchants just as much as the reverse.

My point is : either accept the risk (price it in if you have to) or advertise that you don't ship internationally. This is what Zappos does - they want to create an excellent experience, so they only ship within the USA. Don't create a crappy experience for a customer in the off-hand hope that someone might decide to get caught in a bait-and-switch payment scenario.
This is quite entertaining.

In the same vein:

"What Happens to a YouTube Video Uploaded 1,000 Times"
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/04/youtube-video-uploa...)
In the minority here ... But anyway, my 2c:

1. Travel is overrated. I hate the airports, taxis, traffic, annoyances, inconveniences, etc when I'm trying to relax.

2. Get a dog?
I highly recommend taking some poetry through this process. I also highly recommend taking the translation back to English after each other language, so you can watch how each translation changes it.

However, this is one case where Google's improvement of their algorithms make the outcome less interesting. I've watched it happen.

I record music as a hobby. In the past 6 years, I've recorded 24 albums in 24 different genres — many film and theatre scores, and "experimental" (groan-worthy term) electroacoustic music. When I'm not quite satisfied with lyrics that I've written, and instead want a can't-quite-put-my-finger-on-it weird mood, I use this exact technique. It translates what I've written into more idiosyncratic forms. There are chains of languages of which I'm most fond, particularly to/from Japanese (seems to be the weirdest of all the asian language translations — gives a lot of weird articles).
I didn't know Toronto had a TLD.

Also, I hope no one I know finds out about this app ;)
That sounds like a great idea. Added to my todo. Thanks.
Calculation is important, but not strictly because it contributes much to math, it's important because you ought to be able to do basic number manipulations in your head or you'll be taken for a ride in all kinds of ways. Bad sales pitches, obviously flawed political polemics, business plans that can't possibly fly, there's endless practical reasons to be able to do this stuff in your head rapidly and comfortably. Kids need to spend about the same time learning calculations, but it also needs to be somehow deprioritized so it is made more clear that it is in fact "calculation" and not "math".

You need comfort with numbers to learn math, but as any number of math professors can demonstrate on demand, you can get an awfully long way with single-digit multiplication and addition and not being able to do much else. It's the rare algebra problem that has you multiplying 37 by 23 if it isn't explicitly a fraction problem.

I'd support splitting the terminology up.

Or I would support a terminology split, if I had any confidence there was anybody left in the education system that actually has any clue about what "math" is anymore. Until you solve this problem it's all moving deck chairs around on the Titanic. And I mean the Titanic of today, sitting there long sunk, not the usual metaphorical sinking Titanic.
I pay my wife to do my laundry
For the record, we haven't cured Polio. We do have a vaccine for it though. :-)
I apologize for the confusion, but that still doesn't change much. See these papers on Nemerle:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/sscli2005/pachols...

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/moskal/pdf/msc...
I could be wrong, but the Wikipedia admins aren't responsible for creating pages or accepting pages. That's an "editor", e.g., a standard user. Admins can make pages, but I guarantee it was an interested editor/user who created the Alice ML page, not an admin acting as an admin.

Still, Wikipedia's deletionism is arrant nonsense up with which we should not put.
>Most companies put an implicit value on size for the sake of size, and doing any cheap viral game in the book to get there, even if it means a low percentage of users ever engage with your app or return to your site again.

These "Mafioso" Startups are playing the right game. Leverage slow growth and focus on maximizing value per consumer, rather than maximizing the number of consumers.

A good point made in the article, that could have been overlooked.
Does it need to be at all sophisticated? What's wrong with categorizing lists according to "well-known" and "lesser-known"?
I like how Paul Graham describes "the money problem". It sounds like you've got the money problem solved. Take a step back now, and think about things you would really like to do.
I'm pretty skeptical that the government would start regulating addictive video games. Even though they are regulating video games for content I don't really see the government regulating addiction.
Wikipedia's Notability Requirements And The Slash
I'm tempted to actually do a quick test, but I think it probably comes down to something like whether you're closer to the duostack servers or the instantdomainsearch servers.

The reason this is with WebSockets isn't because I needed the speed of them - it's because I wanted to play with [socket.io](http://socket.io/), which provides a really nice abstraction for bidirectional communication, and I wanted to play with Nodejs. It seemed like The Thing To Play With.

The original domainzomg actually loaded hidden images and used onLoad and onSuccess handlers so in theory you didn't even need XMLHttpRequest support in your browser for it to work. So that's the opposite end of the spectrum. Then I figured I'd try rewriting it for ease of maintainability. It's really just a tool I use myself, and a couple friends started using. I'm going to use whatever technology I feel like playing with at the time.

Also, I'm not technically versed in how multiple requests on an HTTP 1.1 connection would work, it's possible that it may even be slightly faster if you just have one XHR request rather than 3 WebSocket requests. WebSockets should be used when you need to push data to the client that isn't part of a direct request-response loop - if you have the request-response loop, XHR is just fine.

tl;dr: 100% right that WebSocket doesn't always get you performance improvements (it might even be slower for some use cases), but socket.io is a super nice abstraction layer that makes programming more fun.
Your Body Can Patch The Cracks, Not Mend the Foundation