skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The moment I read excerpts from "surely you're joking mr feynman" about Brazil, I thought someone had done a major typo and put Brazil in place of India, because that is how students are taught here; sad part is that Mr Feynman was referring to Brazil of 70's and 80's (correct me if wrong) and I am referring to India of 2011. I assume that Brazil is doing much better now (?). The Indian education is more about serving (read ITES) than leading.

The article is indeed right but it misses few points. Given the fact that India is just 60+ years old, the dreams that Indians see is lot different from the ones being seen in west. People in India still struggle with the basic lifestyle, which includes a car, a house, broadband, smartphones, 3g, air-conditioning (yes I think all of these are part of basic lifestyle). You don't find furnished homes in India very often. Once you are in, you have to manage everything (bed, refrigerator, laundry and what not). When you are asked to survive in one of the hottest part of the world and you cannot afford an AC, doing work is nightmare. So for an Indian guy right out of college, there are a lot of questions unanswered. I don't think this is the case in west, is it? (I stayed in London for an year and everything was there right from the first day). So it's a little unreal to expect everyone to jump into doing a startup or becoming famous.

But yeah, above all the best part is that situation is changing very fast, lots and lots of Indians are taking the unconventional path, trying to make sure that future holds something good.
You do a good job of segmenting the population of unemployed people in to various groups, but you make not even a single argument for why they shouldn't be counted as unemployed.

For instance, you say, "women who don't work ... shouldn't be included in your unemployed figure." Why not?
What is the most interesting under-the-radar startup?
This article is clearly biased and (not to put down the original author) borders on hero worshiping of India and her engineers. Some glaringly partisan comments "liberating Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) from Pakistan’s colonialism", "India manage to fight (and win) two major wars just a couple of decades after independence", "slog through med-school, do a post-doc specialization, an internship, become an assistant, and finally 15 years later, in-debt, start your own medical practise.(sic)"

There are large number of problems with the engineering system in India (especially about the number of engineers and the quality of engineering education) and the author just sweeps them under the rug.

Poorly written.

Full disclosure: I am an Indian Engineer now studying in UC Berkeley. Almost a perfect fit to the model described (except that I didn't graduate from the IITs).
>>> The article is indeed right but it misses few points. Given the fact that India is just 60+ years old,

No, India is the oldest civilization alive.
> I want a system in place that will help them realize their potential. There are plenty of authors who are now considered iconic, who had very rough starts and only realized their potential because someone in the publishing industry spent a lot of time and money helping them develop.

I'm not arguing for what is the ideal system. I'm arguing the position that market dynamics are such that publishing houses will lose to self-publishing. The casualty of that may very well be authors that can't make it without a lot of mentoring. I'm not saying that publishing houses don't and can't have good impact on the creation of good writing. I'm saying that their contribution won't be enough to justify their cost and they will be put out of business.

> so I'm really not all that concerned that "unleashing experienced editors on new authors probably reduces variability in writing.

I'm not concerned about this. I think it's an argument for why losing the mentoring and distribution barriers will create more niche markets, fueling the success of self-publishing.

> As long as there are publishers who are able to successfully identify and develop such diamonds in the rough, and unless someone comes up with a different way to perform this task, the traditional publishers will not go away. Even if they lose all of the authors who are good enough to jump right into self-publishing, that still leaves them with a significant role in the market, growing great authors.

Finding "diamonds in the rough" may not be enough to sustain a publishing house. This may today be a valuable service but that doesn't mean that it will still be profitable in the future. When amazon launched the kindle, ebooks were mostly priced at 10$. These publishers fought to be able to raise the prices. When all the "truly great" become self-publishers they will lower the price of ebooks so now as a publisher you've lost your sure bets and have to instead spend considerable resources (paying all these mentors/editors) on riskier bets that when/if they succeed will have to be priced lower to compete with the self-publishers. I just don't see the economics favoring publishing houses. Being a freelance editor/mentor sourcing authors from first-time self-publishers may very well become a profitable venture though.
I meant independent India :)
9: 10+2*5: Work in short spurts of 10 minutes,
interrupted by 2 minute breaks. Use a timer.
Do this 5 times an hour to stay on target without
over-taxing your physical and mental resources.
Spend those 2 minutes getting a drink, going to
the bathroom, or staring out a window.

Compare and contrast with the John Cleese piece on creativity:

http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1604148

There he talks about getting into flow, and how long it takes.

Then in 17 they talk about time-boxing, which is in direct contrast.

This is basically 50 platitudes all presented so you can cherry-pick your favorites and feel good about yourself. It's a psychic cold-reading, designed to give you enough to agree with, nothing controversial, and then you find yourself agreeing with it.
How to read Harold Garfinkel's "Studies in Ethnomethodology"
The Point of Laziness
In my opinion, laziness often complicates things, as it is very hard to predict the performance and memory usage of language constructs.

The famous example:

sum = s 0
where s acc [] = acc
s acc (x:xs) = s (acc + x) xs

It is not easy to see, that such a sum function will cause a stack overflow (for longer lists).
just because you're trying to improve doesn't mean you have to share your bad code with the world.

there's nothing wrong with writing code and trying to improve, but there's something to be said for being a good editor and not releasing every keystroke you type. why release that which isn't good or useful?
Startup ideas you can develop in 48 hrs in...Nigeria
The critical functionality in this application seems to be online calculation, i.e. he wants to know a player's exact rank immediately after insert. A sorted set is good for that.

In general I agree though. If you relax the consistency requirement slightly you can get away with regenerating the rank table every minute or so. It takes ~500ms on my machine to generate the ranked table for 500k rows on PG9. Unlogged tables in 9.1 would probably make it faster.
The source code isn't in any repository because I don't work with repositories. And, if I were to list a specific version of the code, it would become slightly obsolete in less than a week -- as I am continually tweaking Readable's text-parsing algorithm.
You can find an always up-do-date version of the code here: http://readable-static.tastefulwords.com/_r/bulk.js
Readability 2.0 choosing to load and reformat the pages via their server instead of doing it in place in browser really slows it down.
I like the minimalistic drive, but in the end it boils down to javascript on the serverside. Which you can agree with or not.
In California, the fine is $160 + County and State enhancements, so the parking space could cost you about $400 if you don't have a passenger to use the phone.
I made a game for Xbox Live Indie Games. Here are the sales stats.
First month as a start-up founder in Portland, OR
yeah I'll probably port it to Android and iOS at some point.
Looks interesting. There is another good project that does this called Boilerpipe: http://code.google.com/p/boilerpipe/

I recently developed a web service that performs these sorts of operations called Linguini (http://linguini.me). The service hasn't been officially launched but it's in beta and usable. It can extract html/blog text through JSON web service calls and can tag names/companies/locations in that text.
The one thing that the article overlooks is that engineering is still the safest way to get a healthy living standard in India. The salary paid by IT firms is exponentially higher than what middle class India has ever seen. Our culture taboos failure. People are worried about a child doing badly in 1st standard. This aversion to failure mixed with the IT boom has led to such a large number of engineers in India.
I've never heard of either the quote or the underlying case (might not be an American case?), but code is speech. A law directly solely at the code or content of a game would be struck down by the (US) courts. And indeed, nearly every (US state or federal) law so far directed at regulating the content of games has been struck down by the courts.

The execution of a program is "action" and can be regulated if it runs afoul of laws on action, i.e., in the sense that yelling "fire" in a crowded theater can be outlawed. It would be an extremely narrow set of circumstances in which such a law on video games would be allowed. The (US) states have tried to regulate video games many times, and have failed just as many times.
I was given a free Pre2 by Palm's Developer Relations Team as a development device. After a week with the thing, I fully expected to be clawing at my iPhone, performing 40 Hail Steves, and vowing never to stray again.

Instead, I haven't touched the iPhone for eight weeks. WebOS is a delight, and I wish I'd had the guts to try it sooner; not only is the OS better thought out in many ways (multi tasking, global app menus, discreet notifications, OTA system updates, polished app switching, 'just type' launcher, the gesture area, and more) but the Enyo development kit has been easy to pick up, and hardware touches -- like the Touchstone charging dock -- make the device a joy to live with.

I'm currently porting an iOS app to WebOS, and will be launching future apps on both platforms, even though the WebOS userbase falls short of iOS and Android's reach. In short, I feel really positive about WebOS, and hope HP's acquisition of Palm will be the kick it needs to find the success it deserves.
One of the leveldb authors here. TokyoCabinet is something we seriously considered using instead of writing leveldb. TokyoCabinet has great performance usually. I haven't done a careful head-to-head comparison, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was somewhat faster than leveldb for many workloads. Plus TokyoCabinet is more mature, has matching server code etc. and may therefore be a better fit for many projects.

However because of a fundamental difference in data structures (TokyoCabinet uses btrees for ordered storage; leveldb uses log structured merge trees), random write performance (which is important for our needs) is significantly better in leveldb. This part we did measure. IIRC, we could fill TokyoCabinet with a million 100-byte writes in less than two seconds if writing sequentially, but the time ballooned to ~2000 seconds if we wrote randomly. The corresponding slowdown for leveldb is from ~1.5 seconds (sequential) to ~2.5 seconds (random).
Honestly, I browsed around for less then ten minutes, before deciding on Creative Commons for the code -- and I did so only because I previously saw source-code under various Creative Commons licenses.
I did not know that it wasn't recommended; thanks for letting me know. I'll be sure to study the issue more thoroughly and re-license the code.
Welcome to HN commenting, Sanjay!

(For those that aren't familiar, his bio is here: http://research.google.com/people/sanjay/index.html)
Super nice, I was playing around with the idea of running an article extractor and running the output through festival (with a little clean up the output is surprisingly good, and certainly a lot better than it used to be a few years ago) so that I could hear blog post while I was working.
So did Google choose C++/Java/Python as their standard languages or are they just the natural standard languages of the industry? Was there any push by Google to those 3 languages aside from developers knowing that is what they use internally?
Whoops. You're right about the second extension. The law itself (Sec 1202) was not extended, but other code sections that interplay with 1202 extended (and expanded) the scope of 1202.

That's what I get for commenting after midnight...
It is unclear to me how this ban will incentivize China to stop spying on the US. If anything, it might lead to more espionage to make up for the information flow lost to the ban.

Also, the statement from congressman Wolf "we have nothing to gain from dealing with them" seems to contradict the very purpose of a collaboration - I'm yet to see a scientific collaboration that goes only one way.

As with most embargoes, both sides will probably lose.

A more reasonable response might be to engage with US companies and technology hubs to improve their defenses.
Thanks a lot for your comments, and I see where you're coming from. In retrospect, there may be a slight bias, and I'll be sure to keep that in mind when I write my next article.

My aim was not to glorify engineering in India; very far from it, actually. The aim of the article was to provide a really shallow look into the history of engineering culture in India. There's a lot more that I really haven't even talked about - how politicians set-up engineering schools since that was a major way to pick-pocket the middle class, the (alleged) abundance of black money in many "premier" institutes of engineering, and in general, the way engineering in India is taught is plain wrong.

I graduated in 2010 from an "NIT", and I am fully aware of how bad the engineering system in India is.
Correlation implies causality until proven otherwise?

Where did I say that? I said that a comment like "this chart only shows correlation" is as useful as "The sky is blue." The sky is probably blue.

Scientifically inspired voodoo is still voodoo. Say those with higher education have lower employment, you still don't know why. These people could be wealthier than the rest and have better opportunities in life REGARDLESS of their "education" (as one example).

Please refer to the models that such data could support (my previous post). The joint influence of other variables like f0,...,fi is certainly discussed.

The macro-economist would then cite this data point is proof for needing more spending in higher-education, when in reality, this may not be the case.

Please refrain from judging a profession unless it is one that you are familiar with. I mentioned econometrics, which is a specialized form of statistics that focuses primarily on extracting information from observational data.
XKCD: Michael Bay’s Scenario
Glad I made an impression; and thanks for the compliment.
I'm actually about the same in real life, too.

Don't worry: Readable won't ever have advertising -- the most I'm looking for is something like a very small "Sponsored By XXX" banner, at the bottom -- if any cool company will ever be interested that is.

The new site will be redesigned -- and it will be a lot better when JavaScript is turned off. But I really don't recommend you use the old site any more, as that still runs the old version of the application -- which is way worse, in terms of performance.

I hope you're still using Readable, and that it's still helping you read the web more comfortably.
Thanks for your comments. I'm with you on that - and that's what I meant when I wrote:

"Becoming an engineer in India virtually guarantees financial security for life, and this blinds parents into forcing their children to choose engineering."
Boilerpipe is great. Also see the diffbot article API which is quite good: http://www.diffbot.com/docs/api/article

There is some deeper discussion of text extraction tools on Tomaz Kovacic's blog:
http://tomazkovacic.com/blog/56/list-of-resources-article-te...

One advantage of Goose, (the linked project), is that it tries to also extract the best image from the webpage. None of the competitors do this. I am not sure how good Goose's text extraction is, compared to boilerpipe or diffbot.

A new tool just popped on my radar called justext: http://code.google.com/p/justext/ It was written by the BiWeC web-as-corpus people, who crawl the web and expose it through the SketchEngine for NLP research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_India
Going All In
"Expecting everyone to have IPv6 connectivity sorted out throughout the enterprise network before June 8th is ludicrous..."

It's 2011. What's ludicrous is enterprise desktops with broken dual-stack support.

If IPv6 day weren't happening, remaining problems would not get fixed. Then in a year or two, major companies would start dual-stacking their public webservers in an unsynchronized fashion, and end users would be complaining about miscellaneous brokenness off and on for months, possibly years.
If you have any suggestions, I'm very open to them.
As a matter of fact, if you're up to it, you can design your very own theme -- I'll let you name it, and give you full credit.
Or, if you just have a couple of quick suggestions, feel free to list them here, or get in touch (http://readable.tastefulwords.com/about-and-contact/).
Being happy about it, as long as you aren't in the mix is pretty hypocritical.
I really do wish we could find a way that was cheaper than college for what is, in these cases, essentially a personality/intelligence test.
I asked her; no bells rung. Sorry! I'll keep thinking...
Staying Hungry
Internet Boom 2.0 is here
I thought it was about actual ear attachments that would give you directional hearing... So disappointing.
I really like the idea of letting people comment on it, like a group birthday card - just has effective, and way easier to coordinate.
Yup; all text processing is done in the browser.

URLs are tracked, though -- they would be tracked in my server logs, even if I didn't do anything specific to track them.

But they are intentionally tracked -- and a percentage of them are run through an automated Readable test, every day, so that I can see, on average, how often Readable gets things wrong.
Jaguar EV Supercar Headed for Production
A Yahoo Pipe for the list of the best links on Hacker News
I know his comment sounds smug at face value, but he is correct. If you do the math in terms of sales outlets, they have an impressive footprint globally and I'd expect that to translate into impressive sales down the line. Don't forget they expect to integrate webOS into their printers and other things too.
What would be the way to fix a too slow server then? Slow down all your other servers clocks until they catch up with the laggard?
I loved that story from Feynman's time in Brazil. What I've often wondered though, is this: Did his time there change anything for the better?

What became of his former students? If even a couple learned to look at the world a bit more like him, then the ripple effect might have been great. If nothing else, it's hard to imagine that the educational system has been unaware of his critique. Did it spur any sort of reform in the decades since?
This reminds me of experiments I did in using Lua to generate SVG. With a little work, I thought it could make a useful replacement format for vector graphics (if anyone would adopt it; not too likely). It was nice to able to use control structures, especially loops and random numbers, to generate images. I definitely think XML is not the best format. Maybe something based on Haskell or some other functional language could work?
A great improvement over Readability! It's bookmarklet has been replaced, at least on my bookmark bar: it's faster, has increased customization options and justification, and is open-source... Add hyphenation to that mix and you've got a solid ten out of ten service.

(Justification and hyphenation were the two features I always wanted Readability to have, and it always seemed odd to me that something branded "readability" lacked them...)

In the FAQ you answer to whether Readable is open-source: "no" in the sense that the source isn't on display somewhere. Not to split hairs here, but that sentence is incredibly confusing; what does having your code "on display" have to do with being open-source?
Heh, yeah have no fear. The likes of the carriers and companies such as Motorola will look after your long term interests, they're not evil at all like that dastardly Steve jobs and his minions at Apple.
I'm Readable's author.

If anyone has any suggestions for improvements, or even feature requests, I'm all ears.

I'm not promising I'll implement them; but I'll definitely listen and consider them carefully.

P.S. jbm, thanks a lot for posting this -- I've tried posting Readable to HC myself (twice), but it didn't stick.
Curious what you are trying to say. I program mostly in Python, but never considered ease of refactoring to be its strength. I felt more comfortable changing code in C++ mostly because of the static typing providing additional correctness guarantees at run-time.
Jct: They're not. Ithaca Hours. Berkshares. Timedollars. Lots of legal models. What's illegal is making the tokens look like the real thing. Why else would he do it in such an illegal way as to incur the wrath of the government. I think Liberty Dollars was a Judas Goat effort to bring the government down on the whole alternative currency movement.
And do you have any solid reason for why that will happen or are you just throwing the mud to the wall and see if it sticks there?
leveldb is a persistent ordered map; bitcask is a persistent hash table (no ordered iteration).

bitcask stores a fixed size record in memory for every key. So for databases with large number of keys, it may use too much memory for some applications.

bitcask can guarantee at most one disk seek per lookup I think. leveldb may have to do a small handful of disk seeks. To clarify, leveldb stores data in a sequence of levels. Each level stores approximately ten times as much data as the level before it. A read needs one disk seek per level. So if 10% of the db fits in memory, leveldb will need to do one seek (for the last level since all of the earlier levels should end up cached in the OS buffer cache). If 1% fits in memory, leveldb will need two seeks.
Speed the clock up.
bad description doesn't connected it with the current problems or its causes rather connected with indo-china war but started making "some sense" after mid of the article.
I'll fix it. Thank you.
The Open Media project also has bounties: http://openmediaproject.org/bounty

While not a prime driver for development, they can be useful for picking off new feature branches, etc.
Hyphenation is a planned feature.
As are hanging (typographic) quotation marks.

So hang tight: more cool stuff is coming -- I just have to find more hours in the day.
Also, what is weird that BBC article quotes the main guy behind the project as a great success, but when you look at the actual newspaper websites, you could struggle to find any information about paywall. e.g. on sme.sk

e.g. "After two days we have reached our goals for the whole month," he said.

What goal was it? I am really struggling to hit the paywall. I had to go to their project website - http://www.pianomedia.sk/payment/index.php?xSwitchLang=en to get any information about the paywal.