skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems that you did a lot of problems, and gained no insights. Perhaps you were never intended or destined to be a mathematician. This is no insult - I genuinely believe that different people think in different ways, and the balance is important. I work with engineers who do things I never could, and I do theoretical work in which they have no interest. I don't understand why everyone seems to want to be mathematicians. However, having good math is valuable.

But there are insights about differences of two squares, sums of cubes, divisibility tests, prime factorizations, smaller denominators imply larger numbers, greatest common divisors and lowest common multipliers, and many many more.

I find repeatedly that I show people small arithmetical tricks and they are intrigued and surprised. I then expand on the basic ideas and derive things like RSA and DHMW codes, or the fact that primes of the form 4k+1 are always the sum of two squares, or that for primes larger than 3, p^2-1 is divisible by 24.

And so on. People are often fascinated by these trinkets, and yet they are observations that for me arose from doing the arithmetic.

I don't deny that most math teaching is appalling, and that many bright kids give up out of sheer boredom, but without the basics they are equally ill-served. We need teachers who actually understand the math they are teaching, and not just regurgitating the curriculum they've been given.

That's why I spend around half my time going around talking about what math is really about, and how it can be interesting, useful, fun, and occasionally exciting.

Without a basic facility in arithmetic, so much of real math - as opposed to arithmetic - is denied. If every calculation you do requires that you reach for a calculator, or fire up a symbolic math package, you are slowed to a crawl.

It's like trying to programming without being able to type. The ideas can't flow when you are constantly held up by not having mastered an underlying skill.

And i suspect we are more in agreement than not, each colored by our own experiences. Mine were happy, full of discovery. Yours weren't. How can we make kids experience more discoveries if they won't actually play with the underlying basics?
Yup. So, anyone who cares more about manipulating their readers into being more likely to follow them on Twitter than about not being rude should totally do that.

(Is it really rude? I dunno; it doesn't offend me when I see it, though it does grate a little. But when someone says "X is rude" it seems pretty weird to respond by saying "There is some evidence that X achieves something the person doing it wants", as if that were actually responsive to the complaint.)

Incidentally, I can't help suspecting that with more people using the "You should ..." form, its effectiveness relative to other ways of asking to be followed might be less these days.
Good read. I had been sitting on an email for a few weeks to a possible business partner because I didn't want to look like a moron that doesn't know how things work (I am said moron). I just pressed send.
Behind the scenes of the new GNU mailing list server
Not here in Germany (although the German standard DIN 16511 seems to come pretty close to the US ISO 5776).
Does javascript differentiate between left and right shift?

edit: Looks like it doesn't care. Interesting fact, if you bind an "keydown" event to something, it will fire when you hit caps lock to turn it on, but not to turn it off.
A broken core containment still provides some protection.

Have you seen what a plane crash does to a structure?

As far as I know most reactor walls are not hardened to withstand a plane-crash.
That means you wouldn't end up with a "broken core containment". You'd end up with a pile of rubble.

not too impressed by things that have little chance from happening

That's a valid opinion. But I think it's an equally valid opinion that terrorist attacks are not
as rare as meteor rains. And that terrorists will specifically target these facilities.

The only reason people are afraid of nuclear power is that it is associated with those bombs

Personally my concerns are not related to the bombs.

I merely think the economic equation that makes nuclear plants appear cost-effective
will collapse over the first such event.

Your average nuclear plant is said to be profitable to the tune of $500mio USD/yr.
The total cost of the chernobyl disaster is estimated at around $235 billion dollars, and counting.

That means all US nuclear plants combined (circa 100) have to run for 10 years
in order to break even with a single disaster. And that's under the assumption that
a meltdown in the middle of the USA wouldn't be quite a bit more expensive than
a disaster in the middle of Ukrainian nowhere.

Thus my conclusion is that the facilities will be shutdown rather quickly
when and if such an event occurs.
Best Skin Care: Top Skin Care Tips
Ask HN: How do I harass my clients politely?
inevitably at least one client in four or five will take forever to pay me. I've been chasing one for about a year now, and I suspect one will start dragging out too.

the amounts aren't enough to justify small claims (they're all a few grand each), but I feel like the occasional reminder email is pretty easily ignorable.

what do you guys do?
I think you misunderstood my example. My point was that knowing that there is 5 1/12 oranges (as opposed to 5) is the important precision, and it works logically to a child's mind.

It's quite a bit more complex to expect the child to discard the 1/12 and suggest there are 5 oranges. It's not that the 1/12 is useful for anything, it's the fact that it exists, and is accounted for.
Chartwell font draws pie, bar and line charts with ligatures
fast, cheap, good quality. Pick two.

99designs is for when you need just the first two. Choosing these can often be a reasonable choice for a lot of cases.
Why the absence of pictures? I'd expect a more, ahem, user-friendly approach than walls of text from a UX blog. A picture is worth 1,000 words.
Ignoring the rumor community, right now TechCrunch, CNET, CNN, and Fox News all have front pages stories about Apple/iCloud/WWDC.

The BBC doesn't mention Apple specifically, but does have an article asking: Is cloud computing ready for primetime?
I did something similar - I finished the area under my basement stairs, hung monitors from the stairs above me, and put fabric on all the walls for soundproofing.

I have to climb through my storage area, under a shelf, and through a small hole to get in... but that also means I cannot easily get out and take a break. I just keep on working.

Likewise, I am so hidden that my kids just assume that I am downtown in my office, and they do not interrupt my work. And my wife won't come in either, as she get claustrophobic.

I am easily 3x as effective when working from home now.
DHTMLX Touch 1.0 RC Released
Ask HN : How to turn quote requests into paying clients?
It's been a while since I am getting unexpected quote requests. The subject line states "quote". While most of them are with little info about actual work to be done. I have been quick replying those emails asking few questions about the work to be done, but couldn't get response. How do you handle such requests? How could we turn an unexpected quote request into a paying client?

Here is a recent one:

Hey there, We are looking for dev team that could provide programming and updates for some web apps we are planing to launch. If you are interested in long term business relationship let us know.
And quite a lot of Protestants are perfectly happy even with methods that may result in the loss of some fertilized eggs. And many, many Catholics use contraception, whatever they're theoretically supposed to think about it.
I realized this while typing, but decided to go with it just because it was in the spirit of mocking the comment I was replying to.

Interesting bit about jail times being increased for possessing a firearm while committing a crime though.
I believe he lives in Canada. You can find a few good stories on his blog about it. http://jacquesmattheij.com/dealing+with+burn+out
Ask HN: How to go about getting seed funding?
I am working a job I like a lot and hacking on my own ideas in my free time. I kinda fell in love with one of them and now I'm wondering what would be my best course of action:

a) continue hacking nights and weekends - slow going with building site, app and infrastructure

b) outsource some of the work so work gets done while I'm at work, faster but will get expensive

c) try to raise some funds based on current prototypes, leave job to give it a go full-time

Any advice from you guys about these options would be great, as well as possibilities I have not considered. Thanks!
If you use a Mac and want to force yourself to use the correct shift keys, I threw together a KeyRemap4Macbook config that will disable letters typed with the wrong shift: http://forr.st/~LXx
Viola is the american far-too-spread wrong spelling of the french expression voilà, which could be translated roughly to "behold" or "that's it".

Et voilà :)
Why Men Love Porn
Please don't try and spice up a submission with your own "more interesting" headline. Usually it winds up being inaccurate or misleading. The original CNN
headline is "Cell phone use can increase possible cancer risk". The actual quote where the new "headline" apparently came from is "The agency now lists mobile phone use in the same "carcinogenic hazard" category as lead, engine exhaust and chloroform." The new title doesn't even make any kind of logical sense.
Really? My observation about the US is that there's hardly ever a policeman around. Oh sure, they exist and they'll turn up (often en masse) when called, but otherwise they don't leave their cars. There doesn't seem to be such a thing as a policeman walking a beat, at least not here in California, which tends to increase low-level antisocial behaviour.

For instance, if you walk down University Avenue in Berkeley you'll see all sorts of people engaged in various levels of borderline-illegal dickishness -- blocking the sidewalk, harassing passersby for money, standing on a street corner with a ghetto blaster on full blast, whatever. Police officers go past in their cars but don't stop unless something serious is happening. If they were patrolling up and down on foot then they'd have the ability to slow down and talk to the troublemakers and hopefully move 'em along.
Evidence for a new particle gets stronger
Sorry, you misunderstood me. I wasn't saying that any of this was a good excuse, just that it is probably the cause.
I've got a slightly unusual pattern; for letters I use exclusively left shift, but will use right shift for the punctuation symbols on numbers 1-5, function keys on the left side, and the home/end/arrow navigation keys. So I answered both, though it's 90% left.
What is Mobitto?
Also Go and Erlang

~ $ go
gobject-query godefs godoc gofix gofmt goinstall gomake
gopack gopprof gotest gotry gotype govet goyacc
~ $ erl
erl erlc
All society is based on mutual fear.
Pippa Middleton se ríe al ser fotografiada saliendo de parranda en París
I use the right shift button but space with my left hand. I don't know if I was taught to do it that way or if its just more naturally comfortable for me. Just out of curiosity, I'd like to see something process some text to determine the most commonly capitalized letters to see which side actually is better to use from an efficiency standpoint.
I would love to see a pic of this setup.
Someone just suggested Adyen - does anyone have any experience with them?
Thanks for the feedback. We've go some info on where the score comes from and what it means, but we haven't published that yet (shame on us!).

And the goal with "standing out" is that your Work for Pie profile will be automatically updated as you participate in the HN, Stackoverflow communities and as you publish code. You may be doing this on your personal site, you may not. We want to provide a way to aggregate that info easily.

So, what would make this more compelling for you?
Microsoft: Will it be too late to tablet party? Not with Office optimized device
I thought I used both, but after paying attention to it for a few minutes, I seem to use the right shift well over 90% of the time. It's really too bad there's no way to actually detect which shift key is being pressed using JS or even Flash.
On a side note, Google Wallet's logo reminds me of GLAAD.

GLAAD: http://www.glaad.org/

Google's is just flipped with different colors and rounded.
A friend of mine was scammed at a private pay lot. A parking thug was posing as the attendant and took his money. He comes back some time later and finds his pickup truck booted. The PITA thing about this, is that the private lot has no incentive to prevent this sort of scam, so long as it's not prevalent enough to scare people away from lots in general. In fact, there are parties involved who would benefit by encouraging this scam.
I used to have a 2 x 27 and 2 of the high pixel density Samsung 23" displays. That was a killer setup.

At home I have a iMac 27" + a 27" cinema display which works well, but still not as nice as my old four monitor setup.

From the back:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethank/4364175082/

a pano:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethank/3971556051/
Indeed. I'm (somewhat) in favour of concealed carry, but based on observation it doesn't prevent folks from annoying other folks.
Stop downvoting this man and post a response. Do you folks not think these are cloud services?
This article is specifically about America. It has nothing to do with any of the other things you mention.
Pray tell, which ones are the "correct" ones?
I noticed OpenCL performance for bitcoin miners improve a lot (about 15%) when switching from Snow Leopard to the Lion Dev Seed.

No real explanation, just an observation.
That's because you've got a physical identifier of this concept in your mind. Does the idea of a pacemaker feel bad? Probably not, because your "heart" is an abstract idea--you'll probably never see it with your own eyes. A lot of professors teaching dissection have noted your feelings, girls in general don't have a squeamishness to overcome in testicular dissection since they don't have that externality of organs.
Hold on - Chiropractors are in the same class as homeopathy? I thought Chiropractors (which, admittedly, I've never been to, but have heard many good things about - particularly when people need to get their back "adjusted") were in the same class as Acupuncturists - kind of easternish philosophy, but effective within their domain. Not so much focussed on increasing health, as enhancing comfort (or reducing pain) without drugs.

Not the case?
This actually is one of my frustrations with Scala, too many right ways to do the same thing. Makes it easier to write but harder to read especially when people have drastically differing styles. One of the advantages of Java is how easy it is to read and use someone else's code since the base language is so limited.
Brain drain or gain?
Philosophically I would imagine you would implicitly upvote your own submission, hence it makes sense to start at 1.

Alternatively, it could be seen as two transactions:

-1 posting an article costs 1 karma

+1 upvoting your own article costs 1 karma
It is safe to say my app is a social one, like twitter, or even chatroulette.
It does not solve anything in particular, besides boredom.

Chatroulette does not solve anything either, and people are more likely to use skype or msn for video.
I doubt there is high traffic search for "chat with random strangers".

Anyway, i will share some progress. I tried a few ad networks.

Banner ads seem like a fail, only 0.1-0.15% ctr, this is horrible.

Adwords is also not kind to me. Since the idea is new and does not solve anything (as in there is no “how to….”) i can’t target specific searches. Some related keywords are getting very low traffic search and ctr is 0.04%, terrible.

Those were CTR if you didn’t notice, not conversions. Conversions from above are single digits.

What i did find to work marvelously well is ads direct to website (popups and such). Right now i have a decent coming soon page, and for some regions i pay 4 cents per conversion (as in email). For conversions from US it costs 60 cents per conversion. Is it worth paying x15 for people from us? Maybe it will be easier to get "big in japan" and get world domination only later on?

I wonder how many users will actually be created once I start sending emails out.
Left shift is only used for gaming, anything else is right shift. A lot of times I will even hold right shift for an ENTIRE SENTENCE IN CAPS because I am just so damn used to holding right shift for caps.

EDIT: I suspect most people use left shift because that allows them to type w/o removing their hand from the mouse (most people use the mouse w/ their right hand).
Why Square is the Most Disruptive Startup Ever
this is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. the amount of wealth that would be destroyed is beyond all measure.
Haven't found a way to do it with JS - I don't think it's possible. Apparently you can do it with Java http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/api/java/awt/ev...
Mainframes are very much impressive, I've worked with one before. They just operate very very differently from an "open computing" environment that we're all used to.

Once you rely on a mainframe the cost of continuing to operate it, while fairly large, is hilariously less expensive than moving all that code and data elsewhere. Especially given you will have to test all the code again and most people don't even know what it all does anymore, much less how to make sure it's doing it correctly.
For the most part, I usually think in pseudo-code
Trying the sample EffectCheck script on http://effectcheck.com/about : the sidebar says it's counting occurrences of phrases which score on each dimension. How is the association of word/topic determined? The measurement is valuable if and only if "Anxiety" defined as the count of ("different", "trigger", "taken out", "over", "carefully"...) corresponds to anxiety on some other psychologically relevant scale.
As someone whose native language is not english and is actively learning russian, I do experience the same kind of feelings when having to deal with both natural and programing languages.

When writing C, I don't feel like I'm "translating English into C" as somebody else said, rather I "think" in C: in pointers, in functions, in arrays, in structs... Likewise right now I'm not translating my native language into English, I just think and write in English.

I also experiment the same kind of frustration when I have to write something in a language I don't know well (be it Python or Russian). I don't know the vocabulary, I have to look up everything on the web all the time to find out what's the right way to express something. Some parts of the grammar seem backwards and you try to say things in one language the way you would say them in an other, and it ends up in a complete mess (and often, you blame the language, see that "C is better than C++" thread that was on the frontpage earlier).

That being said, it's pretty obvious that learning a programming language (even something as big as C++) is orders of magnitude simpler than learning a foreign language, so I would not say that knowing Python and Prolog is nearly comparable (or as big an achievement) to knowing Japanese and Arabic. On the other hand, we use programing languages to solve complex problems that always require some mental effort when speaking a language becomes completely natural once you're sufficiently fluent, so I suppose both may be beneficial to the brain in the long term.
Hi everyone,

So there seems to be a lot of skepticism about whether our algorithm can actually measure emotional impact accurately. For the long answer, I'll refer you to the about page[1] for EffectCheck. For the short answer:

My co-founders are an AI PhD and a Clinical Psychology PhD. They spent three years curating a huge dictionary of words using a methodology similar to the Harvard Psychosocial Dictionary [2], but with the twist that they were focused on lexical impact of words. The dictionary is pretty accurate at measuring both impact and sentiment [3]. For example, we can predict Amazon reviews as being positive or negative, using the stars to validate if we are correct-- blog post on that coming soon.

Regarding context of the word usage: Both behavioral studies and fMRI scans have confirmed that context is not as important as one might believe. Our brains process multiple meanings of words in parallel, and the emotions associated with those words linger in our subconscious even after we know the correct context. Similarly, in cases of reviews and comments, people who use hostility-evoking words are often hostile themselves (angry people tend to make others angry) and the same is true of the other five fundamental emotions we measure.

Happy to answer more questions. Also happy to analyze any data that you would like to see in order to verify accuracy of the algorithm-- just give me a link or the text. :)

[1] http://effectcheck.com/about

[2] http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~inquirer/homecat.htm

[3] Note that sentiment is correlated to impact only if the writer or speaker is writing without detailed attention to word choice. For example, political speech writers comb over every word to make sure they have the desired impact-- thus, the final text likely has little correlation to the sentiment of the orator.
I can confirm the iPhone 3G jumped the gun by a long way. I got one of the early versions that had next to no reception. In the USA some people went into stores and got replacements. Outside the USA I got fobbed off on the support line and got to pay for an expensive data plan I couldn't use for two years. That's over 1000 euros for what amounted to an ipod touch: and I don't use iTunes.

As you can imagine I researched this quite a lot and I'm quite aware of Apple's other iPhone problems, and the problems they've had with various laptop models. They are well behind a number of phone and PC manufacturers in terms of hardware quality.
How about stop worrying about being polite for one?

In all seriousness - these people owe you money. They've stolen from you. While I'm not suggesting you call them up and launch into a profanity laced tirade because they are a day late, there is no need to be anything other than curt yet professional with them.

One polite notice is all that is required. Then one direct reminder. Then one demand. Then a threat. (we're going to collections) Then you act on the threat. (Write off/collections/end business relationship, etc)

If you're getting 25% of your clients not paying you consistently, I'd suggest that you should alter your payment arrangements to demand more up front, or raise prices. Delinquencies are normally never more than 10%, and even that is high.
Web Development
How to access the download link which is block by the server?
I find that those who've made something really interesting usually asked a lot of people for help along the way.
All On One Page: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_vasectomy/all/1
Where are the confidence intervals and error bars? In order to be taken seriously when aggregating 1.8MM comments, you need those. The variability in pg's plots makes me think the data for any individual is going to be just as noisy.
Seems like a very good service!

One comment though: there are very few details on radishapp.com explaining how Radish works. The blog post describes a bit more: there is a daemon running besides Redis that sends statistics to Radish.

A little 'About' page on radishapp.com, with the most important information from the blog post, plus a list of supported platforms (does the daemon run only on Linux, or on all platforms where Redis runs?), would be very nice.