skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my (private) high school's health class "like" and "um" and others were referred to as "stop-words" by the teacher because people would say them instead of pausing. It's really obvious once you look for them, for instance I hear things like college tour guides that would literally say "um" after every single sentence, probably unbeknownst to themselves!

One of the class projects was for us to remove the stop words from our speech by the end of the semester. We did this by all using recording software (had to submit either by cassette tape or wav/mp3) and answering questions such as "Do you want to live forever and why or why not?" by speaking for at least 5 minutes. These were our homework assignments.

We had to very consciously never use any stop words. We could pause the recorder if we had trouble thinking of what to say, but we could never say those words.

I was skeptical of the assignment at first but my class all agreed by the end of the semester that it made us much better speakers, simply learning to consider our pauses instead of filling the silence with "like" and "um".
Node.JS, MongoDB and CDN used in a clever way
The CPR example that's used throughout the article is a bit weird, isn't it? Isn't CPR performed when someone has no heartbeat? What does it matter if you crack their ribs? It's only painful if the person survives.

I'm not debating whether people should attempt to prolong their lives with aggressive chemo, just picking a nit.
I find those that think in such general terms also tend to think poorly ;-) My personal experience is the best writers rarely have much to say, but I have probably spent to much time in the consulting world where saying something meaningful is far less important than saying something well. Still, I try and avoid generalizing to much because incite rarely comes from generalities.
We used to have a ping pong table in an abandoned part of our office space. It was great for a quick break to get the heart-rate up and burn a few calories.
Red Cross Wants Real Life Laws Enforced Within Virtual Worlds
How Two Guys Raised $100K To Make A Magical Keyboard
It would be amusing to know a bit about how such a system works and intentionally trigger responses from it. If enough people did that, it would become useless.
Because math is by far the worst taught subject in schools, including university level.
Reminds me of this Finding Nemo quote:

Marlin: It's like he's trying to speak to me, I know it.
[to Squirt]
Marlin: Look, you're really cute, but I can't understand what you're saying. Say the first thing again.
New Mediative Whitepaper — A Realistic View of Mobile Advertising in Canada
They already do a fair amount of stats for repos, for example: https://github.com/github/hubot/graphs/impact
There's a fundamental flaw in that argument. Once a sentience, or as i would define it, a species capable of creating technology, exists, it is highly likely to not die out as other traits easily can. It only needs to occur once. One could argue it has -almost- occurred on earth many times, including dolphins, elephants, octopus along with apes right now.
Huh. This looks like stuff any business owner should know. I looked through these briefly and didn't see any trig or calculus. I could see someone maybe not remembering some of the terminology ("congruent", "similar", etc.) but it's very surprising to me that someone who runs a successful company would have trouble with either of these tests, unless there was very significant time pressure.
Can You Get a Headache from Sugar?
Too true. Some guys over at college humor are on to this problem already... Anyone who has spent time in Silicon Valley will find this clip awesome!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMmdl4VltD4

Enjoy!
The 'habitable zone' is overly simplistic in general. Look at Europa - it's nowhere near the habitable zone, but is one of the most Earth-like plants in our Solar System. That's just inside the one Solar System we have a fairly complete planetary record of!

It also assumes that liquid water and an oxygen atmosphere are prerequisites for life. Extremophiles [1] living on our own planet prove that this is not so.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile
Right, but it's missing things like how many people viewed this project, how many people cloned it (not fork) after viewing, who is referring people to my project.
Why They Don't Answer Your Emails
American plutocracy
The guardian is one of the very few of these apps which, when you click on one of the stories, will still redirect you to their site if you click "no" when asked to install the app. From then on you will go straight to the story upon clicking them and are never asked about the app again. They deserve kudos for this.

All the other news outlets I've seen keep you on facebook if you don't install the app, which is where this plugin comes in.

Unlike others I haven't blocked these stories because my list is small enough that I actually care what the people on it are reading. This plugin will be useful.
If I have any examples? Sure I do.

Just a few week back, wasn't Google rotating the whole browser page for a specific query?

http://www.gtricks.com/google-tricks/do-a-barrel-roll-google...

Google has tons of other easter eggs. Here is a Top 17: http://www.pcworld.com/article/142620/googles_top_17_easter_...

Apple's Siri contains easter eggs referencing "2001: A space odyssey", "HHGTTG" and other stuff:
http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/12/2486618/siri-weird-iphone...

In MS Outlook 2010, the default picture for new contacts is a silhouette of Bill Gates from his "arrest mugshot".

Facebook has several:
http://reface.me/hacks/facebook-easter-eggs/
http://www.yesbutnobutyes.com/archives/2009/05/facebook_east...

Adobe has included easter eggs, here are some for the CS5 suite:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEmO9-RsVgQ
And I can assure that it is not my fault. I am a software engineer, for one, and I run a tight ship - my Windows system is perpetually bare-bones. I keep as little running as possible. It's not my system (which is modern and up-to-date, including keeping up with Windows Updates).

Plugin-wise, almost nothing. Flash (groan), but I tend to keep that turned off unless I actually need it.

Under that scenario, Firefox is still sluggish and crash-prone during normal browsing. Innocuous browsing, to boot - I'm talking things like news sites, reddit, HN, StackExchange.

It has left such a bad taste in my mouth that I have very little interest in trying to figure out what is actually behind this - especially when I can install Chrome and have a squeaky-clean browsing experience in an identical environment. I think it is pretty fair to place the blame squarely on Firefox.

While in retrospect, I regret the wording of my original post, I stand my position that I do not feel Firefox is fit to be considered a top browser.
Suppose someone launched a competitor to Gmail today. What would be some killer features from Gmail that should be emulated? What are some anti-features from Gmail that should NOT be cloned? And what are some brand new features that should be introduced?

I know it's a bit nuts to try and go up against Google, but what the heck, allow me to speculate and daydream for a bit :)
I was always annoyed by the fact that I couldn't copy-paste stuff in Google Docs and had to ^C ^V it. Now I realize this is a feature.
Sadly enough that is the kind of talk that gets you hired as a manager in some places.
I remember reading an article about complex passwords vs what was basically called "offensive gibberish", I've actually taken a liking to this approach more recently than relying on a password manager. The whole goal is to make your password memorable while also making it long and complex enough to avoid cracking/brute forcing.

e.g.
For gmail rather than "password3" one might use "give me my god damn email you stupid machine!" It's great because it's easy to remember, and complex enough to keep you relatively safe.

e.g. 2.0 : http://xkcd.com/936/
RickRolling a thousand people a day
Yes, thanks for clarifying. I see that now. I've been through your demo a few times in Chromium, and I've been poking around and looking at the "Cookies and Other Data" values. So yes, I see now that my actual private key is in "Local Storage".

By the way, these concepts of localStorage and sessionStorage are new to me. Evidently they're something like glorified large cookies in HTML5. Chromium handles it just fine, but I don't think my Firefox browser even understands it yet. I see where I can examine all my live cookies there, but I don't see any mention of "storage" there. (I'm using Firefox 3.6.24 on Ubuntu.)

Consequently I haven't been able to get it to work yet on FF. But maybe that's because long ago I did a bold yet insane experiment wherein I deleted all trusted root CAs in that browser. So it might be my problem, not yours.
I hadn't known about gaug.es before, will have to check that out. Notice that the post says:

All Ordered List products are now GitHub products.

I take that to mean that gaug.es, speakerdeck, and harmony aren't going anywhere, i.e. this wasn't just a "talent acquisition", it's the combination of two profitable businesses joining forces.

I get warm and fuzzy seeing bootstrapped businesses grow.
IPod plus iTunes Timeline - Click the previews
I remember when Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series was first shown on PBS; the episode when the Drake equation was covered was one of my favorite, although even as a teen I understood how small were the chances of finding other sentient life as we hadn't found a single extrasolar planet at the time, let alone in the Goldilocks zone of a star.

Planetary discoveries (like this one) in the past few years are so cool to me.
Yes, it would be fair. Especially since I did mention the level of ability would be influenced by me as a person. I should have expanded on that.

But, as a human, you do have the ability to learn but a proper education does go a long way in helping you discover how to learn a subject. Instead of goofing around on a subject for ten years when you finally figure it out, a proper education lets you learn the subject much quicker and more efficiently.

After all, as a basic example, it would be rather difficult to learn physics if you can't read the papers written by the smart people who came before you.
Because proofs are interesting. They're the "under the hood" of larger chunks of math knowledge. If you understand how to follow a proof, you'll have a much better understanding of the strengths and limitations of various mathematical statements. If you can work a proof youself (which is a lot harder actually), then you can participate in the global conversation among mathematicians and maybe even contribute.
Historically, if someone is looking for past "whoishiring" posts, this post will point them to the anomalous post that handled/compensated for this month's SNAFU. In that sense, it serves a purpose even though all of this month's hiring communication is on the other post/thread.
I sometimes fall into the trap of not asking questions in order to avoid looking stupid. However, when bullshit rises to a certain level and I've heard practically no substance, I don't ask questions mainly because I don't care. Once the bullshit bit is flipped, it is hard to unflip.
Yes, exactly.

I hate that they are hijacking the browser's behaviour and replacing the normal scrollbars with those silly little things for example.

Trying to make this act like it's not a webpage is awful. Make it work like a better webpage, not less of one.
New approach to determining human impact on climate gives same answer
Agreed.

When preaching sermons (which are all recorded) I soon learned that a short pause was better than a stop word. And as long as you don't look or sound panicked when you pause, it comes across as being thoughtful and people accept it as a natural part of speaking to deep issues.
My point is that it's really hard to tell if something is a buzzword or is substance.

If you didn't have intimate knowledge of modern web development, everything in that sentence could be a meaningless buzzword and you'd have no idea.

When I hear friends talk about a domain I have little experience in, I usually have little idea what they're saying.
IOS fragmentation? not really. . .
I Prefer Phone Calls over Text
Single most important Gmail feature that every single email client (web, desktop, mobile) should have adopted since April 2001 but didn't: conversations.

Also, if you're thinking of designing an email client, you should take some inspiration here http://smcllns.com/a-better-email-client that will of course make it a very targeted email client, but I think that's the only way to make a dent in that space. Also look at Facebook Messenger.
Interesting. I didn't notice that at first. Thanks for pointing it out.
We are in a new space race, since we are also rapidly approaching the day that our Earth will be inhabitable.
I am generally not a fan of common run-times for clients, it took the JDK years to iron out the bugs and they are still not competitive on the client side. Generalization is the antithesis to customization, which is what you want when we are talking about usability.

A better solution is to implement as much logic as you can get away with behind REST services, and then make each platform a client to the services. This makes implementing new clients less burdensome, as it just becomes a different customized, for the platform, workflow to the overall system.
Tenth Day of the Challenge-How I Kept Being Inspired
What's the gravity on the surface? It's 2.4 times the size of earth, is the density the same? If so, that amount of gravity may very well make it uninhabitable.
What % of SMB's use CRM?
I have worked with several small businesses (under $50M annual sales) that still continue to use excel or their diaries as their CRM. There are a plethora of SMB CRM's out there, but the problem still exists. I always wonder if the only way to displace those excel spreadsheets is to replace it with something extremely basic yet powerful enough to convince SMB's to adopt a different solution. There is a huge un-served market here, even in terms of enterprise CRM apps. It would be nice if there was some market data on what really matters to these SMB's.
The life of a full time comment moderator
My entire dev team (all 4 of us) have started doing burpees at 11:00am and 3:00pm everyday. Great all-around excercise that gets your heart racing and even works out the whole body. Japan has a milder version, called Rajio Taiso.

Not sure if I'd be able to walk while in a meeting, even if its at a slow pace. When I'm working out, I usually try to get into "the zone" and I'd probably have difficulties staying focused.
Very quickly in my case.

At the church that I pastor, it is still small enough that I am the principle sound engineer as well, so I get to hear my recorded sermons before uploading them. This cured the use of stop words and also is removing my rabid dislike of hearing myself speak.
Ask HN: What are some unique skills startups look for
To startup founders, what are some of the most valuable skills you feel are lacking in your current startup?

Eg. SEO expertise, twitter marketing, etc
Absolutely (in the US here). Some carriers will allow you to block all text messages, which can get rid of the annoying ones you wouldn't want to accept, but also forces legitimate ones to get eaten - causing some people to think you're ignoring them when you actually had no idea they even tried texting you in the first place.
They don't know the density yet, but future observations should tell us. Probably next year, I think.
The real problem is startups raise money too early. In my mind there should be two main reasons to raise money: 1) You have figured out a way to make $1 while spend less, and your data tells you you can do this x times over, 2) You cannot afford to pay for your servers or dev time due to customer growth. Can you think of more reasons?
There are so many dynamics at work when it comes to burn rate. At previous startups in which I was involved, we were expected to increase spending by the investors. While we wanted to walk it slowly, they wanted us to spend more (on headcount.) As was expected, the lesson of ten-women-cannot-make-a-baby-in-a-month was relearned.
Yes, in the US, if you have no TXT plans, you pay for receiving TXT messages.
> Slow down there. Nobody is looking for "human intelligence" on other planets. Maybe that's why you think it's impossible. I'd say dolphins are intelligent. So are some of our computer systems. There's a lot more intelligence that we can recognize that isn't like ours.

When I think of intelligent alien life, I think along the lines of Klingons, not alien dolphins. Are we going to find alien dolphins? Absolutely. Klingons? Nope.
Ok, I will play the devil's advocate here because someone has to. This has been going on since the pre-internet era. India unlike the US and like the UK doesn't have unlimited free speech and have fairly strong defamation and libel laws. This was a rich man's problem because how would you defame someone unless you have access to printing press or can go on radio and television. The internet changed all that. The government doesn't want it to change (for obvious reasons), hence all this hoopla.

Of course the free speech will win because it's almost impossible to censor the internet but the people in power will not go down without a fight.
We have data. A brief sampling: http://www.nber.org/papers/w15853.pdf, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1508924, http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2002/FERREIRA/FERREIRA..., http://www.scribd.com/doc/18370009/Sources-of-Financing-for-...

There is plenty more out there, all suggesting that women are promoted differently, treated differently, more likely to experience active gender-based harassment and are more likely to be excluded from the camaraderie and informal networking that leads to job satisfaction.
Don't assume that just because you are ignorant everyone else is too. Some of us have been engaging with, measuring, quantifying and attempting to change these destructive culturally-sanctioned behaviors for a very long time.
Yeah, that is a bit strange.

Sure, it's not entirely straightforward to figure out an algorithm for sorting emails into conversations. But it's not rocket science either.
No, they require time.
Cell Phone Surveillance Justifies Paranoia
40 Wordpress Premium Themes for Photography Websites
Python Glossary - A Brief Bible
Wow - after reading the comments on this thread I have to say that I am thoroughly disappointed in the HN community. If you replaced the word math(ematics) with a religion of your choice you'd see the same kind of fanaticism you often see from religious zealots.

The God of math has spoken: obey, conform or be cast out...There is nothing other than Me. All other gods require Me to make them whole - in fact you can't even think without Me... Now go forth and preach my wisdom because there is no other wisdom other than Me.
I was put off by 'tokenadult's first post (no part of it seemed well argued; it also started out by citing Twain to argue that school board members were "dull"). And as always I appreciate your commitment to rational debate.

But even Asian Americans reliably outperform other ethnicities in American schools, placing in the top 5 in math performance worldwide despite American schools, it does not necessarily follow that American schools are performing adequately.

For instance, Asian families can obviously be supplementing education through private tutors, additional study and demands at home, &c.

It also doesn't follow that just because this system "works" for Asian Americans that it's a reasonable system to apply nationwide. Perhaps Asian families manage this because they're economically advantaged. Perhaps Asian families make unreasonable sacrifices in other areas of their life (by a measure of "reasonableness" along the lines of "benefit to child ends up being worth the cost to the family").

Also worth mentioning, but perhaps not worth dwelling on, that TIMSS includes private schools. How much more likely are Asian Americans to attend private schools than (say) Latino Americans?

Finally, I think this particular debate may be besides the point. We have the ethnic and socioeconomic mix that we have. We do not have the option of being South Korea. So the question is, does the education system we have serve the best interests of mix of students we have today? That's the question this WaPo story is addressing.
I don't have any trouble understanding people when they say something like "I'm in the sort of sustainability space around kind of bringing synergistic value-add to other people's work around this kind of space." They're simply saying nothing. I remember watching some cartoon where some aliens are watching humans converse and they interrupt by saying "ritual gum flapping time is over". That's all this is: ritual gum flapping. When two people flap their gums at each other for a few minutes, it increases their comfort with each other and that social comfort helps keep society glued together. Sometimes conversations are about exchanging ideas, other times they are purely about socialization. In this case, the conversations aren't about the ideas, they're about having a conversation.

It may seem pointless, but a lot of being human is pointless.
MIcrosoft's bid to rule your living room with the Xbox 360 begins tomorrow
Increasingly, K-12 mathematics is taught as a matter of brute-force rote memorization. Even the higher level math up through algebra and geometry is taught through memorization of formulas and "plug and chug" techniques combined with excessive levels of busy work (massive homework loads, etc.)

It's no wonder most kids get turned off by that.
I thank you guys for the advice, and I have done this and I have perfected (to the best of my abilities) my ability to monolog. Which is what these exercise teach you, my problem comes in natural conversation in which I am excited about the subject. The conversation is more dynamic in a dialog, and I find myself hopping from idea to idea faster than in a monolog in which I an the one who determines the switches in context.
Darpa - Shredders not as safe as you think
Why would his lack of sufficient stomachs have anything to do with whether or not he is right? It is a green tie argument, or in debate terms, fails to clash. It is just an excuse to avoid engaging with the actual point.

In other words, your analogy still supports his point.
I don't use (no longer use) Dropbox. 1Password database is synced to my phone via Wi-Fi, and I always have my phone with me so it never really a problem. If I ever leave my phone elsewhere, then I've got a bigger problem anyway.

Dropbox Web UI is just a HTML implementation of 1Password (read-only) sitting in your disk, so its HTTP security depends onto Dropbox (or whatever sync service you use) rather than 1Password itself.
If you read that caption, it's not stock photography. It is however taken from a low angle, looking straight at the woman's behind, a not so subtle bit of art direction.

I'm all for having active workdays, but if we're going to have walking meetings I'd rather have a mid-sized park and a quiet path to walk along. Or a grand promenade if it needs to be indoors. This just seems like an over-engineered solution.
SEO Salary Infograhic
For most people, dealing with mathematical proofs is a kind of parroting.
They learn a path and can follow it all right, but they never deviate from the said path because there's no point.
Which might be insightful but is inherently boring, because there's no way you'll make anything that didn't exist before. You only make some mind ways in your brain which will perhaps help you one day dealing with some real problem with real output.
Might as well flash a firmware over your brain.

Given the current state of math, very few people would ever be able to contribute anything.
Others can skip to the plan B immediately.