skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's worse is that the article is stuffed full of hyperbolic crap about Maoism and misses some of the more valid criticisms of UK education system (the transformation of technical colleges offering effective vocational training for non-academically inclined people into degree awarding bodies which felt the need to adjust their course content to match; the objective of the previous administration to get 50% of school-leavers into university which inevitably resulted in the reintroduction of fees to pay for it, skewing the entrance pool)
in favour of arguments that are dubious at best. In effect, he's blaming the government for flaws that sit squarely on the shoulders of the academics themselves.

If you believe the author, the worst thing that has happened to the education system is the requirement that lecturers actually produce academic output (due to the "envy" of the taxpayer subsidising them). As the author points out, some of this is less than seminal, but frankly I don't find the implicit argument that the same academics would miraculously produce more valuable contributions to the world if not shackled by the requirement they actually justify the money being thrown in their direction. I've read some decidedly mediocre papers written before academics were obliged to get things published on a regular basis.

Also he complains about modularisation, because apparently higher education students aren't smart enough to choose their own areas of specialization. Sorry, but if the University of Leeds' course on webdesign in the 1990s was too easy, it's because the academics running the course were slow to embrace and understand the potential complexities of the web, not the fault of the bleddy gubment. Just be glad they didn't make it a "core" subject that everyone gets high marks on.
What a year: London Stock Exchange in severe IT problems, BlackBerry falls flat
I wouldn't use "great", just "weird enough not to be infected by the mind virus du jour".

We depend on weird people.
OpenOffice is far better than recent Microsoft office for opening old Word documents.
I have experienced two degrees in two different universities in the UK. First was a standard undergraduate course finishing in 1992, a joint BSc in Economics and CS. Course content was fine (complexity, algorithms, compilers, database design etc).

However the students attitude was poor. As an undergrad straight from school I did not self learn, did not study - generally not motivated. Left in recession and with poor CS skills could not find work so delivered pizzas, worked the call centres, manned beach car park huts - all fun however.

Second degrees was a 1 year MSc in Software Engineering - this time focusing on the softer skills around methodologies, design, large systems modularity etc.

This time the student was motivated. I read, studied, wrote C++ and Java programs, delivered tasks on time and used my previous economics knowledge to build a dissertation on neural networks analysis of wholesale electricity prices. I left and went straight into a C/C++ job helping to build a mobile phone network planning system.

On both occasions the tools, environment and time were available. Just the student attitude differed. I saw what I wanted and went for it - just not the first time.
I use tripadvisor all the time, content wise it is excellent. The user interface really needs a major overhaul though, it isn't nearly as easy to use as it could be. (No complaints about the ads.)

Two sites in your general industry that have nice usability are oyster.com and redtag.ca

Oyster.com content wise and usability blows everything else out of the water, it makes every other hotel/resort information website look like it was developed in 1990, which in most cases I think might actually be the case.

redtag.ca search engine is head and shoulders above expedia, travelocity, or any other of the big names I've used. I literally can't get expedia to work. But then, for hotel information, links go through to the archaic websites of the vacation package provider.

Take all of tripadvisors massive user generated content, put a good search engine on top of it, curate your content (photos especially, to try and get something half as good as oyster) and you would have a powerful platform. It's a shame to see such amazing content not properly exploited.
Why I Oppose the Twelve Chinese Hacker Groups Claim
I'm intrigued by the the vast difference in time spent between female and male users. I would honestly think that it would be much closer.
Choose your Jekyll style - preview sites directory
I was trying to find a quick way to choose a great style to fork from Jekyll Sites directory at: https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/Sites

This is what I made:

1. get wiki page source
2. open textmate
3. replace all \* "([^"]+)":([^\s]+) with * !http://pinkyurl.com/i?url=$2&out-format=png&resize=640($1)! "$1":$2
4. preview html with ⌃⌥⌘P

Any better solution?
Backbone.js Fundamentals
two other possible solution:

- there are many advanced civilizations in our galaxy, and each tries to colonize whole galaxy, but it takes much longer than 100 million years. because of competition and other unknown reasons.

- colonization is not done as we taught, we are not experienced in planetary colonization.
7 Hacks for a Better Next Flight
Is there any supporting evidence for GNOME 3 being great for most people? My experience with it was so bad that I can't really imagine that being true. And it's much easier to find negative than positive comments about it on the net. Clearly the dislike isn't quite universal, but my impression is that it's the most hated "upgrade" ever.

Also, recommending the fallback mode as a solution is disingenous. At least performance doesn't suck as badly as with the real shell, and it's not totally alien to existing users. But it still has a number of totally ridiculous and gratuitous differences to both GNOME 2 and every existing UI I've ever seen. For example how could the way panels are configured make sense to anybody?

And if that's not enough, the word is that the fallback mode is going to get killed once performance without hardware acceleration is good enough. (And the bar for that has to be pretty damn low).
I'm utterly confused. I've never heard it pronounced like "lark". When/where has that been common?
That's only because we live in a world that's built around the principles of commerce and capitalism where activities are lubricated by money. There's no reason to expect that the same system exists in alien worlds.
It's one place Nest has to keep updated, not $BIGNUM.
Well... Someone always wins the lottery.

You can also twist it around: if we were the first ones, what would we see?

One can also imagine the window between the dawn of technology and becoming undetectable is short enough the odds of finding a peer are very small.
> For maximum impact: Google should disable all of its public facing web servers for a week.

That would be making a point that would be lost on a lot of people.

Their first and last thought would be: "What the hell is going on? I'm losing orders here and my packers are standing around drinking coffee."

You can tell people what you want them to think about, but you can't force them to think.
Ask HN: "HipHop" (compiling Ruby to C++) implementation for Ruby code?
As most of you know, PHP code could be compiled to C++ code with the help of "HipHop" and as a result becoming about 4 times faster.

I'm curious, what's the main obstacle that this technique hasn't been applied to Ruby (RoR) code?
Psd to html
Dear client, You have the masterpiece - your design, CreateMarkup has the knowledge and tools to convert it to a web-site using XHTML and HTML 5 standards.
"At that point, why bother exploring the universe?"

Greg Egan's novel Diaspora has significant number of people choosing to live in fully uploaded virtual environments - the problem being that you do have to start paying attention to the outside universe when it tries to kill you by destroying the hardware running your environment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28novel%29

Iain M Bank's Feersum Enjin covers some of the same ground:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn
Ugh. Thanks for pointing out my counting mistakes. Mea culpa.

Vowels: You're right, of course. My bet originated during lunch talks. My intuition (in other words: more stupid mistakes ahead, maybe..) says that by leaving out the vowels and overloading letters (b or v? f or p? u, o or v? etc. pp.) the language loses a lot of error correction margin [1] and leads to more collisions/a denser field of 'actual words' [2].

1: That refers to the ability of taking western languages and removing all vowels there. Or stripping out random letters etc. I'm certainly _far_ _far_ from an adapt reader here, so I'm musing about things that interest me although I lack the required experience.

2: Which leads to my 'Hebrew or not' idea. My gut says that randomly pounding the keyboard results a lot more often in 'real words'.

Not bashing hebrew. I even like the script by now (in the beginning hand-written text looked especially random to me).
Bodas malaga
tu boda en málaga españa
Philadelphia slip and fall lawyer
They fall under the legal category known as premises liability. When property owners fail to keep their buildings, parking lots and walkways safe and secure, they create a risk of injury. In some situations, landlords and property owners must maintain safety standards based on codes set forth by the local government.
Living a Microsoft lifestyle using Apple iOS products
Santa caught doing A/B testing of gifts
With "var" and shadowing you can still shoot yourself in the foot, it's just the other foot.

If you need global variables, it's sensible to just adopt a simple naming convention, like prepending g_ (or whatever pleases you) to all your variables. I already did that with plain JS and it's well worth the "effort".
jQuery nor coffeescript really imply "clean" client-side code, in fact I would argue that most uses of jQuery are the opposite if you compare communities like mootools. As far as coffeescript goes you still need a good sense of structure like regular javascript, nothing new there really.
Solar Paint
Bradley Manning's Mistakes: 7 critical privacy pitfalls and how to avoid them
Linux is a kernel. Your question could be rephrased as "We have Gnome 2, 3, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Unity, Cinnamon, Android, WebOS, ChromeOS. Has any of these any chance on the desktop market?" and become meaningful.

Right now, I don't even think PCs as we know them - where we manage locally stored data and applications rather than the curated experiences popularized by Apple - will be a meaningful chunk of the market.
That's true - if your program works like a conversation. That's not always the case ;) You can give all the needed context by updating the page when needed.
related to your start up and not this post, you should work on your introduction/explanation video on the home page. Just from a quick watch it has some problems, the lack of any script (or if you had one you didn't rehearse it) means time I am investing in watching your pitch to me as a potential customer is time spent watching you think and decide on what to do next. The video on your tour page (http://helpjuice.com/tour) isn't great, but it is much much better as an introduction video to your product.
Agreed. If "grandma" were to choose Ubuntu, she would have a good quality 140 page manual ready to download and dip into. See the Ubuntu-Manual project on launchpad for the Unity version (currently at alpha).

https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-manual/msg02859.html

Is there a comparable tome ready for Gnome Shell based workflows? I'd really like to find one.
I hope a linguist will chime in here, it's an interesting subject and I'm wondering if my guesses on the vowel-less nature of Hebrew are correct.

I'm not sure how much this will change your "random pounding on keyboard" idea, but English has a much larger vocabulary than Hebrew.

P.S. I see you're in Israel now, hope you're enjoying your time in Tel Aviv.
Wow, that is really impressive! Unfortunately, this means lots of work for the C preprocessor (and the C compiler, then) at compile time. But it's cool that it works this way at all.
I came to comment on that exact same question - so not only will VC's not sign confidentiality agreements, but they can ask something like this? I'm curious if there are instances of this happening?
Brain reading advance out of UCLA
No, the Javascript model is "you name things with `var`, you mutate things with `=`".

Python went for a more complicated scheme of having every variable in a function be a new binding when first assigned, and then it's just mutation (i.e. 'local'), unless explicitly declared to be nonlocal, but it still makes sense with their... penchant for mutable state.

And Coffescript instead went over to PHP to have some of the glue it was eating.
"I'm trying to minimise my risk by hedging my bets" sounds like a relatively straightforward answer.

Add a comment about how venture capital usually comes with advise and connections, and it's a perfect explanation.
One more thing: selling a house or other property is not the same as selling a company, which (probably) requires a certain amount of time to maintain in order to generate value. The time that affects the founder's commitment to the startup he is trying to fund.
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You are correct, but in that case it's not the question of what is easier, but what is necessary. "Easier" implies that there is a choice between comparable options, not that one is the prerequisite for the other.
> Given simple life forms, evolution shows progressive trends toward larger bodies, brains, and social complexity.

Evolution does not progress toward increased complexity. We have increased complexity mainly due to the Drunkard's Walk effect of random mutation in a space with a hard lower limit to complexity.
Is there any reason you aren't using Open XML rather then COM? http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5124

For files <100MB I found it much nicer to use then interop.
I'm in a similar situation. I graduated a few years ago from a good British university and got a first, but I frequently look back and wonder how I managed it.

I distinctly remember arriving and working hard for the first semester, I got 80-something percent in one course and 90+ in the other and had this awful realisation that I could glide through the first 2 years (of a 4 year program) where only a 50% passing grade was needed.

By the third year the courses did become much harder but only relatively. Whilst money doesn't seem the right way to restrict entry I do feel like they could have enforced higher entry standards, especially when I saw only ~30% of my fellow students make it to graduation.
So the right answer to that is "because you are a professional and honorable business man, and not a sleazy bastard". ;)
Infographic: If America Wrote Santa A Single Letter
"...an intelligent, exponentially-reproducing species could colonize the galaxy in just a few million years. " They could not be stuck in a self created virtual reality, an exponentially-reproducing society of aliens would be forced to move out from their home planet, and forced to send radio signals or communications. They could not have forgotten. Most likely they are just too far from us.
Star Trek:Deep Space 9 ?
I once read a great comment that when a VC asks "what would you do when Google enters your field", the best answer is "what would you do when Google enters yours"? http://www.googleventures.com/ ;)
Tel Aviv: My first winter wearing t-shirts. Cannot complain. :)

vowel-less: (I don't need to repeat the 'I suck at hebrew' disclaimer, right?) Kind of. From what I know:

There are no explicit letters for 'a', 'e'

You can represent an 'o' or an 'u' with a ו (otherwise used as consonant, 'v'). I know for a fact that words with 'o' can be written without a 'vowel' letter (לא for example: no). I don't know if 'u' is always represented as a letter of it's own.

'i' is often used as 'ij' or 'ji' and teams up with 'י = j' in that case. It can be represented without a letter just as well though.

Bottom line: Except for 'u' (no idea about that one? maybe just as well?) you can have all vowels 'hidden' in plain sight.

Would love to have someone from IL chime in here though and correct all my mistakes.
A point in my guess is that an old civilization won't be trying to use radio to communicate with us and will be using something better than radio we don't know about. Next, for communications over 1000 light years with just radio, there can be some issues of signal to noise ratio!

Sure, we can see a star 1000 light years away, a galaxy 1 billion light years away, and a quasar 10 billion light years away, but a signal from a planet over 1000 light years away? Besides, 1000 light years may not be far enough to cover many planets transmitting. Our galaxy is, what, 100,000 light years across? So, just for our galaxy, might want to think about distances of 50,000 light years or so. The nearest ordinary galaxy is the one in Andromeda, and that's about 1.5 million light years away.

Those are long distances for a radio signal from a planet.
"How is believing in your product an excuse for not trying to minimise risk. Especially if you know that most startups fail, there's no good reason not to hedge your bets."

Would you agree that this would not be a good answer even if it is the reason?

Some gentler ways to answer:

- Keeping my house gives me a feeling of security so I can devote all time and energy to the startup.

- My heavily mortgaged house is not nearly enough to fund the startup.

- Keeping my house is not unreasonable when I am already investing an enormous amount of my time and energy and my life into this.

- I might indeed sell my house but I don't think I'll need to. I feel that this startup is a great investment, and I think investors will agree.

Anyone got a better response?
Limited by the resolution to some extent though. Hi-res screens help a lot. With realistic text sizes on low res screens there is much less in it.
4kx4k pixels is a higher resolution than all but the most extreme gaming system can display (ignoring the fact textures are wrapped around 3d objects). So, I think the idea is 64KB chunks out of an arbitrary image that could in theory be 64 MB. AKA, you get to have 1,000 of those chunks for your 4kx4k image some of which are loaded into memory.
I would like to elaborate a bit on this. Currently, Hiphop supports 99% of the PHP 5.3 features. When we started working on Hiphop, less was supported.

Stuff like closures, eval(), create_function(), constants with dynamic names (e.g. defining constants from an array) and class destructors were all not supported. Some more subtle stuff: you cannot use current() to get the first element of an array in Hiphop, class_exists() always returns true.

We also had to port our custom PHP extensions.

Finally, we spend a lot of time on related stuff such as precompiling all Smarty templates (so that the generated PHP gets translated to C++ too), using Hiphop's daemon system and setting up compile, build and deploy systems.
That sounds like a very good mentor.
Yes, its not hard to find cases where evolution let to less complex forms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunicate
4 Quick Ways to Brighten the Smile
Smile is something that makes one look more beautiful and happy. It enhances the features and the muscles of the body. For a good smile the first and foremost thing is to have the Whiter Teeth. TheWhiter Teeth add confidence to an individual so that they can laugh in a more exciting way.
TBH i dislike those quirky names because they become fodder for popular media nonsense. Just like the way the "God particle" can be misunderstood for having something to do with religion.
In the US, for Web 2.0 projects, mostly can boil down to just one question: Do you have traction that is significantly high, say, over 100,000 unique visitors a month, and growing rapidly?
my high school american studies teacher would recommend stating "I firmly believe in the right of jury nullification" to get out of jury duty–he was of the opinion that jurors who voiced their awareness of this right were almost never selected. I'd be curious to know if this was actually true
I read English (my native language) and Chinese (my undergraduate major subject). I have been reading articles about reading speed of second-language speakers of Chinese since my first year of study of the language, back in the 1970s. There is a very strong impression among persons who read both languages that reading Chinese is faster, but the experimental finding, over and over over, is that for a given reliable level of comprehension, reading speed does NOT differ in a way that favors Chinese for most bilingual readers, whether their first language is Chinese or their first language is English.

The late John DeFrancis, who through his innovative textbooks was the first teacher of a whole generation of Americans who succeeded in acquiring Chinese as a second language, was a co-founder of the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, and author of a fascinating article titled "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese." The Chinese writing system (no matter which form of the spoken language, ancient or modern, it is applied to) is full of ambiguities and other partially cued information that slows down reading--as is every other writing system in the world. By dint of much practice, I can read Chinese comfortably for information on a variety of subjects. By test, I was one of the most proficient readers of Chinese among second-language learners who participated in the norming rounds for a Test of Chinese as a Second Language in the mid-1980s (which I think was never rolled out into regular use, perhaps because it showed that most learners learned more Chinese from overseas residence than from taking university courses in Chinese).

Hacker News readers who would like to learn about English, Chinese, or other writing systems would be well advised to read the specialized articles in The World's Writing Systems

http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/d...

edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. The article on Chinese is very good, and the overview articles that discuss general features of writing systems are also very good.
Those are excellent articles. I am going to add that when working with paper airplanes with cambered airfoils, (a hobby of mine), I have observed very interesting floor and ceiling effects which can only be attributed to vortexes.

I would add that real wings clearly rely on vortexes to fly, and that this is readily observable.
BlocksKit is a framework library for #iOS 4.0+ and #Mac OS X 10.6+
BlocksKit is a framework andr static library for iOS 4.0+ and Mac OS X 10.6+
6 Biggest International Stories for the Year 2011
Works well in Gnome 3 fallback mode.

Works well in unity as well, provided you get rid of the global menu which is fundamentally incompatible with FFM.
Top Mac apps of 2011