skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Are you telling me it's unfair to refer to an authoritative source as to the meaning of a word?

Unfair, no. A sign that the argument is weak, yes. Particularly in this case.

Also, use is meaning. Dictionaries are authoritative only in the sense that they capture current use at the time of publication. Even in that case, they're often lacking in some word senses and/or connotation because they don't exist in the writer's dialect.

>By defining Farmville as a "game", you could just as easily define twiddling numbers on an Excel sheet as a "game".

Are you twiddling the numbers as a form of play? Then yes, that'd be a game according to the definition given above. Games don't need to be challenging, or even all that entertaining.
so she's only 1 in 1000?
What is your biggest challenge with web forms?
I've started to interview people about web form builders services and only 1 of 10 wants to use online services.

Why don't you use online services like wufoo or formstack?

What is your biggest challenge with web forms?
Why aren't they using something like this?

http://www.wombat-voting.com
They're trying to "troll" them for abusing their search monopoly to promote their services- but unfortunately they can't prove it at the moment.

They went after Microsoft for similar reasons- they were using their operating system (Windows) to push other products (like Internet Explorer), which limited competition and hurt consumers. Now Google is integrating Google Plus into their search, and ignoring sources like Facebook and Twitter for that same positioning. It's pretty clear cut to me why they're doing that.

The other issue here is that the author of this article is the one making this connection, and adding his own thoughts about it. No one from the FTC is saying they're trying this second path because the first one didn't work- in fact, if you follow the links from this linkbait blog post, you'll see that he's filling in a hell of a lot of blanks himself. The FTC is still pursuing the original issue, they're just also going after this second complaint at the request of Microsoft and Apple (amongst others), who think paying 4 billion dollars to add wifi to their phones is a bit ridiculous.
Also, Kraft probably wholesales half the store brand stuff to Publix.
A reasonable article, however they do not use the term "subject" correctly. The subject of their example is not just "the smallest", but all of the following modifiers (adjectives and relative clauses). From "the smallest" to "subunit 6 gene" is all one noun phrase, albeit a complex one.

The appropriate advice is therefore to have short subject phrases.
Heart attacks in young people (under 35) are rarely related to smoking or high cholesterol (unless accompanied by morbid obesitas) and more often undiagnosed heart or congenital issues (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, et al.), related to drug abuse (cocaine, weight loss drugs) and/or eating disorders (bulimia).

Memento mori, carpe diem, but know that your chances of being struck with heart attacks at a young age are very slim. If it runs in your family, get a screening, but other than that, don't worry too much.
Cool, awesome.
OTOH, if you're in a mode of operation where you're interacting with data directly with any regularity, SQL syntax is a massive improvement over MongoDB's JS DSL.
>Those systems are extremeley limited in terms of coverage relative to Metro North/LIRR in NYC or Metra in Chicago. A huge amount of the residential development in northern VA is out in Fairfax County, and that area is just now getting a Metro line. Moreover, the metro stops in Vienna, Fairfax, etc, are god-awful. They're built in the middle of the woods so you have to drive to them. A sensible rail system needs to have high density development around the station.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here?

The DC area systems are pretty young relative to the ones you're comparing it them to. The NY subway has been around since 1904. The DC Metro broke ground in 1969 and opened 1976. This is significantly different from systems like Metra or NJT which subsumed existing commercial tracks.

How densely populated will Fairfax be in 2084?

DC versus wherever else was never my point though. It's about people with cars who choose to brave some of the worst traffic in the country rather than driving the local Metro station and zipping on in.

Personally, driving all the way downtown takes about 1:15, taking the Metro is 12 minute drive to the station followed by a 35 minute train ride which I can spend reading to within a block of my workplace.

>Meanwhile, Metro North, LIRR, and NJT go pretty much anywhere people live in Westchester, Long Island, or NJ. And the train stations are all approachable on foot. I walk 4 minutes from a 40 story high-rise in Westchester to the train station. That's 4 minutes from getting on my elevator to being on the platform.

That's great. Plenty of people who ride the DC Metro have the same experience, there are 85 stations.

How many of those approachable train stations have 3500+ parking spaces or are served by 50+ buses?

Apples to oranges.

They're different systems serving different geography at different points in their development - any of which is surely better than driving.
I wish the article said more. It is hard not to see anything 140 characters or less as fair use.
Because the problem isn't tallying the votes; it's that a sizable chunk of the electorate is displaced due to the storm and can't get to their polling places.
Ask HN: Name that website
I seem to remember a story on HN a while back about a website that I really wish I book marked. Can you help me find it again?

The site allowed you to send random gifts to a friend of yours for as little as a dollar per day. You would sign up and say where you wanted the items shipped, then, with however much money you chose to spend per day, the site would choose a gift in that price range and send it. Does that sound familiar to anyone?

I've been trying to track it down because I know a few people who would get a kick out of a gift like that, but my googling skills aren't what they used to be, or so it seems.

Thank you so much!
Rodzinny Interes-Śmieszna Fotka
Whee my username is in there as a PHP file
Google is not allowed to search tweets and Facebook posts. Twitter and Microsoft do not allow Google to do that and they both made an exclusive deal with Bing.
I grew up in Singapore and went through the education system there before moving to North America at 16. Singapore isn't really the "education heaven" that it is made out to be.

The biggest different I would say is that Singapore education churns out book-smart students. These are the people who are best at following instructions, steps, and established methods. We're very good at following and reinforcing the paths well trod.

Coming to North America, while I did far better than my peers in strict academic settings, they would constantly do better in things such as dealing with people, creative activities etc. People here have a better sense of adventure and are willing to challenge themselves/the status quo to experience the world.
Assume yahoo has a better finance website than Google. Then ponder the results for these queries:

AAPL

Finance

Finance website

And then articulate what is wrong with Google's results.
I thought IE was supposed to be bad...
Your dropdowns are being hidden by the video player. To fix this you need to

1. set the `wmode` on the embed to `opaque`, though this disables some optimizations and thus takes up more CPU

2. hide the video while drop downs are active

3. (probably best) move the drop-downs to where they don't overlap with the video
> It makes me wonder what they could do to, say, maybe a politically charged children's book?

Seriously? You undermine your own argument with that comment.

If the CPSC is doing its job well it will react towards gadgets that are within its domain and statistically shown to be dangerous. Regardless of how you feel about this agency's actual mission, that is a good design to keep them from eventually trying to keep you from reading Mein Kampf or Lady Chatterley's Lover or something. (if you're in the United States you also benefit from the first amendment...)

> It doesn't take the harmful objects out of the market, so why set this precedent?

This also strikes me as a really myopic thing to say. Do you really think that eliminating an item from the toy store shelves and relegating it to scientific supply shops is not going to effectively remove it from kids grasp? The obvious counterexample is the chemistry sets of yesteryear.

(it's worse than that: those shops won't finish the magnets in the user-friendly way that these guys did. that was their innovation.)

> What makes this ruling more egregious than any other that comes to mind is that it seems to have been made selectively and without good reason.

Again, very disingenuous. Kids were getting hurt, it's not like the CPSC was making that up. "Good reason" is obviously subjective but the important thing is that it wasn't arbitrary: accidents involving children requiring abdominal surgery are something approximately 100% of us can agree shouldn't happen, regardless of the cause.
It's all about the SSDs
No, it probably doesn't matter. Voters are only allowed to cast ballots via email if they've been displaced by the storm (or are a first responder on-site mitigating storm damage), and must request a ballot from their precinct to vote via email. The number of people who will cast these ballots will probably be way below the margin, and all of them will be traceable in the event of a close election or recount.
one problem is that when last-lousy-point fraud is used to tip a tight election one way rather than the other, the election has now provably gone to the party that was willing to win it by unethical means.
This is hilarious. This is one of those "in the right place at the right time" things. Vandalism like that usually only is up for a few minutes, apparently the same few minutes when DuckDuckGo was crawling that page. Amazing.
Do some white hat SEO.

Google.com/webmaster
Excellent article, full of excellent thoughts and ideas. I hope it'll remain frontpage material to clear some misrepresentations.

"Heard Yeezy was racist, well, I guess that’s on one basis, I only like green faces."

I guess I'm like Kanye then: I'm green-biased, because in the end, that's the only thing that matter - profits :-)

"Underrepresentation does not equal racism" is also a great idea to cite - who cares about one's representation?

Profits are what matters. Is there a white resentment about having too few white players in the NBA? As long as they are good and get well paid, who cares?
I don't know why they bother putting 'Mystery' in the headline.

http://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=obama,%20romney

Surprise, the incumbent president is far more popular than the challenger, in terms of historic searches. There's no mystery, this is somewhere between a fluff political piece and an advertisement for Google's new search tech.

Come on WSJ, you can do better.

edit: A bigger mystery; does anyone know why these searches are more popular in Africa than the United States? The top five countries for Obama searches are:

1) Burundi
2) Guinea
3) Rwanda
4) Sierra Leone
5) United States

Meanwhile, Romney is pretty much only relevant in the US.
How IT bosses turned the tables on our cushy consultancy gigs
The comparison makes sense when you see that while cigarrettes have caused millions of deaths and continue to cause cancer worldwide we consider a simple warning sufficient, yet when encountered with 500 emergency visits a larger warning label isn't sufficient? I don't see how it's the company's fault if there's a big label and yet the parents still "don't bat an eye" when their child swallows a magnet. I'm simply trying to point out the dichotomy and the uneven enforcement of regulation that is supposedly there to protect us.

Furthermore, as I stated in my previous comment, I believe the mere existence of the CPSC is a threat against my civil liberties. Thus, I also believe the ban against lawn darts was incorrect. The only reason you're probably hearing about it now is because we are now only having the opportunity to discuss it, not because they pushed back on a "nerd toy"[1].

I understand what the CPSC is trying to do, and I'm not decrying the goal of trying to protect children. I'm also not trying to tie some conspiracy together here, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

This seems like needless, overarching legislation that opens the door for abuse, and when couched in the "Save The Children" argument it sends off a lot of warning bells in my head that I don't think deserve to be ignored.

[1] Really? "Nerd toy"? You do realize your audience here... correct?
Cached from when it last crawled the page.
I'm no fan of Mensa, but there's one thing that I don't understand in this article - if the test was for non-English speakers and it contained pictures of animals, why was one of the possible answers that popped into the author's head "sheep - because it has five letters". That's language-specific, and should not be regarded as a valid answer in a language-neutral test. But the point is, it seems to me that the author is trying to find holes in the test. Of course that "hen" is not the only possible answer. As the author suggested, meat of pigs, for example, is not kosher. We can find things that differentiate any one of those animals from the rest. In any set, you can find some property of any object that will differentiate it from the rest. But that's not the point, is it? The point is to find the most obvious answer. The same goes for sequences of numbers. Yes, you can continue a sequence of numbers with any number that you like, and your answer will be perfectly valid. But the point is to find the most obvious one.
For eu countries just make sure that your uk subsidiary is an interested party /effected by the crime and eu arrest warrants are easy to get.
There's a difference between identifying risks and forcing people to act risk averse.

I'm all for the government continuing to act as a consumer's advocate, as they should be. However I do not feel comfortable when the government makes these decisions for me.
I know the person he's talking about in this article, he's an old friend of mine from primary school, he's only a little bit younger than me. It was a shock to everyone. He was incredibly fit, in the prime of his life and everything.

I'm on the other side of the world from him now, but it was still a bit of a wake-up call. Inspired me to go travelling, something I'd been putting off for ages.
If you use GCal: try this FourSquare combo we hacked together: https://www.google.com/calendar/render?tab=mc&gadgeturl=...
Assuming you include Russian Jews, you get a lot of successful Russians doing tech stuff in the world -- just in other countries than Russia. Israel, the US, etc. have Russian Jewish populations who are incredibly successful in tech.
The perception of offering charging for any type of access to your apartment enhanced or not would be perceived negatively. Consider an apartment where the landlord charged you $1 every time you want to use the elevator, but you can always walk up the stairs. While one might be an enhanced way, I think people would still view it as the landlord double dipping. I think this product is much more suited to be a promotional feature subsidized by an outside delivery company (pizza joint) or the landlord to show off fancy bells and whistles in his building to entice new renters.
I am not questioning your integrity (I've been a long time admirer of you on HN, and always found you to be fair and intelligent), however, I don't believe those statistics are correct. Can you point me towards your sources?

You still have not responded to my question about balloons. Do you feel they should receive a similar ban? By your logic it seems like they should. They seem to be, at the very least, somewhat dangerous for children (and certainly more dangerous than they appear).

I would never want to earn a living at the expense of children's lives. We are not bad people. But I honestly do not believe that Buckyballs are as dangerous as they are being made out to be. In addition, I see no reason why a product such as Buckyballs should be uniformly banned when there are millions of responsible adults who enjoy them safely and appropriately. There are no children in my household, and if a child is going to come visit, I make sure there is nothing around that could possibly harm them. I would put alway bottles of liquor, cover power outlets, make sure there are no lighters on the coffee table, and ensure that no buckyballs are within reach. I believe that responsible adults, with appropriate warnings and instructions, should be able to enjoy adult-only products within their home. If I had a toddler running around I would absolutely not have buckyballs in my home.

There is no substitute for proper and attentive parenting. All the bans in the world are not going to save a child who is left to roam around swallowing anything they come across.
Can't reach the site since it's down but another site that I've used and recommend is http://sqlfiddle.com/. Supports several DBMSes
In the Netherlands, we already have trams with facial recognition cameras: http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2011/09/facial_recogni...
563km for any wondering.
There was an app on SharkTank that basically offered all these features.
> Is Office even necessary anymore?

I still keep a print-out of a requirements document on my desk that our windows-running QA person printed for me, because there is nothing else in our office that'll display it properly. Office for Mac, Google Docs, LibreOffice, etc - all display revision garbage mixed in with content, outdated text, etc.

I could ask the client to re-send the document without tracking information, or converted to a PDF, but due to their various chain o' command issues, it would probably take a week.

So yes, Office is still necessary, at least in our case.
This is an actually interesting topic (i.e., that Google personalizes search) that is spun in a political context to generate pageviews. In the spin, the interesting element is actually lost, because after introducing the topic, the journalist digs no deeper and gives the audience no greater insight than what they might derive from a better-written headline.

The fact that personalized search applies to political topics is unsurprising and probably reflects that Google is data-driven. The fact that Romney doesn't trigger the same personalization as Obama probably reflects that, until recently, his name was virtually never searched for (relatively).[1]

By introducing Mr. Weinberg, the author gives us hope that we will learn something about the nature of personalized search and its implications, but I think that HNers would be much more satisfied to re-read his blog entries on the topic.[2]

[1] = http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney&...

[2] = http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/08/how-do-you-compl...
So is this the part where you engage with criticism, as the worst that will happen is fanning the flames of controversy which just drives more attention? But I'm not saying that your comment isn't in earnest either - you're wishing to figure out how to categorically make spam look like not spam, as your startup is based on making it easy for people to spam their friends and associates, and so is highly vulnerable to the social repercussions of bad first impressions.

A simple and easy first step to making your site seem less spammy would be to register a whole bunch of different domains composed of relevant keywords. These can be used to mitigate being banned from link aggregator sites and to delay users noticing the pattern. Markov chain generated text surrounding the links would do wonders on the less savvy users, too. I'm sure there are plenty more of such tips if you hang out in the right forums.

What you fail to realize is that credibility has been destroyed by each and every detail of the situation. The earnest blog that has the occasional spammy referral post can be mostly forgiven (although the users that upvote it shouldn't be), as it's clear that the writer has a life purpose besides referral links. I see no such redeeming qualities here.

"Should know better" refers to the fact that you present yourself as part of the tech community, while simultaneously disrespecting the general consensus on spam. Although maybe it's just that the shark that was jumped has died of old age.

Oh, I just remembered it's Sunday - I've got to go do a bit of sanitation hacking.
That's actually not true. Here's the past 90 days in the US for Obama (blue), Romney (red) and taxes (yellow): http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama,+romney,+taxes&...

If you restrict to just US news searches (as many of the inserted results are newsy), it is similar: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney%2C%...

Actually a lot of election-related queries, most of which searched less than Romney and Obama transform results in this manner, e.g. social security, health care, abortion, taxes, ohio, election and many others. Just not Romney: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=romney%2C%20social%20...
Pretty sure Google's long published webmaster guide discouraged that domain name years ago.
> who have every interest in making the higher cost phones more attractive by not updating the Android version on lower cost phones

You'd be better to attribute that to them being under-resourced to deliver software updates to all models of phones immediately. They focus on shipping to the high end phones first -- those customers have paid more for that support. Some low end devices just never get to the top of the priority list.

If you want upgrades, buy the best phone you can. If you are buying low end, you have to realise that it's essentially locked to the version that it ships with.

That's my take on it anyway. I don't have any inside information.
Example of a bad google page that ranks high in search?
The CPSC doesn't ban cigarettes for the same reason it doesn't ban firearms: they aren't marketed as toys. Like I've said: the CPSC actually isn't "banning" small round shiny rare earth magnets, either; it's only banning their marketing as toys.
First, note I'm not endorsing the Bell Curve, but exploring the implications.

There isn't a consensus on sex-linked differences in IQ, but none of the realistic studies show anything close to a 1+ SD shift. You see results like a 0.33 SD shift or a 1 point narrower standard deviation. What you see on the SAT Math is a 0.3 shift in mean and a slightly narrower SD.

Also, as a practical matter, engineering is not a profession of people 2SD+ above the mean. It ranges from Texas Tech to MIT. Typical IQ's for engineers are estimated around 110-120. If we look at SAT Math scores, 600+ would be a reasonable estimate. At the ~600 level, there are about the same number of males and females, with the gap growing to about 30% females in the perfect-800 pool (3SD above the mean). In other words the observed disparities far outstrip what would be expected from standardized test scores. Even taking the studies more favorable to the aptitude argument, you'd have to have engineers at 150+ before the observed male-female ratio was consistent with what would be expected based on IQ scores alone (5:1).

And of course, this assumes the only relevant measure of engineering aptitude is SAT Math performance or IQ. In that sense it's probably an upper bound for the measure of engineering aptitude.
Recent reports show IE gaining and FF dropping.