skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So basically facebook is what facebook was 7 years ago when you could click on a word in a profile and find out everyone else in your (college) network that also had that listed.

I'm glad they brought back functionality they removed forever ago.
My friend worked for EA Sports, so I trusted the information he provided, but I guess he was wrong. The marginal tax rates are 43% at 135k.

Yes, Vancouver has some tech companies, but I wouldn't call it anything like a tech hub like Ottawa or Toronto. Also, UBC and SFU do not have a strong tech program. I'm sure it's average compared to most cities, but you won't find the same amounts of tech people in Vancouver like you will in Seattle or Silicon Valley. In fact, I'd bet that most above average developers in Vancouver would move to a more tech-oriented city.

He also mentioned that the cost of housing in Vancouver is twice the amount of Seattle. Not sure how accurate that is either.
So the side you disagree with has no use for logic? There is definitely some 'starve the beast' mentality going on, and IMHO it's needed. Government spending is out of control, and taxes overall are too low. The problem is that both sides need to give in a lot if things are ever to be fixed. Neither will admit to any problem and just point fingers at the other.
> I received an invite was reluctant to signup because there is an "inactivity fee"

From their site: "After 180 days (6 months) of inactivity, we charge a $5 monthly fee to avoid escheatment,..."

I think if you were to switch to Simple it would be very rare to not use your card for 180 days, but that's just my 2 cents. But yeah, I wouldn't switch to only have an "extra account" that would eventually hit that 180 day inactivity time.
Given the title of the link, I approached the article with intent. I answered the question "What does the opening line do for me?" before continuing. Here are my results:

* It is straight forward and obviously relates to the title, giving me the impression "An article about writing by someone who may actually know about it".

* It piqued my curiosity: "Is 25 young to be doing this job?" "I bet this was formative... how so?" "WTF is rewrite editing?"

* It nicely sets a tone of "here's some experience for you to chew on" (and the rest of the article keeps it decently.

Note: my opening sentence is a poor mimicry of calinet6's opener and of TFA's opener. Seems I need some practice :)
The marketing value of a Facebook like just soared.

I feel like a Luddite for it incentivising me to remove stuff from a wall I want to be a place for actually interested friends to check out my photos and not a collection of metadata for marketers
I've been writing 'seriously' for about 17 years.

I think what the OP says is great advice. The list is especially useful for beginner writers, because it gives them a specific guide to follow.

I was taught the value of an introductory sentence and paragraph differently. I was told to simply "Be specific!" If you have a look at his dos, this simple phrase is put to use in all of them. The don'ts are the opposite: they're vague. I default to this be-specific phrase when I write.

Having said that, writing is such a tricky thing. All throughout my academic history, I've been taught the 'principles' of style only to have to unlearn half of them and adapt to a new 'standard'.

As a few people have written, context matters.

In the end (and in practice), you have to consider your audience, how much time you have to write (if it is your job, because there are hundreds of content mills), develop your own style (this itself is a trite/clichéd remark), but most importantly, have a reason to write that word or punctuation. This last concept is what I adhere to, which is why I only write short stories and poems. Novels are a completely different beast, though I am working on one slowly but surely.

I can read Shelley and Keats and love every expressed emotion. Most people will tell me, "But it's soooooo cheeeesy!" Damn right it is. So? What's your point? Context. Business writing is not creative writing is not poetry is not a short story is not a novel. Likewise, romanticism is not modernism is not postmodernism is not magical realism is not anything.

If you think about it, writing is a very depressing art form. It is one of few skills that has a low price tag in a society yet is valued by everyone. "Oh, he's a great writer! Found his book for cheap at a used bookstore! $1 for a classic!" The only writers that make a good chunk of change are the Stephanie Meyers or the sci-fi writers that pump out a book a month. Author mills. It is rumoured that it took Ezra Pound about six months to write a three-verse poem. Can people even tell the difference? Some say they can.

It's difficult to go in to an interview and act like I really know how to write. My use of grammar and style is poor. I edit a lot. Revise, revise, revise. It takes me an hour or more to write a short paragraph. It doesn't come naturally to me. The only thing I do better than others is spell correctly.

There is an ongoing joke that is repeated pseudosincerely: the worst thing you can do is take advice from a writer.

So what do I know.

PS: One of my favourite opening sentences comes from Camus's L'étranger:

Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. (Mother died today.)

This one is from Kafka's Der Prozess:

Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet. (Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.)
Usually talking about unpublished, constantly evolving algorithms in simplistic terms is a bad idea. The number of times people talk about Google PageRank in a discussion about "how Google works" is baffling because it's pretty obvious Google has a lot more going on behind the scenes than some simple algorithm in an academic paper.
It will not compete with my google searches, I usually search for wikipedia articles, homework questions, and programming tutorials/help... Seeing people with similar interest is cool but I already do that with meetup.com (very nice in Boston). I am just out of touch with most of facebook target audience? I guess so.
I got one - they may just be sending them out in batches.
You're not missing anything... that's it. Facebook CEO rolls out search feature.

While I do think that the feature is pretty interesting, I don't think it warrants reporters flying in from all over the country to cover the event. I'd be pretty upset right now if I flew in from a news organization NYC to cover this.
Facebook introduces graph search
Under the Hood: Building Graph Search Beta
You should upload the app somewhere and make it available. It seems very cool.
Have you ever considered that women are totally OK with just being a friend with someone and that the person who feels they are in the "friendzone" should just be OK with a friend relationship? The idea of the "friendzone" is so misogynistic, this idea that women do this to men as a form of punishment or gaming is ridiculous.

> Women are 10 fold better at determining who is interested in them. They are also loads better at determining who is congruent with the attitude/personality they're projecting. Women are also really good at hiding how they feel.

This is not true whatsoever. There is nothing inherent to gender to say that someone will be more socially aware than someone else.
XML seen in the wild rarely has good separation of attributes and values. It can be useful to distinguish data and metadata, but it’s more expressivity than perhaps most applications need.
To an extent I agree, however there is also the Title, so the opener can wander a bit from pure bluntness.
Apple stock hits a nine month low as rumors swirl and confidence falls
If you would have kept absolute links, you would know that every single one of your pictures is still there.
Did you do the same with your Instagram photos?

http://blog.instagram.com/post/38143346554/privacy-and-terms...
The example queries remind me of Prolog.
Mmmkay, so out of 3 ways to implement ranking:

1) Rank by popularity among all friends.

2) Rank by global number of check-ins.

3) Rank by a one-off friend's preferences.

You think (3) is the way something called GraphSearch works?
Generally you pay taxes where you do business, not where you are incorporated, so probably.
I would be torn too if people used my app, but I like this. Building your own app has it's limits. I built a facebook app to show mutual likes sorted by likes because facebook's pages browser only showed mutual likes sorted by friends. The FQL to do this is slow and unusable if someone has many hundreds of friends and likes. Plus, some friends don't allow apps to query their data, so the result is incomplete.

My feature request would be to allow us to create and share custom FQL and views computed and rendered by facebook. Then, friends don't have to give permission to apps to access their data and facebook runs the query faster.
Just because you can make money with open source doesn't mean it is a good business model.
I did half of your roundtrip. Grew up in the Bay Area, moved to Texas. Swore I'd end up moving back but seven years later I have absolutely no intention of doing so.
Unless you have certain melanin levels, in which case it is still a police state too.
Completely agree with this. I've used a few "The Idiot's Guide to..." for Java, Pre-Calc and they helped tremendously.
If you meant population, you should have said population. The phrase "postage-stamp-sized European countries" is pretty broadly understood and used to mean things like Andorra, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Montenegro, &c.

By no stretch of the imagination is interpreting a widely-used phrase as it's widely used "being intentionally obtuse."
This is an important step for Facebook and I'm surprised no one has really mentioned it (all ~50 comments so far are about the graph search).

The big thing here isn't graph search, or the fancy searching per se. The big thing here is this:

> "and meet new people, too."

This is huge. Huge!

Facebook from the start was envisioned as a sort-of dating platform but that part of it got swept under the rug real quick. Throughout Facebook's history meeting people with Facebook has been a slim thing. Typically it was always one way:

Meet in real life -> Add on facebook.

It's only a matter of time until Facebook tries to make it the other way around. It seems they're explicitly avoiding the "dating" route, which may or may not be wise (dating sides have some weird connotations among some groups of people). It looks like they've finally found their solution.

The amazing thing here isn't Graph. It's that Facebook is going to change its paradigm so that meeting new people is a viable goal of going on Facebook.

So eventually we'll be meeting people through Facebook, starting with meetup.com style interests. That's big.
"so how much worse can Mexico be?"

That's sarcasm right?

Mexico: 3rd highest number of murders in the world (only India and Brazil are worse). Nearly 5x the murder rate in the US - nearly 2x the total number of murders.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
I've never even had an Instagram account so I am safe there.
> For guys it is viable to be easy to get with and spread your genes about. For women, each child represents a huge resources cost. Therefore very high levels of pickiness and making men go through trials and tests and rejections is the best method for them to make the best choice. Evolution doesn't care about your feelings. If a woman has to throw a dozen good men into the friend zone along with another hundred just to get one good one, then that is the best method from an evolution standpoint, and that's what will become the genetically preferred behavior.

This line of though for evolutionary biology is generally rejected and has no factual basis.

> I think it makes sense that women are built from an evolutionary perspective to be picky, misleading, tough to successfully engage with, test out a guy and dump him later, etc.

The majority of people will date many partners and most relationships end in a breakup. This isn't special to any particular gender.
I think this would simplify implementing a load-balancing proxy in some ways. If a server responds with a 503 generated by node-toobusy, the load balancer will know immediately to reroute the request to another server, rather than having to wait for a timeout or some other threshold.
Pretty awesome that Facebook could pull this off so quickly. I literally said that exact line to Lars (who lead the search team) during our meetings last year... I can't believe he reused verbatim in the video:

"Facebook is for the all the people you know... Ark is for all the people you should know".
Some of the examples in the promo videos are pretty far-fetched. I mean, does anyone really give Facebook any information about which dentist he or she goes to? I've never even seen a post from someone talking about going to the dentist, let alone including the dentist's actual name!
If anyone would like an invitation to Simple, please shoot me an email via my profile, with a brief explanation as to why you might enjoy it =)

I get a few invitations every once and a while (have 3 currently) and would love to give them to people who would truly like to use this awesome bank.
We’re Writing a Book
Aaron Swartz - remembering a freedom fighter
"To my knowledge I don't know anyone who picks up novels, reads the first few sentences, then throws them away. Maybe people do this in airport bookstores, but I don't think Orwell, Ray Bradbury, or Kafka wrote with the ADHD audience in mind."

Browsing is (was?) incredibly common in the bookstore era, and will become even more so in the modern era and beyond. Especially as digital sampling becomes more prevalent, and as the barrier to entry (price) comes down significantly. If anything, we'll see even more buy-and-then-browse behavior. And for what it's worth, book returns were prevalent in the heyday of the B&M bookstore, and they're a significant factor in Amazon's business to this day. (In fact, I'm willing to wager that quite a few people, even the highly literate ones, haven't read the majority of the books sitting on their shelves.)

Regardless, I'm not talking about the opening line as a sales proposition. I'm talking about the opening line as a gambit to get someone to keep reading when they first pick up the piece. How many times have you bought a book, or picked up a magazine, or clicked open a blog post, and simply lost interest after the opening paragraph? I'm not saying you immediately regret picking it up, but rather, that you think to yourself "Meh, I'll skip this one and read something else. Maybe I'll come back to it later." This behavior is pretty common, and by nature, the human attention span in limited. In no way am I talking about the "ADHD audience" here. I'm talking about basic human wiring.

As for Kafka, Orwell, et al., bear in mind that their initial audience was a reader at a publishing house, journal, or newspaper. Oftentimes, your first target reader is the one who decides whether or not to publish you in the first place. This person reads thousands of pieces a week, and getting his or her attention has been a crucial task since the invention of the printing press.
>>sad and unfortunate fact that we are wasting time on silly petitions that single out individuals rather than
>>investing all that time and effort into changing the laws

Please elaborate on your track record in "investing time and effort into changing laws".
Let these silly 30,000+ petition voters to learn from an expert.
A joke, I believe: melt vs. blend
Let's Celebrate The Atlantic, Not Chastise Them
How to Use Spring with Data Aware Monitoring for Cost and SLA Management
Yeah, I agree the branding is odd. To most people, graph still means a dimly remembered plot of sin(x) rather than, you know, a network.

Of course OpenGraph wasn't either open or a graph, but then that was a developer product.
we're excited to bring this concept to Boston, and to improve upon it! We're committed to working with local companies, and to providing our graduates with continued mentorship after the duration of the program. If there's any more information I can provide, I'd be happy to!
> The scale of the pickiness is the problem. I don't mind women being picky locally, but when they spread rumors and attempt to destroy a guys reputation amongst large networks... thats the problem.

Anyone can be as picky as they want for an intimate partner, to suggest that someone lower their standards to please someone else is really offensive. Also, rumors are a totally legit form of social defense, even if rumors can have downsides, but the solution to that isn't less talking and lowered standards.
Even though getting officials fired is not your preferred method to help jumpstart reform there are no reasons for you to discourage others of doing so.

If you think you have a better axis of attack on this problem, I beg you, please lead an effort on that axis.

If we waited for a consensus on the best manner to proceed before doing anything, noting would ever get done.

To make a comparison relevant to this community, imagine that HN was used to shame others starting businesses that don't use the best consensus methods or ideas. How many good startups would never see the day?

With startups, more than 90% of attempts fail. I'm pretty sure that attempts at changing the system don't have better odds. If we reduce the efforts to a single attempt, there is 90% chances it will fail.

Also, consider that special interests have probably built legal and political walls in the most obvious paths of change. It's worth trying all fronts to find a weakness especially the newer little known ones.
Planet Earth Abandons Death Star Project
Magic? Most likely not...

"The competition to attract the most desirable mates is ferocious. Consequently, those most valuable are perpetually in short supply compared to the many who desire them. People who are themselves high in mate value succeed in attracting the most desirable partners. In the crude informal American metric, the 9s and 10s pair off with other 9s and 10s. And with decreasing value from the 8s to the 1s, people must lower their mating sights commensurately. Failure to do so produces a higher probability of rejection and psychological anguish. ..." [1]

[1] http://edge.org/response-detail/23862
True now, but it wasn't true a year ago when I installed Windows 7.
Better account planning (with Safe-to-Spend + goals), excellent UI, instant report generation using searches, humongous network of free ATMs.

The inactivity fee takes a long time to kick in--we're talking a year of not posting any transactions to your account. Their customer support is very open about it.
> Let's just ignore the fact that MS has a development centre in Vancouver

Wow, MS centre! It will save us all. And they don't have MS centers anywhere else, right? Vancouver here.

* All of Canada has as many my profile job openings as Seattle.

* Salaries are lower here than there.

* Taxes are higher here than there.

* Prices are higher here than there.

* Selection of everything is miserable here.

* It's impossible to have a career if you can't talk hockey for 2 hours. Nobody gives a f$%k about your abilities - you must be "one of us".

> How's your health care?

Pathetic, thank you. I just waited 4 months for an ultrasound. They said everything was OK - but why then would I have insisted on it in the first place?

> BC starts to become very, very attractive

Do you have a house for sale? Because it sure sounds like it. BC does not start to become very, very attractive to anyone ambitious and able - and these guys will go to US for the same reason that all ambitious and able Canadians move to US.

There are M.D. taxi drivers and Ph.D. WalMart cashiers here - because their names are Davinder and Reza rather than Sean and Tim.

No doubt, BC is a great place for natural resources barons, drug traffickers, porn and gambling shops, and bribe-happy Party officials from China. It's extremely neophobic, hypocritical and hostile to changes.

YMMV
30,251 right now.
My parents have fallen for this sort of thing within days of getting a new computer. It's so hard to get rid of and it made them feel like they were downloading viruses when they were really downloading legitimate software. It's a shame you've ended up having to do stuff like this when you are performing what should be, totally secure installs.
Mainly because of plea bargaining.

"Fewer than 10 percent of the criminal cases brought by the
federal government each year are actually tried before
juries with all of the accompanying procedural safeguards
noted above. More than 90% of the criminal cases in America
are never tried, much less proven, to juries. The
overwhelming majority of individuals who are accused of
crime forgo their constitutional rights and plead guilty."[1]

From what I've read elsewhere, of the 10% or so that do go to trial, something like 9 times out of 10 the verdict is guilty. Given that a federal criminal trial takes $1.5 million to defend and that the prosecutor has all the weight and resources of the federal government behind then and the citizen has to rely on his own financial resources (which are likely to be frozen if they are well-heeled defendants), then that rate of conviction isn't surprising in the least. Federal criminal cases are totally asymmetric in favor of the federal government. As citizens, we always complain of well funded people prevailing in civil and criminal cases because of the money they have to defend themselves, but we ignore the well funded prosecution that US district attorneys have that allow them to consistently find people guilty who may not be.

[1] http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regul...
Also note that for any thing that relies heavily on art assets, specifically games, open source is largely irrelevant.
Apple Stock Slide Could Cost It the Market Cap Lead
Sir, I've worked on/off with Project Gutenberg for over 12 years (since I was 18). I've mailed thousands of CDs/DVDs full of PG's library to people in thirdwave world countries, and I've also reviewed hundreds of books, on my own time and for no compensation, for their Distributed Proofreaders project (http://www.pgdp.net/c/).

No, I have not tried to digitize old journals. But I HAVE helped contribute to the digitization and distribution of public domain works. I'm aware of the time and financial resource commitments involved.
"Perhaps defined-benefit retirement plans should not be in the public sector" - that's not an opinion, that's an idea. Not a good idea, either.
Very cool! Can't say much else until I try it. I have a large number of conservative friends who have enabled every privacy setting and provide minimal meta-data, so I already know it won't be as the PR video depicts.

Anyway, This reminds me of of the Google+ search by www.findpeopleonplus.com
I'm quite receptive to the argument that connectedness is causing things to look worse even as they get more open, and this does apply to a few of my stated points. But it's a huge leap of faith to go from there to insisting that this implies progress, or even just non-deterioration, across the board. For example, what kind of process dictates the quantity of federal government employees?
"You don't like popups? I'll bet they know that."

Knowing is not caring.
The first time I read the sentence I misread it, giggled like a school boy, and quickly replied to the post tongue-in-cheek.

However, HN did not appreciate the joke, and to be honest it was rather inane. I should try to remember that puerile humour belongs on Reddit and not HN.
It stretches the definition of equivalent but folks interested in an open-source version of the Mathematica language should see or contribute to http://www.mathics.org/
A new kind of checking account. No overdraft fees. No worries.
No, but influence certainly is.