skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I'm in school now, I have to go back in the Fall, and I have no cash. I applied to YC with some friends, but I'm afraid our ideas weren't as polished - we applied pretty late, and got rejected. I still think they are viable ideas, and I'd love to build them, if I had the funds to do so.

In the meantime, I'd like to spend the summer gaining some experience, and hopefully saving up a little.
Maybe, but you're also forgetting that the one child policy means children are even more prized. Immigration makes more immediate sense.
There is a long Chinese cultural preoccupation with having legitimate descendants who will carry on the clan line (that is, have the same surname as the father). This is expressed in Shang era bronzes from almost 3,000 years ago that I have seen in museums. The inscriptions on the cast bronze objects, which were often given as rewards to faithful subjects who achieved glory in battle or the like, include expressions of a wish to have children and grandchildren for countless generations.

The common saying is

不孝有三，無後為大

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%8D%E5%AD%9D%E6%9C%89%E4...

indicating that the very worst way that a child can be disobedient to a parent is to not give the parent descendants.
This imbalance is very common around the world. I don't understand why the press gets so anxious about it re: China. India has a similar surplus, like 20 million extra boys in the 0-14 range.

In places like South America there is often an imbalance favoring males before age 15 which shifts over to females from age 20 onwards. It doesn't mean war or revolution -- just a lot of urban violence and early deaths of males as they compete for mates. It's not pretty but neither is it a dire international problem.
I've heard that this had lead to an increase in human trafficking, namely women in poorer countries like North Korea being "imported" and taken as brides.
I think the headline is misleading. It's not that devs are being blinded by the iPhone, it's just that it significantly raises expectations for what the "Develop and Sell a Mobile Application" experience should be like.
Little Puzzle: Permutations and Derangements
"Many are useless, like "Omit needless words.""

Useless as instructions, perhaps, but highly useful as mantras. Much of writing is editing/refactoring, in which case it's great to repeat to yourself "omit needless words", "Be clear", and "Do not explain too much" as you do it.
Add to that a customer base that actually buys apps. How many other cell-phone platforms have a customer base that buys anything more than ringtones?
ok corrected. thanks.
Mathematical Test: Rationality vs Altruism
I came across this interesting article on (mathematical) Game Theory. The most thought-provoking section is at the end of the article, where it describes the "Centipede Game". It is interesting because the logical and rational strategy for playing the "game" leads to modest gains for the players, but an irrational or "altruistic" style of play is more common among human players and can often lead to large gains for some players ( http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/rationality.html )
My take: the suggestion that anybody should be pursuing nuclear weapons to solve socioeconomic issues.
Yeah, I don't know, but I'm being serious. Vietnam and China are ancient enemies, and Vietnam is the likeliest source of stolen brides. A few h-bombs, pursued for the exact same defensive reason that France and the UK had, could prevent demographic dislocations, between wildly disparate world powers.
Is "Diamond Supply Company" a brand a skateboarder would recognize?

yes
I don't think so. My assumption is that Joe is predictable by a mathematical equation. I find that this is only true of certain people and only true in certain circumstances.

People, in general, operate the opposite of computers. We don't think about what we should do, we think about we shouldn't do. So, it is very hard, if not impossible, to represent human behavior by a mathematical system.

This argument is explored in great detail in the book: Godel, Escher, Bach.
A billion apps downloaded, a billion dollars paid to developers.

Developers want money and fame and the iPhone provides both.

Easily.
We used iUI for our iPhone (and Android) versions, and it worked very well, and was really easy to apply to an existing web application (an old-fashioned non-AJAXy one at that).
I hear a lot of people pointing to the Economist as the example of what newspapers should do. That's fine, I agree that would be a good thing.

But please don't point to Newsweek. The traditional U.S. news-weekly is dying almost as quickly as metro newspapers.

What's the difference between Newsweek and the Economist?

Point of view and voice. That's really what this is about. The Economist has a point of view and takes sides on the issues it covers. It will always side with open markets and capitalism. That's its POV.

What does Newsweek stand for? U.S. News and World Report? Time?

So yes, weekly could be a good approach, but really, the problem is a lack of voice and POV.

Also, I used to buy the line that while the big dailies were struggling, the weekly neighborhood papers in U.S. cities were doing ok. That's been said by a lot of people with access to good data.

And yet here in Chicago the family-owned business that published 5 weekly neighborhood papers recently folded one and sold off two for a song to a husband-wife business that's turning them into newsletters. So there's some struggling going on there, too.
My step-mother was Chinese, and came from a very large family, with very strong family values. That was usual. They also ran a very successful business. Also usual. Fukuyama's "Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity" confirmed that large Chinese families work well as the basis of a business (but larger scales can be problematic).

It was only when a 24yo postgrad from China moved into my sharehouse that the changes to China hit home to me: due to the one-child policy, she was an only child, and she was the focus of her parents, and all her grandparents. Although a sweet girl, she was also startlingly childish and selfish. That's just one anecdote. But only children do have a tendency to be spoiled (I was an only child myself, and I was certainly spoiled).

These two experiences illustrated for me the fundamental change that is transforming China - from family to individual. I think this consequence of the one-child policy is far more significant than the gender imbalance. What will it mean?

(I apologize if I've offended anyone with this sensitive topic; it's not my intention. I'm connecting some of my own meaningful experiences with large scale changes, and I welcome refutation/refinement.)
Arduino microcontroller and Ruby to display song lyrics
Read the comments on the first link, it's a fake.
> That kind of disrespect beckons retaliation of some kind.

Not for everyone it doesn't. It's highly dependent on culture, and it's personal too. When 37 signals criticized Get Satisfaction, Get Satisfaction replied with grace, and addressed the points raised by 37 Signals. Of course it wasn't perfect, but it certainly didn't fall in the camp of retaliation.
that such an audience exists is certainly the bet that a lot of longer form journalism is making, particularly the newsmagazines. i work for one who has been struggling with its identity online since the early days of the internet and it seems like the question of whether or not to be a breaking news outlet or a more analytical outlet has been at the core of that struggle the whole time.
i think that has less to do with their nature as weekly papers and more to do with the kinds of advertising that they carry. for example, the weekly dig in boston probably runs 75% or higher of advertisers that either wouldn't or couldn't advertise in the globe.

this may also relate to the pervasiveness of the large newspaper conglomerates. it seems like there is a lot of opportunity to outserve the larger papers when it comes to local or niche customers.

(edit: either i'm going crazy or you edited your post a little, so i am now replying to a rather minor point)
An email newsletter that's actually worth subscribing to
I may as well be the one to say it, your resume is awful. Your entire resume is a waste of people's time, HR will throw it in the trash before they read it. Get it down to one page, remove your photos, summarize everything into bullet points. People have thousands of applications to go through, I spend less than 30 seconds per resume. I skimmed yours and did not see bullet points listing your technical expertise. Trim it and get professional or don't get hired. You might like writing, but recruiters hate reading.
How Google Stole Control Over Content Distribution By Stealing Links
You may be smug and logically sound, but OP still has no job.
Have you read Strunk and White?
PageZipper (http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/pagezipper) also automatically adds the 'Next' page to the bottom of the page you're on. The cool thing about PageZipper is that it's insanely simple to use- you just turn it on. PageZipper locates and adds the next page entirely automatically, so you can focus on what your reading instead of mucking around with selecting links or editing xpath expressions. PageZipper also provides a way for you to navigate through any online image gallery using keyboard shortcuts. Check out the video to see how it works.
That was the original (afaik) code. It was changed a few more times with randomUpdate containing different strings. The latest I saw before the url of the script changed was http://mikeyylolz.uuuq.com/x.js (404'd now)
Have you thought about contacting one of those "premier ad networks"? This would seem perfect for your app, where once in a while an advertisement is growled with a click hook to go to a URL. Twitterific does this too with The Deck. Check out:

http://decknetwork.net/
http://fusionads.net/
"I am embarrassed that I made a mistake with that article about lambda, so now I am going to write 15 pages about how it is someone else's fault."
search is no longer a technical problem, it is a marketing problem. yahoo continues to throw money at search and has good people...yet their search marketshare is going nowhere. microsoft bought powerset, pours a bajillion into research...they're still likewise making no inroads against google. its possible that skrenta knows something no one else does, but i doubt it. the challenge isn't building a search engine, its getting people to use it. for 99% of the market, search === google, and i don't see that changing
YouTube - Medical Tourism - India
Macs vs PCs all over again? Cheap and customizable won over expensive, designed and usable.

But Apple has cracked a mass-market since then (iPods), so either they've learned how to dominate or (more likely) found the market that suits them in the form of "special-purpose consumer electronics".

This latter hypothesis predicts that if the iPhone category become a general computing device, Apple will lose.
Monogamy is probably out the window.

I disagree, seeing as it's a shortage of women, meaning that multiple men would have to share a female partner. Polyandry is utterly impractical, as men would rather go to war than be stacked up by the women. Sharing is worse/more humiliating than having no wife at all.

Polygyny tends to ensue in societies when there's a shortage of women, because women are the reproductive bottleneck and, therefore, much more valuable. If the women are "underutilized" (sorry for the crude term) the group will not repopulate fast enough. Polyandry, on the other hand, does not result from a shortage of females. Crime and unrest do.
The local paper is a serious, though different problem. I read a very touching article last week about the collapse of the local press in the UK, with old people quoted as saying there was no newspaper left to publish their obituary in.

Back to monetising serious journalism in the national (or even international this day) press - I have a different view of the problem, which is I want to pay money but the sites are not asking for it. Rather than subscribe to a single paper, what I want is to make a micro-payment for an article that I read that interested me. For example that long piece on Dubai that was posted here a few days ago, or the piece on newspaper ownnership posted today - both were from newspapers that I do not regularly read or visit. I read the articles, I enjoyed them, they were long serious pieces of work and I would have pressed in an instant a button that said "If you liked this story click here to donate $0.10" in order to reward the person who paid the journalist to write the story. In fact I am many, many times more likely to give 10 cents that to click (or even notice) an advertisement on the same page.

The search engine and other type of aggregators (such as HN type sites) then become a clear boon to the primary content provider because they are not diluting page views or anything like that - they are just delivering a potential paying customer straight to something they are likely to pay for.

Why is nobody asking me for my money?
HN e-mail listserv? Thoughts?
I think Palm and Blackberry have healthy 3rd party app markets.
Does Google Really Control The News?
I think it's kind of redundant, given the functionality and purpose of the site itself.
The author is obviously a fan of B&D languages. (http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bondage-and-discipline-languag...) There's nothing wrong with preferring a little B&D, but it's a shame that there are still masochists in this day and age that claim other languages are "broken" because they don't spank you often enough.
[2003] Get Rich Slowly
Consumer, Investor Confidence Continue Their Surge Higher
Mobile/web gaming and micropayments
int N = 0;

void printV(vector<int> v){
for(int i = 0; i < v.size(); i++) cout << v[i] << " "; cout << endl;
}

void f(int index, vector<int> v){

if(index == N){
printV(v);
return;
}

for(int i = 0; i < N; i++){
if(i != index){
if(find(v.begin(), v.end(), i) == v.end()){ // hmmm
vector<int> t = v;
t[index] = i;
f(index + 1, t);
}
}
}

}

/* print all derangements for ints 0 to n-1*/

void PrintDerangements(int n){
N = n;
vector<int> vInit(N, -1);
f(0, vInit);
}
"click the big red button, and ScreenCastle will load a small Java control application"

sounds like "software" to me. With a title like this, I was expecting screencasts made with play dough or something. But alas, its just software.
I'm having one of those moments where I can't tell if the guy is really smart and "above my pay grade" or if he's stuffing his sentences with industry terminology in order to make everyone think he's a SME.

The crux of the argument seems to be that SSDs and something called TRM will eliminate the need for column-oriented databases. Even then he softens the argument by special-casing "existing petabyte OLAP systems". To me this argument abstracts to "${advanced_technology} will eliminate need for ${good_design}", which is almost never a winning bet when taken in absolute. After the "except for really big systems" softening it abstracts to "${advanced_technology} will eliminate the need for ${good_design} except for ${unusual_workload}", which is basically the personal computer revolution in one sentence.
Every Color Has A Name
How does one differentiate "deflection-style 'what about' arguments" from valid "what about" arguments free from bias?
uh..hard point to understand (or swallow?).

I don't believe in this assumption -- "There are certainly some combination of country/startup where the founders would be better off in Silicon Valley - when we are talking about founders who need visas (they can't get EB5 green card which is given based on investment or business visas which are pretty much given to anyone who has valid established business or who are not already in US as a student/employee..in that case founders do get H1B easily transferred for their own company provided they can show company of substance..if they pursued advanced degree here then they don't get in H1B cap)..so limits to be the people without much of resources of their own - who don't understand market here (at least not on first hand basis) and don't have connections..how will they succeed.. why misguide some of them and also fool ourselves that such a thing is useful..especially, given there is much better chance if they stay where they are then they will be able to pull off something successful targeted at the market they already understand

and that too putting up number of 2500 such startups every year ..good idea to write 2 examples to validate it first..tell me some story..

so my point..people should start company where they understand the market and if US wants to benefit from international resources then investors should go outside US because only that will work..because that is right for startups/founders/investors..
Doctors confirm woman's imaginary third arm
In my experience the noise in a recruitment is generally a reflection of how well you write your ad and how clear you are in your mind about the kind of person you are looking for. Even in a downturn, I doubt anybody wants to waste their time applying for a job they are clearly not qualified for. Through the years I have learned to write much tighter job ads avoiding generic terms like "DBA" in favour of things like "Sybase administrator". At least that weeds out the people who don't know that Sybase is a database :-)
there is no ranking of the applications; Apart from requiring they meet the minimum requirements they are just processed in the order received

okay, all H1-B holders who want their applications held up for a year while a reasonable basis for comparison is accumulated, raise their hands
border guards are one step up from prison guards. just hold your nose, blow some sunshine up their asses, and move on.
I suspect you're right, and this is a double-whammy when you consider that excluding file sharing, there's no significant driver for internet bandwidth above a small fraction of (even USA) broadband installations.

You can stream HD video in 2mbit, and virtually all of the content on YouTube is drastically lower native bitrate than this (and transcoded to 300-384kbps).

The elephant in the room is that YouTube should have given Google the "first mover advantage" and control of the legal feature-length TV episode (and perhaps movie) space, giving them the revenue of the popular, high-rate advertising to bear the load of the "uninteresting and unwatchable" (mind you that unwatched media has no bandwidth costs associated with it, reducing it to a storage expense alone). Hulu blindsided Google and now Google's best bet is to pull a Microsoft and iterate and hope for their competitor to slip. This is complicated by the fact that Hulu is backed by the content producers themselves.
okay come on you have totally warped expectations of what a work visa provides. work visas are not created to allow you to wonder silicon valley looking for cool startups to join. nor should it. thats what residency visas are for. a work visa should be tied to an employer. you seem to think you need a work visa in order to get a residency visa...no. tens of thousands of people every year become US citizens simply because they want to.
Anyone that tried them both care to opine which was better?
And at $161 it's not going to sell as well as The Elements of Style.
No they don't. Google and other news aggregation sites just make it easier to filter through the crappy news. Combine that w/ higher quality, more focused reading material via the net and the large news orgs start to suffer.
i'm starting to think angels are just dumber, poorer VCs

i defy you to spend ten minutes on basho.com and actually know WTF their product ACTUALLY does. no wonder the VCs passed on this fluff
Excuse me, but how does this "lock in" students? Once they become part of this program they always have to use MS products?

Students should try to expose themselves to as many possible technologies as possible. Open source, Microsoft, Apple, etc. These sorts of programs help students do that.
Critical Illness Insurance - For You, Your Children and Your Business
Pretty sure he can't - the ECU in the RX8 is encrypted in a way that hasn't been broken yet :(
It seems that Mr. Hawks, the critic toward the end, is somewhat confused about evolution, expecting traits to disappear once they become no longer useful.

His second assertion, from the finding that toe length does not affect walking, strikes me as completely nonsensical even considering the above confusion.
Even though it was never mentioned, I couldn't shake the feeling that he was talking about Scala. Scala allows nulls for compatibility with Java, but prefers the statically checked Option type (equivalent to Haskell's Maybe). It puts variables (var) and final variables (val) on equal syntactic footing, but convention dictates you use a val by default and only switch to var if it's really necessary. Case classes and pattern matching let you define statically checked data types. Type inference helps so that all the static typing doesn't get in your way, but errors are still caught at compile time.
Does Goldman Sachs Manipulate the Stock Market?
It's not Chinese bias, it's one-child policy bias against the Han Chinese
One of the comments claims it is called a Tuo Quoque (You also) Fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
off topic, but that logo sure looks familiar...

http://images.google.com/images?q=xbox+360+logo
Or, leave error-handling code just as bulky as it is, but design languages in which errors need to be handled less frequently.
I mean I literally can't understand you. This is like Finnegan's Wake.
100 Attributes of People Who Start Companies
There is some old saw that intelligent people believe so many strange things because they are smart enough to convince themselves...

I've seen that even in non-ideological areas, for people with "too large" verbal talent, which believed their own bullshit. But that might pass with age.
It's both. Google is still technically superior to the rest as well. Technically, search is far from being done. There are many interesting approaches in HCI, IR and systems remain to be tried. I really hope that blekko can come up with something more interesting than yet another cuil.
Skrenta is very clear-eyed about Google's domination, see for example:

http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_...

So I'm very curious to see what he's cooked up to make a dent in that.
If that was a serious question and not a troll, check philosophy courses; should be some online. They have a bit of history in that discipline of logic and analyzing arguments...
Actually there is a cap on H1B visas for advanced degree holders (20000/year) and this year this cap was met before the cap for the general category.
> What bothers me about the immigration caps is that they appear to be completely arbitrary, as opposed to being in tune with the industries they "serve" or based on some up-to-date metrics.

They're not arbitrary, they're just not aimed at a goal that you recognize.

Always remember that the first priority of a congress critter is to get re-elected.
Even as something like Yahoo search has approached parity with Google on core results -- in fact sometimes surpasses, when I'm trying to find a document I know exists somewhere -- Yahoo has neglected to do some little, easy things that could help make it my primary search.

For example, no "define:" operator, and their calculator/units-conversion isn't as good as Google's.

I know these aren't key to the mass-market, but really: why let tiny things -- things an intern could add -- remain as gaps compared to Google? It gives me the impression no one is minding the store, methodically fixing everything that could prevent a person from switching.
Here we hit against a law of nature: there is no algorithm that would analyze an arbitrary piece of code and determine whether it will only produce valid search trees.

Why not? I know about the Halting problem, but I don't see how this is equivalent... am I missing something?