skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can I admit this? I used to admire this one aspect of the Federal government: The way they'd calmly and objectively state their case, without emotion, in indictments, in tax notices, in diplomatic letters. It was a model I strove to emulate in my correspondance in times of personal conflict.

No longer. They are increasingly vindictive and flighty.

Perhaps it was always this way, and we have the Internet to thank for giving us (as Paul Harvey would say) the rest of the story. At any rate, the loss of the calm, emotionless appeal indicates a loss of pack-leader, Alpha behavior, and among apes and most other orders of mammals, will lead directly to a loss of respect.
So it's impractical and undesirable.

Welp, better get the town council to legislate it into existence, then! Population density is for people who read Asimov instead of Heinlein when they were little, the pig bastards!

They're all going to end up in a stinking hivemind when the negentropy runs out, anyway, while we'll die proudly on our lunar dirt-farms!

(Sorry, I'm just feeling snarky today.)
So he's using the muni gem[1], which uses the nextmuni/nextbus api. To my knowledge, NextBus is unaware of the length of trains. The announcements in subway stations here are sourced from the Automatic Train Control (ATC) system present in the subway. If you're in a subway station, it's the screen sometimes next to the nextmuni screen -- the one with the terrible mspaint graphical style showing the length of the ATC system.

[1] https://github.com/jeffremer/muni
Exactly. I've been looking out for (and possibly missed) a tool to make a Reveal.js-ish slideshow [1] from just markdown rather than 'HTML with optional markdown in each slide'. This is that.

With Reveal.js you can do:

<section data-markdown><script type="text/template">
#markdown slide here
</script></section>

But that's a bit of a hard-sell when I'm trying to open non-softie eyes to the benefits of markdown-everywhere (as they have to encounter HTML too). So yeah, I realise that a regex that replaces `---` with the above and hoicks it into a Reveal.js template is (almost) all that is needed to achieve what this project does, but I'm thankful for it all the same.

Worth noting that I've also used the `slideshow` gem [2] back in the day. This does basically the same thing as this project, and with the Google HTML5 Rocks [3] theme it isn't bad as a 'just markdown to slideshow' tool, but it was a bit fiddly to get started and 1) that homepage is a big undersell with all the old crappy themes/defaults on it and 2) I think their version of the Google deck is now pretty outdated (was buggy when I used it). Still, worth looking into for Rubyists I think.

[1] http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js

[2] http://slideshow.rubyforge.org/

[3] http://slideshow.rubyforge.org/tutorial.html5.html#slide1
I and others said this 17 years ago:

http://arachnoid.com/lutusp/mars.html

There's more detail in the new paper, but it's not a new idea.
Today's internet and the digitization of media have had a humongous effect on the economics of content production.
I'm a member. What would you like to know about my motives and/or agendas?
I'm interested what those questions are.
Ex-Googler Gives the World a Better Bitcoin (Litecoin)
What are those questions?!?
Hit him hard
> The truth is the vast majority of technical interviews for developer positions are conducted in this bullshit manner today.

How do you know?
The Free JavaScript campaign
> Yeah, no kidding. That somebody could sincerely espouse such a position is mind-boggling to me.

The key thing is that getting stranded somewhere like Hawaii would become a real problem. If there is a right to travel interstate to/from Hawaii, then there is a right to fly there. I would argue the same regarding Alaska too since you either have to go across international waters or through Canada.

> It ranks up there with "Gay people can already get married too (to the opposite sex)."

Having lived in more traditional places (and being in Indonesia now) I actually the due process issue in flying is far worse than the view you position, at least internationally. Marriage is extraordinarily cultural and multi-functional and in many countries, the fact that there are obligations to parents as well as children (and gender plays role in determining the qualities of power relationships) makes that argument valid in most of the world, so I have real trouble with the idea that it is a human rights issue. This being said, I think that "Marriage is about raising children and same-sex couples can adopt, but we don't want them to get married" is something I can't really understand how people believe.

Both of these issues are functional questions. Can you drive across the Continental US as an average person, or take a train or a bus? Sure. One could argue that flying there is a matter of mere convenience but not a core liberty interest. But what about travel to/from Hawaii and Alaska? As an average person one cannot so easily get there outside of being on a plane. Holding this to be an area where government can freely interfere also then puts residents of those states fully at the mercy of the federal government in a way that California residents are not.
Carnegie Speech is another good product in this area, that as the name suggests came out of Carnegie Mellon a number of years ago (I have no affiliation with the company).
Not at top schools where most of a class may well deserve an A or B.

Outside of a period in the '60s (the draft) MIT never suffered from serious grade inflation (I've looked at the numbers), and the general rule is that if you've picked a suitable major you'll make As and Bs unless you're having personal problems.

It would be stark raving mad to grade its students on the curve ... and I've heard of serious pathology in schools that mechanically do, e.g. premeds sabotaging their peers taking organic chemistry (one tale had one deactivating many of his peers' alarm clocks). You just don't want to set up the wrong incentives, and I can attest that at least in the '80s MIT students were generally happy to help each other.

On the other hand there are state schools that by law have to accept every applicant who meets a random external threshold ... they don't have much choice but to flunk out large fractions of their freshman. But after the courses that do that, and often do that for a major, they shouldn't obsess on the curve.
Pretty much what this gentleman said! :D
And if you are going across the Pacific it might take a month.
I don't know the particulars of the claims, but I do know that:

1 - the wsj is barely distinguishable from anti-government propaganda, so they're worthless: any claims they make need to be verified with first party sources before belief;

2 - this happened:

Pediatric gastroenterology specialists responding to the survey reported
more than 80 children with magnet ingestion. Most patients required
endoscopy to remove the magnets or surgery to repair damage to the bowels.
Twenty-six children had bowel perforation; three needed major surgery to
remove a section of damaged intestine. [1]

[1] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120904100844.ht...
>There are 25 horses and a single race track. The track has 5 lanes. Your job is to find the fastest 3 horses assuming you don't have a stopwatch and all horses always run at a constant pace. What’s the way to find the fastest 3 in the fewest uses of the track.

It's not specified that one lane = one horse, so... release all horses at once, pick the top 3 :)
Well, I tried to have something about buckyball magnets in there when I submitted it, but apparently this title is so much more informative. Who knew?
If I was giving that interview, I wouldn't give a shit if you found the optimal solution or not. But if you could spend a high-energy hour with me iterating over possible solutions, then that signals to me that you're smart, have fortitude, and think outside the box. All qualities I would never hire a candidate without.

At the end of the day, companies aren't looking for just PHP programmers or UI designers. They're looking for problem solvers first. I've said this before in other threads, but the fact that you cannot solve a given "puzzle" does not mean that you're definitely a bad candidate, but the fact that you can sure as hell signals that you might be a good one. And any company that's in-demand can afford a few false negatives here and there.

A PHP programmer's ability to handle saving a company after being hit with a SQL injection attack is surely going to be correlated with PHP coding tenure and expertise. But that being held constant, it's absolutely going to be much more heavily correlated with general problem solving ability, which - as much as it sucks - tends to be correlated with ability to solve "bullshit interview questions"...
In defense of scripted interviews, if your doing a lot of highering it's useful to get a less biased view of the candidates. It's really easy to rank outgoing personable people you like far higher than they deserve, but if they completely fail FuzzBuzz your going to dig a little deeper.

That's not to say you sould only asked scripted questions, but there are plenty of good developers the question is often are there weaknesses a good fit vs there strengths.
I would love to explore adding an optional to render a reveal.js slideshow, instead of using my "reinventing the wheel" approach. Shouldn't be terribly difficult, just a matter of adding a new template :)
Too Big To Fail. So it went from being applied to defense contractors to banks and certain brokerages.
(and gender plays role in determining the qualities of power relationships)

Nope.
An Amazing Stabilized Spoon Lets Parkinson's Sufferers Feed Themselves
While clever and inexpensive, the low speed and low accuracy of this device made it unusable. It was billed as "3-figure accuracy", but in fact it only got that on some cases. A bright undergrad or grad student could quickly uncover useful problems that it flat out couldn't solve.

In short, it was a toy. Anyone basing one's academic grade on this thing was a fool. You really did have to spend the money for an HP-35, or the later Texas Instruments SR-5x calculators that were less expensive.
> Failure to enforce your trademark's registration can expose you to claims that your mark is no longer "in use."

That's true, but C&Ds are not the only way to enforce a trademark. Tumblr could have granted him a license to use the trademark in exchange for a dollar a year. But they chose to be dicks instead.
> They certainly don't explicitly say it's optional.

If they don't say it's mandatory, then it's optional. A mild form of the so-called totalitarian principle, which says "everything not forbidden is compulsory".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian_principle
Hey HN,

I recently started an Open Source club at my school, and one of the key aspects of the club is that I (along with a few others) give quick tech talks. I found that it took far too long to whip up a short slideshow, so I wrote this. Its entire purpose is to allow you to get something presentable and interactive out quickly.

It's sort of a two-birds type deal because we'll be actively working on this project through the club :)

I'd love to hear your feedback!
Show HN: Discover Awesome Internships in the Bay Area
> I don't know the particulars of the claims...

You confess that you don't know anything about the subject at hand,

> but I do know that... the wsj is barely distinguishable from anti-government propaganda

but you're happy to throw around an ad hominem attack on the site that published the story.

Right.
The product may well have been redesigned to been safer, that's beside the point.

The allegation of lack of process portrays the CPSC as unable to interact with manufacturers in a civil manner that addresses concerns constructively. If the US continues scaring off entrepreneurs, the US will be weaker, less competitive and more boring as a result of bad policies.

The larger concern is that US-based thought-leaders are leaving in droves (Woz, et al) as well as the thousand and change that queue up to relinquish their passports every year is swelling; this may be only the beginning of the flickering flame of American exceptionalism. [1]

PS: I also feel that fair reporting on this piece would give the CPSC the opportunity to comment and share its views, if even to say the token "no comment." (One side does not make a complete story.)

[1] How to relinquish citizenship http://travel.state.gov/law/citizenship/citizenship_776.html (8 U.S.C. 1481(a)(5), obviously be certain to secure other citizenship arrangements first)
re 2: So? Kids hurt themselves and swallow dumb things all the time. It's your job as a parent to keep those things away from them. It's not the government's job, and it's certainly not the manufacturer's job.
Analysis of generators and other async patterns in node
Poverty is a great opportunity for startups. There's huge pent up demand for crowd sourcing of the Mechanical Turk variety. There's no real reason a person shouldn't be able to work anytime, using just a smartphone, and earn a middle class income. This is going to be huge next year, 2014 will be the year of the crowd-work.
It does in most of the world.

For example here in Indonesia, Chinese-Indonesians prefer to retire with their daughters because the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship is more complex and problematic than the mother-in-law/son-in-law relationship or the father-in-law/son-in-law relationship.

This means that over here same-sex couples are not similarly situated to the duties of marriage to the elderly.
The dichotomy between privileges and rights may have some special legal meaning ascribed to it, but in practice, it's a distinction without a difference. For example, going to Disneyland is almost certainly a privilege, but if Congress passed a law saying Tom Jones from Denver, and only Tom Jones from Denver, was forbidden from going to Disneyland, I bet Tom would have a pretty good case that his constitutional rights were being violated.
In your talk, you advocate Codes Of Conduct and the like - has any progress been made in the industry towards these?
Heh, I was asked the same horse question for a linux driver development position.
I disagree. I don't think grades are the kind of top that academia should motivate students to aspire to. There should be plenty of role models and amazing achievements for any student to look up to. I consider grades to be at best a necessary evil, and any attempt to shape them will only make them more evil and less necessary.
Pg is the equal of very few of the people with whom he does business. He has more money, power, knowledge and experience than almost anyone he deals with on a regular basis. YC applicants are not equals, they are supplicants. His equals are VCs, super angels and C-suite executives from big software companies. People who are not equals can have mutually beneficial relationships, but treating rhetoric about people being equal in dignity or legal rights with an accurate description of the world is a mistake.
I didn't see the letter linked to or quoted on the site. I doubt it was like JD, but it might have similarly tried to explain the trademark issue.
Yeah, I personally feel that there's a great deal of "modality" in the sonic motifs we are attuned to. It can be remarkable how palpably different "listening in English" is from "listening in Mandarin".
Considering the kinds of abuses of law, policy, and practice that the EFF is fighting, it requires little more than taking an active stance against those things to be "indisputably ... The Good Guys."

(As opposed, say, to people who just bitch about those things on the internets.)
They have an answer for that: the government installs black boxes that monitor stuff. That's why so many companies cooperate by giving them data, it's a lot better than having random stuff in your machine rooms with actions and purposes you neither control nor understand.
TOR won't help, they can't reach a node.

Long distance mesh networks will help, but not completely solve the problem. We need to decentralize the connectivity resources, we need things like wifi drones with long distance repeaters, and we need them to be cheap enough so that they become a public resource and ownerless.

But until we can make something like that, yeah, long distance mesh networks will help.
Take the idea of evolution. As pg points out in his essay, the reason evolution was so difficult for people to accept is that species seem to be unchanging, static fixtures. It would be absurd to suggest that a dolphin used to walk around on land, yet evidence shows that they did, a couple million years ago.

It turns out that the idea of evolution is useful in other contexts. Most of the best software was written by following a procedure strikingly similar to how a creature evolves. The idea of "release early, release often" is the idea of evolution applied to the process of writing software. In fact, this idea is so valuable that we probably wouldn't be having this conversation without it, because neither Viaweb nor Arc nor YC would exist.

It was normal for society to be unaware of evolution the same way we're unaware of the spin of the Earth. And when people started to look at the evidence, it was normal for society to reject it. It wasn't until Darwin, an established scientist near the end of his life, that society allowed the idea to take hold.

The consequence is that those who live a life that society lays out for them are almost universally denied access to the best ideas, because the best ideas are the ones you haven't thought of yet.

It's tempting to believe that you're resistant to the effects of society laying out a normal path for you to follow. Aren't we free to think whatever we want? After all, no one can prevent us from thinking, right? Actually, that's exactly what happens. "Here is where you live. Here is where you play. Here is where you learn. Here is where you work. These are the hours you may relax." That cycle is too powerful to resist unless you actively try to break it. It stamps its seal onto your brain. For 16 hours a day, your thoughts are not your own -- they are owned by whomever pays you. The reason is because even though you are technically free to think whatever you want whenever you want, most people never do. At work, people think about work, or about coworkers. At school, you think about school or (more commonly) about other students.

That sounds quite a lot like an addiction. In the same way a drug user becomes obsessed with acquiring their fix, most people are obsessed with living whatever life society tells them to be living. And in practice that means most people are limiting themselves to a small fraction of their potential, because your potential stems from your ideas, and your ideas come from your thoughts, and your thoughts are mostly not your own.

I believe those addictions are the real ones to be avoided. And avoiding smoking is good while you're at it, but probably doesn't matter as much.
I am an iOS Freelance Developer, and I would highly recommend getting into mobile development. Right now, I am able to pull in $X,XXX/month through freelance projects on the side. On the side, I develop my own apps which will start earning me even more very quickly.

If your general goal is to make around $1,000/month with side projects, that is definitely possible!

As with most reoccurring revenue models, find a niche. Before you even think about development, do your research. Understand the market you are in. Is your competitor a Google app, or is it an app that hasn't been update in a year that has been getting bad reviews. At least for your first project, find the latter. Read the reviews, find out with keywords are being used, and think about why yours will be better.

The App Store is an complex jungle, with Candy Crush being a Lion, and hundreds of thousands being ants. Find a nice spot next to the watering hole and you will be able to bring in a substantial sum each month. If you're happy with the results, iterate and make even more!
Travel is one of those things you can do for free if you really, really want to. Hitch hiking doesn't cost anything, so you can travel all over North and South America if you've got patience, thick skin and a willingness to take risks. I've a buddy of mine who did just that. Started in San Antonio and is now in Argentina, if I recall. He's not poor, so he could do things like hire a boat to get around the Darien Gap rather than stick around and try to work to get enough money for it.

But even if you're poor, you can always find ways to make just enough to scrape by. I met guys while I was traveling that didn't have a dime but yet still managed to get around and even have fun.
Wow I didn't know about this product. It looks really advanced, would be good opportunity to see the other players in the market.

I think one advantage I have over this product is, SayAfter.me stores ever growing stats of word/phrase pronunciation attempts from all users.

Later on it can build custom exercises depending on the background of a particular user.

I will be able to say "You are Spanish, other Spanish users had the most trouble with these words. So here is an exercise that contains problematic English words for native Spanish speakers".
Mine isn't from academia specifically. It was along the same vein though. I wanted to figure out how different components worked and ended up making my own full stack NLP platform exploring every topic (question answering, named entity recognition, summarization,...). Within about nine months or so, I got it done enough (fully implemented, maybe not perfect like a full team of engineers could do) to build things on top of it. However, it's accurate enough relative to competing or similar products.

I decided to think of ways of making money on it, and just built something on top of it, now I have customers and all that fun stuff.

A research project and a startup (software obviously) both have code parts to them.

It really comes down to the problems you're attempting to solve.

In my case, I love the position I'm in now since I have the ability to make a lot of different kinds of products by just adding a web app in front of a rest API.

As long as it solves a particular need, customers don't care how or even when you built it as long as it does what's advertised.

Research projects are how startups can start though. That's why I think they say get out there and just build something interesting to you (in this case a research project) and see where it takes you.
Nope 6, 5 races aka 1 for each horse with photo finish + 1 with the winners of each race to calibrate the first five races.. ;)
Or maybe the recipient just freaked out because he didn't know how to dance to this tune and C&Ds seem like mighty and terrible things to someone who has never received one before?

Sending a C&D is fast, cheap, and requires almost no thought on Tumblr's part. Tumblr is optimizing for how they focus their time and attention, not how they treat folks using their name without permission. Why spend a few thousand dollars of attorney-hours going back and forth with every person who puts "tumblr" in their domain name when you can spend a small fraction of that and just reflexively send a C&D? Next up, freetumblrthemes.com, tumblrscripts.com, tumblrbots.com, themes4tumblr.com, officialtumblrthemes.com, etc.

Tumblr isn't being a dick. They're being prudent. This isn't an area of their business that is important enough to optimize relative to all the other things they might be working on, so you come up with reasonable defaults, delegate to your attorneys, and stop thinking about it.

But, hey, if you get a C&D you now at least know you have Tumblr's attention! Why not be contrite and reply asking for exactly what you propose? There's no downside. Indeed, you now know you're going to receive a prompt and unambiguous answer, whereas if you had asked for permission up front you most likely would've been ignored.

There is, however, plenty of downside to complaining that you received a C&D in public, particularly as a first rather than last resort.