skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How does it compare with Pandoc[1], which is the swiss-army knife of Markdown-to-foo converters, and also handles presentations.

[1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
So, if this article is beating the war drums to incite people against algorithmic trading, what is a possible result?

In the given example, the trader was just looking for a mismatched bid and sell, then fulfilling ("raping and pillaging") it faster than anyone else.

It's hard for me to imagine what could be improved or changed there.
MIT accepts only very smart people, to apply differentiation at that level wouldn't work very well: the motivation and aspiration has already been satisfied by the MIT selection process!

But even a good hard-to-get-into department (computer science) at a good state school (UW) has a fairly diverse-ability student body, so curves are quite useful in creating some top to aspire to. Even here, since the students got into the department and the bell curve is fairly fat in the middle (hard to fail), it doesn't create for such a toxic environment as being at the top is nice but definitely not necessary (even if you want to go to grad school). The trouble starts where being at the top is necessary (pre-med).
There are some people who are genetic freaks though. Could you ever hope to spontaneously come up with brilliant mathematical theorems like Ramanujan did?
Although there's probably some Streisand Effect happening here. I hadn't heard all this about Tumblr - but now it's the most memorable thing I've heard about them. It's bad PR, but as others are pointing out, it's likely Trademark protection.
The difference with TI's calculator was there was a social motivation/aspect to programming them. Everyone had them and it was very easy to get started.There are programming environments for the iPad but it is a lot harder to share programs as not everyone has one and even if they do they need another level of indirection to get the program. The calculator is also much more prevalent/easy to use in the classroom.

My first program was a quadratic equation solver that everyone at my school used. I remember a couple people tried to imitate and improve on my program but I crushed them with new features and a better interface. I don't think I could do that with the iPad.

The technology is also a lot more complex and daunting with the iPad. You have the paradox of choice in choosing how you want to program it. You can't easily share programs with others and TIBasic, just due to its simplicity and the lack of design knowledge and effort for the user interface is a lot easier for a kid to pick up and start using.

One thing that isn't mentioned in the article is that if you wanted direct control over the screen you had to program in assembly; I don't even think they had programming language support for it at the time. It made it a lot harder to use than the regular TiBasic.
>>> Why?

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-smartphone-p...

"The U.S. added 31 million smartphone subscribers in the past four quarters. That represents a reacceleration of growth in U.S. smartphone penetration."

"Overall, U.S. smartphone penetration stands at 58% of mobile subscribers aged 13 and above. That's up from 54% at the end of 2012."

>>>How would a smartphone serve me better than my LG VX9900?

Ever get lost? Do you travel a lot to other states/cities? Maybe its your first time in a city and you have no idea where a decent place to eat is. Ever want to check HN on the fly? Maybe get caught up on current news events or breaking stories? Ever wonder how your favorite sports teams are doing? Maybe you want to know how hot its going to be so you know what clothes to wear or if it's going to rain at 2pm or 3pm today.

I can do all of these and more with my smartphone. Not sure you have that capability with your 9900. Although you do have a camera and can shoot video.
Before you reply to any of these, skim through https://bookofbadarguments.com/?view=allpages because a lot of people wouldn't want you to fall short on explaining yourself.
> I've always been uncomfortable with my pronunciations.

You mean "my pronunciation." English is pretty weird about when we do and do not use the plural form and this trips up a lot of people :) I wouldn't mention it, but given that you're here for the specific purpose of improving your English, I thought you'd want to know.

Speaking of which, mass nouns always trip non-native speakers up, especially in IT. Do NOT use the following words: datas, informations, softwares. Data is already the plural of the Latin word datum and none of those words are used by native speakers.

I would add 'codes' to that use as it is often misused, but there are a lot of times when using it is correct, so you'll just have to study up on the rules for mass nouns sometime.
For a man who specializes in foresight, Burke misses the boat on eavesdropping.
You are confusing whether it should or not with whether it does or not.
Shoot 22 horses - the last three left alive will be the fastest.
Can you explain the reason for this though? It seems like the site is talking about the actual website Tumblr, I'm not confused about the brand in question. I'm not well informed from a trademark stance but it seems like as a consumer (and this response page) this site is not confusing the trademark at all. Was it previously using logos/wording saying that it was Tumblr?
I am. My girlfriend is not. We both got our visas in Germany. (Her case, however, was slightly different than the norm since she went from an academic work visa for post-docs, to a Blue Card, to permanent residence.)

A Syrian would certainly need a visa to enter Germany in general. I believe that you're incorrect as to whether or not, given a valid visa to enter the country, a Syrian citizen would be able to apply for a further visa from within the country.

For reference, this is the actual law that I was referring to which provides for highly qualified foreigners to get a visa to look for work in Germany for six months:

http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/aufenthg_2004/__18c.html

I believe the only point in question is if a Syrian would be able to apply for that from within Germany with a valid visitors' visa, or if they'd need to apply for that from outside of Germany.
One is 27; the other is 36.
I prefer the train going through a tunnel version. Here it is better explained:

Relativity Paradox - Sixty Symbols http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGsbBw1I0Rg
Introducing Programming Challenges
Are they just supposed to send one to every website that says the word "Tumblr" in it?
That's not quite what the analysis of their hiring practices says. All it says is that among those that pass, it does not predict their future success with the company. It may however be a good predictor of negative success--those that don't pass would not have gone on to do well at Google. Of course their data cannot determine that.
She also did away with the standing rule that you could take any written standing offer - NO MATTER WHAT (unless you were actually fired for cause) - which was Bill's way of ensuring that great engineers couldn't be tossed out by one horrible ass-kissing manager ... which is pretty much all of them today.

I've read this about ten times and still don't understand it. Do you know what it is supposed to mean?
They didn't chose to be dicks at all. For all intents and purposes, most trademark enforcement C&Ds are not just glorified spambots, but indeed have to be. When faced with a typical long list like "freetumblr", "tumblrthemes", "tumblrporn", and so on, a lawyer's time just isn't worth spending money on. Better to just deal with the ones who write back.

This is exactly the same situation that, in reverse, helps people win small claims court cases against multinationals (because a £150 product refund is cheaper than the legal cost to fight the case)
But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.

There is a simple and effective technique to help adult learners to perceive difficult phonemic distinctions, called HVPT (High Variability Phonetic Training). It consists of listening to several native speakers produce the phonemes in question and being quizzed on which phoneme is used in each case. You receive immediate feedback whether you were correct or not. This turns out to be much more effective than simply listening to a single speaker pronounce the phoneme pair and being asked to hear the difference (multiple speakers are crucial in helping you generalize what the salient differences are for a range of pronunciations).

Unfortunately, I don't know of any actual implementation of HVPT, and it doesn't seem to be used much if at all in language learning. Surely there is an opportunity there for someone to design a web-based HVPT system.
This is likely an expensive argument to make and one that Tumblr would be glad to spend legal dollars to fight. Tactically, it would make more sense to be as contrite as you possibly can, play the naïve engineer who loves Tumblr to death, and ask them for permission to use the name in the domain in exchange for including a prominent banner + disclaimer at the top of the page or wherever Tumblr prefers.
Just looking through the "HTML Slides" examples, seems like Pandodoc is more than capable of achieving what Cleaver does (and much, much more).
It's true that Microsoft Research is working on operating systems, including something to someday maybe replace NT. But the the biggest problem they've been working on has been input, specifically voice and touch input.

Somebody has to be the leader in the voice driven interface, as always on communications in cars become the norm, users are going to run into the wall that is Siri, Google Now, Samsung S Voice, and the OEM platforms behind them. They just aren't that capable, they can't really deliver voice results to simple questions, or effectively control navigation. They can't do full queries of contacts or calendars, or integrate with other systems. They are limited by the bandwidth of the company building them. Microsoft was always about empowering developers to create software, and voice is a platform with no category killer. There are no good APIs for voice input, no good app store for delivering small pieces of functionality to expand the ability of a voice interface, and no real work is going into building one. The smartphone is seen as a device with a focus on interaction through the screen, but it is an audio-based device, a telephone, and it makes sense for the wide capabilities of it's applications to be available through a hands-free interface.
This is the most poorly written article I've read in a long time. How someone who doesn't understand financial markets gets a job writing for cnn finance website is beyond me.
I really enjoyed this, and can imagine myself using it to teach my kids about good and bad arguments one day.

It also makes me think of a class which has just started on coursera, "Think again: How to reason and argue"

https://class.coursera.org/thinkagain-002/class/index
This is true. I think that past a certain level, though, you don't get the real poverty experience. You get stress, but it's a different sort of stress. Like, yes, you might be having some trouble with your mortgage month-to-month, but selling the yacht is always an option. They don't have to work out exactly how far into starvation they'll have to get to make ends meet this month.
dig a little deeper.

I think that's a key point. If a candidate seems mostly okay, but then something goes wrong, dig deeper and don't just immediately send the form letter rejection.

Now, if you dig deeper and discover they are actually not good enough for you, then send the form letter rejection, but don't hallucinate their incompetence out of only a few chats while completely ignoring their entire portfolio and/or work history.
His issue is that oom_killer doesn't get it right straightaway. Alt+SysRq+f would still need multiple invocations before it gets flash.
Personally, I do use Alt+SysRq+f since it predictably targets GMail-on-Chrome everytime on my system. That is usually enough on my desktop OS for me to jump in manually kill the offender. I can then just F5 GMail.
That is way cool. The idea that the baseband processor should handle voice audio paths and mobile network signaling is a very "bellhead" idea. With all-IP networks, doing voice payload and signaling in the user space of the main CPU is fine, and could result in more telephony apps based on being able to access voice and signalling more readily. Like, for example, secure calls.
Also look at Asciidoc which outputs Slidy slideshows.
That is the answer: people who understand the finance industry have jobs in it; CNN hires 'journalists' who write articles after several hours of 'research'; the same as they do for a myriad of other subjects.
It depends on what you mean by "says the word 'Tumblr' in it."

I'd give my attorneys carte blanche to send a C&D to the owner of any service using "tumblr" in their domain name, if that's what you mean. I'd ask them to create a template for me to ok and never think about it again, unless it seemed like they were spending too much money on it or other evidence that they were being overzealous came to my attention.
>As others have demonstrated there are plenty of apps that allow programming the iPad in a way that is at least comparable to TIBASIC.

Although the power to program exists on the iPad, the chance of "just stumbling into it" is very low. The magic of programming on the TI was that although the device had some value with no custom programs, someone with no programming experience could greatly increase the capabilities of the device with a little bit of code. Everyone at some point made the basic quadratic equation program. Some people would make more complicated programs and maybe even start to write games. Programs were also extremely easy to run on the calculators.

The critical difference between the iPad and the TI-83 when it comes to programming is how much utility you get out of your first hour programming the device.
First, this is an article specifically about High Frequency Trading (HFT), which is just one type of algorithmic trading.

Second, read to the end of the article. It suggests changing the market from a continuous free-for-all to a series of auctions at multi-millisecond intervals. Sounds good to me.
"Authorities even took the children’s passports, making it impossible for the family to escape ... "

Now that's low. How is that even legal?
Do we have a Constitutional right to freedom of movement? Travel? Are the two any different? Why do I have to agree to involuntary sobriety checks (searches, IMHO) if I get a drivers license?

I would like to think that I have these rights already defined or that they are defined under the Ninth Amendment. Given the current political climate, I am afraid that they are not.
2. The fact that this happened is in fact quite relevant to the product's regulation, but there are larger issues here about the way that the regulators actually interact with regulated entities (e.g. suits that a skeptic may worry are motivated by revenge, attempts to tear down the limited-liability structure underpinning the modern corporation's ability to interact effectively with the economy)

1. The WSJ, reporting on things which could affect Business in the general case, is opinionated, but - that notwithstanding - generally quite reliable, doubly so by news-organization standards. That's why they're still in business. That said, I am awed at some of the screed that makes it to their Review and Outlook opinion section (the pro-SOPA piece which was nearly slanderous in impugning the motives of the likes of Jimmy Wales comes to mind) and can express a modicum of sympathy.

In the meantime, while you're consulting the government agencies in question for your "first-party sources", here is some third-party coverage, which is also opinionated but does have more citations. http://www.wlf.org/upload/legalstudies/legalbackgrounder/08-...
the laws that eliminated the homeschooling option literally date back to the Hitler regime.

It goes further back. The Prussian regime was basically the founder of our current institutionalized public education system in the west as we know it today.
What that means is that if your manager is terminating you with extreme prejudice (but "without cause", e.g. not for stealing from the company), he's not allowed to be a gatekeeper and prevent you from joining another team. E.g. one that knows you are great and your manager is of the "horrible ass-kissing" variety.

Let me supply another comment, which shows how terribly bad some very high levels of managers have become:

http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-is-going-...

Anonymous said...

O.k. here are my 3 favorite Microsoft "principle consultant" experiences:

1. I had this really brilliant L-62 dev who couldn't believe just how STUPID the "chief architects" (L-65 and up, really were). So, one day, one of them walked into our office and took great offense because we'd changed his slides ...

Without even blinking, he said "you can change the text all you want, but you can't change my pictures, because that's all people look at."

As he was trying to explain to the guy that the "pictures" came from the actual "data" ... I suddenly realized that this moron didn't actually know where charts came from, and I excused myself and waited in the hallway for the really great partner consultant who thought I had a really bad attitude problem, to come flying out, desperately in need of a drink.

It took 10 minutes. I took him out for a cup of coffee so no one saw him shaking, throwing things, and revisiting his whole opinion of Microsoft.

Seriously, that one wins - but not by much

2). And the same great dev marched off one day to to tell the lead architect that the product he was planning to use, just didn't work that way ...

And that one's just plain funny. The "Architect" (who I wouldn't hire to build a computer for a 5-year-old, looked really annoyed, pulled out a glossy marketing folder, pointed and said 'of course it does - IT SAYS SO, RIGHT HERE."

Right. Bill Gates would have just shot these people and put their heads on stakes around the castle.

[ 3rd example is a bit more intricate but just as bad. ]
That is a false dichotomy.
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.

Maybe that's the problem? If I'm in that situation, I get more annoyed than excited about playing find-50-ways-to-solve-pedantic-imaginary-crap-from-memory.

For me, it's instant deer in headlights because I'm uncomfortable making a lot of dumb false starts that don't go anywhere then being judged negatively based on the false starts you wouldn't see in a real world scenario anyway. (Some interviewers understand draft-then-improve processes, others expect perfection (and fast perfection) out the gate.)
It would probably help to live there and do the job of an investigator. I would imagine (since I don't live there or do the job) that they learn to see vey few people in certain neighborhoods as truly innocent. If you feel that all of the people you charge have gotten away with crimes in the past then it may not seem like a big deal to put them in prison. It may seem like you are cleaning up the neighborhood.
There is a sliding scale of scrutiny for judicial review of laws (e.g., see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny). If the law has no "rational basis" (as the example here of a specific person being forbidden from going to Disneyland) it will almost certainly be struck down, even if the restriction it imposes is unimportant.

My point is that judicial review does not break down simply to determining whether a "privilege" or a "right" is being curtailed. Certainly, if a "right" (and this means specific rights such as those guaranteed by the Due Process clause) is being curtailed, this will tend to push the standard of review higher. But that is not the only factor at work, and there is a very specific meaning of the word "right" in this context.
Given that Sprite managed to get Linux booting on a hard disks processor [0], I'm increasingly aware that the embedded device we use are overpowered. Makes for some interesitng hacking though, I bet you could run a webserver on my washing machine.

[0]: http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack
My Google-foo is strong today for you:

http://www.loonwatch.com/tag/torture/
http://www.loonwatch.com/tag/civil-liberties/
Legal letters breed resentment. I was once threatened by a big business and promised myself never to use their services in the future. If only they had sent an informal email pointing out the error and suggesting a fix, but nope, it was a threatening legal letter through some third party with a short time limit for response. Just makes me angry thinking about it and this is now several years down the line.
This is a beautiful example of pure nonsense.

Brooks, you sound like you were made for sales. Maybe try catering your resume towards those positions?

Anyway, I'm an unfulfilled critic, so I don't know if your reading this, but here are the things that made my head spin about your post.

1) You editorialize a third party synopsis of your life into a headline without any indication that you're making a parody or something. "One accidental entrepreneur is finding it hard to" (This reminds me of someone during a manic episode)

2) You build your story out of clichés, but they seem incompatible with each other. (described as both "accidental entrepreneur" and "serial entrepreneur")

3) Totally ignore all important or interesting details that might indicate something about you or what your experience is. (leaving company i started for all the 'normal' and uncomfortable reasons? What?)

4) Generally weird stuff. Give me a job? If you're an entrepreneur, you'd know you wouldn't hire anyone with that attitude! Jetsetting in poverty?

Anyway, best of luck. I'm sure you'll find somewhere you fit in. You sound like you're made out of enthusiasm, and that rocks. It'd be interesting to know more of the facts of your story- I think sometimes the more specific detail of a thing you can share, the more powerful it can be. (I bet one uncomfortable thing that happened to you would be cooler for me to read about than a two paragraph synopsis of the last few years of your life even!) Also I want to know how much money your parents give you =D
First of all, congratulation for pulling off a new and experimental user interface!

However, I believe, the idea that tree- or graph-like structuring of text is beneficial for reading and writing text in general, comes close to the graphical programming fallacy. Eventually, the spatial make-up fails because of the following three reasons:

(1) The manual difficulty of navigation and the count of subconscious visual cues necessary for retrieving a passage increase exponentionally as the content grows, (2) altough thoughts do seem to come in hierarchical structures, we usually don’t think of text, code, stories, memories nor knowledge as visual graphs and (3) textual hints for emphasizing and linking text are more efficient and flexible than visual hints.

At first glance, Wikipedia seems like an affirmative example for graph-like structured text, but that structure is usually not used for primarily intended navigation. The articles are actually expected to be self-contained for readers with only a fair amount of prior knowledge.