skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
just to play devil's advocate, page ranking is extremely critical for lyrics websites, where every website is functionally identical. you could argue that rapgenius' tweet-for-link scheme was necessary to compete in a marketplace full of lyrics sites that actually buy links for money or employ other darker-hat techniques.
(1) the name sucks. i have no idea how to pronounce it, and it is hard to remember.
(2) the green is far too bright for business purposes.
(3) i don't get what it does from the frontpage. do NOT begin with "x is not just y, but z". starting everything with "imagine..." is also a problem. i want to see, want to do, not imagine. re-think your phrasing, create better explanation, and make a (if only screencast) intro video.
China's biggest challenge is ecology and with that, natural resources. It is a mountainous country with human habitation mostly in narrow valleys except for a few large river valleys and deltas. And it has too many people. This is likely to lead to ecological collapse in one way or another. One way to stave that off would be to subordinate themselves to Russia so that Russia provides raw materials and therefore China doesn't have to dig up so many mountains, but that doesn't solve all the ecological issues.
I love the linked article on "Magic Tricks For The Amateur Chemist (1936)." Nearly every trick there involves adding sulphuric or hydrochloric acid to stuff :-)
Pictures Of Apple's First Employees
Arthur C Clarke: "One day, a computer will fit on a desk" [1974]
Well, I'm not a big fan of this "infinite magnification" idea in the first place, but "arbitrarily close" is typically one of those things that infinity can beat.

(Compare e.g. with the fourier transform of a function. It consists of a sum series which comes "arbitrarily close" to the function, but "at the limit" when the number of terms approaches infinity the function and its fourier transform is one and the same.)
This is a long and very entertaining read. If you want to skip to the main accusation of hypocrisy, it is:

Speaking of facts: While presenting itself as the champion
of the working classes, the fact is Dentons Gawker empire is
guilty of almost every crime it accuses the tech industry of
committing, and several it doesnt. Denton, who now
encourages others to sneer at Silicon Valleys elite social
clubs, made his own millions as co-founder of First Tuesday,
an elite social club which spanned Europe during the first
dot com boom. While crying foul at the off-shore tax dodging
of San Francisco tech companies, Gawker Media is registered
in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying US taxes, an
arrangement which the New Yorker described as like an
international money-laundering operation. As Valleywag howls
that Google interns earn more than you, Gawker Media is
currently the subject of a class action lawsuit over its
earlier refusal to pay its own interns a dime for their
labour. And how about Valleywags mockery of lavish Silicon
Valley workplaces? Why not ask Denton about that when you
visit his steampunk office, featuring a lounge area that
looks like its straight out of the blue pill/red pill scene
in The Matrix, an office surfboard and a rooftop party deck?
Business Insider claims its one of the 15 coolest offices in
tech. And while youre there, make sure to also ask him about
Gawkers Privilege Tournament, a smug little contest in which
Gawker readers were invited to vote on which underprivileged
group (choices include: black, blind, transgender, people
with AIDS, the homeless, overeducated, and fat) should win
by virtue of its sweet, sweet moral superiority or as
Salons Katrina Richardson called the tournament: a
shamefully racist, sexist, homophobic and classist attempt
to silence large swaths of people.
Sounds like Canada more than it doesn't.
> The world is built on American financial institutions such as World Bank, World Trade Organization.

Those are not American financial institutions. The World Bank is an international organization and the WTO's headquarters are in Switzerland.
Well, at least where I am (Ann Arbor), the student co-ops also allow nonstudents, though they need to be approved by the house. But I agree; it's disappointing that cooperative housing should be so largely restricted to students. And having to be approved by the house is a substantial barrier when you don't know anyone. (And of course if you let in a large number of nonstudents, they cease to be student co-ops, contrary to what they're supposed to be. Which is again why it would be nice if more co-ops existed that weren't supposed to be primarily for students.)
When people say that inflation is not being properly measured, what they're likely referring to is the fact that some policy makers use the CPI Less Food and Energy which means that some of the biggest expenses for the majority of people, food and energy, are sometimes ignored when discussing the effects inflation.
From what I could tell on wikipedia[1][2], it's natural and the wells hold water in a way to allow As to collect in higher concentrations

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_contamination_of_ground...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_poisoning
Rivers also methodically analyzed many songs, including all of Nirvana's songs to help him with his songwriting. He writes about his songwriting process in the liner notes for "Alone II", an album of his home recordings. The liner notes are amazing. He goes through each song on the album and explains the back story, often mentioning what kind of methods he used to write that particular song.

I dug up an old Rolling Stone article where he talks about his "Encyclopedia of Pop". They also mention him writing several hundred songs in 1999:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080228012507/http://www.rollin...

The names he gives some of his methods are pretty excellent. Some examples:

* Intellectually acquired emotionally volatile concept: http://www.weezerpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Intellectual...

* Incipit-Melody-Guitar-Develop-Tea
: http://www.weezerpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Incipit-Melo...

* Arbitrary-Progression-Distortion-open-Strum-Intro-Melody-Arrange: http://www.weezerpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Arbitrary-Pr...
What do you consider a "good" conversation? How do you go about having one?
I've recently become interested in improving the quality of conversations I have with people I don't know very well.<p>The types of conversation I consider to be "good" can be split into two major groups:<p>Comedic - irony features fairly heavily in my sense of humor. Unfortunately it seems that it takes someone else with similar sensibilities to successfully build a conversation.<p>Epiphanic - one or both parties realize something that he/she hadn't before (could be personal or impersonal, due to exchange of ideas).<p>I don't really attempt to dictate the direction of a conversation, which I think may be a problem.
Not to mention: forgery, counterfeiting, embezzlement, bribery, tax fraud
Since life in Silicon Valley ends at 35 unless you hit it big or move up in management (and simple logic tells you that most won't), I'm curious what people younger than this think they'll be doing at that age.

This is the (context of the) question, in case folks can't see it on quora.

__________________

The top ranked answers are all variations of: start a company, witch examples of founders (primarily) in the 36-41 year range. eg

Mark Pincus was 41 when he started Zynga.

Reid Hoffman was 36 when he founded Linkedin.

Marc Benioff was 35 when he started Salesforce.

Robert Noyce started Intel at 41 with a 39 year old Gordon Moore.

Irwin Jacobs was 52 and Andrew Viterbi was 50 when they founded Qualcomm.

Pradeep Sindhu was 42 when he founded Juniper Networks.

You don't need to be under 35 to start a successful company. There are many more examples outside of technology of people older than 35 founding well known successful companies.

_______________________

Its debatable if these examples are not the singular caveat outlined in the original query, tho. viz

unless you hit it big or move up in management

As digging into some of the bios above would attest.

However, the argument that the future will look like the past is not always the correct one.
Campus is a startup doing interesting things related to communal living and groups housing. http://buildcampus.com

I had a chance to meet the founder. They're targeted to the younger crowd. Recent grads moving from dorm life to city life with nothing in between.

I think I you can get some of the benefits of "group living" from having roommates. I was fortunate enough to land in two great roommate situations in my early and mid 20s. I suppose a startup jumping into a fragmented market makes sense.
This is exactly what those marketing guys have said. In so-called objective reality 99% of apps people are using, such as FB, Adobe reader, Skype, WhatsApp, you name it, are NDK apps.

99% of TOP20 apps in each category are NDK apps, you like or not.
Yeah, getting kind of sick of residents of the home our two most evil industries (media and finance) talking shit about SV tech firms. New Yorkers drove our economy off a cliff but would rather bitch about fucking Google Glasses. Please.
Valleywag is the TMZ of Silicon Valley. Remind yourself of that when reading it, and you'll be fine.
People act like their self-identity were dependent on everlasting American super-hegemony. Then trolls like this author come around and push your buttons to make themselves feel important. This author and his stories of futuristic lethal space robot battles mean what to whom? We're all going to be killed by China's space lasers and there's nothing to be done of it? Ok great thanks. Not being #1 means absolutely nothing to me. Lots of fine countries in this world do just fine not being #1.
genuinely curious here, why would a bigger economy mean a better quality of life for regular citizens? who's to say the wealth wouldn't be all concentrated in one area of society? as far as i've understood it, in free market capitalism, companies increase their profits by cutting their marginal costs (like worker's wages)
I'm unaffected by this as I have never used Admob but I wonder which imbecile at Google thought it was a good idea to mess with payments and push/pull money out of people's bank/Paypal accounts around Christmas holidays?

I feel bad for all those affected knowing that there's virtually no way to get any kind of customer service from Google.
Wow. This is pure gold, thank you much!
That is the majority opinion around here, yes, but I contend that that opinion is flawed, precisely because of cases like i4i. It is a textbook case of a big guy ripping off a small guy, and patents being the only thing that helped the small guy.

The Wikipedia entry has surprisingly little backstory, so it turned out to be a poor choice on my part. But the gist is that like the Stac case, Microsoft was in active discussions to license or buy i4i's Office plugin before they turned around and, without warning, built it themselves into the next release of Word. Unlike the Stac, and indeed most, patent lawsuits, Microsoft was found guilty of willfull infringement.

I'm mostly a fan of Microsoft, and I don't really believe all the hate it gets is justified, but this is one case where it was really a bad actor.
This is bullshit, IME usually stores the user input habits/frequencies on the cloud to improve the user experiences, it's also important to download internet words into local database. Why don't you see MS secretly uploads my data to NSA?
Blaming Biddle for rape or murder threats against Justine Sacco is a big stretch when he only posted about the tweet. I don't see anyone blaming buzzfeed for the same thing.

This article makes some good points but lumps them in along with several ad hominem and other pointless attacks (who his father is does not change the validity of any of Biddle's points). Farhad Manjoo's critique was much more fair.

Besides how can anyone read Valleywag and not see how desperate and reaching most of it's articles are? Why should anyone even take them seriously?
>>> import Levenshtein
>>> Levenshtein.distance("pando", "pander")
2
Amazon was a Prime shopping source this holiday, gaining 1M more subscribers
Also perhaps on a more exciting note, @meh` added PROMISES and some other cool stuff as a Christmas gift to the community! He is doing amazing work on this project.
I'm hoping GitHub will update their copy of Jekyll at some point.
Huh? Workday has never turned a profit... and AFAIK do not report gross margins (for support contracts) the same way SAP/Oracle do...

https://www.google.com/finance?cid=401330883723564
Maybe we should teach them programming or something
The Windows Japanese IME is awful. I never gave OS X's one a chance though, since I've used Google's ever since I found it.
Is that crazy or just human nature to lump people together based on profession or what region they live in? It's a good sign of simplistic reasoning.
Show HN: Quickspin—automatic web server deployment
It wasn't something I'd read before, but having it summed up so succinctly assures me that it is definitely not something I'll be reading any time soon.
Nominally true.

But at least the World Bank is blatantly pro-American. Every World Bank president has been American. The Chief Economist up to 2000 are all pretty much American (one Israeli + one dual Israeli/American).
Well, I'm not a teacher, but I've got two kids in 6th and 8th grade, who are learning programming. We've been doing this for a few years now. Both kids are proficient in reading and math, and are interested in a wide range of subjects. Oddly enough, they have radically different styles of learning.

I think it's important to be perceptive of what things kids consider to be interesting, as opposed to what we grown-ups believe to be important. The kids will be bursting with ideas of things that they want to make, and the trick is finding a way to channel some of those ideas into projects that they can actually carry out within finite time and material budgets. But I've learned that what they make doesn't have to be a full blown polished app. The pride of making it themselves trumps any adult aesthetic or ergonomic sensibilities.

Scratch is great. The animations and sounds provide enough creative space to keep kids interested for quite a while. They can teach one another. It has some practical benefits, being written for widespread installation and "safe" use. The accompanying Web forums seem to be pretty closely moderated by grown-ups, while still allowing plenty of fun chatter. The mechanism for sharing and modifying programs provides a taste of open source!

We've had fun with S4A. This is worth checking out. Making stuff dance around on the screen is all well and good, but I think that interacting with the physical world really drives home the fact that you're making the computer do something.
What Is Dogecoin ― Business Insider
Here are things I use for those 3 things that I find really helpful, maybe you will too.

1.http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InteractivelyDoThings

2. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DeskTop

3. For 3 I just use built in shell-mode, but what is really neat is saving your shell session to a file "C-x C-w" every so often. Then if you reboot or crash or whatever, emacs-desktop will bring back all your open files and all your shells. I usually have 3, regular bash, a sql session, and maybe an ssh session to somewhere, all with a full record of what I've done, sometimes going back months.
Show HN: Motivation For Hackers (Chrome Extension Available)
Eh... more likely China and Russia will end up going to war over Siberian resources. Russia has a huge Chinese immigration problem on their hands and China has provoked skirmishes even in Soviet times: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict
Java is a cleaned up version of C++. The JVM is an implementation detail, albeit an important one. The language itself though is about removing the necessity to manually manage memory, but staying within the OOP paradigm (or the OOP paradigm C++ proposed).
Sorry, but explicit > implicit for markup.

Btw, how's that repo going? :)
The challenge is how they'll be able to teach folks computer science, when they fail to teach them basic reading and math.

The other problem may be salary. Years ago I was looking at teacher salaries for Seattle public schools. Salaries were identical for all subjects and increased only with length of time as a teacher and advanced degrees. They started around $30K with a BA and $36K with an MA. Pay topped out after 30 years at $60 or $70K-ish.

You're just not going to get many competent CS people for that kind of pay. Yeah, a couple of hero teachers will show up, but for the most part you're going to get shortages.

Based on the reading I assembled here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-... , I'm skeptical that we're going to see much improvement in public schools, and especially urban public schools, until we deal with the teacher union issue. Unions enforce lockstep payscales.
Why isn't this considered "grant piracy" and this guy charged with wire-fraud by the feds? Surely he mis-used the postal service, banking system, and inter-state commerce in here somewhere? Why not a conspiracy under RICO? there seem to be all kinds of ways to send a better message than...please wait three years to attempt your next crime!
Update: Unit tests are now a convention.
It's an inconvenient truth. The oil boom in this country over the last 6 years seems to go mostly unnoticed by the media, except for the odd article here and there about housing shortages. (Way to find the "problem", media!)

I guess the oil boom doesn't advance the narrative that everything is going wrong for the blue collar workers in the US, that we're completely dependent on foreign oil, that we're not making "good jobs" anymore for people without a college education, etc.

I'm really curious how long it will take for the culture to come around on this one.
I've long wondered if there isn't a potential legal hack hiding there: Providers that advertise an expectation of privacy, webmail with a "This is a private message" checkbox, those (generally pointless) email footers that clarify that the message is intended for its recipient only, etc. (IANAL...)

Obviously, in the current court system it wouldn't do much good on its own, but it could form the backbone of a single precedent-setting case.
We aren't talking about independent escorts here. Here's the link for one infamous redlight area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonagachi

>5.17% of the 13,000 prostitutes in Sonagachi are estimated to be HIV positive

>According to some sources, prostitutes from Sonagachi who test HIV positive are not told about the results, and live with the disease without knowing about it "because the DMSC is worried that HIV positive women will be ostracized."[5] Some prostitutes in Sonagachi have stated that "the clients, at least three quarters of them" refuse to use condoms and "if we force them to use the condom, they will just go next door. There are so many women working here, and in the end, everyone is prepared to work without protection for fear of losing trade.”[5]

Weaning them off prostitution is a net positive.
Rerun by rerun
>One could have said this about the U.S. and Germany in 1927.

Source?

I read about history sometimes and am a big fan of WW2.

I've never heard Germany and the US being "inexorably intertwined" and find the comparison to China/US almost preposterous given the modern global economy and the feeder/lecher relationships we have now.
That's a rather controversial comment you're making here.

I'd rather see a man deprived of sexual intimacy than a woman constrained to prostitution for lack of better opportunity.

The first fate seems largely less cruel than the latter.
Nice one, I learned a lot from this article. Looking forward to trying out console.group() and console.assert() for tests.
One reason we are in decline is that for better or worse, our own people are a bit too mercenary for our own good. We have built giant multi-billion dollar corporations, which in theory should make us incredibly more wealthy and powerful, but they are no longer American companies, they are global entities that operate in a multitude of countries.

The jobs and profit don't necessarily stay in the USA either. In many cases the best place to hire workers or produce goods or services is not the USA. There are thousands or millions of talented people elsewhere who can do it better for cheaper and the profit that happens off of the difference is not going to come back to the USA.

If you think in terms of the "global" economy, there is no particular reason why the USA would have to stay #1 forever. Without significant effort, it is almost impossible to imagine how America stays on top for the same reasons that it is hard to believe that either Portugal or Great Britain could maintain such large empires from such tiny countries with limited resources.

I don't think USA goes from #1 to #50 overnight, but dropping to #3 or #5 seems plausible.
google: asian pressure to succeed

yeilds 7.660 million results

Its a generic and terrible stereotype, but then again | data

http://www.realclearscience.com/2013/09/30/china039s_black_m...

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21586845-flawed-system-j...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/world/asia/07fraud.html?pa...

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/02/china-academi...

Again, not any excuse for an overzealous association but the data are out there.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Dong-Pyou+Han
I agree with they accusations regarding Gawker. I didn't in the past. IMO, Back when Huffington Post and Gawker were relevant anti-establishment media outlets, they played a critical role in getting the message out about the corporate and political madness of the greed-obsessed right wing. Unfortunately, they both fell to the greed virus and became what they so vehemently claim they are not.
Infinity is a pretty strange concept. :) I'm not sure arguing over it in this format is meaningful, but for the fun of it:

Consider that the integral of the ruler function from 0 to 1 is 0 (as is stated in your reference 1). In layman's terms you could express this as "there are infinitely more irrational than rational numbers between 0 and 1". At the same time, "for every two rational numbers there are infinitely many rational numbers in-between them". What sort of "picture" is this compatible with?

I still think that the only picture that really makes any sense is a solid line at any finite magnification, yet empty space at infinite magnification.
Any idea how to force the monitor at 30Hz on OS X? The lowest I could set on my monitor is 50Hz.
I admit, some of his ideas are a bit.. well, I don't like when people talk about God seriously, and he sometimes mentions it, very rarely. But aside that, everything I can understand from what he says is true. It's a philosophical debate and if you are on the "real numbers" bandwagon (where most people are), you would lose integrity and your reputation might suffer even if you would speak to Wildberger about real numbers. It's a shame really how people don't see why it's bad to use abstractions which are so general that they can be fit for any kind circumstances. Even if you real this article about the real numbers, there is wishful thinking (where he says that the real numbers would look like a line even at infinity but the rationals wouldn't. well, I don't see why the rationals would stop especially given what he says later...), cherry picking / the whole axiom selection stuff for proving it... and yeah, the axiom idea is generally bad anyway. etc.