skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never learned cursive. Even at 3 years old, when I was learning to write, it made no sense to me.

I still write "non cursive" (not really "print", just that letters are disconnected and I write each separately- each letter has a distinctive shape and some flourishes and so on) and my handwriting is clear and legible, but it seems to shock people when I tell them I don't write cursive. Thay aren't shocked when reading something i wrote. Strange, now that I think of it.
Nobody is throwing out all of the data. The data, last I checked showed no warming over the past decade or more, even though greenhouse emissions continue to rise. The data, last I checked showed temperatures much warmer and much colder at many times in our past (assuming we can extrapolate, which is a big assumption). The data, last I checked, is inconclusive over whether CO2 is a leading or trailing indicator of warming -- we've just assumed it's a leading indicator because of what we know about greenhouse gases.

Nobody is talking about not using the scientific method and continuing to take measurements and observations. Almost all of the types of data we are recording now have never been recorded in history, which means we have absolutely nothing to go on except some guesswork about cores and such. Nothing wrong with that either, but one has to put these observations of melting arctic ice in their place -- nobody knows what arctic ice was like back when Iceland was lush with farms in the during the Maurader minimum. Nobody had any idea of what arctic ice looked like from a low orbit view until we started launching satellites! And as for Antarctica, we haven't even been there that long, much less established any kind of track record to make comparisons. Cores can only take you so far.

I'm not a big fan of running interventions for half-baked fear-mongering masquerading as science. But let's assume for a moment that I were. How would you know what to measure, what to control, and whether or not anything was working? You pull on rope A and bell D rings, does that mean that rope A is connected to bell D? Or just that bell D was going to ring anyway? I'm telling you it's no better than bearskins and sky gods.
HTML5: a story in progress
Isn't this the difference between the way an automobile moves and an airplane? The automobile applies force through friction of a rotating tire against the ground, a non-moving surface. The fact that the car moves through air is secondary, hence aerodynamic designs...

The aeroplane applies force through movement of air via propeller or jet/turbine engine. The fact that the aeroplane interacts with the ground is a secondary (hence bearings to reduce friction) while the primary thrust is derived from air movement.

Therefore, wouldn't the brakes remain relevant for providing the friction against another form of energy (inertia) of contact with the ground to help "fight" the plane's movement through air as it lands? Now a plane is harnessing both mediums - Air flaps/reversed engines to help create braking push against air flow, and wheel brakes to push against the ground...
TRNSFR did a nice job with Bandize.
http://trnsfr.com/
http://bandize.com/
I think there's almost always a reward, especially for people in the tech sector. Either you get a raise and/or promotion at your current company or you get a stronger resume and better relations with coworkers who may be looking for jobs elsewhere. Plus there are non-financial rewards that can range from increased job satisfaction to your manager stops yelling at you.

But the other thing I wanted to point out is that a lot of time taking the initiative makes your job easier. Granted in the story above I did read a 300+ page book over the weekend, but after that I was able to do more of the work I wanted to do in the same amount of time I'd already been giving.
Publishers, please, please allow us to buy electronic versions of your books. Just make it reasonably cheap ($5-10 instead of the full $50?) and in multiple formats (PDF and HTML are my favorites), and I will gladly buy them. I have a lot of trouble paying $50 just for a paper version of a book. Is there a chance this could be profitable?

The thing I love most about free books is not that they are free, but that they are generally available in electronic formats that I can then use on my many devices. I can read them on my laptop without having to carry around twice the weight, have them for reference on my desktops without having tons of shelf space and copies for work and home, and have them on my iPod Touch for reading in bed or on the train.

It's particularly an issue with large technical books, as they tend to be big and heavy and won't fit in my bike bag the way an iPod does.
is there a pdf or portable format, I like to read my digital books when I don't have an internet connection.
Good point. I want to work for my own startup though so access to a large number of customers is more important to me. I don't yet know how this compares (the ease of finding new customers in Canada as well as traveling to the US as a Canadian resident to meet customers) but I am looking into it.
Tolerance Essays
Everything about Tolerance Essay writing! Review ideas on writing and free written papers!
shouldn't the title of this post read "HTML5: a story in progress"?
First that article on North Korea and now this. It's so sad that people live like this in the 21st century. And there's no way for us to do anything about it since their governments so actively block any real information.

"People's Republic" my ass. China's government is no government by the people for the people. It's just an evil empire. And we're supporting them with every Chinese product we buy and every attempt Obama makes to improve our relations.

After reading stuff like this, I'm not so sure we should be. I'm not advocating sanctions or anything of that sort, I just feel like we should take a harder line against such human rights violations.
I honestly don't know if you're being facetious.
Fine if he thinks people will pay for things. They will have to actually provide added value. Like Zynga or Blizzard.

So Diller find out what people will actually pay for. Don't give us crap about how free is not free. Same goes for the NYtimes figure out some new business models. Stop trying to protect what the internet killed.
I hope that society developes a different view of debt and consumer debt in particular through all this.

One thing to note, is that either the paying off or writing off of debt is deflationary -- something that was an asset on someone's books, either simply vanishes, or else is replaced by money that was extracted from the economy.
User-generated late capitalism
China may not be democratic, but it's no evil empire. Boycotting Chinese products or freezing them out diplomatically won't fix corruption problems; in fact, it's likely to have the opposite effect. China has improved a great deal since Nixon went to China, and there's no reason to believe that continued engagement won't further the same process.
the fact that finding a treadmill that can act in a manner as suggested by the problem is impossible is another issue completely.

Fine, but the reader's acceptance or non-acceptance of the existence of such a magical treadmill pretty much exclusively determines how they decide the issue, so you can't claim that it's irrelevant. Nobody that accepts that such a treadmill exists (in the problem) says the plane will take off, and nobody that thinks it doesn't exist says it won't.

Which makes it a brilliant problem from a psychological standpoint - everybody gets to feel like they're smarter than the other side, but really they're all just being asses and arguing about different problems.

Any time you can prove both P and !P in a system, you can prove literally any statement. The airplane on a treadmill problem asks us to assume "normal physics," but then postulates some magical treadmill, vitally important to the "paradox," that violates everything we know about physics. It's no wonder the arguments degenerate into foolishness quite rapidly.

Think people: They have breaks on aircraft wheels do they not? (They do) You can sit on a runway with the engine revved equal to your break ability and not move. If the engine in the problem can outperform the treadmill, you've solved a different problem.

The brakes on the airplane are not supposedly engaged during the treadmill experiment; if the problem specified that there was some specific amount of residual friction from the wheel joint, then we might have a problem to discuss, but it doesn't. So the best we can do is suppose that we're talking about a normal plane, and for a normal plane with normal wheels the treadmill would have to be moving so rapidly as to rip the wheels right off the plane before it could overcome the force of the engine.

At that point, the plane would fall on its belly onto the treadmill, and the backwards force the treadmill could exert on the plane would be dominated by the coefficient of friction between the fuselage and the treadmill. But that becomes far less fun to discuss, because it's now a standard physics problem and we actually have to find the parameters involved.
I think this analysis misses the mark. My opinion is that there is a serious tension between some of StackOverflow's objectives (i.e., to have some "Wikipedia-like" "wisdom of the crowds" effect cause answers to converge towards the ideal) and the incentives they have put in place (which tend to reward the first semi-correct answer over later, better answers). It will be interesting to see if some form of appropriate tweakage can diminish the gap.
I bought PCL so as to encourage this sort of thing, even though I can read it off my laptop. Plus it's a good book. :)
wget http://progit.org/book/
Well, any time the government gets into micro-managing salaries, the whole thing is fubar, guaranteed. The problem is that the government decided that there was a shortage and decided to start tinkering with employment levels, which set off the chain of events leading to this kind of discussion.

Anyway, you make a good point about cost of living issues, so some sort of local indexing would be a good idea.

To me, the most important thing is that we include other professions in the "market rate". As it stands, even if H1Bs pay market rate, they can still put a damper on wage growth, while other fields without extensive guest worker programs sprint ahead. So I'd say "if there's indeed a shortage, what other professional degree paths are getting these students?" So in this case, they'd need to make sure that grads of top engineering schools who get visas are not paid significantly less than grads of comparably ranked law and business schools. This would protect against the use of visas to cause wage stagnation in engineering relative to other professions.
Being Data-Driven In A World That Increasingly Isn’t
Research says women are getting more beautiful
Again, that's because in the huge interim between IE6 and IE7, the other browsers caught up to IE and then pulled way ahead.
Yes, but they were not in a public school, but rather a small private school. Mostly A's with a couple B's. Not too tragic though, as he has a better job now with more room for growth than most of his peers that did get their BA's.

It's all about drive. If you have drive, you will succeed regardless of you formal education. A motivated person will not remain ignorant, even though they may not have the certification to prove it.
Some history on the Somalia situation:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892376,00.htm...
Weird. I seem to be experiencing quite a bit of cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile a publisher like Sys-Con, which as he notes, draws in Microsoft, IBM and Sun as advertisers, and publishes reasonably well-respected journals like ".NET Developer's Journal", "AJAX World Magazine", etc., with articles like "Turkish Fags Who Live in London: Aral Balkan".
Twitter.com provides the entire Twitter infrastructure, but only a mildly popular front-end application. They should focus on selling their infrastructure (i.e. cloud computing). I'm sure there would be tons of people interested in their real-time search pipeline.
I've been wondering the same thing. I spent some time playing around with feedburner, but after two hours I gave up. I have absolutely no idea how many subscribers I have to my blog.

Please someone - do a startup that gets this right. It can't be that hard and there is a real problem waiting to be solved.
I have a machine with two quad-core CPUs, I want to run 8 parallel jobs at a time!

Most of these make replacements start with design decisions (like using Python) that pretty much rule out ever reaching what make does best, and which is essential to get my build times improved by at least a factor of 6.

Using a tool (like CMake) to generate your Makefiles is an excellent solution, heck, even a Python script that generated a Makefile and then ran make would be to prefer over this tool.
That's a pretty loose definition of "gamed".

Obama ran campaign ads and probably said "vote for me" to at least a couple of people- was the presidential election gamed as well?
It's called not cutting corners and doing things right.

You haven't seen Quicktime's H.264 encoder...

Personally I think they have just managed to convince people that if something looks and feels good nothing else matters. That and playing with the media and building up hype machines.
Thanks for the link, I'm just starting out in R, coming from Python and C++, so the article is perfect for me.
This should be available as an electronic book from Apress, too - all formatted and pretty and whatnot. When the book is shipping, you'll be able to get a professional digital version if you wish. Of course, if you want to take this markdown and make a PDF of it, do feel free.
This explains why the 100m dash speed record keeps getting broken.
If you're questioning the existing data, you're doing science! That's all I'd like to see. And if that data is being collected for the very first time, isn't that the point? Then re-evaluate each year thereafter.

What's interesting to me about science in a democracy is the experiments can only be as grand as the public allows. The interventions now being discussed, even cap and trade, are more like small fixes. And look at the political difficulty of passing that! The difference with bearskins and crystals is you can measure and contrast effects. The system may be too complex to truly pull it apart and reduce it, but I still don't get what you're against exactly. You're for nuclear plants and for measurements. What's the problem then? Doing science is simply about trying to isolate causation. With more data and more interventions, it should be possible to see if man can have a causal effect on global temperatures. Most climate scientists think that we'll see positive changes. If they're wrong, we'll find out in our lifetimes. What's the alternative hypothesis you're pushing? Giving out large numbers of sky god dolls and watching for an effect? I don't think you really want to cut all research funding in the area, do you?
Not directly. There are situations (at every top-notch institution, I think) of sorts that all the candidates are excellent achievers, no matter what measure.

Then there is a problem how to differentiate between them further.

This is where the concept of "fit" comes in, where the recruiting board tries to enrich the "social experince" of this particular microsociety. For example, thinking is, a group of physics graduate students living in the dorms may enjoy a little improvised cello performance by one of them. This happened to my friend. He had a very strong application but, no doubt equally strong, cellist was choosen. My friend had to work part time for the greatest part of the year to afford undergraduate studies at all and it never occured to him that a cello, or any other extracurricular activity (for which he wouldn't have time anyways) was that important to be a well-rounded physicist.
Customer-wise stay in the US I say :) Canada doesn't really have a consumer culture to the tune of the USA, and because of lower income and higher taxes, you need to sell harder to get our money.

For tech companies focusing on mobile apps this is especially troublesome. Telecommunications in Canada is expensive as hell, and come with a ludicrous number of strings attached. Want to do a high-bandwidth site like Hulu? Forget it, your customers get hit with overage fees from their ISP like the plague. Want to do a mobile app? Sky high costs for data plans means your customer base is severely limited, and even the ones that do have it are apprehensive about going over their paltry (500MB to 2GB!) monthly limits.

I wouldn't consider doing a Canadian startup that sells to Canadians. I would, however, consider a Canadian startup that sells to Americans :)
Beginner’s 4-CH Co-Axial RC Helicopter Tutorial Guide
Come check out this 37 minute tutorial on 4ch RC helicopters. It's a great watch and is very detailed as to the steps you need to take to be a savy RC heli pilot.
Get a color palette that matches an image
I didn't feel like working so that my neighbor can walk away from their mortgage and my relatives can walk away from their credit card debt. So I don't anymore.
Squatters in paradise say it's job from hell
Not Postlets. The site I'm talking about used to charge $10 per listing directly to agents, but they now have a bulk listing package which is completely underwritten for active real estate agents by third parties, including lenders. It complies with all RESPA rules. I bought one of the bulk listing packages to offer to agents. (I also own a mortgage bank and a few brokerage offices.) Where are you located?
Ask HN: How do you hire a freelancer without fear they'll steal your idea?
I've begun to find myself in a place where I have more ideas than time to execute each one of them. And while I have an idea of which ideas may be more successful than others, I'd like to hire some freelancers to take on the projects that are smaller and stand-alone in nature (browser extensions, iphone apps, etc.). Furthermore, some of these ideas involve technologies that I'm not up to speed on ... so hiring somebody else to do the development would allow me to bring my product to market faster and determine whether it has legs.

My question is this ... How do you go about hiring a freelancer to build these types of things without the fear that they'll take the idea and run? Obviously, a legal agreement could be put in place as one means of protection, but I belong to the camp of people who believe that once lawyers get involved, nobody ever really wins except the lawyers.

What's the best approach to hiring somebody to take on this type of work?
hope it won't start running in opposite direction....
What that educated stupid scientist doesn't know is that we have plenty of time: because there are actually 4 simultaneous days in one 24-hour day! Hence, 4 times as much time as we thought!
And as I said: most planes.
Have you tried http://www.99designs.com ?

I used the site to have a logo created, and am very happy with the results. You can have websites designed there as well.
The education system is an attempt at creating equality for over a billion people. It's implemented by people for people so there will always be corruption. It's sad that there are no checks for when these things do happen. The media would be a good check but alas, not in China where the state controls it.
Ask HN: Please review my startup Ventoria.com
Geez, people, for the love of Pete, even if you can't wrap your brains around why the plane would take off at least learn to spell "brakes" correctly!
Unless it actually reaches 0, rather than just asymptotically approaching it.
The problem itself is not technological but political. The system that has evolved is pretty bad and the only reason it has evolved is because of the government. Unless there is some third party (free press, independent justice system) that oversees the government, there is no easy solution.
I just let Feedburner manage everything. That's what I started from day one. They have pretty a good service and I have nothing to complain about. But you have a valid point that they control everything.
Microsoft To Fix Critical Hole In IE
On a related note, the first Sun, Sand and Startups meetup in Barcelona is tomorrow night. Come and join if you are in the area!

http://www.sunsandandstartups.com
Government Bans India's First Ever Porn Site
His files had vanished. But with his story in the NYT, how long do you think it will take for him to vanish? :(
If Apple is all about hype, when have most of the developers I know switched to using Macs for their laptops, running OS X? Because they believe the hype or because the user experience, even for a developer, is better than the alternatives?
Banned words in Google's SafeSearch
Computer Models Improve Salmon Passage at Hydropower Dams
I gave my Windows PC away four years ago after buying my first iPod. I now have three Macs, other members of my family account five more, and we all love them. They're not perfect, mind you, but they're much more reliable and easier to use than our PCs ever were. Whatever Apple's doing, I hope they keep doing it.
I accidentally put in a date before today.. and it came up with results!
One of the most obvious answers is that the most well known and most successful web businesses have actually based their business on algorithms. For example Google and Wolfram.

Although one does not have to be an Architect to build a house, you will need to be one to build a 50 story high building. The question is common in many disciplines and can be translated as ... why do I need to learn that, if I will not be using it at my future workplace... However, from my own experience as an Engineer (Mechanical) a true professional must have the breadth as well as the depth of his field.

Since any program is an algorithm the more you understand algorithms the better.

Program= Algo(Algo1+Algo2+Algo(Algo+Algo..)....)
OT: is it "No Wine Till It's Time" or "No Wine Till Its Time"? I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
Surely as I get older!
Get a Google Voice number.
Learning algorithms and data structures is important because:

1. Knowing the standard algorithms and data structures will allow you to figure out which one you should be using, even if you're just doing that via an external library.

2. Knowing the standard algorithms and data structures will help you in cases where you want something which is almost but not quite standard. For example, I recently wrote a no-inserts hash table, because for my particular application I wanted to start with a populated table and then gradually remove entries; by removing the ability to insert entries, I made the code much simpler and faster (no need for rehashing!) -- but if I hadn't been entirely familiar with standard hash tables, I wouldn't have been able to do this.

3. Studying the standard algorithms and data structures gives you an opportunity to learn how to think about algorithms and data structures. Even if you live your life without ever needing to sort a list, having studied sorting algorithms will make it easier for you to figure out the best way to solve whatever obscure domain-specific problems you do encounter.
"If Apple is all about hype.."

Apple isn't all about hype, but there is a lot of hype about their products. But then again that isn't new in consumer products.