skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The big difference is in HOW MUCH we need to remember. There simply wasn't that much new information to remember Before Writing. An expert story teller in ancient times probably didn't remember more than a few novels worth of information - far less than I take in in a month - over his lifetime. Others had even less, and most of what they took in was gradual changes in the surrounding environment, not a lot of explicit information (like, to use the original essay's example, telephone numbers; and we don't remember as many phone numbers today as 30 years ago because we're not dialing as many).
By "cross-gender" I assume you're including categories like "biological men who identify as women", which is a very large group compared to the biological categories mentioned in the article.

I mean, I have no problem with men who want to identify as women, or indeed with men who want to identify as $6.99 Ikea table lamps, but the existence of such men isn't a challenge to binary human/lamp classification schemes.
I dont think that is a metric easily measured - and I am convinced your solution doesnt measure it much, depending on the context.

So if a maths question was asked including complex mathematics then, yes, it would probably work. But many questions are just not that specialist!
What is the HN meet? Can you give more information?
[0,1) = (0)
[0,0) = ()
[0,0] = (0)
[0,x] = ()

Probably you'd say x=-1 but if you're using unsigned indices, then you can't distinguish the biggest possible sequence from the empty one (this is true of all schemes, actually, but at least the other don't require negative numbers).
oh, bother, I forgot what HN does to asterisks. In what I wrote above, look for the bit in italics and mentally insert asterisks on each side of it. It was right when I typed it in, I promise...
Poor Matthew!
The Sony Playstation 2 SDK had functions that resembled the TRON OS (thread, event & message system). It even had the fixed thread priorities and such.
As an American who spent a few months in Italy, I can attest unless you spend a lot of time with the language, Italian phonemes are weird. Italian is incredibly easy to pronounce, but feels strange to an American used to different (and more varied) vowel sets.
>I got a job at O'Reilly as a marketing coordinator for their software group as a way to get me to California. I was 25. I had no degree or significant tangible skills. (I could "code" HTML, ColdFusion, VB...and write marketing copy.) I had spent the last few years trying to get my own Internet company going in Nebraska, which was a painful (but educational) mess.

Maybe the problem was not so much Nebraska but the fact that he had no significant or tangible skills - in 1994-1997, when it would have probably been more difficult for a guy in the middle of nowhere to pick up the necessary skills by himself.
For sure; it's always sad when these things happen because this community especially knows how hard all these people have worked whether their ideas ultimately panned out in the end or not. A complete 180 from Techcrunch comments where assholes seem to rule.
Pre-scheme.

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

I experimented with other languages/things before for embedded programming. I think forth would be great if it worked the way my brain does. Otherwise, there are good reasons everybody uses C.
I've been to Padua; I seem to recall a lot more than just a tongue.
Is it tragic that it will be illegal?
This is a good example of monolingual ignorance. Who is this "we" that don't use Galileo's last name? From reading the article, you could only draw the conclusion that it's everybody. The word "English" is nowhere to be found; all the reasons enumerated in the article have nothing to do with English and everything to do with the Italian conventions of the time as well as the particular customs of Galileo's family.

I speak three languages fluently; in two of them, including my native language, the man's called Galilei. He also appears to be normally called Galilei in French (the spelling's a bit different, but it isn't his first name), German, Dutch, Norwegian, a bunch of other European languages I checked randomly. Poles call him Galileusz for some reason. On the other hand, in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (spelled Galileu), English, and perhaps other languages he's known by his first name.

All this takes precisely two minutes to discover by clicking on the Wikipedia articles in various languages, and seems to be completely unknown to the author of the article. At best, he explains why Italians have been calling him Galileo; but "we" are not all Italians, surely? To explain why he's Galileo in English, you need to at least be aware that he's Galilei in most other European languages, and build some kind of argument to explain the discrepancy. And merely nodding at the usage in the Italian will not necessarily do. Seems to me that looking at how his name was transmitted in the scientific tracts of his time, mostly written in Latin, would help trace and distinguish the two traditions, if someone was really interested in understanding why "we" call the man Galileo.
I think you're being rather over-generous in applying the word "academic" to the output of such kooks.
Why not just ban those who aren't either verifiably male or female from competing?

What's that you say? It's unfair that these people, through a genetic quirk and no fault of their own, can no longer compete in international athletics? Well boo hoo, neither can I, so go get a real job like the rest of us.
I'd try to do it as a side project if at all possible. I've never gotten more side-projects done than when I was in college (and I went to a fairly work-intensive engineering school). If it helps, see if you can get credit by getting a faculty advisor and writing up some reports or papers about it.
The article was a little short and sloppy, but what most people who make this claim mean is that computers are increasingly integrated into EVERYTHING we do today, so having at least a basic understanding of how they work, similar to what is learned in, and most easily learned by, an introductory programming course, is increasingly important in effectively using them.
perhaps search for funding and use that process to hire a freelancer or find a committed cofounder?

beyond that, there's not any easy way for someone here to analyze your situation and tell you what choice is best, especially without knowing more about the project (i.e., how much development time would it take to produce a product, etc)
I don't like either of those ideas. Problem is, if you don't have either time nor money to implement the idea yourself, why should a partner/freelancer implement it for you and then let you keep the profits?

If I were you, I'd do one of two things:

1. If you really believe in the idea, take a leave of absence from college and pursue it full-time. Build a prototype, put it out there, validate it, and then if it still looks like a good idea, enlist people to help. You'll have a much better bargaining position then anyway.

2. If you don't believe in the idea enough to do #1, put it up for adoption and let someone else run with it. Or just forget about it and let it die.

One of the hard lessons I've learned is that you can't serve two masters. I tried the volunteer-website-with-classes-on-the-side in college, and I tried the startup-on-the-side-with-a-full-time-job afterwards. With the former, I barely managed to graduate, and the website took far longer to do than it should've. With the latter, my job performance suffered and I found the code I wrote for the startup was so bad that I threw it all away and started fresh once I quit. If I come up with another good idea for a startup, the first thing I do (after validating it and making sure it's feasible) is to quit my job and pursue it all the way.
Imagine a series of counters as attributes to the articles submitted. If enough people decide 'enough Erlang, let's flag that stuff down' then you can imagine a flurry of activity by a limited number of users (say 10 or 15 or so) that would remove all the articles within a minute or so, which is when the last person to be able to do so clicks 'flag' for the relevant articles.

Don't attribute to 'divine' intervention what you could easily achieve with the tools at hand.
Also, you'll create a new problem: second-rate male athletes will try to get into the "none of the above" category, where they'll presumably be more competitive due to the low number of genuine contestants. How do you prove yourself "not verifiably male"?
For fixed size ints, no rule for mapping pairs of ints to a range of consecutive ints can allow both the empty range and the range of maximal size, e.g. you can't have both "", the empty range, and "0,...,Maxint".

You really need to give up one of the possibilities, or use an extra bit.
In summary: you need partners. Good ones. I failed to find any, and, like your first attempt, my startup burned out.

Working by yourself is just dangerous - even if you're entirely self-motivated (I'm not), you can only have so much perspective. Ever spent days trying to get some small thing to work because nobody was there to tell you it didn't matter? This goes much more if your project isn't a full time job - you need someone there to help you stay motivated. Heck, see paul Graham's #1 startup mistake:http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

On the other hand bad partners are even worse than nothing. Partnerships can go wrong in all kinds of ways - in my case I had someone who was big on talk but light on delivery. Doing the work I thought he was going to do took too much time, and my project was stillborn. Cool looking, somewhat functional, but with too many big issues to be usable. It needed another 6 months of polishing, and I didn't have 6 months of money left.

Never mind if your relationship should become actively hostile - nothing will kill things like a good round of lawsuits to waste your time and money. Of course, most startups never make enough money for that to be an issue. Also, having someone professional do your employment contracts (as I did) can help you avoid IP ambiguity.

It's hard to tell who will be a good partner and who won't, too. I'm still looking for someone to carry my project on with, since I do have all the IP. If anybody has figured it out, let me know.

I thought about freelancers, too. But I think for a startup you need someone genuinely invested. Someone who cares about the project - not just "give me my $X/hr., and I'm out the door". A startup requires more than that. A startup requires passion and commitment, something freelancers aren't exactly known for.

That's what was missing in my project. Somebody - else - who really was committed to making the project succeed. Somebody who'd sink huge amounts of their own money and/or time to get it off the ground.

Good luck - if somebody has a better idea for finding partners, I'm all ears.
No, articles with over 10 points are no longer auto-removed by flagging, after some complaints a month or two ago. It was pretty clearly a moderator action.
"'Bank of America spent $40,000,000 dollars on airplanes last year. We spent $40,000 to develop an iPhone application so you can check your balance from anywhere.' (Hmm, the iPhone app should cost like $2.99.)"

I think he's misunderstanding something...the iPhone app may cost $2.99, but it doesn't cost $2.99 to develop.
It's Szczecin, and it's not entirely impossible to pronounce, but it does require practice. The inital szcz is pronounced about the same way as sh ch in fresh cheese.
Wikipedia Apps age-ratings compared
Don't try your cheap tricks on me.

We go from 1 to 5, so the math would be 5-1 +1

You go from 0 to 4, the math would be the same, 4-0 +1

Using 5 as your upper bound, then starting from 0 to 4 is the same as me using 6 as my upper bound then going from 1 to 5.
Don't know who was downvoting you. I agree. Don't know if I'd have agreed three months ago, but I'm starting to grow increasingly weary of rankings and competition.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of human potential. When I see people performing on levels I can't think of reaching, it gives me a fuzzy feeling. But we've gone past that in society, to the point of fetishizing achievement. I think it's awesome, for instance, that Michael Phelps broke the records he did. It's what he loves doing, apparently, and the technology behind his suit was pretty cool, and the spectacle was fun. But we aren't really given a choice about what to find fun, are we, when every media station heralds it for a week at a time. I'm sure other cool things were happening that didn't involve milliseconds in an expensive pool. Then the fame gets so ridiculous that his using marijuana became a scandal in and of itself, and he had to apologize not primarily for using but for letting kids down.

I'd like to see society move past these anal little obsessions. It's awesome that some people like some competitive sports, but I don't think it should be the center of our society. (I really don't think society should have any center whatsoever, but that's crazy talk.)
No, it comes from a common Slavic root of unclear origin chet- or shet- with meanings, in various languages, of "comb", "picket fence", "bristle", "fir needles", etc.
You allow all races in one class - same thing.
I demand a basketball league for short fat white guys.
Agile Project Management Is Not Enough
Fresh chocolate is like a tender charming cayote.
Whatever you do, don't buy a laser printer. If you're anything like me, the combination of feeling a great sense of satisfaction at how fast the things are (still!) and liking reading pages more than the screen will lead you to print out everything.
Bug #48669: PHP now includes GOTO
"how many fingers do I have? 5 - 1 = 4. Oops."

Upper-Lower+1, easy. Whenever the lower is 1, just the upper is enough.

In your case you go from 0 to 4, how's that different from how many fingers you have? 4-0=4 Oops.
> Don't know who was downvoting you.

This started about a week ago, maybe a bit longer, no matter what I write, first it will go to -1 or -2, then slowly back up. Weird...

> really don't think society should have any center whatsoever, but that's crazy talk.

I don't think that's crazy at all. We value things like beauty, speed, strength and so on. But everybody has a story, and when you dig deep enough everybody has hidden strengths, all it takes is the right circumstances to bring them to the surface.

What we need to recognize is that 'spectator sports by the clock', beauty contests and so on have essentially become so meaningless that what you wear in a race (or in a beauty contest!) will make the difference between winning and losing.

I'd like to see a guy like Lance Armstrong compete on a 70's racing bike. Those bikes were plenty fast, but I highly doubt he'd make a chance.

All that drives it now is money and some weird nationalistic drive.

Let's refocus from sports to stuff that actually matters (and no in the /. sense), let's hold a competition who has done the most good for their neighbourhood. Let's have countries outcompete each other on slashing their defense budget, on minimizing their crime rates and political record.

All that energy going towards slicing .01 of some record or other it fails to excite me.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686303

pg: "If a story has enough flags, that alone will kill it, without moderator intervention. I just added a point threshold to prevent this happening to stories that have received a significant number of votes."

On the other hand this change doesn't seem to be in the latest news.arc from arc3.tar, whether it was removed, not included in that distribution yet, or I'm just looking in the wrong place.
Competition sports are historically good for entertaining (actively and passively) billions of people. Do you have an alternative activity which is as engaging to as many people? Why not be entertained by watching fellow human beings push their bodies to the absolute microsecond limit? Why not reward those which are the most entertaining? Most of what we do in the end is completely pointless anyways if you get philosophical enough about it.

If we were all robots capable of performing brain intense activity all the time with no need for leisure activity, you may have a point about sports being pointless. However, we obviously are not. Sports are easy to relate to, easy to participate in, easy to admire and easy to watch. And since sports have remained popular for so long and now have such specialization, the differences amongst the most elite athletes are now only microseconds or centimeters. There is nothing wrong with measuring or finding entertainment from such small differences. I argue it makes it even more exciting.
I'm not a huge support of HSR, but I am a huge supporter of rail.

The main problem with rail is not necessarily speed. Current Amtrak trains are slow and painful because:

- They stop everywhere. There are hardly any express trains that run between major cities. This punishes the majority of inter-city travelers by forcing them to stop at every little village along the way, making the whole trip unbearably long compared to air, or even car.

- They share track with freight. I cannot count the number of times the train would stop just to wait for some 100-car freight train to pass. Passenger rail needs its own capacity, not piggy-backing on top of industrial rail.

You fix these two problems and instantly the majority of inter-city rail travel will suddenly already be competitive with air travel - and completely destroy car travel in terms of convenience and cost, for short to mid haul routes anyway. All of this without laying a single mile of special-gauge track, ludicrously expensive trains, and all using off-the-shelf, mature technologies that don't cost a quarter as much.

The solution to America's transportation woes IMHO is not sci-fi level technology. Yes, HSR may be justified in a few places, but for everywhere else, I think good old fashioned overhauling the existing rail system would do wonders.
Yes, currently using git for all my projects at the moment.
If you do the firebombing properly there aren't any poor angry people left. There are only 30M people in the whole country, say 20% of them are farmers - it can't be too difficult to wipe out 6M people with some B52s, enough agent Orange and some nerve gas.
Insure your fantasy team...No, seriously.
If I were going to do this I would integrate input from user actions as messages using a serialization like Thrift or ProtocolBuffers and likely an AMQP transport. This allows you to hook into the system in a number of places with whatever language makes the most sense. Getting data to the presentation layer is going to be really dependent on what type of data you're dealing with so it's hard to give a pat answer to that, but in the most basic of cases, you can continue to use a messaging based approach and combine it with a distributed hashtable/cache system.

This approach allows you to hide the data models of both parts of the system from one another so you don't end up back in the hell of integrating via the database, which is what I suspect you were driving at with your question. You obviously can't avoid having to share some information between systems, but in this model you can share message and service contracts rather than database schema.
I'll admit, I loled.

What is the reasoning behind goto in PHP though? I know php well enough, and I can't think of a time or place I've ever said: "I really wish I had a goto here!"
Seems like a legitimate bug submission to me.
I think it can be both; see http://genealogy.about.com/cs/surname/a/italian_surname.htm.

Take heart in the fact that Joan of Arc's last name, which was probably Darc, was reinterpteted as d'Arc and transmogrified in English into "of Arc".
Finally, it is now possible to produce true spaghetti code in PHP.

I wonder why this took so long. To this date the oversight of omitting goto from a language that otherwise seemed so geared towards obfuscation puzzled me greatly.
Yeah, there are some other bits and pieces, but the tongue is pretty distinctive.
What's distributed is not necessarily what is running on the site. I think there may be some secret sauce, if only to make it a bit harder to game the system.
You're implying that there are only two options: strict dress code and a bunch of smelly guys wearing torn jeans/old tshirts.

>Clothes are communication.

Bingo. But what is dress code if not an attempt at killing communication?

So what do you have when you have all employees dressed in slacks and shirts and suits? Isn't it an attempt at supressing communication? An attempt at supressing individuality and instead forcing a corporate culture of obedience, brainwashing, mindless loyalty and mediocrity?

Fuck that! I will not be forced to be dressed in a suit. I might choose to wear a suit if I want to communicate obedience and professionalism. I might choose to wear a turtleneck sweater and jeans. I might choose to wear a ripped tshirt and shorts. I might choose to wear a robe or pajamas. See where I'm going with this?

You are asking for communication yet asking me to lie? You want respect? Fuck respect, fuck professionalism, and fuck all these things that make life sour, dead, and joyless.

You say respect and seriousness. Since when did respect became better than honesty and truthfulness? Since when did "seriousness" became more important that joyful curiousity, aesthetics, and playfulness? Since when banality became better than destructive creativity?

I will die, I know that. And I will not spend my short life dressed up and living like some fucking corporate schmuck wants me to because it's "professional" or "serious".

Yeah, programmers aren't special. I'm not arguing that programmers should be exceptions to dress code. I'm arguing that dress code in itself should be placed on the shelf with slavery, religion, and all those other retarded mores.
On the flipside it certainly makes implementing TCO a lot more possible for those of us generating php.
new submissions were being deaded before being on the page long enough to be flagged, that and the lack of any entropy at all (they really did all disappear at the same time) and that some of them had ~10 comments suggests that it was manual.

Im not complaining about it if they were manually removed, I agree that they were out of hand.
Sure just because you're highly skilled in a narrow field doesn't mean you're a better human. It sucks that because of media we relate these skills with human worthiness, but you can't say that competition at a high level is worthless because of these drawbacks.

There are good reasons to have highly competitive sports. It lets people see what our bodies and minds are capable of, and it helps gives us an identity as individuals and as humans. Not to mention that entertainment is not pointless. Unless you're only going to look at it from a philosophical perspective, then yeah, pretty much everything we do is meaningless.
Avatar's 3D takes film to a new level (but you still need glasses)
A culture of quality has a significant cost. This is justified if lives are at stake, but that's pretty much the only case where it's justified. Grocery stores also don't check each apple 3 times independently if it's not rotten. :)
The right answer to the question could be passed via back-channels so this is as gameable as could be.