skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are correct. My brain was thinking those with observance. Early morning/tired posting victim. Thanks
A lot of people have asked this same question for a long time.[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters#B...
How Clever Design Can Help You Learn Chinese
Allen was my professor at Olin. In a facebook comment to when another prof posted an article about this "study" he did (which was purely for computational statistics purposes, not to really make a theological statement), his response:

"I'm so proud. Structure of all responses to my paper: (1) New study says Internet is a tool of Satan, (2) correlation does not imply causation, so this paper is stupid, (3) here, on the basis of no evidence at all, is the real cause of religious disaffiliation."

The way the internet has contorted the original study to make sensationalist commentary is pretty hilarious.
> as the moderates leave, the fundamentalists make the churches more and more fundamental and fanatic, driving out the moderates still left, which gives the fundamentalists even more power and the church drives out those moderates still left and so on.

That's a fascinating point. The question is, as this circular process reaches a new equilibrium, what are we left with?
I don't know why we differentiate art from action. Some people intend for their actions to be consumed by others for a purpose of communicating or commerce, but there are no bounds to how little difference there is, theoretically, between any action and art - including inaction.

Any constraints given to a "form" of art are illusory. Every constraint can be deconstructed and bent into meaninglessness.

There are no forms, just our perception through living. We have the benefit of sensation - creating contexts and realizing patterns. This leads to valuing or appreciating certain presentations, but that's all arbitrary based on how we experience our existence.

Art is a marketing term for what most of us would call living.
To the downvoters: what did you find objectionable about my contribution?
Once some service controls a significant user base, its priorities start to shift. It's cheaper to make additional investments in advertising to gain users (or convince existing users to consume content you already license) rather than continue to add content. If you go from 1000 to 2000 titles, your reputation for content increases proportionately. If you go from 1,000,000 to 1,001,000 titles, it's not clear anyone will notice. It becomes increasingly expensive to enhance the value of your service by acquiring new content.

That depends on the licensing model. If you model it such that the content owner gets a fixed % of the revenue for each view they get, then once you get to 1,000,000 titles you wouldn't have to pay anything more for another 1,000 titles- the people who own those titles would organise themselves to put their content on your service since otherwise they would miss out on a revenue stream.

I think if a service like spotify or netflix gets a dominant position, and presents a deal that seems fair to everybody, eventually you'll be able to find pretty much every song/movie/etc on those services.
I hadn't thought about the differences between how one goes about learning phonetically vs...whatever the optimal way of learning Chinese/Japanese would be called.

At the college I went to, which had a good Chinese department, as far as I could tell, classes were taught entirely by native Chinese professors. I would expect them to teach in a way that works for the language, but as pretty much everyone there had previously learned a Romance language to some degree (very typical of the high schools in the area), I wonder if they brought preconceptions from that experience.

I knew many of the students in the department, and their experience lines up pretty well with what the author explains (they studied intensively for 4 years and could still only read at any reasonable pace from textbook passages/speak passably on certain predefined topics).
The literalness of these words may look strange to native English speakers, but they're not too different from their own language, or from other highly literal languages.

"Television" to borrow from the list above is a literal word in English ... if you happen to know Latin, as it's comprised of the words for "far" or "distant" and "seeing". The German (one of those pesky literal languages I had in mind) is "Ferhnsehen", combining the words for "distant" and "seeing". I remember hearing the word "Mehrheit" in a German broadcast, not knowing it, but thinking "Hrm.... 'moreness' -- that probably means "majority" or something like that. It does.

"Movie" is a shortening of "moving picture". Earlier in the technology development path were shadow lanterns and similar slide or silhouette projectors.

"Computers" (a term transferred from those who computed to the machines they used" are also know as "electronic brains" or "thinking machines".

Trains were often called "iron horses", a term sometimes applied to motorcycles (motor + bicycle -> two wheels) today.

The literalness of English is obscured by the many different language roots and influences from which its words are derived: Old German, Celtic, Norse, French, Latin, Greek....

Another example which I found fascinating was the contribution of Arabic to Spanish. The Alhambra comes from the Arabic "Al Hambra", or "the red", for the read clay of the region. From a time when the Arabic Moors controlled much of present-day Spain.

Another fascinating bit of linguistic lore I only learned recently: the Basque language, unrelated to any others in Europe, may be a relic of the Cro-Magnon people. This was an earlier race of humans who occupied parts of Europe and North Africa ~40,000 years ago. Further linguistic analysis (and genetics) have shown relationships with language fragments in North Africa:

http://www.atlantisquest.com/Linguistics.html

Generally, modern Cro-Magnon people can be found in certain parts of Western Europe, North Africa and some of the Atlantic Islands today. Physical anthropologists agree that Cro-Magnon is represented in modern times by the Berber and Tuareg peoples of North Africa, the all but extinct Guanches of the Canary Isles, the Basques of northern Spain, the Aquitanians living in the Dordogne Valley and the Bretons of Brittany; and until lately, those living on the Isle d'Oleron. (Howells, 1967; Lundman, 1977; Hiernaux, 1975, et al.)—this indicated by obviously Cro-Magnoid skulls.

There are other cases of language showing the dispersal and/or subjugation of tribes elsewhere: Jared Diamond includes linguistic evidence showing the sweep of tribes through Africa, and later of words introduced via colonization. Pre-Han populations in China and Taiwan leave traces through language, as do the Roma people, who migrated from present-day India to southeaster Europe.
I wish had known about the event a bit earlier since I am graduating in a couple of months..
Ask HN: What can you ask freelance programmers to find out how good they are?
This is different from finding out how good ordinary programmers are. When you hire a long-term programmer you want someone brilliant. But when people hire freelancers what they often want is just someone who'll reliably implement their plan.

What can you ask freelance programmers to find out if they can do that?
妞妞牵牛，牛拗，妞妞拧牛。妞 means girl, 妞妞 is a common name for little girls; 拗 has two different pronunciations, ao and niu; the ao pronunciation is usually used as a verb for bending something, while the niu pronunciation is usually an adjective for stubbornness. I guess 拧 is better translated as to wring or to squeeze and twist, but you get the idea.
Also, online communities and communication could go some way to replacing what some people enjoy about the community aspect of churches.
There are tools like ocamlbuild and cabal, which are implemented in Ocaml and Haskell, and used to build Ocaml and Haskell.

But ocamlbuild doesn't have a build file. It just knows how to build Ocaml. And build Ocaml is about all it can do. Cabal is powered by a .cabal file, which is a data structure, and a Setup.hs file, which is run like a shell script via runhaskell.

I think what tikhonj envisions would be a lot of work to achieve. Maybe he already knows that. I suspect that the closest most of us will ever get is putting something like this at the top of a Makefile :)

.ONESHELL:
SHELL = /usr/bin/runhaskell
This isn't completely true, there are issues which come up with code like

newtype Foo = Foo Int

map (\(Foo x) -> x) listOfFoos

which should be a no-op at runtime because the representation of Foo x and x are the same, but due to the newtype, the traversal does need to occur. [1] discusses a way to avoid these problems. Basically these newtype should only ever be needed during type checking, and should really be erased after that; once you've type checked everything, then you know your program won't ever treat something which is a non Foo Int as an Int, so you can then get rid of the compile time tag and gain better optimisations.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...
I am not sure I would call it cheating but there definitely is an issue here, and the author dismisses it all too easily. The issue is that it seems that a lot of today's artists just do not have the skills of the artists of the past. Paul Graham actually touched on this as well in one of his old essays.

Thus, when artists use photography they may not use it as a tool to expand their abilities, but as a crutch to compensate for lack of skill. And they try to argue around that by saying something like "art is not about skill it is about ideas and expression". But the thing is, when you get the skill then you can also have much more interesting ideas and expression.

For example if you look at a portrait done by one of the old dutch masters, you often see so much expression and emotion and character in the face. This is often much more than you can see in the usual modern photograph to say nothing about the crude camera obscura methods of the past. How do they do it? Well they use their skill in connection with their vision in order to make painting more powerful. They make minor embellishments and subtly change this or that to make the face look more striking.

But my point is, in order to do all of that you have to have the skill first. It is not that easy to separate skill and expression.

I think that is why many artists today are talking about how the old masters used camera obscura. They just want to provide an explanation as to why no-one seems to have the skill of the old masters anymore. By the way that theory is wrong. All you have to do to prove it wrong is look at some rembrandt self portraits, for which he could not have possibly used camera obscura and which do not differ in technique from his usual portraits.

Now maybe I am being too hard on artists. Those skills are tremendously difficult to master, even if you do have the talent. And considering people do not spend much on art anymore, it is probably unfair to expect today's artists to spend the enormous time and effort to obtain those skills. Perhaps, certain art skills will be permanently lost like ancient violin making.

That's ok, and I cannot blame artists for being creative and expressing themselves with the skills and techniques they can practically develop. But lets not lie to ourselves and pretend that it is just as good. Something is definitely lost when a photograph replaces a face drawn by a skilled master.
"Piketty converts the entrepreneur into the rentier. To the extent capital reaps high returns, it is by assuming risk (over the broad sweep of history real rates on T-Bills are hardly impressive)."

The high returns entrepreneurs and investors can receive is a result of capturing winner-take-all market opportunities. Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, took very little risk in the scheme of things. I heard a talk by a Sequoia partner once. He said that their investing philosophy is pretty simple: Look for billion dollar market opportunities, and invest in the team/company most likely to capture that market. Thanks to Sequoias's reputation and contacts, they can attract the top entrepreneurs and thus earn extraordinary returns. Risk has little to do with it.

Much of the risk in startups actually comes from the fact that the market opportunities are usually pretty obvious, so there are a bunch of startups competing for the space, and only one or two can win. There are some entrepreneurs who take on genuine technology or market-existence risk, but this tends to be the exception these days.
No, people bring work home because they need to put in some extra hours, but do not wish to stay at the office until 9PM.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions/dp/1...
I explained how it's unlikely, but here we go again.

Tom has spent considerable time (as I have, in my own company) getting people to a point where they think for themselves, make decisions as a group, and generally behave as independent adults rather than the kind of infantile employees who just do what they're told by their boss. Since the latter is the way most businesses operate, it's no mean feat to get this done with a company of a dozen, let alone with one of hundreds.

If Tom decides to arbitrarily fire someone, even just one person, without going through the group-oriented processes he's spent all this time building up, he immediately undermines all that, potentially fatally.

Since he clearly cares about the company's culture (enough to make it his priority for the last half-decade), it's very unlikely he would risk that to get rid of one person.

And finally, again, there's the evidence: if he really did want to get rid of this woman, and he could, why didn't he?
Ask HN: Does your prospects ask about your freelance portfolio?
How often do you get clients or prospects looking through your portfolio ask for references about particular projects?

What if some of the projects you did while you were hired as a developer years ago at a company, could you put include it in your portfolio?

Should you only have the ones where you were the full stack developer and had created the project start to finish?
Of course, every language has bonkers exceptions. But Chinese is actually quite bad. For example, if I tell you "mao mi", and you had never seen the characters before, you have about no chance to figure it out. Conversely, if I show you the characters, but you've never seen them before, you have absolutely no clue what character it is.

Sure, there are radicals. Don't count on them to tell you anything remotely useful. Sure, some characters do tell a proper story with their radicals, but it's laughable to count on them to tell you anything.
Hah... "novice... with some 5-10 years of experience". Actually you're not too off the mark. And in any case, with c++11, pretty much everyone who's not been following the c++0x/c++1x process assiduously, counts as a novice.
PayWith secure mobile transactions using a one time/use card number
In some cases, maybe a secretive minority willing to die for the incredible belief in their cause and not enough moderates to criticise their behaviour?

Bit like what you can see with friends who push their partying too hard. They alienate more conservative friends but find agreeable social partners elsewhere, gradually re-filling their social circle with other hard partiers. Over time, perhaps what was normal seems boring and the behaviour gets worse?
Our loss of wisdom – Barry Schwartz
If I was to guess a little.
-Email Certificate
-Outlook License
-Online Outlook license
-Remote VPN services and remote dialup + support
Which is a big pile of money off the top.
-Help Desk
-Hardware/Cloud storage and what not, probably a small portion.
Stuff like this comes up in management training.

In the beginning of my career, certainly before I had the cash reserves to easily weather being laid off, I worked for a company that had a 4-month death march. The two nights before the work was due I literally didn't sleep. As an aside, I really can't recommend this; the code I produced was basically nonsensical. And I think I added far more bugs than I removed, but I did get the final blocking bug out (no matter how many every-so-slightly lower priority bugs I added in its stead.) The ceo came in the morning of the final due date and saw me -- wearing the same clothes for nearly 48 hours and utterly sleep deprived -- and made a crack about how I didn't look like I'm been working hard and I should get to work or he'd fire me. Joking about firing people may or may not ever be funny, but definitely stops being funny when the person has the ability to do it. And some managers fail to understand that - your relationships with employees change when you're their supervisor.

Similarly, it's really not hard to see how being too close or too friendly with people you supervise can cause all sorts of problems, ranging from letting them get away with things they shouldn't because of the friendship or them sharing things with you that force you, as a boss, to choose between your friendship or what your company requires.

I just don't think it's a good idea either way. It's a bummer that it makes workplaces a little more impersonal, but imo it's for the best. I bet it's the reason the military doesn't (from my perspective) seem to encourage enlisted and officers to co-socialize.
Let's all just hope that "connectivity" includes internet access and a workstation for that user as a whole?
Web data commons – hyperlink graph
Myth: Less people go to church now then in the past.

Really weak since more people go to church now then they did in 1994! :) The numbers show that more people attend church percentage wise then ever in history of America. Don't even look at World Wide church attendance because it might make your mind explode on how much Christianity has grown.

It is always shocking how people report the death of religion without the numbers. I think people who are religious are the origins of this myth.

Look at this one look at USA http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/fastfacts/fast_facts.html

Worldwide (Based on CIA world facts and few others
http://fastestgrowingreligion.com/numbers.html
Oh, but one more thing. It's very nice if the abstractions you use to do this are resolved down to nothing at runtime. So there's no penalty at runtime for the precision you added to the code. Let the compiler do the hard work so that you can say "Position", but at runtime, the code is as if you had written "Float".
>What is even more powerful is that the president can't buy a better Coke. What if more products were like that? What if more products were that equitable?

Coke does sell drinks that are dramatically more expensive than, ah, coke.

http://www.coca-colacompany.com/brands/all/

I mean, even the top-end energy and health drinks, while retailing for several times what you'd pay for Coke, are still within the reach of most people, but my point is that they do engage in price discrimination, like most rational profit-maximizing entities.

The difference in price between coke classic and monster, for example, is greater, I think, than the difference between a Honda civic and a accura ILX. The only reason you might think that coke is an "everyone" brand is that you make enough money that the cost of a coke is functionally zero.
Some books I've read recently that I enjoyed:

Mindstorms and The Children's Machine by Seymour Papert

Privacy on the Line by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men by Donald McCaig

How Children Learn the Meanings of Words by Paul Bloom
Atheism is a belief but not a religious belief.
Your ignoring population growth. As there is around 50 million more people in the us now than there was in 1994.

"In 1990, 20.4% of the population attended an Orthodox Christian church on any given weekend. In 2000, that percentage dropped to 18.7% and to 17.7% by 2004. Olson explains that while church attendance numbers have stayed about the same from 1990 to 2004, the U.S. population has grown by 18.1% — more than 48 million people. "So even though the number of attendees is the same, our churches are not keeping up with population growth," he says." http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/139575-...

http://fastestgrowingreligion.com/numbers.html. Global Christian growth rate 1.36% is below the population groth rate of 1.41 %. Which is a sign of a slow death, Islam at 2.13% on the other hand is well above that.
What is concerning is the marine life that ends up on people's dinner plates containing such chemicals or some weird disease because of the exposure to it.
Perhaps...

But you're talking more about what becomes avant guarde and that's established by trendsetters. Sometimes that's people with money (maybe most of the time) --and curators race to tap that new trend. Sometimes there is little objective reason why something is "in" in art vs. something else. Remember the demand from Japanese patrons who had money before their bubble burst? And the artists raced to fill that demand and then the art dealers had no use for that art. So, some mediocre art can become important and the next day be forgotten. Curators, artists, galleries all are tuned into their patrons and their money. That's what sets trends and defines what's art.

There are few cases where that's not true --like the New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape exhibit. But that's the exception, I think.
Welcome to the world of government contracting. There is lots of money to be made in this area if you know how/who to talk to, and the red tape to jump through. Lockheed, L3 and Northrop, make a pretty penny, along with many many bottom feeders (some hiding behind a shell companies that fit labels like "disable business veteran" owner or other such preferential categories).

It is a multi-billion dollar world, with its own rules, players, business cycles, customers, marketing and so on. You get to use exciting technologies such as Window Vista (still XP up until not too long ago) and RHEL 4 and 5.
Some sites are banned. Most of these are spam. Others aren't spam, exactly, but have been the source of many bad-for-HN articles. We also ban things like novelty sites.

However, for mixed bag sites where you get a lot of fluff and also some solid pieces, we don't ban the site. That is what minimaxir is talking about.
It's either an exaggerated academic demonstration or a joke, but it's convincingly presented in a serious tone. Nobody genuinely thinks it's a good idea to replace a 9 line C function with 156 lines of templated C++ code (not counting the header full of templates classes it includes).

https://github.com/BartoszMilewski/Okasaki/blob/master/Tripl...
Interesting article. Any particular reason for resurfacing it now?