skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And you cannot understand the "tolerant" period in the middle east without realizing that that period happened with a partially muslim government, but with the society very much an eastern roman society.

1) Barely any muslims at all. The actual society was near 100% Christian at the time with small concentrated pockets of Judaism, and a muslim army concentrated in the capital.

All of the organisations that made the golden age happened, almost without exception, were Roman organisations that existed before the muslim invasion and got more freedom to operate. It ended they started getting systematically killed.

Even so, immediately the dhimma system was introduced. If that's what people call tolerant, then why not say that Nazis were very tolerant of the Jews ? It's essentially the same thing.

2) Even so, this muslim government itself was not tolerant, given for example it's treatment of institutions of learning. Yes they did not just go out and directly destroyed all of them, but ...

In 642 AD, Alexandria was captured by the Muslim army of Amr ibn al `Aas. Several later Arabic sources describe the library's destruction by the order of Caliph Omar.[34][35] Bar-Hebraeus, writing in the 13th century, quotes Omar as saying to Yaḥyā al-Naḥwī: "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them."[36] Later scholars are skeptical of these stories, given the range of time that had passed before they were written down and the political motivations of the various writers.[37][38][39][40][41]

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria)

While the library was notorious for political interference, keep in mind that it recovered from every attack except this one, mostly because the previous destructions of the library did not involve a massacre (they were not bloodless either, but there is a large difference). The muslims killed everyone they could find in a large area around it before burning it.

Muslims, during the golden age, made a habit of killing scientists. Yes there were a lot of scientists during that period, but to say that the muslim part of that society tolerated them is stretching the truth beyond recognition.

3) Massacres were very likely a common occurence. While not much history is known from that period from Egypt), this is from Spain, same government (more or less), same time period, same "Golden age" :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_Granada_massacre

This is not an isolated incident in Spain, but a constant during that time period.
"Build it and they will come" works a lot better with land, since land is pretty finite and people tend to want to do something with it. Also see the adage, "location location location".

Online mindshare, on the other hand, is basically infinite and unless there's a path to discovery, there's not really any reason for people to show up.
People have known about the potential for much longer than a year:

http://www.slideshare.net/guest2821a2/web-browsers-and-other...

http://www.slideshare.net/guest2821a2/web-browsers-and-other...

Actually going out and doing it is something else.
Then why doesn't he give people fellowships to become apprentice plumbers?
Zurb tackles responsive ads
> The Thiel Fellowship still needs a success story. It is in its early stages. All it will take is a single fellow that accomplishes something revolutionary and cool to completely change public perception of this program.

Perhaps that will change the public perception, but it says absolutely nothing about the actual value of the program. It's a selective group of high-achieving teens, of course some small subset will go on to experience amazing success.

Harvard could lay off its entire faculty and sell its campus, but as long as admissions stayed the same Harvard acceptees would continue to accomplish amazing things.
Thiel is accountable to nobody for the results of this program. It's more of an experiment. It becomes a more powerful tool for the members if the media likes the program, and a single shining success is what the media requires.
I'm in the process of finishing LYAH, and I'm also following CIS 194 which is available online (http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/, https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0_mzHzbl3GbNXBWMVZPVGNtX3M). I've learned about it from https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell.

I think CIS 194 would be nice to be added in the book listing section? It's a great course with exercises and at the same time refer to chapters of both LYAH and RWH.
Depends on the intended meaning -- if it is that Haskell is advanced among purely-functional programming languages, rather than both advanced and purely-functional among programming languages, then the former is far better.
You can get a vigorous chaotic motion going with a high top mass, low bottom mass, and high angles.
Natural, declarative, statically typed code.

Not sure how that first adjective applies.
>>> Religious dissent has no empirical anchor.

True. But what of it? Not everything in life should or can have an empirical anchor, it is only a tool, and with limited usability at that.

>>> Religions splinter and fragment, all the while furiously denouncing the other's moral depravity.

Not all religions denounce each other's moral depravity, far from it. As for splintering, so do scientific schools or art schools or sports teams or companies, what's wrong with that? It's the market of ideas, like any other.

>>> As for slavery and racism, one would expect that social and cultural forces would be the primary drivers for beliefs about races.

As if religion is something that is orthogonal to social and cultural forces instead of being integral part of it? If you read _why_ religious abolitionists were abolitionists, you'll see plenty of purely religious reasons for that. Of course, not all religious people were like that - there's dissent in science, and dissent in religion, people love to dissent and the question of racism was not an exception.

>>> Attempts to use science to support racism and slavery were used as well, of course, but flawed in the way the practice of science itself was flawed at the time.

Science at the time was no different than science today. It wasn't flawed in any specific way it is not flawed now, and we did not do anything different today than we did back then. People changed, and some things that were done back then are not considered fit to be done today. But it's not because science discovered something different - it's because the morals changed. And science has very little to do with morals, unfortunately.

>>> Neither religion nor science can claim any credit for ending slavery, that credit can only go to evolving social views.

Again, if you talk about social views, religion is much closer to what we understand by social views than science.

>>> gradual but steady rejection of all forms of violence

I would be hard pressed to find any scientific and empirically supported argument for rejecting violence and increasing empathy. In fact, if you look in the empirical examples from the nature, abhorrent violence and terrifying behavior is the regular occurrence. However, if you look at religions, you can find plenty of argument for empathy and non-violence. Of course, not in all religions, but at least you can find some sources for these ideas there, while you find very little in the empirical science. Same goes for other ideas that underly most of western society, such as Protestant work ethics, or rule of law, or concepts of law and justice, etc. You may dismiss the religion as stupid superstitions, but be careful not to throw out the whole civilization we're living in that was built on the same basis.
Sadly, a strong argument could be made that the technology sector / startup scene is perhaps one of the most desperate cultures in need of formal liberal arts knowledge.

Sexism, invisible privilege, and other forms of uneducated myopia stand as obvious examples. Interesting technological / sociological solutions to hidden issues possibly another.
I actually prefer the current design, and here's why:

--navigation: putting the comments button so far to the right, away from the title, makes it annoying to navigate between the two. I often like to open both in new tabs.

--visual complexity: humans understand numbers well, especially hackers. scanning down a page, I can read and understand numbers much more quickly than charts.

While I really think the ideas behind some of your aesthetics in the redesign (like the score meter), I think these take away from the usability of HN. HN is a site mostly visited by HN experts, people who use HN everyday, and, as such, I think navigation, especially quickness, is one of the most important principles in the design of its layout.
I love the concept of Elixir, but is it used out in the wild much? A language's popularity, or lack thereof, has little influence on whether I'll learn it or not, but I'm always curious about this.
The relevant gotcha is when doing lazy IO in Haskell. The general answer is "don't do that" - there are a number of approaches for how. (Lazy IO is fine and quite convenient for things of roughly the scale of a shell script. It's not a good fit to bigger things.)
To the Moon is one of my favorites, and it's got a pretty good soundtrack.
And a lot cheaper than Imp at scale- <$15 per device in hardware at scale.
That is essentially true, actually - it will be a thunk until you force it. That is the case whether or not Maybe is involved, though.
Could you suggest a simpler example?

Finding primes is something that is taught in the first programming class in Indian high schools. I guess I've never thought of it as something hard.

I looked at nodejs.org, and their first example is a web server! Python has the Fibonacci as it's second example (the first one show's numeric operations).

Ruby does simple string operations on it's home page. While I think that is indeed simpler, it's a little nuanced in Haskell. Depending on how you're doing it you'll need to Map toUpper from Data.Char or use toUpper from Data.Text, and I don't think it's a good first impression have something that uses Data.Text, and the OverloadedStrings extension.

PS - Although, I do agree with some other commentors here that this code isn't actually the Sieve of Eratosthenes, and is far more inefficient, and that is a valid reason to replace that example.
Lovely page, but that primes example is going to put off more people than it attracts, IMO. If you're not familiar with Haskell, or functional programming in general, the syntax and concepts shown there would appear alien and obtuse.
Ain't that a chaotic system which is not deterministic?
One theory was the Sierra's ridiculous puzzles were designed so frustrated players would call Sierra's pay-for-clues customer support line.
You've got it- you can build your own board using our reference design and pay us a minor fee to use our lovely cloud. Pricing isn't public yet, but we can discuss it privately if you have a need. Thanks!
Is JavaScript taking over WordPress?
>I find I learn best by reading books and talking with smart people

How do you know how you "learn best" as a 16-19 year old who has never even been to college?
While plausible, there is an aspect of a filter bubble / confirmation bias you are ignoring that comes with a formal degree. In particular, liberal arts degrees.

Being forced to look beyond one's bubble is extremely rewarding. Being forced to tackle trying tomes of knowledge that test the will may be the only chance one can have to learn on certain topics.

The whole “skip university” trope is a sad meme to push were it only for these reasons.

It is sadder still when one performs a reducto ad absurdun where the sole metric is formal education as monetary gain.

Where would our culture be without music, literature, philosophy, and art? Is there value in studying these worlds beyond monetary gain?

What sort of an elevated impact might the brilliant minds around HN offer with a diverse and eclectic formal education?
A Tale of Two Women and Hacker News
What is your legacy as a software craftsman?
I'm not sure I see how this changes much. My point is that with laziness, your explosion doesn't happen right where you unwrap a Maybe in the code. It happens where you evaluate the unwrapping.

Apologies for the ninja edit above, but this scala seems to show it isn't just IO that is at danger here.

class Foo(x : =>String) {
def happy = println("I'm good.")
lazy val ack = x
def sad = println(ack)
}

Again, if I do "new Foo(None.get)", I can call happy as much as I want, but "sad" will blow up.

Now, I do not and could not claim that this sort of nonsense would have proliferated with the same abandon as null. I am claiming that this is not that unlike a null pointer exception, though.
There are a couple companies in the wild using Elixir. Once Elixir hits v1(August is the estimate) it will change less week to week and will be more suitable for production usage.
This is the ?v=3 submission, previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8000981 (?v=2) : 1 point by jbrisebois 1 day ago, 0 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7999406 (?v=1) : 1 point by jbrisebois 1 day ago, 0 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7998851 : 1 point by jbrisebois 1 day ago, 0 comments
There is a separate emoji panel, but in my experience you tend to remember the name of the emoji used the most, and in 10-key mode it's pretty fast to type a 2 or 3 kana word.

About the android phones, I was a bit surprised by the low quality of Japanese support. But I didn't try the ATOK keyboard nor the input available on Sony phones for instance, only the Google IME. To Apple's credit, they've been doing IME on the mac for long enough to have a very good integration of the emoji in the system dictionary.

But really, my point was not only on the colourful emoji, but more on the fact that characters like ↑,♡,◎,△ are just unusable on a daily basis on a US/european computer, but are super easily summoned on a system with an IME. And Japanese people have been using these kind of pictograms in their communication for decades, the emoji used on the phones being just an advanced kind of the same thing. I think that would be the main cultural difference regarding to emoji.
FTA:

sudo /etc/init.d/chrome-remote-desktop stop
sudo /etc/init.d/chrome-remote-desktop start

You have to install chrome remote desktop on linux and start the service on the machine before you can connect to it elsewhere. I don't see how this is any different than any other remote desktop other than the client is built into chrome now.
Because Google and its acolytes like to portray the company as the omnibenevolent curator of all that is good with the world(by world I mean everything online)?
Most of the doctors I've talked to see Medicaid patients for two reasons:

(1) They consider it a form of charity or service to the community (they usually limit the number of Medicaid patients they see)

(2) They were pre-existing patients who at one time weren't on Medicaid

I'm not arguing all Medicaid patients result in a loss, but the vast majority do. I would challenge you to find a doctor who sees nothing but Medicaid patients and who is staying afloat without some sort of financial assistance (be it charity or government funding).
I think there's something else going on there though...

South Korea (per capita GDP $24k) is hardly the only success story in that part of the world. Japan ($38k), Hong Kong ($38k), Singapore ($55k), and Taiwan ($20k) have basically pulled off the same trick. All these places have in common that they are either Chinese (mostly Chinese, in Singapore's case) or very closely related culturally to China (Korea and Japan are more closely related to China than, for example, Laos or Myanmar). They are all small, without huge agricultural potential or much other resources, but with good access to the sea.

A more recent, and possibly more relevant example is Malaysia ($11k). Malaysia is an interesting case. It is majority Muslim, but it has a significant non-Muslim Chinese minority that controls most of the economy. It is a large petroleum exporter, but it has successfully expanded to manufacturing and services, arguably escaping the "resource curse".

You might be tempted to conclude that Malaysia pulled this off because of their Chinese population (and I know some Malays have said exactly this), but there are counterexamples to this - Thailand ($6k), Indonesia ($4k), Vietnam ($2k) and Cambodia ($1k) all have significant ethnic Chinese populations. On the other hand, ethnic Chinese control business in all those countries far out of proportion to their share of the population.

What useful lessons Arabs can draw from this I have no idea. Well, I have some idea: just look at North Korea ($0.6k) and Vietnam ($2k). The lesson isn't just simply "communism is bad" though, because they are well behind Russia ($15k) and even Cuba ($6k).
Office productivity is now a Web activity, in part because that's how modern tools can be used on otherwise locked-down desktops. Whether it's desktop Linux or people bringing their own iPads to workplaces with PCs running old versions of Windows, IE, and Office, nobody sees the supposed productivity of their desktop systems as a reason not to abandon them.
> An 18 year old Harvard kid should be smart enough to not make major errors like this.

High academic performance doesn't necessarily indicate good judgement or emotional well-being.

Five to ten years later, that same kid will probably look back at his 18-year-old self and reflect on how he has matured since, just like most people do.
Looks like you're being downvoted, but I have to agree with you, especially given some of the examples right at the top.

foldr (:) [] [1,2,3]

There is absolutely nothing natural about that line of code unless you happen to already have some background. I executed that in the sandbox and got:

[1,2,3]:: Num a => [a]

And I still don't know what was achieved.
Dan Scheinman’s Blue Ocean Venture Strategy: Target Entrepreneurs Over 35
Elixir is still very young. The only language I know of that had any appreciable acceptance at this point in its life is Go.
I say we start taking lots of pictures in the ghetto, just to screw with them. Who's with me?
I hope you were able to set him on the right path.
To put things in context, Israel killed at least 24 people in Gaza today [1], including children. Did they have access to Twitter, let alone any telecommunication mean, let alone food and water? Sorry, but I really don't see how your twitter account being rate-limited or whatever has the slightest importance in this tragedy.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/08/world/meast/mideast-tensions/i...
Chaotic systems are deterministic (as shown by a deterministic computer algorithm simulating one). They just aren't predictable except by simulating them (which constrains us by time and accuracy).
http://freerice.com/content-group/watch-argentina-vs-netherl...
I'm confused, then. Sounds like it can have obscure, "doesn't bite you immediately and appears far away from where the problem actually is," properties that were attributed to null.

That is, at the point that a Maybe String statically changes to a String is not necessarily where the program will explode. A lot like a null assign. (Again, in a lazy language. Unless I'm mistaken on this subthread, the point was simply that you can still have that level of WTFery with Maybe that you can have with a null.)
No new features in Linux RT
I like how I posted this earlier, but the repost with the messed up URL gets the votes ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8001507
The walled garden answer is strictly true, but moot in this case, since you could also use region monitoring to wake up your app, and that will use SSIDs indirectly.
Haven't done the math myself, but if you factor in years of salary earned while the doctor in training would be at school/residency/fellowship and the salary on that page is for folks who have been at it for a while and either have a private practice with many clients or have been in academia for 10-15 years.
I did basically this in my first year of college! See [1].

(Note: code was never intended to be visible to the public, and this is old and bad. But hey, it works!)

http://kevingibbons.org/doublependulum.html
> reach the same goals in balancing the odds

Did you seriously just write that? As in you are trying to have more Israelis killed so there will be balance?

Tell me I misunderstood you.
That's a pretty funny thread.

Near the bottom you see this guy talking about his startup ideas and Drew Houston replies and asked him if he wants to help with Dropbox.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35088
Entire Internet Update Insights – Jan to June 2014
The technical part of the problem is relying on a commercial 3rd party for authentication. This enables nation-state-level access based on the current laws of the land (the non-technical part of the problem).
If we're going by quotes from corporate websites, Comcast also supports the open internet, so none of us have anything to worry about.
I care about these things as well, and have dedicated a few cycles to new concepts in propulsion. If you are ever around the bay area, it would be good to chat. I could give you a tour of LightSail and we could get tea.
Given some of the posts elsewhere in the thread, that automated warning system isn't foolproof, so more info is better.
Its frankly easier to just go to another company. Its pretty rare that a company will give you raises to match the market in my experience.
If they hadn't posted that link (to the BBC), I would have.. and if I didn't already have an account, I would have made one, just for that one post. Someone had to point it out.
How to avoid the recruitment agency horror stories
I'm afraid I don't, that was just me pontificating. Mostly gathered from observations on how different people with different senses of morality get wildly different readings from the same religious book, almost invariably a reading that is convenient for themselves.

I think most people agree that at least most religions are man-made (all, if you are an atheist, but I think that most theists would agree that religions other than their own are man-made). If a particular religion is man-made, then it is made within the context of some particular culture. While it is possible that the new religion introduced new and novel ideas, more often than not I think the religions that found acceptance in their host-culture did not rock the boat too much. Those religions therefore largely reflect the cultures that they were created in. If a religion advocates stoning gay people, then chances are the culture in which it was created was also pretty on board with stoning gay people.

I think that religions are adapted or re-interpreted when they are introduced to other cultures that already have different values. Lots of things that were taken literally by the host culture suddenly become metaphorical. Holidays that were previously cherished by the new culture are wedged into their new religion under flimsy pretenses. Etc.
C# only kind of gives you this. When I said "the problem with languages that have null", that's really what I meant. There definitely could be a static language that let you choose if something is nullable or not. But really, at that point it's just sugar for an option type.
It's one we'd used before that needed some updates
What good does widespread HTTPS use do if you can not trust it?

I'm all for reducing our dependence on CAs, and, reducing the number of CAs we trust for signing a site, like putting the keys in DNSSEC. But until we do that, we must not trust bad apples.
Bill Gates and Zuckerberg didn't leave Harvard permanently though. They took a leave of absence which means they'd the option to come back if things went south. Also both (and Gates especially) were from quite well off families.