skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went through the articles with an open mind. I know this is going to be an unpopular sentiment here... but, to be honest they don't give a good impression of him in my mind.

I think it's just really a bad idea to have a large part of your legacy defined in usenet posts.

Here's his xml rant people pointed me to:
http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html

XML is great but it's not exactly the deep end of the pool. I honestly don't understand why someone with his intelligence would bother with something like that if it generated such negativity.

Finally, at the end of the day, I think XML defined Erik Naggum more than the other way around.
Sure, you want to study computer science today, but who knows after three years. If you do get into HYP, just go to HYP, instead of UCBerkely, CMU, MIT.

Undergrad from HYP can open doors in fields you may like: IB, PE, HF, Consulting, etc, in the case you lose interest in being a programmer. You can become a programmer even after an HYP education.
Texas Lawmaker Wants to Make It Illegal to Film Cops from Less Than 25 Feet Away
I live in greater Vancouver and I take public transport almost every day. I am almost certainly going to vote NO.

Translink just threw $200M down the drain on the Compass program ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass_Card_%28TransLink%29 ). If/when this ever comes into effect it will increase my transit costs (vs. the 10 book tickets I can buy now). It will almost certainly increase my travel time due to lineups. My kids who home school will not be able to get a student's fare any more. Causal riders will avoid public transport because they need to give Translink $12 just for the privilege of a single bus ride (card + minimum "fill"). It will almost certainly increase Translink's expenses in maintaining this system. I'm not happy with their choices.

Public transport in greater Vancouver sucks big time (perhaps except within the city proper.) I used to have a commute of 25 minutes to work by car/motorcycle. Taking public transport would have made that over 2 hours. Most transport lines go from somewhere to downtown. If you need to go "across" and are outside the center good luck. If I miss my "express" bus in the morning (because it came 10 minutes early, which happens) then I have to walk 1km and wait 20 minutes for the slow bus that takes 20 minutes longer. If I come early, well, the bus can also be 10 minutes late... I understand they have a larger/less densely populated area to cover but they do not seem to be creative enough in doing that. The SkyTrain is just about the most expensive way of doing transport per km. I'm not sure other options were considered (e.g. there are de-comissioned train tracks running through Vancouver). Public transport is also quite expensive compared to anywhere else I've taken public transport. Dropping prices would help increase ridership which might help fix some of the other issues.

Fares that were raised when energy prices came up didn't come down once energy prices declined. This plan itself was made at a time when energy prices were higher and it seems they're not going back to the same levels any time soon. At the same time, Vancouver is pretty much the most expensive place in North America to get gas. Supposedly that tax money should have gone towards improving public transport.

Once taxes are increased that money can go anywhere. There's no "contract". There's no accountability. There are also a lot of improvements that could be made without getting into big ticket items. Optimizing the existing system towards public transport. I view the tax increase as throwing good money after bad money something I try not do to in my personal finance and I don't want the province to engage in this in their finance.
My claim is that this idea that Japanese and/or Korean can be shown to be related to any other known language is very much a minority and/or fringe position, held by few mainstream historical linguists. (My only source is held by that I am a professional linguist and sometimes travel in circles that care about such matters.)
How Bitcoin Tech Could Make It Easier to Switch Emails
Albanian sworn virgins
OpenSSL releases forthcoming March 19 to resolve “high” severity defects
Associated NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/science/study-reveals-gene...
If you get past the resume screening stage (which it sounds like you'll have no trouble doing, with your resume), then those four companies you mentioned only care about your interview performance. You're correct that side projects won't get you a job at Palantir. What you should do is practice, practice, practice technical interview questions. Get Cracking the Coding interview and do every problem.

Getting a job / internship offer at those four companies is the exception, rather than the rule, so don't feel bad about getting unlucky this year. I squeaked by Facebook intern interviews, but was rejected from Dropbox, Google, and Palantir.

Better luck next year!
I think she gave off an arrogant feel. The sharks didn't like that she acted like she was smarter than everyone. When she said that she met the VC at a bar.. my immediate thoughts were related to all those stores of women claiming sexual harassment issues when meeting with VC's.. but the opposite.
Another fundamental fact to consider is the benefits of having open hardware.

When I make software free, it can easily be forked, contributed, and can scale to thousands of contributors. Consider the cost in man-hours to write a patch for Linux.

Now I make my hardware free. How do you submit a patch to a piece of hardware? How many man-hours does it take? How do I test this said patch? How do I accept pull requests? Can a piece of hardware have thousands of contributors? It is definitely significantly less trivial, when compared to software, considering the special equipment one needs to design physical hardware.

A lot of the free software movement revolves around improving software because it is more open. If I release open hardware, I don't see how the same will hold true for free hardware. Open hardware is just a giveaway.

I believe hardware is more akin to art; no one submits a PR to the Mona Lisa.
Agreed! I didn't set a goal that I held myself to. Rather, it's just a lucky coincidence it worked out so perfectly.
Rejection letter from YC:

> I’m sorry to say we decided not to fund you. We liked you as individuals but we had a hard time seeing how developer API documentation was the right beachhead.

Perhaps I'm looking too much into it, it's just surprising to see, on the record, the polar opposite of what pg claimed on several occasions: people, not ideas. Or did I misunderstand it?
> I have no idea what you are saying.

Sorry not to be clear.

My view of efforts in grades 8-12 or so
to have students do well in math competitions,
e.g., the Math Olympiad, is that those
efforts are not promising
for helping those students do well
with math or anything else later in life.
Instead, mostly the efforts are just wasteful
for all concerned.

The main reason for the waste is that the
people, usually the high school math teachers,
running the programs don't know enough
math to give good direction to the students
that might want to do especially well in math,
well enough that 30 years later we would
commonly see significant positive effects
from that direction and the resulting
efforts of the students.

So, the direction that is commonly given
is to have the students study
relatively useless material,
say, recreational math, some
puzzle problems, every tricky
thing they can see in Pascal's
triangle (the binomial coefficients,
that is, the coefficients of
(x + y)^n with one row for each
value of positive integer n), and there are a lot
of such tricky things.

But, right,
the binomial coefficients have some
nice properties, some of which are
good to know, and an early volume
of D. Knuth's The Art of Computer
Programming has some good coverage.
But, net, mostly to heck with the
triangle and, if insist, then read
the relevant sections of Knuth --
but even there Knuth has a good reason
for presenting that material, and what's
important is the applications Knuth makes,
so, really, just read on in Knuth.

So, instead, students who do want to
do better in math, and I did,
should just proceed along the usual
topics, texts, etc. for a ugrad math
major. In particular, as a first goal,
ASAP get a
good college calculus text, get
the basic prerequisites, and dig in.

By the way, the time I looked
at the AP calculus materials
I didn't like them and
concluded that the people
who wrote the materials
didn't understand calculus
very well. Instead, just get
a good college calculus text.

For the rest I mentioned, about have
to have a relatively applied
ugrad math major to
understand: So, would need to know
some linear programming, network flows,
optimization, integer programming,
something about the question of P versus
NP, and more.

For Lagrangian relaxation,
that's a bit tricky and specialized
and not commonly well known even among
college math profs. I did give an
outline in

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8919311

but it's not really easy reading.
But it's a cute topic with some
a good intuitive views, a bit
amazing in some ways,
and at times shockingly powerful.

E.g., the guy who first did the
many worlds interpretation of
quantum mechanics, a Ph.D.
physics student
of J. Wheeler at Princeton,
an expert in relativity theory,
was H. Everett, and at one time
he had a nice applied math
shop near DC doing resource
allocation for the US DoD
using a first, simple version
of Lagrangian relaxation.
What I outlined in

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8919311

is more general and powerful
and makes some cute use of
some convexity -- that there is
convexity there is also surprising
but true and powerful and, with
the right setup, easy to prove.
Seems entirely reasonable for these disclaimers to exist given that while Go is a legitimately open source project separate from Google, it is still strongly associated with Google in people's minds (not too surprisingly considering how many of the core Go team work at Google) and thus it wouldn't be hard to imagine some people getting the wrong idea of this somehow being Google's (or the Go team's) "official" answer to UIs in Go.
Designers Freebie Pouch of March, 2015
The plan has been similar for years, and translink has been trying to get funding for it. The referendum is the last ditch attempt to actually get funding. In the event of a no vote it is unlikely that anything but road expansion will occur for the next five to ten years.
> I'm fine, so it's all fine

I absolutely do not hold such an illogical position. Rather, I'm fine and don't care about the rest.

> Further, with transit specifically, everyone benefits taking cars off the roads,

I'm an example of taking a car off the road, without transit. Since you believe that people should pay some levy for the sake cars being taken off roads, it follows that a tax should be collected and some of it transferred to my personal bank account.
We were all a lot younger when that photo was taken 25 years ago! :-)

Happy to answer any questions about the early days of VB. Gary and Frank and Mark and I built most of the "visual" side of VB based on Alan's Tripod prototype. It was called Ruby at the time (no relation to the programming language) and was originally going to be a programmable shell for Windows 3.0 but turned into VB instead.

If you want something specific to blame me for, that would be the VBX interface...

Here's an article with more of the story of how Microsoft turned Ruby into VB:

http://www.forestmoon.com/birthofvb/birthofvb.html
As the article mentioned, he runs one of the largest ISPs in Pakistan called BrainNET. At least that's what I remember.
An ASP.NET bug from 1973
This is a bit of a tangent, but I really wanted to comment on the product he is making.

I have been using apiary.io, and I always felt that it was lacking in many aspects (versioning, ghetto note editor, parsing issues in the preview, etc...). I just discovered readme.io and played with it briefly and it has solved every issue that I had with apiary.io. I will definitely migrate over, but having to re-do all the documentation from ground up is a bit of a pain.
I think in this case at least the poorest would be voting YES because they depend on transit and pay little PST (it mostly taxes discretionary spending).

More broadly speaking, giving more votes to rich people would never fly. Even if you could scientifically show that it would improve everyone's lives. Entire civilizations have revolted over less.
Right now we're using paypal. It takes a bit of bureaucratic finagling to get them to connect multiple paypal accounts to a single bank account, i'm not sure it can be done honestly. In the future if paypal is ruled out, the form of payment will be used to help mitigate people trying to game the system. (posting this to the FaQ section - thanks for the question!
I believe that the plan will affect most of those things negatively. More traffic, more density, more pollution.
It's quite alright, thanks for sharing and I hope you found it useful!
You're right. Thank you. I will add a "legality" page to the website. The approach is that the organization can be made completely legal by jumping through the hoops designed by business licensing law. We're not setting up anything new, except for the fact that we're letting it be democratically controlled.
Actually over the years, I've found that shutting my mouth would be helpful not only when talking to law enforcement. Not always so good at carrying that out though.

Anyways, it reminds of the time I was arrested for smoking the forbidden devil vegetable. We were brought into the city court room to be indicted while we were waiting two suburban white teenagers were in from the bench getting chewed out by the judge, saying that he's sick of seeing these kids from the suburbs coming into the city to buy drugs and encouraging crime in his neighborhood. After he finished his rant, he asked them what they plead and they said not guilty of course. Then one of them felt the urge to speak up and said, "I just want to point out one thing before we go... the police officer wrote down that it was crack cocaine, but it was regular cocaine, not crack." After the judge picked his jaw up off the floor he broke character and told them to shut up until they had a lawyer.
I would say "all of the above."

LEO do routinely believe that people they investigate must be guilty. They don't investigate at random, but rather are prompted by some evidence of criminal behavior. That certainly doesn't mean that you must be guilty if they investigate you, but it sets them up to believe you are.

The system is set up with compartments so nobody sees the full consequences of anything and this sort of misbehavior is encouraged. If you send somebody to jail, they disappear from your life the moment the verdict is reached and you have no reason to dwell on the harm you've caused them. (And if you do, you probably think it's a good thing, because you think they're a criminal!) And you probably get a commendation for putting a bad guy away.

Bad behavior does get reported disproportionately. Most cops are good cops. For everyone like this, there are ten cops who find a lost cellphone and personally deliver it back to the owner, as happened to a neighbor of mine a few months ago. That doesn't make the news. Although that doesn't mean it shouldn't be a concern for the majority of us. Even a small risk of being falsely imprisoned is important, and there's no harm in taking the "SHUT UP" route with a good cop.

Finally, I would be wary of assuming that malicious intent is no higher than among the general population. Bad people tend to seek power over others, and what better way to wield such power than to do so legally as a member of the police? No doubt, the legitimate "protect and serve" folks still greatly outnumber the bad guys, but I would bet they're more concentrated.
PC makers are laughing at the new MacBook
Yes, the wording is specifically chosen to make the amount sound smaller. This article argues in favour of the tax, so it makes sense that the author would choose such wording.

The total sales tax (provincial + federal) would go from 12% to 12.5%, so you could call it a 4% increase rather than 10%... there's lots of ways to spin numbers :)
I would agree that puberty has a big effect on eyesight. I had terrible vision as a child, glasses from about 6 years old on. At 12, about the time my growth spurt kicked in and I shot from 5'5" to 6', I suddenly realized I could see fine without my glasses (which was fantastic, since that was when I started playing basketball a lot, and gah, RecSpecs...) I've had roughly 20/20 vision since.
problem solved: arxiv.org
I remember having very heated debates about using Option Explicit and the use of Variant in assorted AIM programming chat rooms.

Fun times.
- Initial kings collect women like Pokemon.

- No contraception. Much baby.

- Many claims to throne in 18 years.

- Claimants go to war with one another. Soldiers are invented, voluntary and noble at first. Religious later. Can't do mass conscription from the common man as he's working the essential farms.

- Losers happen made. Slavery is invented.

- Slaves work the mines and other harsh labor, allow for post-agrarian activities and advanced economies.

- King sits back and lets the the whole clusterfuck evolve in his favor.

A self-regulating male shortage. Easy peasy.
For anyone else that site no longer loads there is a mirror @
https://archive.today/daFxI
Millions Watch Miracle in Iran – Padina’s Story
- Initial kings collect women like Pokemon.

- No contraception. Much baby.

- Many claims to throne in 14-18 years.

- Claimants go to war with one another. Soldiers are invented, voluntary and noble at first. Religious later. Can't do mass conscription from the common man as he's working the essential farms.

- Losers happen. Slavery is invented.

- Slaves work the mines and other harsh labor, which allows for post-agrarian activities and advanced economies.

- King sits back and lets the the whole clusterfuck evolve in his favor.

A auto-catalytic male shortage. Easy peasy.

Inadvertently, I have just Twitterized the Old Testament.
No, because having kids in school is not comparable to refusing to get out of your car or bus.

If I don't have kids in school, I have not found an alternative way to achieve the same thing as someone who does have kids in school (an alternative that is cheaper, more efficient and easier on the environment).

If we don't have kids, humanity vanishes. If we have kids, but they don't go to school, everything will go to hell in a hound basket within the span of a generation.
"Five year plans" for my generation have a bad sound to them. They were the basis for planning in the Soviet Union and were kind of a joke in the '70's and '80's to mean "stuff that never gets done."

That said, goals aren't plans, and five years is a reasonable time-horizon for a major goal. He did a lot of things right in his use of time, including giving it a go too early, and then again getting sucked in to a startup that didn't really work out. There is nothing like seeing things fail to teach you the elements of success.

Part of that use of time should definitely be asking yourself "Am I pursuing the right goal?" as you learn more, but a fair number of people get it right.
As opposed to the current state of things, where there is basically no requirement to publish freely whatsoever?
This is the best simplest interface for getting things done I've seen. Awesome! Are you open sourcing this?
I've worked for startups and for public companies. All of my equity success (into and past your range) has come from my stock options in the public companies I have worked for. The startups have netted me exactly 0 thus far (but the jury is still out).
> PR are not the place for jokes.

There's a well-established tradition of pull requests and issues being used for commentary and humor.

Here's a selection. The first one is by the founder CEO of a company with a ~$1B valuation that's prepping for an IPO and is very similar to the one everyone here is complaining about. The second one has comments from a couple well-known tech folks. And so on...

https://github.com/saberma/shopqi/pull/409

https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/pull/1074

https://github.com/ericf/yui3-gallery/pull/21

https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour/issues

https://github.com/joyent/node/pull/2472

But apparently now that Microsoft is using GitHub, everything is Serious Business™? Is there a dress code now, too?
The Company You Work for Is Not Your Friend
Anand never fails to impress with his design!
If you define

#header-inner img {max-width: 100%;}

instead of "width: 100%" inside the css the image would scale down if the screen becomes smaller than the px width of the graphic, but still stays 100% of it's own px width when more space is available. So no ugly upscaling.
https://i.imgur.com/9TH3Al7.png
The only time I ever did this, it was a routine traffic stop and I was with my wife and my parents. The cop was asking me a bunch of questions about why I was driving so fast, and I just played it off like I didn't understand, just trying to say as little as possible. It was a bad tactic - it raised suspicion and I later learned that my mother thought I was actually holding drugs or something because I was being evasive. I still in general agree with the advice, but... it requires some subtlety.
If someone else has write access to the your filesystem, you're already screwed.
You're right--not sure how I screwed that up.
It's definitely a problem for some where such expectations do not yet exist in their fields. They may be willing, but do not have the wherewithal by which to find a place to put them. The IT requirements for what is simple for tech folk like us might be heavy barriers to those in various fields in academics where they can do their research without needing a lot of knowledge of web hosting.
Hi! I'll bite. Two questions for you.

VB and Hypercard get a lot of nostalgic love these days, and a lot of people (including ITT) maintain there aren't any real successors to them.

What would you consider to be the standout merits to Ruby/VB that ought to be reproduced now?

Second question, since plugins and dynamic extension are never out of style: in the VBX interface, what did you think worked well, and what did you think was a tremendous disaster?

Thanks!
Internet's Biggest Illegal Marketplace has vanished in a £8M swindle
Where is Jennifer's husband?
Yes, but _ has dynamic scope (I believe). That's very dangerous in general.
No, it isn't. Biking to work is best when there are no cars on the road at all, or when they are bumper to bumper, moving in small 15 km/h bursts (in which situation I can treat them as de facto standing objects).

Also, small narrow streets where cars have to go slow are better than big wide lanes.

Part of this proposal is about improving the road infrastructure which is about, doh, more cars, moving faster. Faster commute times are promised to drivers and transit riders alike.

Also, transit buses present a particular threat to me: they always pull over to the right, cutting me off so that I have to swerve left around them into traffic. Almost daily, some bus driver races ahead of me and then cuts me off, even though I'm faster on average, and if he just gave me a few seconds, I would be out of there and he'd never see me again. If I vote Yes, I'm saying I want more of these jerks out there trying to kill me.
Thanks. I was pleasantly surprised that I was the first to note it. I figured it was appropriate for our community, but I got nervous when there was little uptake at first. Thankfully, after a few hours, it was on the front page, which restored my confidence. I'll keep an eye out for more useful stuff.

Incidentally, I realized that my GP statement might make people think I work at the NSF, and I don't. I work at Ohio Supercomputer Center and this was announced to us via an internal mailing list.