skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree that you should question statistics, particularly those appearing in op-ed columns, I don't see how this statistic contradicts the thrust of the article at all. The self measures regarding happiness all still apply.

It seems to me that this particular question seems to have to do more with being able to imagine a better life. That is, despite their happiness, Costa Ricans are able to imagine things getting even better. Despite our unhappiness, we in the U.S. have slightly more trouble imagining our lot improving.

Even if you disagree with my interpretation, you have to admit that it is incredibly open to interpretation, even more so than the question, 'are you happy?' I'd say the more direct measure would be the obvious one to quote.
Sorry to answer a question with a question, but what is it that you want to do for Google?
This comes up a lot for me with programming, so many different languages, platforms and APIs are flying past us here on HN as well as languages that have been around for a long time.

So many times I see a cool new API and say that would be great to have a play around with if I had the time.
RTO stands for "Retransmissin Timeout" and is the length of time the sender waits for a packet to be ACK'd. (Source: http://www.opalsoft.net/qos/TCP-10.htm)
Fair question. Develop web apps, really. But I'm pretty open, and plan to leave my "what I want to do for you" for the cover letter when applying for a specific job.
Greenpeace ranks Apple as greenest electronics maker
Not being able to backspace (at least on my MacBook with 10.6) is a deal breaker here. As much as I'd like to be, I'm not a perfect typist.
I'm sorry, "on the box"? I'm not familiar with that phrase.
Last Torrents
Do you really think that MS is in trouble because they focused on non-core ventures?

If anything, I'd say the complete opposite: they're in trouble because they're not good at focusing on the web, which is a major non-core venture for them (I think MS Windows & Office are their bread & butter).

Fundamentally, MS never "got" the internet, and they have too much weight to maneuver effectively now.
An Engineer's Guide to DNS
Backspace works here on my 10.6 Macbook in both Safari and Firefox. Though, Command-w to close it doesn't work for me.
The death of your site
It's not slam dunk in EU -- even if the commission is participating in it, passing stuff still requires most member countries to approve. A stink will be raised.
Using Mixpanel with Ruby on Rails
The original article is here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7277/full/463039a... (paywall). But this is basically a review. The actual research in this week's Nature is not by this UT Arlington lab, but instead by Horie, et al, from Tokyo ( http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7277/full/nature0... )

That 8% of human DNA comes from viruses is interesting, but not new; this has been known for at least a few years now. What is interesting about the new findings is that this is the first non-retrovirus found to insert DNA into the human genome.
Cool. I can't speak for their current interview process, but I went through the phone screen mechanism a few years back. My problem was that I wasn't sufficiently focused in one area; I tried to market myself as both a Systems Engineer and a Software Developer (which is common for start-up-prone types such as myself). My biggest take-away from the interview process was that that was a bad idea. I suggest that you focus on a particular area; web apps alone is still possibly not specific enough. They'll perhaps want to know what specific technologies or facets of modern web apps you are into and proficient in.

Of course, that was then and this is now. Some other HNers probably have better advice:)
Which is uselessly slow on anything other than webkit.
500,000 lines of Python and SQL?
This article suffers from a bad case of TL;DR. There's great information buried in there, but it's presentation is poor. Typography should be taught in primary school to stave this off.
I'm curious about the following:

- What scale you're operating at.

- What vendor you've found that can provide you with 100 leased servers in 2-3 days while costing less than a cloud provider and not requiring you to maintain your own routing/switch/etc infrastructure.

- How you see a dedicated vendor providing managed leased server hosting, network services, on-hands management, etc, as to be genuinely different from a cloud provider -- other than requiring a significantly longer turn-around on provisioning and management tasks.

- How expensive (and for what length) the lease terms are on that server hardware. I've yet to find a quality managed hosting provider that will lease hardware at terms that come close to matching the pricing of either in-house maintained or EC2 provisioned servers).
We'll be launching http://www.textbookrevolt.com this weekend. I scoff at Amazon and Chegg :)

Peer to peer textbook rentals where students are the ones who save and make money.
It would be possible to have a JRuby applet so everything would run within the browser but.. that'd involve having a multi megabyte applet to activate on the page and they kinda freak people out nowadays.

Some sort of Flash based Ruby VM that you can interact with through JavaScript would make it rather interesting though..
Preventing people from carrying on well-designed bladed weapons has significantly increased my likelihood of intervening should I see a disturbed individual. A Box cutter at close range can do a lot of scary damage - a cork screw, broken bottle, or other roughly crafted shiv may gash me pretty badly, but I stand a fighting chance at taking my opponent down, particularly if someone else joins in.

One of the reasons for preventing edged weapons on planes is to enhance the performance of the passengers in subduing suspects in unarmed combat.
Cool giveaway, but I wasn't patient or persistent enough to complete my purchase.
Tell HN Students: DC Startup Scramble
StartUp Scramble DC University Challenge: January 29th-31st, 2010<p>SAVE THE DATE! Ashoka’s Youth Venture and Young Impact, in partnership with a consortium of sponsors, announce the StartUp Scramble DC University Challenge taking place January 29-31st, 2010!<p>The StartUp Scramble™ DC University Challenge will bring 100+ entrepreneurial-minded college students from DC universities together in a weekend-long event to build and launch sustainable ventures that address social issues affecting local communities.<p>From Friday to Sunday evening—54 hours—teams of students organize to pitch, plan, and work tirelessly to launch socially-conscious businesses and organizations. Participants deep-dive into an accelerated process of venture development over the course of an intense, two-day facilitated start-up experience. High-profile guest mentors, speakers, and panel members visit throughout the weekend, giving participating students the opportunity to network with potential investors, service providers, and employers.<p>Youth Venture and Young Impact are inviting aspiring social entrepreneurs from over seven leading universities across the DC-Maryland-Virginia area to participate in the StartUp Scramble™:<p><pre><code> 1. American University
2. Catholic University
3. George Mason University
4. Georgetown University
5. Howard University
6. The George Washington University
7. University of the DC
8. University of Maryland
</code></pre>
Students will return to their campuses equipped with the platform, tools, knowledge, network, and motivation to sustain the momentum around advocacy and action that they began in the weekend Scramble.<p>The StartUp Scramble™ DC University Challenge concludes Sunday evening with teams pitching their ventures to a panel of expert judges. Winning teams will receive mentorship, up to $1,000 in seed funding, entry into a global network of Ashoka “changemakers,” and the possibility of one year of incubation services from Ashoka and its partners. Youth Venture will continue to work with the winning young social entrepreneurs intensively in the coming year to support their ventures, connecting the venture teams to StartUp Scramble™ sponsors for additional mentoring and engagement.
http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/intro
Beware of linear projections.
Except that's more like a hire purchase agreement than a loan. If you take a bank loan to pay for a car/boat/to fund your startup/whatever and you can't pay it, you're still on the line for the loan if the assets purchased can't match the capital owed. Mortgage loans seem to be treated as a special case in the US.
Congratulations, Scott :)
I think that if you're going after a job in our field these days, you ABSOLUTELY should have a resume like this. Actually, it is less a resume and more a carefully crafted sales pitch for yourself. You can do so much selling it isn't funny -- links to your OSS contributions, etc. (I would have surfaced the code more quickly than you do in your resume, but this is a very minor nitpick. Oh, and if you have a blog, you have at least one or two articles on it which are exemplars of your best work. Link those directly.)

My one suggestion is that your sales presentation says an awful lot about you and not that much about Google. That goes against pretty much everything I know about sales. ("But its a resume! It should be about me!" No, that is a meaningless tradition perpetuated by people who are much less savvy than you are.)

If I wanted to get a job at Google, I would make it obvious that I understand Google's business about as well as I understand Ruby, or better. Talk about how your experience with MicroPledge prepares you to deal with web-scale computing. (Even if it doesn't, demonstrate that you understand the differences.) Talk about how your e-commerce experience at Gifty gets you inside the head of Google's customers, and how you understand Internet advertising on a deep level because it determined whether you ate or not. (The truth that I advise you to keep at the foremost of your mind and not say out loud: Google is an advertising company.)
Correlation might not imply causation, but nothing implies causation. The best we've got is a pile of correlations, a few anecdotes, and a lot of imagination.
runs great in V8
Hmm no OpenGL widget that I can see.
http://xkcd.com/605/
This might not apply for new homes, and those are the ones that are underwater.
I was thinking the same thing. I'd consider removing the "500 kLOC" line. Makes me suspect your code is verbose rather than elegant.
Looks like a nice resume. :)

The following feedback probably isn't google-specific, and it's really just nitpicking, but I would say:

- "move to the U.S. for about two years in mid-2010". AFAIK, most employers (maybe not Google) would probably rather just hear "move to the US in mid-2010".

- "Skills: I can... develop web applications". This section can be rephrased as "Skills: I have... developed web applications", etc. This is a job application tip I've had drummed into me, to always stress what you have done rather than what you can do.

- It might sound better to slap a better title than "long-time friend" on your third reference. Maybe you two collaborated on a project at some point?

- Hehe @ the Fermat reference. Nice touch.

Just my myopic 2c, and like I said it's really mostly nitpicking. :).
Can you please elaborate? Are you really saying that it isn't legal to be able to use one's data on usage intelligently? Don't utilities need to -- and do this -- anyway? Is it true internationally?
What about NodeBox? http://nodebox.net
Doesn't work in Chromium for me.
Likely the credit card company believes he lives at his billing address, and has done some geo-analysis of credit trends for mortgage holders in his area. Your credit record will indicate when you initiated your mortgage and what the terms were, and it's relatively straightforward to do risk analysis after that.

I've frequently wondered what impact having all my bills sent to Paymybills/Paytrust at Box 14814695, Sioux Falls, South Dakota for the last 10 years has had on my credit profile. :-)
> When a person shows that much contempt for the life and well-being of another human being, they really don't deserve to continue living..

I agree.

> Personally I think cases like this are a great example of when capital punishment is acceptable.

I disagree. Because we can never have a good enough standard of proof, and since the state is us, when we execute someone innocent, (which has happened, and will happen again), it makes us all murderers who have no right to live.
You make a really good point, patio11.

I know when I've written with paper resumes, I've always rewritten the resume to suit the job application (in addition to writing an extremely specific cover letter.)

I don't know how that works when it's a personal web page. If the OP really only wants that web page to read by (and accepted by) Google, I guess they can do the same thing. :).
Oh dear! Good catch, that's embarrassing. I did a recursive "wc" but then read the wrong column. It's only 21,000 lines. :-| Fixed now: at 21kLOC, is it still a figure worth including?
The stupid part about waiting for a local minimum isn't the waiting, it's the thinking that you can even identify a local minimum.
tldr version: A former Lotus executive wrote an article claiming to prove US-style laissez-faire capitalism superior to European-style market socialsm. This is why he was wrong.

That there is and ongoing argument between the political Left and Right is not hacker news. That bad arguments are made (and sometimes refuted) on both sides is not hacker news.

And when people inevitably use this submission as a pretext to broadcast which side of the Us Versus Them line they stand on, that won't be hacker news either.
Yeah, for whatever reason the command key doesn't register on the page
So it's probably the data. In that other ranking the author mentions, Denkmark doesn't fare quite that well. Costa Rica on the other hand does well in both rankings.

The maps are quite interesting though in that the continents mostly appear as uniform blocks -- which of course if also due to the selection of group limits but anyway. I'd suspect general cultural factors to be at work.
They are not breaching the contract. The contract says they can walk away any time, but they lose their house. A full recourse mortgage (where you don't have the option of walking away) must be illegal, otherwise the banks wouldn't put such a clause in their contracts. (I don't know, I'm not a legal eagle).
Not cross platform.
Lie Detector...
Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?
I still have the same DSL upload speed I did a decade ago. So at least that's status quo. I've been trying to think of something that humanity has done, besides come up with new ways to sell advertising. Any important diseases cured? Any increases in privacy, civil rights, human rights, intolerance?

Anything?
Actually the practice of companies managing their own energy preceded the creation of the electric grid, and preceded the existence of software companies by over a century. Even today most large scale engineering outfits are both vertically integrated and use vertical integration to launch into other markets (e.g. General Electric, and Tata, which was a steel company.)
I wonder if credit card companies prefer people with a slightly dodgy credit rating, as they are more likely to get hit with late fees?
Good quote from the article:

One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general. Gradually our machines consist more and more of software. Things that used to be done with levers and cams and gears are now done with loops and trees and closures. There's nothing special about physical embodiments of control systems that should make them patentable, and the software equivalent not.

I agree. I just think this is a strong argument against all patents rather than an argument for patents. The march of information technology makes boundaries fuzzier and fuzzier and we have to think what will happen at the limit of this process. The boundaries between algorithms and information expressions becomes fuzzy within a world of pure information. And ultimately, either we will be in a position where all information, all expression, is a priori owned by one or another entities or we'll be in a position where all information is free (sorry about the cliche being true..). I'd rather be in the latter world.
Interesting. I looked up a brand new book on Artificial Intelligence I paid around $90 for at my university's book store. Amazon is offering $10 to trade it in. I could get much more than that selling it to one of the buyers that set up out the back of trucks at the end of each term on campus.

Edit: I also looked up a linear algebra text I paid around the same for, and the trade-in value there was $43. Seems like there's a large variation even for latest edition text books.
Prior to 2007, the majority of Bankruptcies in the United States were a result of medical bills. Without socialized medicine, and a leaky private insurance system, getting seriously ill in the United States basically wiped you out financially.

This is actually one thing that I've never been able to make people from countries that have socialized medicine believe.

The sheer _concept_ of an illness wiping you out financially is typically beyond their comprehension. Most people in the United States without that experience also have a tough time understanding it as well.

Suggesting people can never get a reasonable loan because of a bankruptcy, and therefore likely because of an illness, is a little much.

You do maintain a running credit record that should accurately reflect your (illness free) creditworthiness.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Canadian working Silicon Valley with excellent medical insurance who has never had a hospital stay or need to call on said-insurance (knock-on-wood))
Then fix the death penalty!
Google likes to ask lots of algorithmic questions in rapid succession. At least they did when I interviewed. Knowing of a solution or library was not good enough (they seem to reinvent their own 'everything' anyway, perhaps for good reason?). If I wanted to work there, I would practice doing classic CS problems on a whiteboard in front of friends beforehand, it's much different than real life where you can look stuff up, mull things over a cup of coffee, take a walk, etc. They were in my face the whole time.
It's like the antibiotics problem. There's nothing wrong with capital punishment. The problem is that it's overprescribed.
- several Gigabit dedicated

- http://leaseweb.com

- probably they are not very different than a cloud provider in that aspect, other than that I seem to be getting a pretty good treatment from hosting providers in general (EV1/The Planet excepted, they've gone downhill to the point that we quit hosting there).

There are differences between providers, but for the most part those are relatively small once you reach a certain level.

- The lease terms are variable depending on the use case, but the majority of the longer term leases are for a year to two years, flat rate published price is about 1E29 / Mbit exclusive VAT for 100Mbit, including server lease. I get a better deal than that but I've been asked not to publish it, I'm sure you understand.

A box with 24 1T drives, 8G of ram and dedicated 1G flat-rate uplink currently lists at E1199/month ex vat if you pay in one go for a year, a bit more if you pay month-by-month.

http://www.leaseweb.com/en/configurator/index/id/95

If you're located outside the EU then you do not pay VAT (and if you are in the EU you'll get it back).

Good negotiators will probably be able to shave some off that price, and if you are able to serve lots of bandwidth with relatively little cpu you can add another G for E750, which puts you under 1 euro / Mbit.

If I would do the same using Amazon I'd be paying a multiple.
Yeah. It's spelled "resumé" or "resume", not "résumé". (That would be pron "ray-zu-may" rather than "reh-zu-may".)
As a rule, if you're going to make someone feel ignorant, do so in a way that's relevant to the job. That rule would imply cutting the link to Chesterton (if they get the reference, they'll appreciate it) and possibly the Hofstader's Law reference, too.

In general, very nice. I used to be a recruiter, and I wish I'd gotten more résumés like this. (Keep in mind that the average recruiter, perhaps even at Google, will prefer a résumé that lists jobs, education maybe skills, and nothing else. The filters in recruiting are designed to suppress originality, since there are far more original ways to make the wrong decision than to make the right one.)
Contrarian Investor Predicts Economic Crash in China
As my father (A Real-Estate Developer/Mortgage Broker/Car-Hock moneylender) used to tell me:

"A loan that isn't backed with readily liquidated collateral should be considered a gift with no expectation of return"

Money lenders aren't stupid. They realize that anything that isn't covered with collateral is money that they have a 90% chance of losing. It's is utterly beyond them why _any_ borrowers would not consider walking away from an underwater mortgage once the ROI hit the sweet spot (Credit Record Hit, and possible law suits being two costs factored in)

The NYT article was an excellent summary of the issues though.
The javascript key handlers are absorbing them. Outlook Web Access does this too (and it drives me crazy there).
Wouldn't it make more sense to use each rather than map for that example?

%w{apple pear banana}.each {|f| puts "#{f} is a fruit."}
=> apple is a fruit
=> pear is a fruit
=> banana is a fruit

Map is for creating a new array with each of the results in it, like this:

%w{apple pear banana}.map {|f| "#{f} is a fruit."}
=>["apple is a fruit.", "pear is a fruit.", "banana is a fruit."]

which would return an array with each of the strings in it.
Indeed. I once gave a presentation on the absolute futility of trying to time stock markets based on this excellent paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1032962

Given that and my long horizon, it is absolutely stupid, but that's (my) human mind for you.

"On average across all 15 markets, missing the best 10 days resulted in portfolios 50.8% less valuable than a passive investment; and avoiding the worst 10 days resulted in portfolios 150.4% more valuable than a passive investment. Given that 10 days represent less than 0.1% of the days considered in the average market, the odds against successful market timing are staggering. "

N.B.: To put a less stupid slant on it, I am sure ;) that the markets will shortly give in to periodic hysteria about the economy tanking, affecting retail, taking Amazon down with them
That's really thoughtful feedback, thanks. I wasn't quite sure -- is your third paragraph an explanation of how to put your second paragraph ("saying a lot about Google") into practice?
SPQR
Type in "help", the tutorial that gets kicked off from that is pretty impressive. My Dad has been curious about programming and I think this is what I'm going to point him to.
Links of london Sweetie
Yea.. there will always be overly optimistic bulls and overly pessimistic bears. The future always falls somewhere in between. If you look back a few years, you'll see that Amazon had its fair share of doubters. Analysts and critics questioned their investments, and wondered whether or not they would ever be able to sustainably turn a profit. Amazon's definitely done well, and their long term philosophy works. See http://www.salaminder.com/2010/01/amazon-diversification-diw...

Nevertheless, the OP definitely falls into the "overly enthusiastic bulls" category. What large companies have grown at 15% a year for 20 years?
I hope you're selling puts while waiting.
Yeah, only quote LOC if its someone else's mess you cleaned up :)