skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't wait until this becomes more popular. Then I can send this header and avoid tracking + ads without any additional software.
Oh, mortals do need transactions? Since when?
"Entrepreneurs" are doing brisk business with North Korea, to the tune of billions every year, doing arms deals, chemicals, construction, money laundering, commodities, and what have you. Second to the Chinese, Singapore government officials are deeply tied to the NK regime, for example.
I wondered the same. North Korea is a potential gold mine. Sooner or later, the regime will collapse or open up to capitalism, and when that happens the influx of foreign capital will be enormous. When the labor costs in China become "too high", and when Vietnam is no longer "that cheap", going to NK will be the natural option. Location-wise, NK is right next to Japan, so it's less of a logistic nightmare than, say, Cambodia or Laos.

In fact, I remember reading an article in the mid-1990s about an investment fund that only invested in extremely risky places, like war-torn countries in Africa, or hermit states like Belarus or NK. The idea is that when things have hit the bottom, the only possibility is for things to get better, and though the risk is very high, if 1 out of 20 countries they invested in turns out to become a stable, investor-friendly state, then the foreign investors will flock there, prices will rise, and the fund's initial investments will yield astronomical returns.
Game developers(slightly less so publishers) are almost uniformly male-dominated. Some of it is the internal culture of most companies; some of it is external motivations and expectations that filter out women at an early stage. There are occasional efforts to seek a balance in hiring, but the market really doesn't make it easy.
sometimes I forget I live in a chimpanzee insane asylum.
1. www.medindia.net
$15 doctor consult with an indian doctor.

2. personal health record.

3.expert systems for medical diagnosis / test referral.

4. a lab-on-a-chip device , that costs a few $ , being developed by an Indian company , that could diagnose any viral/bacterial disease.

5. direct-to-consumer testing as shown in this article.

Combining those methods , with usual doctor visits as needed could make a very effective combination , especially for the 1st visit to doctor , where only test referals are usually given.
I've had a look at Scala, but not so much as to actually start writing code. But it does look promising.

http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-repl...

The thing which appeals about Duby is that it uses the underlying Java typesystem, and doesn't have a runtime library. If it ever gets finished, it can be as fast as any Java code, and there's been a lot of effort put into making Java code fast.
> There is a lot of demand for those jobs

Indeed. The problem is that lots of young programmers want ot be game developers, thinking its a really cool job. The games companies know this, and fully exploit it, wringing as much work of of employees as they can, while the employee is still naive and doesn't expect management to be utter cunts. When the employee wises up, there's always the next generation of mugs to exploit.

How to fix this? I guess the important thing is to get word out that employers like Rockstar are scum who should be avoided at all costs. (caveat: I've no direct experience with Rockstar, my impression of them is based on a friend who used to work for them).
I wonder what this means for smaller websites that also use advertising (I run a games site, for example)? I think this has the potential to grow into a very complicated situation if it works out for France and other countries follow suit.
I've never really had a problem with initializers in C++. I suppose it comes down to programming style, and I try to avoid complex initialisations by using nice simple classes with only one constructor.
the problem with your argument is the hidden assumption that writing tests wastes time, when in practice it usually saves it. Long term benefit of tests is rarely denied, but as many of the TDD people can tell it usually saves time even in short term. when you develop a feature you are testing it, manually, by refreshing your browser and sometimes performing non-trivial sequences with it. Writing tests to do just that can save you time and leaves you with a better code.
I don't think the location is the issue. Rockstar have an office in Edinburgh, and they treat the staff there with contempt too.
The Premier Natural Food For Your Cats.
The doctors around the world are saying that if you play with your pet for one hour per day,the stress and tension will be gone.
Could you please supply more information about the gears being used since 2600 BC in India? Wikipedia's extensive reference doesn't seem to have any
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gears.

Also, your initial statement is sine dicendo, therefore useless and rather questions the reason of your comment.

Obviously the Antikythera mechanism is impressive because of the size and detail of the gears and their usage for computation.
Help in tax | Tax help business
If you are citizen of a country or resident alien,the rules for filing income,estate,and gift tax returns and paying estimated tax are generally same whether you are in your country or abroad.Your world wide income is subject to reputed country income tax,regardless of where you reside.
> Weren't some rich Russians willing to pay for the privilege of a pirate-hunting vacation off the coast of Somalia?

No, that was a hoax:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/piratecruise.asp
As one of the people behind NodeBox, I'd love to know why you think this is unfortunate. We have been working hard on an application that runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, and a blanket statement like "unfortunately Java" is a bit frustrating.

As graphic designers we are really sensitive to awkward Java applications that look out of place on Mac or Windows. We are trying to find the right look that works on every platform. We discovered that this has more to do with an attention to detail than the underlying technology. As an example, look at a "Mac-like" application iTunes, iPhoto, iCal or Garageband: none of them use the standard aqua buttons in the main interface, instead opting for custom bitmap buttons.

For us, the choices are really down to Qt or Java. We need a solid graphics layer that provides the same results on every platform. Java's 2d graphics does this, and it has native back-ends (Quartz). Also, by using Java, we can speed up a lot of the Python code without resorting to hunting memory bugs in C++.

Lastly, I discovered at Pycon 2009 that Jython really has become a first-class citizen, officially supported by people like Guido. It also does away with the GIL.

I knew the Java argument would come up eventually: I'm surprised it took so long. However, it doesn't come up with people using the software: our users don't realize/care that we use Jython. Instead they're just happy they can use NodeBox on Windows.
The Deadliest place on Earth? Surviving The Giant Crystal Cave
What type are you?
About The Unlock Iphone
Cell phone, a small gadget makes world as a well equipped and communicated global village. If your family at one side of the globe, and you are at another side of the globe, this small gadget join each other at any time.
The Password is 'character.' Sorry for not including that the first time!

Despite my general dislike for all the "What -x- are you?" questionares, I found this to be very well done. I am not sure I fully agree with the typeface it chose for me, but the presentation was excelent.
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1) People in USA/Canada/Other western world are _addicted_
to products made in misery (in China, for example). Less miserable of course, but still far from good conditions.
2) If there are reasons to think that it can improve their condition, than it os a good idea.
Naturally I was implying some sort of legit investment, such as goods that can be mass produced and sold to the world. It may sound cynical, but a fascination indeed exists with products coming from troubled places. Furthermore, there is a whole commercial philosophy behind supporting developing countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade
No, North Korea will not be a gold mine in this case, it would be yet another nail into the coffin of the western world (USA especially) , insanely, hysterically excited about it's own deindustrialization.
I also note that although, as pointed out, Steve is a much better presenter than Bill, MS won the war.

Having a good presenter as CEO is great, but other attributes are more important when it comes to a successful business.
Please note that I stated that some people were willing to pay for the privilege of blowing up Somali pirates with heavy weapons. You found evidence that the Russian company selling pirate-hunting vacations was a hoax. I am talking about demand for a gory form of entertainment, you're talking about supply. Hence, you have not defeated my argument.

I personally know people who would pay to shoot pirates with 50-cal machine guns. You'd be amazed at how bored executives at big companies can get...
Yes, but if we count them as one geek and one MBA, they are being counted twice. Shouldn't we count them as 0.5 geek and 0.5 MBA?
If you like products, coming from troubled places I'd recommend to look at American products. USA is a very troubled country.
Great inequality, corruption, pollution, crime, wars.
Lack of labor law. Infrastructure is falling apart. There is chance the products are by slaves somewher in midwestern states.
Very good point. China is only the tip of the iceberg. For example, about 10 years ago, there was a scandal that Nike used slave child labor in Pakistan to manufacture soccer balls.

http://www1.american.edu/TED/nike.htm
I've done more repairs on my Roomba than any of my Swiffer mops. The gears on the Roomba brushes keep getting clogged with long strands of fiber. My Roomba model is pretty recent too -- only a year old.
In regards to the poor English, I'm fairly confident the author may have been deliberately attempting to obscure their writing style.

It's very possible that the author feels her husband would not approve of (or consent to) publishing a criticism of his employers. I can fairly easily recognize the writing styles of several dozen of my friends, and I'm not married to any of them.

In any given essay/blog of that length, without employing deliberate obfuscation, someone looking for it would likely be able to spot a saying/phrase/crutch word that could identify the author.

The excessive use of the thesaurus is a pretty solid indicator that the author wrote their original draft, then went through and replaced words and phrases with ones of similar meaning.

For example, I wrote the above naturally, without trying to hide my writing style. Glance over the above and you'll probably notice; I have a habit of using indecisive adjectives in statements where I'm not confident that I'm 100% accurate. (Hell, I reflexively did so while writing the sentence talking about the habit!)

That kind of thing can be as good as a signature. When that signature could hurt your marriage or your husband's career, looking like a 6th grade poet is a small price to pay for some insurance.
When I mentioned that NK could be a gold mine, what I had in mind was investments like real estate, utilities, land, agricultural commodities. My point would be clear if I had not suggested moving factories there to take advantage of cheap labor. My mistake.
Yes, he won the 1990s war. ...and was able to retire and turn over the 2000s war to Steve B.

That said, true: the CEO doesn't have to be the skilled presenter. But IMHO Jobs' central asset is his ability to judge how people are affected by design - and that applies to product design (UX, etc) and to presentation design. He understands how to use the powerful emotional/subjective components of the consumer response (usually; better than perhaps 99.5% of CEOs).
Sounds like you have never laid a foot on a troubled place.
The problem, that USA is _not_ much better in the ways how blue collar workers are treated there. There is a good book "the great squeeze", which talks about misery workers go through working on American industrial facilities. Google Books should have it.
Wow, slow news day.
I wrote a review on Amazon for this book, http://www.amazon.com/Technique-Getting-Things-Done-Directin... , published in 1947, "This is a very useful book on getting things done. If you need hand-holding and specific techniques you can apply without thinking too much it's not for you. It gives few specific techniques, instead it focuses on general methods applicable to almost anything and on many inspirational anecdotes. Very readable." Most of the anecdotes involve the need for persistence and consistent effort.
We still don't have flying cars in our driveways. Because of this fact, popularscience and popularmechanics are forever discredited.

I really want my flying car!
Squeaky F-ing Clean
Price of Tech M.&A. Is Expected to Rise
Seems like if you start making money off of people in France, you'd have to pay a tax.
This makes sense. When economic transactions occur over practices that diminish the quality of life, they should be heavily taxed, like cigarettes or television.
"Chinese" is a special case, in that there are actually a large number of spoken languages (of which Cantonese and Mandarin are merely the best-known outside of the region) that share a common system of writing that is largely independent of the sounds of spoken language(1). Imagine, if you will, that a person could write something in French and someone else could read it as if it were Italian, Spanish or Romanian without a hiccup. I18n would be a much easier task if European languages were so encoded, no doubt, but literacy itself would become a much more remarkable accomplishment.

(1)A large number of Chinese characters are composed of a syllable radical which originally acted as a guide to pronunciation (say, "ma") along with a context indicator which would tell the reader which of the various "ma" syllables was being used. In the original written language, it probably made perfect sense, but language drift over time have left the system essentially arbitrary in most modern Chinese languages.

[EDIT -- tried to use an asterisk there, forgetting that paired asterisks result in italics.]
If his wife is the stronger player and her interests are aligned with his own, that's not a bad thing.
Well - we already do :)
FWIW, I have friends that work at game studios in SF, and they're generally happy (and mostly ex-EA employees). These are indie studios or companies that get contracted out by companies like EA to do "hard stuff".

That said, I don't know anyone who was happy working at EA.
I don't know how to use this... It says my password is incorrect. How do I get the "correct" one?
Sounds like somebody have never been outside downtown San Francisco/Seattle/or whatever and saw real life in USA. I lived in Florida for couple of years, and I never saw (anywhere I had a chance to live) such grotesque contrast between poverty in the inside cities and absurd richness on the oceanfront.
Just wait, google not available in your region unless you pay $4.95 per month
WOT: Guide and settings | WOT Web of Trust
I do own a Roomba 560 with 2 virtual walls (as sold in France). It's easily the best home-related purchase we did last year.

For the anecdote, we nicknamed it "wall-e". Our 2yo is totally used to it.

I'd for sure would be willing to buy more domestic robots if I could find valuable ones (I'm thinking about the Scooba).

Is there anyone with interesting links to share on the subject ?
Damn! I never had any issue with mine.

At first I thought there was one, except that I just forget to RTFM.

Sidenote: I think it's really important to clean the brushes on a regular basis to keep these littl' things running.
Ask News.YC: What features would you want in a news aggregator?
I'm currently designing a new news aggregator. I know it has been done before. Some of the features that are obvious I already know like rss, friending, voting, etc. I was wondering what else I should implement?
> though I wager that behind closed doors they might have a better understanding that these numbers are bunk.

The sentiment behind that wager is why I think this deal with Netflix is calculated, and that the outcome will be favorable (short run, long run all bets are off) for both the studios and Netflix.
We won't have flying cars - we will have eco-friendly flying bikes!
I like this post, but I don't like the self-promoting aspect of the whole post-to-twitter thing...
Ridiculous. They are addicted to inexpensive products, nothing else. Few people ever check a label to see where clothes are made.
No single algorithm can compress all possible files
Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007048

How can the French do this without falling foul of EU laws?
The NeHe guides get you up and going quickly and provide a base for easy experimentation. That alone makes them hugely useful, I believe. The code is horrendous and there's often a lack of explanation, but it's very easy to take the code and play around with it. They're certainly not the thing to read if you're looking for best practices, but they give you the ability to hit the ground running.
Big if.
Unladen swallow review. Still needs work.
Game Theory, Body Scanners and Security Theater
Invisible checker, invisible scanner, invisible detector, yahoo status
It depends upon your definition of "computer", of course.

A clock is a single-purpose computing device; it's certainly not a general-purpose computing device, which is what most people when they speak of a "computer".
Inexpensive (or more correctly - cheap) are almost always made in misery. So by simple logic, people who prefer cheap products prefer products made in misery.
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>The proposals are aimed at helping to save French creative industries from the 'free-for-all' Internet culture.

Let them die please, they produce nothing worthy.

Also i find it fun to see them speak of multi-million euros industries who have done more to kill creation than any other, like if they needed to be saved. This is so typical of our actual government in france. Actually protect the wealthy by pretending they're poor, and do nothing for people who actually needs help.
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"archive"/delete a story to not see it ever again. filters like gmail. better yet, retrieve the associated stories that are linked to, and allow me to filter based on that content. reddit's orange folders. that should be enough to keep you busy for a while ;)
'Zackly. His wife has the power to make him quit. His boss has the knowledge that he has already chosen not to use this power himself. To negotiate, everyone's got to have something that someone else wants.
Such an idiotic claim: "stop enrichment of the world's leading internet players." Why not? I mean, if the would tax google, what, a new french service will pop up overnight?
So odd...
The problem is that lots of young programmers want ot be game developers, thinking its a really cool job

There surely must be a limited supply of people who can do the really serious physics modeling or AI stuff. Are they subject to the same conditions?

I mean, if you can do that, you can quit and go work for a hedge fund as a quant... Same long hours, 10x the pay, treated like a prize racehorse.
I suck. I thought we were still talking about rot13-ing words and that I should point out that Julius Caesar could not have known what the modern English language word "earth" means and that it is the same as "terra" in Latin, i.e., a point about historical linguistics instead of astronomy and natural philosophy.
o Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!
What Clooney's latest film taught me about business
Don't be fooled! Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.
The French are still smarting over the irrelevance of Minitel to the wider world. You know, they were once the leading players in getting consumers to adopt network services. Now the world has passed them by.
This is interesting, because it's working conditions like these which preceded unionization of workforces in the early 20th century.

When I was made redundant last year they asked if I wanted to have a union representative present. It's just part of the standard text they have to say for legal reasons, but as far as I'm aware there are no unions related to software engineering. This is probably because the industry is still fairly young.
I'm not convinced about outsourcing small tasks. If he had outsourced the task of getting that $11, he would need to explain it to another person and give that person all of the personal details etc. needed to do the task. After all this, there is still no guarantee that the task even gets done as you want. Maybe you neglected to specify something, or the other person just isn't as careful and motivated to do the task as you would be. This doesn't even count the time spent finding that person in the first place, and you also need to take into account the risk of unresponsiveness or plain failed result.

Some of my failed outsourcing experiments:

Task: Finding images matching a description (used asksunday.com)
Result: Service ignored details of my request and gave me useless pics.

Task: Create personality tests for an OpenSocial app (rentacoder.com)
Result: Hired several people. Some were unresponsive and didn't do anything. Some did eventually, but there were many spelling and grammatical errors. Some tests were in foreign languages and claimed to be native level, but upon checking with native speakers this turned out to be false.

Task: A content writing task (details escape me, but I directly hired some chinese outsourcing company)
Result: Company copy & pasted content from other sites.

The issue is probably that I haven't been careful enough in selecting the people to outsource to, or haven't paid enough to motivate serious bidders for my tasks.

Successful ones:

Task: Accept packages I sent from Japan and bring them to a convention center in Wien.
Result: Package delivered as promised. This was the one that saved me the most effort and money.

Task: Create a list of words starting with given letter combination.
Result: List delivered as specified, but in the wrong format.

Task: Scan books and send images to me (this was OK because I was official translator for said books)
Result: Images delivered as promised.
Audiophoolery
Also see http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4184
It doesn't hurt that the gyroscopic behavior of the wheels also makes it unnecessary to do steering corrections at high enough speeds. Once you're going fast enough, you can hop off the bike and it'll still go upright for a while.
An addictive IDE for smalltalk [video]
I just had a nightmare of a flying critical mass. Self-righteous hipsters blocking the air-roads to make a point. That point will be, "Hey! We're assholes, look at us!"
Whenever Z-Bo writes I feel like there is a thought there, screaming to get out, but muffled by a blanket of words. I wish he would be more concise.
Any other opinions?