skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My usual question: what country in the world offers a better visa policy than the United States?

A) In what country of the world could an American college graduate in a high-tech major field get off the plane and immediately start working with the prospect of long-term employment and permanent residence?

B) In what country of the world could a college graduate from India or China in a high-tech major field get off the plane and immediately start working with the prospect of long-term employment and permanent residence?

C) In what country of the world could a college graduate from an arbitrary country with an arbitrary college major get off the plane and immediately start working with the prospect of long-term employment and permanent residence?

D) In what country of the world could a person from an arbitrary country with no schooling beyond compulsory instruction get off the plane and immediately start working with the prospect of long-term employment and permanent residence?

E) More generally, which countries in the world enjoy net immigration rather than net emigration?
You seem to be making the assumption that the private sector isn't perfectly capable of manufacturing its own shitty incentives without the government's help.

People aren't rational and decision makers don't automatically have incentives that align with the organizations they control.
World's Greenest Homes: Hong Kong Space Saver : Video : Planet Green
Outstanding! I think I'll pick one up, when available. No hint of a schedule for vols 4b, 4c (and possibly d), or 5.
here is a nice sample:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1043226
I'm not sure about being cheaper without the Microsoft tax. A few months ago, I was browsing a variety of netbook models and found no significant discounts for Linux. Dell actually charged more for Ubuntu than XP on one model.

I think the reason is all the bundled trial software; they make enough money from the bundling to offset the Windows license and maybe even make a little profit. I think this, more than any pressure from Microsoft, cooperative marketing or lack of user demand is the reason PC manufacturers are reluctant to offer Linux and make it hard to find when they do.
Its in the very early pre alpha stages right now, so I guess with a bit of work, it could be pitched better.

Of course, the real barrier to using this for real projects would be library support.
that's not very fun. I was thinking something more along the lines of "the rumors are true I am an alien and here is my spaceship". that would be earthshaking
The same, but with emacs and magit standing in for Textmate and Gitx.

The only reason to depart from these tools is if you need a PHP debugger -- Ruby has a perfectly fine command-line debugger, but PHP's debuggers are an incredible pain in the ass by comparison. Most of the pro PHP coders I know use Komodo or NuSphere PHPed for debugging (although only a percentage of them use such IDEs for actual coding). I despise IDEs and use debuggers too rarely to feel like spending the money on those tools; on the rare occasions that I need a PHP debugger I use XDebug with MacGDBp and pray that it doesn't crash. It seems to be working better, based on the last time I tried it, sometime last month.
I agree fully. I've been largely disappointed with the netbook market simply being low-end laptop PCs. Something like the Touchbook might actually interest me (but give it more cores, please).
It's also the source of the TEX language but written in a "Literate" style that Knuth pioneered.

I just thought it was pretty interesting while reading Coders at Work since a lot of people refer to it.
Hm. But less likely! Recording contract? Knuth plays Bach on the organ!:

http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~knuth/duets.html
Few things to outline my perspective. . . . . I don't like paying for hardware more than its worth. I don't like paying for software.

These are important aspects of the demographic that uses Linux on the desktop and laptop. It and the ideological zealots are why there's no commercial software for the Linux laptop or desktop.
Wow, thank you very much! I'd missed that the last time(s) I'd checked his programs page (or feared it was still written in FORTRAN for some inexplicable reason (that code is hideous)). I had much fun learning the Colossal Cave in the same summer I learned UNIX, it'll be fun reviewing this.
So basically you're using FB to build a public profile (i.e., your "brand")?

IMHO, this is not the use case for most FB users. I use FB to talk semi-privately with my friends (my expectation is that FB be as private as unencrypted email, which it now isn't).

I would use LinkedIn+Twitter to build a profile/brand.
Netbooks are the manifestation of a sort of inverse Moore's law, the race to the bottom in consumer electronics. I don't understand people who say they use these things on a daily basis. Do they have baby hands and eagle-eyed vision? Maybe I've been using Macs for too long, but mashing on a 0.8mm plastic bit for a left click just makes me want to break something. I go from a 15 inch screen to one of those 10 inch jobs and I want to kill myself. For any situation where one may conceivably use a netbook, either an iPhone or a real laptop always seems to be a better choice.

And Jesus H. Christ, this article is exactly the sort of eye-roll-inducing, echo-chamber sycophancy that makes Jeff Atwood such a pain in the ass to read.

"...this pivotal moment in computing ... I'm talking about unlimited access
to the complete sum of human knowledge, and free, unfettered communication with
anyone on earth ... Netbooks aren't an alternative to notebook computers. They
are the new computers."

Gag me. I mean, there's a point in there, probably, somewhere, beneath all the layers of self-important ego-stroking. But Atwood just can't seem to write a persuasive piece without resorting to this Ivory Tower holier-than-thou bullshit. I can't be the only one that thinks this, can I?
Summary: Al Gore got them to change the number 1 in their typeface because it looked like an I.
They also usually fail the "Runs my software." criterium. The most smartphones still have gatekeepers on what software you can install on them (with the iPhone being the primest example). And even the ones that let you install any software don't usually let you install software that can do anything because of security concerns.

Hopefully Android will win and this won't be an issue, but for now it definitely is.
On the other hand, I see too many technical people assuming the questioner must be asking the wrong question on IRC and mailing lists.

This wastes time, and can be rather rude, when the questioner was perfectly correct to be asking the question the way that he was (and this is only determined after 3 minutes of arguing and insinuations about the questioners intelligence). This often turns into looking like the "even ruder" example with question two.

If a short answer is possible, why not answer it and ask why if you suspect that they were really asking the wrong question?
Not really so much. You just target an area where C is not very good and you can do it. For bulk threaded stuff using lots of I/O, Java can be "faster than C." For extremely distributed code, Erlang can be "faster than C."

These claims leverage the fact that the fastest implementation in C is incredibly difficult to write. Usually we discard that difficulty when comparing languages, but as time goes on the costs of developing specific distributed, multi-threaded, and/or reliable systems in pure C becomes so outrageous that it stops making sense to ignore, so we start comparing against less correct implementations.
That was a perfect example.

Roleplaying as a "student" is playing a low status role, to the high status role of "teacher". In that instance you get what you want by playing low. But in another situation you might play high (for another to play low) to get what you want. You could bark orders at someone, and if they follow through they played low to your high. Of course, if this was a serious and non-consensual interaction it'd wear on the players after a while. Improv, since it's fundamentally about roleplaying, parallels BDSM.

Having a boss who was too serious about his high status role would suck, for instance. The fun ones are the ones who joke about their role.
Yes, I'm sorry I took one small nugget of your entire post and ranted on it; I apologize. What set me off was the "find the loop in a linked list" example; that's one I heard many years ago. I never would have figured it out on my own, but once explained (and for me, proven), it's just like having that special wrench to get the nut under your car; you either have the tool and it's easy, or don't and it's damn near impossible. The skill of the mechanic doesn't come into play.

Your goals and means to achieve them were well reasoned and explained, I thought. My only complaint now is I don't seem to have the willpower to do it myself. =\
Why does this trick you? Because it puts you in a situation where you've already told the truth and can no longer lie? Better is to have relationships with your friends where you simply can be honest.

DOUG: Oh great! Could you drive me to the airport? My
flight leaves at 6PM.
YOU: Ah no, I'd rather not, sorry.
I hate driving to the airport at this time of day.
or
YOU: Well, it's not something I really feel like doing
today, but how about you buy me dinner when you get back
in exchange?
I wonder if these short-sighted executives realize that today, it's common for techies to disconnect cable TV service and rely solely on an internet connection for television. As the techies go, so will go the general populace.
A Transforming Trend -- The Natural User Interface
I'd recommend an older Linux distro or Windows XP and using Chrome as your browser (rather than Firefox). My Eee boots in about 25 seconds (15 from hibernate) and feels quite fast.
"Most people view their broadcast networks as if they’re a God-given right, but they cost money to produce, said SNL Kagan’s Flynn. Somebody has to pay it’s not going to stay on Hulu forever for free."

The advertisers pay for it douche-bag. Oh wait, you want us and them to pay for it several times over to boost your failing business model. Sounds familiar.
Yes, but it's in ancient Greek. I meant a translation?
Do you have kids? I do. If it's all pain, then you're doing it wrong.
The problem is that most folks are not made aware of the fact that privacy is a one-way street. Once open to all, the information is always lurking around somewhere, basically impossible to delete. I try to explain that to non-techie folks and they don't believe it.
Built By Google
This is advice for improv performers. Yes, performers deliberately deceive people into thinking they are someone that they are not, and those people are willingly suspending disbelief.

It is also relevant for non-performers who wish to be consciously aware of social cues.
It's both the source code and a book. This single source file can be compiled to both the book (weave->tex->dvi2ps) or too Tex itself (tangle->pascal compiler). It's kind of a beautiful idea I think. I would strongly recommend getting the printed book form (very cheap second hand on Amazon) as it's a fascinating read.
Electricity From WiFi Signals
Strong on anecdotes. Weaker on verifiable data. It fits the mood of angst of parents of young people who are applying to college this year. (I am a parent of a current applicant, but I'm trying not to be so anxious.)
It could be something more mundane. The signs we're looking for are stuff like radio signals, which we'll probably be using for how long? 500 years out of the Sun's 10 billion lifespan. That's a pretty big filter already.

Plus, if light speed is really impossible to overcome, then distant stars get less interesting as a civilization progresses. 100 years didn't mean so much for a given population 5000 years ago (not for its individuals, of course), but already are about 3 paradigm shifts these days.
That's really missing the beauty of the book form. Cross reference and non-linear reading is made easy by those "see also" sections on every right hand page. They're present in the PDF but they don't work so well on an on-screen version.
I happen to be recovering from the flu and I spending part of the day hanging out on the couch. Instead of dragging my 15" notebook, I grabbed my recently purchased Acer (1810TZ- same form factor but slightly more powerful than the 1410 in the article).

It's an amazing machine. 11" screen. Dual Core. 3GB RAM. 300 GB HD. 8 hrs of battery life. Pretty good build quality. And I can really do my work on it. $550 shipped.

I really can't think of what Apple is going to deliver with their tablet that at twice the price and no keyboard is going to be any better than this machine.
Journler -- http://journler.com/ is a good desktop app for Mac users. It shows the number of paragraphs words in the status bar. It also has a load of other features without getting in the way of writing.

Thanks for bringing the idea of writing morning pages into our attention.
Google - Bookmarks
Intentional or not, Apple has implied priority with a user interface API that is very well positioned for the health care industry.
But does he really accuse the EU of anything? As far as I can tell he is talking about "European regions", which isn't limited to the EU. But I wonder whether that 831m is a typo though, as Wikipedia says 731m. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe

But comparing Europe to the US, is fairly arbitrary, why not compare it to North America?
You bet. And it's not just TV... it's also phone. I disconnected cable a few years ago and don't miss it. And 2 weeks ago I disconnected my landline and replaced it with an Ooma device.

Note: I would have gone land-line free, but for me I don't think it's a good idea to have my "official" phone number be my cell #. I would have used google voice, but they couldn't port my number. So Ooma seemed like a reasonable 2nd choice.
Because if you go back, say, 20 years, no one would pay anything that wasn't physical. It just didn't make sense to people back then. There was no reason to.

Now computers are so ubiquitous and powerful that people pay for "virtual" things all the time. They pay to download that song off of iTunes. They pay to download that iPhone app. Hell, they pay for "land" in Second Life and "money" in Farmville.
70+ Beautiful CSS Techniques
How about we just stop linking to Zed, m'kay?
Can you provide two clear objective assertions the article made that it didn't support with adequate evidence?

(I found the tone hyperbolic but the analysis compelling).
Physics fail. I can't see how they would be allowed to market this?
It's like we're being trolled on a kind of macro level. Flagged.
I'm talking about the daringfireball article. Not the posted one. on second look perhaps it's just the secondary articles that are misquoting. If you don't like the word dishonest replace it with exaggerated.
Chinese economic growth rate is actually fairly slow for a developing nation. The government has decided to slowly enter the world economy and by doing so it has made things look great, however it's just repeating the same transition that Japan, South Korea and others went though.

PS: For comparison look at South Korea even though it's slowed down from 1995 to now it still grew ~300x from 1965-now compared to China's ~70x growth over the same period.

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=ny_gdp_mk...
"as many as one-third of admissions, he writes, are flagged for special treatment at the elite universities"

Yale keeps records on its Web site that show that legacy students have made up between 13 and 16 percent of incoming classes in the last 10 years. Most schools don't make this available, so where did the data come from? The use of the qualifier "as many as" means there has to be one university, but which one is it?
We need a tldr service where summaries can be put in one place and embedded in other sites such as HN.
Kindly demonstrate the alleged 'physics fail'. Harvesting the energy of a dozen wifi and GSM signals 24/7 seems a reasonable way to yield a significant amount of energy.

Wait, I'll do the math myself: my accesspoint sends at 100mW. If this harvesting device is 10x10cm and, on average, 1 meter from the accesspoint, it will pick up 0.01/Pi ~ 0.3% of that signal, or 0.3 mW. Let's cut that in three to account for conversion efficiency: 0.1 mW.

My phone has a 0.9 Ah battery. At 3.7V, this is 12kJ. With an uptime of 200 hours, this means it sends out 17 mW to the world. So could I use this device to power my phone? Only with 170 close-by accesspoints and after 200 hours would my phone be fully charged. So it indeed sounds pretty bogus.

Edit: updated as per commentary below and I grant this probably overestimates the actual working of the device. Evenn on an expo, with a couple of hundred hundred GSM signals in the vicinity, it wouldn't work.
Unsolved Brain mysteries
> it isn't pervasive as we had hoped.

As who had hoped?

> What are your thoughts with Linux on the desktop

Meccano dressed as lamb. Fun for people who like Meccano, trapped fingers for people who mistake it for a real lamb.

> Are you going to use a desktop linux?

No, I'm Windowsy by habit and day job, and while it has many teeth grittingly annoying parts, so does Linux, just different bits. Same with OS X. Developments in Trusted Computing / Palladium / DRM might drive me to a different opinion in coming years.

> Would recommend the system for someone else, maybe less tech savvy?

No chance, but that's for personal reasons to do with not wanting to become the scapegoat or go-to support guy rather than a considered evaluation of whether it would do what they want.
He doesn't address the possibility that the start of life is "the great filter", but after that point, microbes were shared between planets in our solar system via metoerites, impacts, etc.

In which case it wouldn't matter what we found on Mars.
http://xkcd.com/638/
That could (should) happen with marijuana, but what's the point in arguing about methamphetamine, heroin, and cocaine? There's no forseeable future in which they're decriminalized.
The author spends a lot of effort ignoring the simple explanation that wealthy families can spend more money on things that make a world of difference in educational opportunities later on, such as books in the home and parents who know how to read.

The educational gap between poor and wealthy students is certainly something worth trying to remedy, but colleges wanting the best students is no more a conspiracy to keep the poor powerless than the demand for money is a conspiracy to keep them poor.
There are very few good product, design, and marketing people in tech...
A few thoughts:

1. The current rate of technological advancement is so steep as to make even 100 years hence, a nanosecond in the grand scheme, absolutely unknowable.

2. Sufficiently advanced technologies would be indistinguishable, intentionally, a la Star Trek's noncontact per Federation agreement.

3. In terms of the author's "Great Filter" idea, maybe some fraction of the supernovas observed by astronomers are really interstellar industrial accidents.
Http://www.proactive.dk/
Interesting read. One candidate I had heard for the Great Filter discussed in the paper is MMORPGs. A civilization advances to the point where they develop immersive games, then vanishes. I tried to track down the source of that idea. Anyone know?

One quote from that paper is interesting: "Considering that space travel was science fiction a mere half century ago..."

Space travel, in the terms the paper is talking about, is still arguably science fiction.
Even if we do develop a sustainable human civilization on this planet using Earth's resources wisely ... the most compelling reason to colonize space is still the inherent precariousness of relying on a single locus. There are any number of ways that humans, even peaceful humans, on this planet may be wiped out by natural causes. Our species cannot be truly "safe" until it ventures out into space. It's the eggs in one basket problem.
> I wouldn't call that "thing" a netbook, but a small laptop. The iBook was about the same size and nobody called it a "netbook".

I agree. I'm surprised Jeff missed the obvious rhetorical reply: 'Netbooks aren't lame laptops; laptops are lame netbooks.'

(And then one would go on to enumerate the advantages of size, battery-life, etc. and give the little mini-history of computer trends.)
On the surface, it looks like a really cheap scam.

The demo is so easy to cook: the device already has a battery, and you can load a blackberry when you plug it to it? Sure. How do I know the energy is coming from "ambient wifi signals"?

I'm also suspicious of basic physics. Basic specs for a blackberry charger: 5V at 800mA.

In theory, I could place 100 of those devices easily in a room, and they would all be able to generate such power. I'll be nice and assume that I can't stack them in 3D because they'd block each other's reception, so I'll agree that I can't stack 10,000 of them in one room and get the same results.

How much power do 100 blackberry chargers generate, and how does it compare to the power generated by one wifi antenna? If the former is more than the latter, we have a serious physics impossibility.
"Nor does diversity extend to racial composition. Of course every college boasts about its efforts to enroll a more racially diverse student body. But here are the facts: A New York Times article in 2004 revealed that Harvard’s incoming freshman class was 9 percent black, but between one-half and two-thirds of those black students were actually West Indian or African immigrants or the children of immigrants, and many others were biracial. In short, they weren’t African-American."

The racial spoils system is mindbogglingly perverse and unjust, and nowhere is this more apparent than the squabbling among people to preserve their access to the crumbs they can take from it. Study hard in high school, pah, that's for Asians -- we've got to keep those Johnny Come Lately Africans from taking our spots!
Ask HN: Desktop + Laptop, or just Laptop?
For the past few months I've been using an interim laptop as my primary computer while I waited for the new ThinkPad lines. Last week the new lines were released. Now, I've been debating whether it's a better choice to build my own desktop, which would run around $500 and get a Dell Vostro V13 (http://bit.ly/7njiU4) which ranges from $450 - $650 for when I'm on the road.

Alternatively, I could just get one of the new ThinkPad w510 (http://bit.ly/90CrsS) which would serve both purposes. The ThinkPad option would likely run around $1000 more than the Desktop + Vostro option.

Although much of the work I do is remote, or in a VM, I still have to have a fair amount of desktop apps installed. Which would you choose? Is using a remote drive via DropBox or ExpanDrive good enough? Have you had successes or troubles keeping your machines in synch? Thank You.

Note: Links shortened for readability.
He seems big on the "no monthly contracts" thing. But an increasing number of netbooks are being sold with data plans, and there's no reason to think this trend won't continue. Consumers prefer the monthly fees and subsidized purchase price to the lump sum buy-it-all-at-once price, even though it ends up costing them more. The idea that you can buy a semi-useful service and get an essentially free netbook is a very psychologically (if not economically) appealing notion, and one that I am sure companies will increasingly exploit.
Jobs' comment about build quality certainly rang true with me: My 1st generation eeePC basically fell apart after a year.
Wait. So this guy doesn't want us to find life, which would be super cool and advance scientific knowledge significantly... because it might mean that human civilization might not last that long in the timescale of the universe?

I mean, I think we knew that already. The vast majority of species that have lived on Earth have gone extinct, and almost all of the rest have evolved to be completely unrecognizable. It's unlikely we'll be an exception to that rule, and I'm okay with that.