skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps Google's decisions have nothing to do with ideology. Perhaps they are legitimately concerned about IP theft and security, and are simply exiting china in the most PR friendly way possible.
If I were a Chinese citizen I'd avoid mentioning my government at all costs.
Of course - trying to line up in the middle of two viewpoints can have issues itself. ( http://xkcd.com/690/ )

Possibly the trick is to discard the outliers first.
...but not the only one. For instance, #2 on the list there is Singapore, which is somewhat infamous as a semi-authoritarian society with, for instance, many restrictions on freedom of speech and laws criminalizing various types of undesired behavior, such as littering, jaywalking, chewing gum, and not flushing toilets. (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Singapore#Criminal_law )

On the other hand, they have little corruption and low crime rates, so hey, if it works for them...
1. Mr. Schell is experienced in the study of glaciers?

2. Public elementary education has a lot of money poured into it. I question whether funding is the main problem.

3. High-speed rail? Next to Germany, New Jersey looks like Wyoming. I don't know that we have the population density.
Surprisingly on-topic :-) For the curious, the reference is within this article:
"We seek the following from the BDFL:

Approval for the overall concept of adding a just-in-time compiler to CPython, following the design laid out below.

Permission to continue working on the just-in-time compiler in the CPython source tree.

Permission to eventually merge the just-in-time compiler into the py3k branch once all blocking issues have been addressed.

A pony."
Just curious, did you do this on AppEngine?
Yes! This annoys me to no end. I would be happy to pay per lb of transported goods, including me and my bag. There is no cost difference to the airline if me bag is 5lb over the limit or if I weighed 5lb more. There should be no cost difference either!
To be fair, the article ends by saying how useless that factoid is.
Mostly resolution and dispatch. Some of this needs very clever caching or the overhead can't be eliminated or hoisted. The control-flow constructs and iterators come to mind, too.

The Rubyists certainly know about these issues, so you'll have to ask them for details.
Where are the 3rd party hardware accessories for the iPhone?
See the followup posting
...and they conveniently put those quick-disconnect dongles on the end so you can make your own normal dongles

It looks like some people have already written Windows drivers, if you wanted to experiment you might look at writing a userspace driver for Linux.

It's kind of strange that they built something custom instead of just implementing it as a couple standard HID devices with an internal hub.
For the cost of an iPhone, you can save a lot more than one life. Donate right now!

http://clintonbushhaitifund.org/

http://awe.sm/helphaiti

etc.
Damn. I was hoping you were making an app to let landlords bid on desirable tenants.
I humbly disagree.

The fonts are microscopic here and when I increase the size to something half-readable then stuff gets pushed out the right side. (on the section-overview pages that is)

I also found this sidebar on the right of the articles very distracting. Don't throw unrelated content at me while I'm reading.
Why don't they implement a point voting system like HN? It's usually quite a good filter.
Market Forces and the much reviled Yugo
No bureaucrats are making any decisions in either of your hypothetical scenarios. In one case, there's an unchanging legislative environment incentivizing more work, while in the other case the legislative environment is incentivizing other potentially valuable things. No decisions made.

As long as the tax code isn't too complicated and it doesn't change constantly, then how is the government meddling? There are just free people making their own decisions; their decisions just have slightly altered outcomes depending on the environment they're made in.
To be fair, the author perhaps does allude indirectly to the attacks by trying to point out a perceived hypocrisy of Google being willing to operate under the patriot act:

To combat terrorism after the "9/11" terrorist attack, the U.S. has permitted police to search civilian emails and even monitor their communications without permission

A related post in the side-links does opine on the attacks directly though: Google probes inside job in hackings.
MIT project lets you author code with screenshots, pictures
This is one of the few sites I've browsed on a Windows machine that made me instinctively think "oh the fonts look like crap because someone designed it on Windows and didn't think about Mac usability", since I'm usually on a Mac. That the fonts look nearly unreadable at any size on a windows machine is hilarious.
1) Define property rights, the ways governments can infringe on them and then assign values to those infractions.

2) In part, you can measure the amount of paperwork and time delay in achieving common tasks, like buying land, building a warehouse and incorporating. The sheer number of regulations may also be an indicator for the amount of friction the government is introducing. Defining "level of regulations and rules" is also important in order to come up with a good quantification scheme.
See, I'm not the only one who thinks weather news in the Chronicle is biased - http://bayarea.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/what-kind-of-wea...
Why there's no real startup culture in New York
This was just linked on Reddit an amusing look at British attitudes to class: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/sathnam_....

I chatted to a younger friend about it and he couldn't believe I'd be so gauche as to classify people based on their background, parenting and education but felt class was and should only be about your income.
Guido doesn't want to share the pony: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3569/3401670115_54e1d32200.jp...
"Such politicization was not provoked by China, but imposed by the U.S. and the west onto China."

Wow, this isn't even good propaganda. I wrote better BS than this for class papers. More believable, anyway.

I guess I should detail a rebuttal. China engaged in an act of war (attack) on a private company, Grossly unethical should not go ignored, and certainly not cooperated with. If the people of China don't like the outcome, they should consider what their government is doing. If you shoot at me, don't be surprised if I stop coming by your house. Sorry if the other members of your household don't like it.
>> Try living on $20k/year and see how that works out for you.

Granted, I'm single and don't have kids, but even living on $20,000/yr right now isn't bad. I can't have a car, but other than that, I can make any small (<$500) purchase I want without any real worry. Tell me I only get $14,000 and I'll start to worry.
Techzing 29 - But, I Digress... (instant audio)
Forgive me if I missed reading it, but how will you be returning a profit?
>> and there will certainly be someone else trying for that

That deserves an award for understatement of the year. You could probably set up a five man brawl to the death for that job right now.
No, it's missing a few things we need like SSL on our own domain.
Ok. A devil's advocate question. If US government can monitor US citizen's emails, why shouldn't Chinese govt monitor the emails of Chinese citizens? Of course, there is difference in what the monitoring will lead to in the 2 cases, but the ability to monitor is what it is. right?
I find it highly ironic that their criticism implores that Google "stop launching surprise attacks against China." Also very interesting is how Google's recent actions are viewed as some sort of US government-sponsored attempt to export US values.
The accounting product will always be free, we'll make money with add-ons like payroll, custom reports, and tax filing.
During historical conflicts between the US and nations that didn't have freedom of the press, there are countless stories of the other side's government believing that because their own media was a total sham, regardless of our statements to the contrary, our own media must therefore be full of lies.

The common response to this sort of story is to laugh and say how little they understood the power of a truly free press. And this is true for its part, but it is also true that there is goverment and now corporate propaganda mixed into the "reputable" news. Not of the same scale or variety, but it is there nonetheless.
Totally agree - and also at the very least I rest comfortable knowing that such a large amount of wealth (Most of Buffets' empire also) is bookmarked to at least try and do good. Not somewhere else (ie: funding weapons)
The .ASPX extension in the URLs led me to make the same assumption
Google Person Finder: Haiti Earthquake
I think Gates should turn comments on. People should be registered, perhaps using Facebook/LinkedIn credentials.

I do agree he needs to be exposed to opinions outside his comfort zone.
I could, but only if I felt the products produced value - if anything it would be a great way of selling my own software if I ever did get around to it.

My primary interest is not in a web startup though - my true love is Aerospace; I'm refining my math and other skills/knowledge so that I can minimize the amount of time I might have to spend doing pre-requisites and get the heart of an engineering degree.

I'm still on the fence about school, but I would love to pursue aerospace engineering.
You should read biased news sources, only they should include those that espouse the opposite of your preferred bias. If you're left-leaning, keeping up to date with Fox News is like doing unit testing on your belief system. Likewise if you're right leaning but can put up with Jon Stewart (yeah, I'll go there and call him a news source).
It's unfortunate that they never hit their original 5x performance boost. Hopefully acceptance into CPython will help.
There's a very solid take-down of this article by Alissa Novoselick at Salon.com:

http://www.salon.com/food/2010/01/15/school_gardens_strike_b...
my favorite part is where the article suggests that google should "stop launching surprise attacks". what did they expect?
Many of his predictions boil down to "You know that weird fringe technology that's too expensive, bulky, and power consuming? In ten years, it'll be common place and cheap." After the fact they look like nothing.

But... despite over fifty years of this progression occurring in the electronics arena, the idea that what we have now is all we will ever have remains pervasive. Very few people have internalized the concept. And so he makes predictions, and they are not met with widespread apathy and people claiming they are trivial and obvious, they are met with disbelief and mockery from many people. So you can't say they are vacuously true from the vantage point of 2009. You need to have said it in 1998 when it was published, whereupon I assure you, you too would have been met with mockery and derision.

One example of where people are not thinking this way is in our discussions about the environment. The closest thing to innovation any mainstream debate discusses has to do with taking technologies that mostly work now but don't scale, and making them fail to scale marginally less, while assuming the same baseload of resource consumption will be in place. Yet technology marches ever onward, and one way it manifests is increased efficiency. A command of nanotechnology, even if it never quite reaches the dizzying heights described in the farthest-out singulatarian literature, will still have massive consequences for the efficiency of manufacturing, manufacturing of food resources, and numerous other issues as well. I find the idea of the Kyoto protocols utterly laughable, because built into the very concept is the idea that we can have meaningful discussions of what our resource consumption will look like in 50 years, an idea so absurd that it is remarkable that it passes without comment. What's the point of negotiating a binding treaty on a world that may literally be growing houses, just to take one incredibly small example?
The best customer support software?
I work for a small early stage start up and our customer service is getting overwhelming (good sign!). We've been splitting email and phone duties but it's distracting us from anything else. We're currently just using gmail, and it's working just fine, but we want to hire someone in the Philippines to help out, and we figured it's time to switch to some more serious software.

What software do people recommend? We need a way to organize the emails, track communication with customers, build a bunch of canned messages, etc. We'd like a way to divide responsibilities with our Philippine help (e.g., they take the standard emails and we take the bug reports).

I've checked out salesforce but it seems too heavy duty. I've also heard good things about zendesk. What else is out there? What are the pros and cons?

Major thanks for any input.
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IMHO I would change the logo. Make it more professional and less cartoony. You asking for people to trust you with details that if mis handled could land them in tax court. Your logo is your first impression. It should leave the impression of professionalism. On the flip side I have spoke with a lot of small business owners - many of them are 2 year olds... so maybe I'm wrong :)
The performance increase is still notable though - I would like to see that static LLVM link changed; I like python for its size, speed, and expressiveness.
My iPhone did not save me, God and the prayers
of tens of thousands of His people did.

http://mashable.com/2010/01/20/haiti-iphone-survivor/#commen...

http://twitter.com/webguydan
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I'm not quite sure what it means to say the U.S. has "permitted police to monitor communications without permission". Was it permitted or not?
So is the goal to gain resources by becoming part of CPython? It seems like the small performance increases they got are completely overshadowed by the additional memory requirements. I don't pretend to understand the mainline Python development cycle, but this surely doesn't seem mature enough to justify declaring it as "the way forward".
Neither of them should. China, in using the US as precedent for doing so, is merely finding an excuse for something it wanted to do anyways - this is not a situation of looking at the US and trying to match capabilities, as you seem to be implying (if the US installed death collars on all citizens, would other nations have some reason to keep up with US capabilities, and therefor need to institute their own death collar plan?)
I will be there.
The problem with ActiveX is that it was more promiscuous with it's permissions than a first year college student on free-drink night :-)

Opening up some additional permissions (using something like the Android permissions model) would be a touch more restrained.
Global Warming: Early Warning Signs
Apologies for my earlier tone. It seems there is some genuine confusion here.

Thanks for posting the link, it confirms my suspicion re: leftover paranoia from the Moniker fiasco. A couple of years ago Moniker was buying domains their customers searched and then trying to ransom them. It was a huge issue at the time, but Moniker was the only big registrar engaging in the practice and has since stopped.

Moniker is owned by Network Solutions. Although the OP on this thread claims he only searched on GoDaddy, its hard to believe GoDaddy would be pinging their chief competitor with domaining tips. The much simpler answer is he used Moniker at some point in the process, or that Heart Internet is a Moniker affiliate.

FWIW, the reason so many people fell for this is that Moniker had a really nice bulk WHOIS tool at this time. But no one buys domains from NetSol because they rip you off, so they would use the tool to find domains and then go reg them @ GoDaddy. That's when they would discover that Moniker had bought the domain and was trying to extort them. Apparently some people did not understand the distinction between GoDaddy and Moniker, and shot the messenger instead.

I'm not here to defend GoDaddy, although in this case they've done nothing wrong, so much as to refute an unfounded accusation made against a site I like (AjaxWhois). Nothing personal.
The UK defense industry is still standardized on IE6.
The article seems to be more interested in mocking other people's social/political ideas than talking about the actual problem, viz., ineffective schooling. Smugly telling someone that what they're doing is a bad idea doesn't really accomplish much, even (perhaps especially!) when it's true. Why not talk about how to make things better?

I tend to suspect the answer to that is "because the author is more interested in political cheap shots than in problem solving", but I admit to being reflexively cynical about such things.
That's less of an issue for intentional APIs (where the API provider is already doing work for you) than it is for unintentional APIs (rss feeds, any reasonably clean page you can crawl with jQuery) where the provider will do nothing to help you.
The title of the article is oddly chosen. Google's customers can only be held 'hostage' by actions taken by the Chinese government. Google is not ceasing to allow customers access to vital data or services - they're simply refusing to follow the arbitrary guidelines set in place by China, and China is blocking access to Google services in response.

So, I agree - Google definitely shouldn't take Chinese netizens or their data as hostages. That's the job of the Chinese government.

This also illustrates how Google's earlier actions (doing business in China in hopes of encouraging the nation to 'open up') have had the opposite effect: Google has handed China a highly effective bargaining chip in the form of their customers' data. If Google had never offered these services in the first place, it would be impossible for their customers to be 'held hostage' by the Chinese government.

To some extent this situation is different for Microsoft - Ballmer was somewhat correct to say in recent discussion that his company has no reason to withdraw from China. The Chinese government has no easy way to hold his customers' data hostage - once you've installed Windows and Microsoft Word onto your PC, it's going to keep working and letting you access your data unless you do something to change that (like connecting to the internet or installing Green Dam), regardless of any disagreement Microsoft may have with your local government. It is only Google's heavy reliance on 'the cloud' for storing users' data that makes this possible.
Bottom line - Baidu outclassed them and they needed to find a way to get out without losing face or having to explain why they were in second place in the largest internet market in the world.

Every other US company has been able to survive except whiny little Google: "Boo hoo, they stole my IP"! Tell that to GE, who are doing just fine in China, thank you very much, IP or no IP.

Google should grow some *alls, stand and fight, or gracefully admit defeat instead of whining.
Actual article: http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepa...

I'm curious: has anyone had experience pairing using EtherPad, either distantly or in the same room?
stratfor.com

You have to pay for the news, but it's meaty and not particularly partisan.
Obviously, I am not arguing that people should try to find bad, unsuitable partners, but that ought to be clear if you actually read my post. (Or alternatively, if you just proceed under the assumption that I have a more-or-less functional brain.) If you read the OP's post, you'll see that his sentiments went quite some way beyond "find a good woman".

Of course people want partners with certain attributes. But the way that gets discussed on this site is often pretty creepy. People are talking as if they're making a purchase ("high quality merchandise") rather than finding someone to love.
This is useful analytically, but one tradeoff here is that if this is in an inner loop, the exp/sum/log process will be a lot more expensive than a simple max.

For proofs and stuff it can be invaluable to have a differentiable objective function, but in actual computation it's not always necessary.
See also, the State of World Liberty index:
http://stateofworldliberty.org/report/results.html
http://stateofworldliberty.org/report/rankings.html

They attempt to get a broader view of freedom by including other indices.

Their tops, from 2006: Estonia, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, Iceland, Bahamas, United Kingdom

And then, finally, United States

Singapore is ranked 49th, on account of being ranked 95th in the "individual freedom" category.
This is why logic is taught in China only when you are learning how to write an essay in GRE.
Glad I'm not the only one who found it incredibly ironic. http://grab.by/1RWF
Spot on. A story can present totally objective facts, but it will still be biased because the reporter decided which facts to include and which to omit. Likewise, reporters choose which experts they want to quote in their stories.
I think that a JIT compiler will eventually be added to python, so the sooner this happens the better. The new generation of javascript engines (e.g. V8) have shown us how fast dynamic code can be; there is no reason python can't achieve this either. I also think the swallow team has gone about this in the right way: presenting what they've done, and asking for what needs to happen before it can become mainline. They obviously value this merge, so kudos to google.

On the other hand, performance so far is quite underwhelming. Certainly, as a PEP, this is by no means intended to be merged now, but to provide a roadmap for the future. Here's to hoping they can remove their remaining roadblocks.
10 Problems That Dog Every Operating System
I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there. Aside from not really being news, it's hardly unbiased. Perhaps the real issue is that there is no such thing as unbiased.

Personally I read The Economist and subscribe to a bunch of sections on news.google.com. In the end you have to make up your own mind.
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Do people these days really need assistance from an app for that:

"Woolley used his shirt to tie off the three-inch gash that was opened on his leg and a sock to bandage the back of his head."
Large or Asynchronous file uploads in ASP.NET MVC
Is this genuinely a case of "We have commercial control of a lot of physical book manufacturing commodities and in order to leverage the value of these commodities we want to artificially inflate the price of the competition"?

That... seems... well, it doesn't taste good, let's put it that way.
Slightly related...

I have been really enjoying writing code for node.js - I'm using it to render content for non-javascript capable clients and it's handing the load nicely. Being able to maintain one set of tests is a huge win over having a python and a JS implementation.

Has anyone got a good way to redirect non-JS clients to a different set of URLs? At the moment I'm using a combination of user agent sniffing and js+meta page refresh, is there a better way?
The fact that luaJIT is written in assembler makes me wonder how practical an amd64 port. :-\