skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A passive way to protect yourself is to buy commodities like gold, silver and oil. Gold in particular is considered a great hedge against inflation. If JPY begins to inflate, its exchange rate against other currencies will rise and gold prices (as measured in JPY) will increase. You will "profit" in the sense that you can sell your gold to repurchase yen after the inflation stops.

FYI, investing the GLD ETF is the best practical way to buy gold:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=gld
As the creator of a MMO, I can tell you it's absolutely intentional. Our initial design document had the word "grinding" it in many times; I'm sure theirs did too.

If you want people to sink hundreds of hours into a game, the gameplay is going to include a LOT of repetition. The tricky part is to keep it fun and engaging despite this.
Data Sorcery with Clojure
Eliminating the Need for Search
The compelling part of a RPG is the process of discovery - discovering the world, the story, monsters, powers, etc. If the content is hand-crafted, there's always something new around the corner, which keeps the game fresh.

The problem with autogenerated content is that the process of discovery changes to discovering the algorithms used to generate the content. Once the player has discovered those algorithms, it's impossible to continue having a fresh experience. So "autogenerated" is, at best, taking hand-crafted content, repeating it a few times, and changing some details in the hope that the player won't notice the repetition right away.

This is, of course, only in the context of traditional RPGs - more sandbox-style games, like Dwarf Fortress, or Love (or, hell, at the other extreme of auto-generated content, Tetris) can do just fine.
http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+mercedes
Take some videos of the thing working, and post them somewhere that you track and that's password protected. The reason for this is so that you can easily show one person at a VC firm, who, if excited, can easily show the rest. A working prototype is the litmus test for VCs, who by the nature of their trade can rarely be experts in everything.

If you've got the money to fast track a provisional patent, so that you can say "We've filed a provision patent," it will give you major credibility, more negotiating leverage, and in particular you'll have the IP that VCs want.

You definitely need to open the kimono a bit. In particular it is practically unheard of that a patent lawyer will screw you -- more often they will just take your money. A patent lawyer's entire career is ruined if they're caught stealing -- whereas you could probably still succeed by out-executing and out-innovating the competitors.

Best
Research: Why men use prostitutes
Good anecdotes. It is funny to think of a parking meter company trying to break into China. The last one, about work gangs sitting around doing nothing reminds me of just about every road construction crew I've ever seen in the U.S.

One thing that greatly impresses me is road construction work in Shanghai. I've seen them rebuild a street, completely rip it up, install new sewage and fiber optics at lightning speed. This entails coordination of at least 3 different departments of the municipal government. In contrast, there is a construction project on I-95 through the middle of Jacksonville, Florida that has been ongoing for over 20 years!!
I can possibly help you with some of this, the majority of things I've been involved in have been hardware, not software.

I have a decent mutual NDA if you want to chat.

Not to be arrogant, but I'm busy enough and happy enough with my current gigs that I don't have any motivation to steal your ideas ;)

I've been through most of the UL, FCC, CE-Mark and similar cert processes, done parts relating to CNC, plastic injection mold, vacuum-form, PCB design/layout/stuffing, packaging and so on.
> Sports are not perceived as dangerous

Not by AOSSM: "With more and more kids participating in sports, injuries are on the rise – an estimated two million occurring each year, resulting in 500,000 doctor visits and 30,000 hospitalizations" [http://www.sportsmed.org/tabs/newsroom/AOSSMPressReleaseDeta...]

"Almost one-third of all injuries incurred in childhood are sports-related injuries." [http://www.chp.edu/CHP/P01650]

I'm not going to comment on that - I just wondered what the actual injury rate is and found this.
Aversion to grind is why I prefer Diablo 1 to Diablo 2. First one is hard enough to be adventure. Second one is just a grind.

My aversion to grind might be also the reason why I don't seek daily job.
Well maybe. In high school I knew I couldn't write that great so rather then writing a ton of little blog entries I tried to take time to write full essay type entries that I could polish a bit (they were still horrible looking back). Over the years my writing has improved and some of that can be attributed to all the blog entries I wrote (or started to write).
I don't have anything smart to say except that I fully support you in your endeavor!
Is there a technical hurdle that has given Adobe performance problems on OS X? Or is it really just the relative market share leading to few development resources on Mac?
You could argue, then, that your parents are responsible for choosing where you grew up and your peer group, and who your other parent is. They're still 100% responsible for how you turned out, it's just the critical decisions happened before you were born.
Googol is a number. Google is what Cookie Monster's eyes do.
Gadget that checks the build status of a project. And shows the status of the unit tests run during the most recent continuous integration build/test cycle.
For me the single best web experience improvement in the last year has been to install ClickToFlash: http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/

Suddenly, Safari didn't slow down or crash unexplicably, fantastic.
The Air Umbrella
The video is dated but still worth watching, especially the end. The point is, How do you know if you have an idea good enough for a startup? I had done two startups in the last fifteen years. The first one everyone thought it was a great idea, especially the VC's. It required tremendous amount of capital and I was able to secure $65M of VC funding. However, as with most startups in the late-90's, we crashed-and-burned when the last bubble bursted. My second company is completely bootstrapped. The VC's thought it was a terrible idea but fortunately most customers we talked to thought otherwise. After we became profitable, the VC's were kicking down our door wanting to buy a piece of the action. I took the opportunity to start my early retirement (before the bubble bursted in 2007). Lesson learned: listen to Paul Graham but kick it up a notch. Don't just build something someone wants and don't build something someone willing to invest, instead build something someone willing to buy. Good luck, everyone.
Anybody who thinks that sounds bad should try running Flash on a PowerPC. It can't play standard size Youtube videos at an acceptable framerate on a G5, while it provides acceptable performance on an Atom-powered netbook running Windows.

The situation on Linux is a little better, but performance and reliability are still poor. Developers should keep this in mind when choosing to use Flash as a cross-platform environment.
He published a book that claimed Clinton was the head of the Arkansas drug trade, and that the Oklahoma City Bombing was an FBI/DOJ operation.

I'd call him a nutter, but I don't think that's true. I think he's a smart fellow who recognizes that editorials that take extreme stances sell better than ones that don't... and hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Nobody argues against this, only mods it down?
I guess based on your argument it's fairly clear why you have given up on it ;)
Fair enough. But my point was that, sooner or later, you'll need to deal with the details and I've found that is, quite often, the most time consuming part (sometimes you just misjudged which ones where the issues, and which ones the details).

You can always delegate the "details", but there's a difference between delegating and deferring (the work for yourself). Knowing what to delegate is very important, of course, which is the main point of edw519's comment, I think.
I can't find any references to the actual product so I'm not sure if it's a prototype or a real, saleable product; however, it's an interesting counterpoint to the "segway of umbrellas" post yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1055493
If you plan to grow the company to over $100m in annual revenues and want to raise at least $750k now, go to VCs; if either of those is false you should raise money from angels.

I wouldn't worry at this stage about how favorable the terms might be. That's sort of like thinking about what to have as a snack when you get to the top of Everest. It's very hard to convince investors to give you money, and VCs especially. VCs invest in less than 1% of the companies that approach them. So the first order of business is to convince anyone to invest in you at all. After you do that you can optimize the terms.
It is often fun to play devil's advocate and argue a particular point, but a conversation (particularly when not face to face) can rapidly progress from differing opinions to a flame fest, and once the first fist has flown there is no going back. Work email exchanges are famous for misinterpretations, oversensitivity, etc., that would never happen in a personal conversation. I look forward to your efforts at increasing civility in a somewhat impersonal forum, I'd definitely be interested in seeing what comes from it.
Well known are Amharic :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amharic

and Tifinagh (now taught in Morocco and Algeria) :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tifinagh
Does anyone know what the device actually did? How can this be Hacker News without someone asking that?
If you ever get around to testing out having multiple voting axes, one of those axes could be civility or charitability. (I suppose that would more frequently be used in the negative direction, though.)
Simple and complex diagrams can be made in any decent graphics app (Inkscape or Keynote are fantastic) and easily exported to PNG or SVG.

Personally I also have a lot of trouble reading ASCII diagrams. Knowing that pipe-slash-dash is a curved line, when the line is broken and the ends don't line up properly.

On a separate note, I suggest whoever moderated me to zero should read the HN guidelines.
Penalty Clauses and the Nexus One
The reason the request rate was at 4 was that at some point your site responded to 4 req/sec without problems.

User-agent is the accepted and standardized way to communicate with bots. Getting angry at us for following robots.txt is like getting angry at someone for showing you her ID when she goes through airport security.

From our perspective, your house put up a sign that said "Hey everyone come in 4 at a time".
I find myself using Chrome over Firebug more and more these days.
flashblock (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433) is one of the first addons I install for firefox.
How big is the market of the blind who can afford something like this? My initial instinct would be that the market is too small.
Not exactly. Your brain is shaped partly by randomness in the womb or in the environment that is not directly under their control. This doesn't include decisions such as whether your mother drinks or smokes but more chaotic variables that cannot be controlled. Also, your parents can do their best to choose what they consider a good environment (e.g. a city or a school) but your innate personality is a stronger indicator of the groups that you will tend to associate with in that context. This is why siblings who grow up in the same environment chosen by their parents can have extremely different personalities and peer groups.
Start with Output
Silverlight is even more unstable for me in Safari, and Flash is fine for me in non-Safari browsers. I don't know if this is everyone's experience, but on my part I'm more inclined to blame Apple and Safari than Adobe.

On the slowness front, maybe Flash is slower on Mac, but it's hard for me to fault Adobe on this either (even as a Mac user). If I had finite resources, I too would allocate more of those to the majority platform.
A former co-worker of mine went to work at Pivotal Labs, where full time pairing is the mandate. After just a month, he quit "the best company he'd ever worked for," and wrote up a lengthy blog post on why pairing didn't work for him: http://mwilden.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-dont-like-pair-pro...
Could each user get a customized view based on similarity to comments they've previously up-voted? This could be based on a simple Bayesian filter, similar to the "Plan for Spam".

This could also encourage users to vote more as voting would (hopefully) improve the filtering.
Insurance will pay and raise your insurance premium because you become higher risk person.
They aren't engineers :|
Comparing a model in which the contract is 'everything is a stream of characters' to function application and composition in just about any programming language seems more than a little clueless.
I think the only thing that would make my Safari experience more wonderful would be ClickTo(Animated)Gif.
Justice Scalia and Orthogonality in an Oral Argument
Silverlight is a breeze in Safari for me. It doesn't eat all of my CPU and the fans keep it down. When I watch a flash movie however on my Mac the fans kick in and it sounds like it's gonna take off or something.
Click2Flash let's me load the m4v equivalent on youtube but that's unfortunately only for youtube.
I don't think ternary expression is ugly by itself, it's only ugly if parameters themselves are chains beacuse then you're back to having a tree. Which is the fundamental problem - chaining is not good for branches, so any branches send you back to nesting. On the higher level theproblem is that you are trying to express a tree as a list - ain't going to work.

Haskel side-steps this problem in a neat way - you can take advantage of delayed evaluation and give names to both arguments of the ternary expression so each individual piece looks linear. So your "tree" is broken down line by line:

x=...
y=...
z=f?x:y

which is as neat and easy to read as a chain, but is more powerful because it can express a tree.

Once could enforce this sort of reader-friendly style by forbidding expressions in ternary operators.
Silicon Prairie News - Highlighting entrepreneurs on the Silicon Prairie
The original link goes to the last page.

First page: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/31770765/the_girl_who...
Not surprising that she was discovered and arrested. The whole point of a missing person's list is to work as an alert system.
I could go Google something, but it'd be easier and more entertaining if you came over and had dinner with my folks, who grew up in the Cultural Revolution era. Or my grandparents, who lived through famines and saw the transmformation from the Dynastic era to a Republic. Don't forget, China has a LONG history.
Interesting. I'm using Click2Flash and I had tried the m4v option, but I get consistently lower framerates for that than with Flash on Leopard.
And thou shalt not discriminate ...
Santa Barbara Start Up that prevents Loss
I just did a very unscientific test, playing the same video in both Safari and Firefox. In both cases Flash used approximately 50% CPU. For comparison, playing a higher resolution video in Quicktime yielded about 15% CPU.
Give me another chance, I wanna grow up once again
I often take photos of textual signs for use later. Take it to the next level: OCR text from the built-in cameras. A friend suggested OCR from live video was even possible (on an iPhone!) My vision was being able to enter text by scribbling something on a napkin, and OCR'ing the text in.

Another cool method is Dan Bricklin's Note Taker (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=997264) Just need to add OCR.

Now, my experiments with OCR algorithms didn't work too well. Apparently the training data is the most important component.

Handwriting recognition is also possible, but still images lack the very useful stroke info.
I know of no research linking survival of un-aided birthing and a lack of neo-natal care to immunity from heart disease in old age. This isn't survivorship bias. It's a separate issue.
As someone who works at Yahoo I'm going to say I have no guilt over China. If you think China commits human rights violations stop doing business with them yourself. That means not buying anything made in China, including anything made by Apple.

The human rights abuses in China are sad, and upsetting. I'm a member of Amnesty and I care about stopping them. However, western business operating in China have an ability to change the market and increase the standard of living and the freedoms in that country through increased wealth and communication.

This story isn't (or shouldn't) be about Yahoo!'s operations in China it should be about co-operation between companies to prevent cyber-terrorism wherever it's from. I'd like to think next time we as a company are more forthcoming with information to others, so they have more notice of potential threats.

N.B These views are my own and don't necessarily represent Yahoo!'s views, yada, yada
They are Research Scientists?
I agree with only allowing upvoting as _the_ metric to measure the quality of a post or comment.
All posts and comments could be recognized as 'default incoming' content or 'approaching exceptional' content.

+1 for disabling downvoting.
Same here. I went to high school in a little farm town. There were no metal detectors or mandatory ID badges, people openly carried pocket knives in case they had to cut something, and some of the classes would leave you unsupervised with power tools. The only problems with security came from damn fool English teachers. One of them flipped out over a plastic butter knife, and another misinterpreted an teenage gloom as a warning sign of impending terrorism and called the police.
An idea I just had that might help civility is to require every post to "explain itself" with a limited set of tags. Sort of like the ./ point system in reverse; you would get some set of options like "Information," "Opinion," "Related," "Off-topic" and you pick one or more. So if you want to start making a fuss or interject something outside the immediate discussion, you have to announce it.

Doing this adds filtering metadata and an gives additional incentive to downvote comments that don't contribute - they're going to be more likely to use few tags or inappropriate ones. On the other hand, posts that use a lot of tags simultaneously and actually encompass all of them are probably detailed and well-considered.

Downsides: more work to post(not always a bad thing), more room for nasty rules lawyering("This is not Hacker News").
I'm surprised she didn't just go to another country and go from there - I'm not sure how easily other countries would be able to trace her back to the missing people in the US.

Worst case she could have started off as an illegal immigrant - it seems with her resourcefulness and intelligence she could have done well.
Attention deconcentration: on free diving and flow
The Best Hiring Tip
Thanks. These bits of "what's it like there" don't jump out of most reading ...

> all programs which display or print dates are going to have to be updated

... unless they're subscribed to "whatsthejapaneseyear.com" and check it as part of their initialization ;-)

[Google doesn't know (yet), and neither does wolframalpha nor bing]
I wholeheartedly agree. All the women executives that I know are assertive, self-promoting, and self-confident. All the female secretaries I've met were really pleasant, constantly smiling girls.

Coincidence? I think not.
That's kind of a bogus question to begin with. Africa is not exactly culturally homogenous, and in fact Egypt (and a lot of nearby civilizations) would be more appropriately regarded as part of the ancient Middle East, owing to the fact that it was easier to cross the Red Sea than the Sahara.
My girlfriend is working tonight, in casualty in the UK. Emergency Room in America. Not surprisingly, she had today off, but got called in to fill in. She called me as she got there, telling me about the seven ambulances sitting outside, knowing its going to be an ugly queue inside.

Some days she gets there and finds a five hour wait, which they work hard to get down to a sensible level. Traffic is variable, often seemingly random, and not just number of people. Different kinds of problems need different kinds of solutions.

Some days she tells me about the number of people who died on her. Those are the hard nights. It's a hard job. It's not a job that lends itself to predictability.
>> I'd also like to find a company where the mission is something other than "Make money".

You're going to have a real problem with this particular criteria. I don't think this is problem limited to Chicago, however.

I'd recommend getting to know Chicago's start-up and consulting scene, as these are probably the places with varied work and that treat people like more than cogs in a machine. Chicago has a very strong Ruby on Rails community, so it will probably help if you work in that language/platform. Places I'd recommend checking out: Among local startups, Groupon has a really talented staff and is absolutely taking off. Obtiva and Pathfinder are webapp development companies focusing on agile, rails, and RIA. Threadless is in Chicago and has a pretty large national reputation. I know people at all of the above and think any would fit your criteria. That said, Groupon seems to be in a rough stretch where developers work long hours as a result of their rapid growth; Pathfinder and Obtiva might not be hiring due to the economy and Threadless recently lost one of its founders (Jeffrey Kalmikiff) to Digg, which makes me wonder what's going on that would cause him to leave.
It's probably both. Couldn't find the source, but I remember it having to do with the OS X driver API and how it doesn't let you do the same kind of low-level voodoo that makes Flash work on Windows. And with limited resources, Adobe probably hacked something together that ran "Hello world!" and shipped it.

I'd like to hear an Adobe engineer's point of view.
An upcoming new law will make it illegal for men to pay for sex with a trafficked or pimped woman – and a punter's ignorance of a woman's ­circumstances will be no defence.

This sort of law, what I believe is called "strict liability" in England is horribly unfair. I understand why ignorance of the law cannot be a defense to a crime, but ignorance of fact should always be. In certain situations, it may be reasonable to require that the person make a reasonable attempt to check the facts, but there's only so much a person can do.
You are right that relatively to Israel's population, the number of open-source Israelis may be normal.

But I'm not asking this relatively to population size. It's already clear that Israelis have a disproportional number of technology workers/entrepreneurs. I'm asking, why so many tech people but not too many open-source-oriented tech people?

I'm active in Python-related communities, and I can recall only one or two Israelis except me in there. Also, I was the only Israeli guy in the last EuroPython, out of a few hundred participants.
I don't think Adobe have given any explanation. Neither have they given any sign that they are working on fixing the performance and stability issues. It seems to me that Adobe's position can be summed up like this - "That's not a priority for us. Learn to live with it." As an example of this there is this mini-flamewar between John C. Welch and Adobe's John Dowdell: http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/06/doing_it_wrong.html
Indeed. It was noteworthy that she mentioned Cal Evans, who I'm guessing is English and in the US on a work visa. If he was American, he'd be a founder rather than an employee.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1055076