skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly I think it's a cultural thing. It's easier to just leave what you don't know to an unknown thing called "god". That's just laziness imo and fear, and probably hope that we are somehow immortal.
I like how this is a mantra that is repeated half a dozen times every two submissions.
Well, until recently we've managed to avoid the vowel flattening and raising that has been pretty much a constant throughout the US since independence. We're accused of saying "oot", "aboot" and "hoose", but what we hear from our neighbours to the south is "aot", "abaot" and "haose" -- the vowel being a tail-rounded flat "a" to the Canadian ear. (We use the same vowel in "house", the verb form, which is distinguished in Canadian speach by more than just the zeddifying of the ess.)

That being said, one shouldn't be deceived into thinking that there is a single Canadian English dialect or accent -- we have a number of regional variants. The upper crust of both Ontario and Quebec (the former Upper and Lower Canada) both spoke with an essentially North American vocabulary and a "mid-Atlantic" accent (the sort of halfway meeting between RP and mid-American that, say, Deutche Welle would use for its English-language world news service). The lower classes in the same provinces were, like the American south, far more heavily influenced by Cornish, Kentish, Geordie, Scots and Scottish and Irish gaelic -- but without the black feedback loop. Nova Scotia has several accents, ranging from the heavily Gaelic Cape Breton to the German Lunenberg. Newfoundland "English" is a language of its own -- the accent is a Gaelic-heavy mix, but the grammar is very much Irish Gaelic. British Columbia speaks an odd mix of SoCal and Pacific Northwest with a tiny tinge of RP in the mix. Manitoba and Saskatchewan are essentially indistinguishable from rural Pennsylvania, but for an odd metre that leaked in from the local aboriginal languages. And, well, Alberta is a State at heart -- I don't think an American would have any difficulty picking out the new economic immigrants to that province from the natives in a sentence or two. There is a lot of overlap between political borders, of course, but there are several distinct regional dialects.
It may be novel to some computer scientists, but the idea can be found in any introductory ecology textbook.

It resolves the apparent 'paradox' between increasing entropy and increasing complexity of life: life thrives only because of the initial low entropy of the sun.
People probably forget/ignore it half a dozen times every two submissions as well.
Angajari Videochat - Modele Videochat - Studio Videochat - Videochat Bucuresti
And I agree with his contention. It seems pretty clear cut to me. For the pro-Eleanor folks, I want to break down here what are the elements in my pro-Jason stance, just to be real clear:

1. just because you can do a thing, doesn't mean you should do a thing [this nulls out the whole "b-b-but technology makes this possible now!" argument; for bonus points think of the implications of your stance regarding the availability of nuclear weapons]

2. you don't have a right to other people's work, automatically, by default, for free

3. if they make it available for free and/or say copy all you want -- that's fine, do it

4. ... but if they do not, you should honor their wishes regarding their own creation

5. ... if despite that, you do not, then you are unethical
Not to mention being influenced by French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, West African and native languages is hardly unique amongst the world's former colonies.
Yes there is. Niall ferguson describes it as "the empires [Indian colonial administrations] distinctly celtic tinge" if memory serves me right.
There's a saying in project management: "The first 90% of the work takes the first 90% of the time. And the last 10% of the work takes the next 90% of the time".
It doesn't go against most of your point, but the reali[sz]e example in particular isn't Webster's fault or an example of U.S. divergence--- it used to be spelled -ize in the UK too, and didn't really shift completely until the past few decades. It's still the form preferred by the Oxford English Dictionary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling

On the others, there's a bit more of a continuum than everyone using the British spellings, though I'll agree the Commonwealth probably tilts towards more similarity with the UK than with the US. But Canadian spelling, especially, aligns with U.S. usage in a lot of respects: it generally uses -ize rather than -ise endings ("realize", not "realise"), and sides with the Americans on a lot of specific one-off differences ("tire", not "tyre"), though it sides with the U.K. spellings on -our vs. -or ("colour", not "color").
The boss he's talking about is David E. Shaw.
Why did you vote "other"? Quakers are Christian, aren't they? All traditions called "Quaker" with which I am familiar are Christian.
I am Mormon. I voted Christian. I run a (desolate) Mormonism-related reddit clone at zionlist.com.
Yes, but where is disposable income growing faster? I'd rather own a small slice of an expanding market than a bigger piece of a stagnating one. The US (& by extension Europe) is financially overstretched on both the government and consumer level.

From what I know about Chinese consumer psychology, Apple could double the prices of iPhones & make more sales. The Chinese love luxury products.
The Equal Odds Rule, from a particulary good Amazon review
Designing UX for Children
I think that usually when people say that 10% of the work take disproportionally longer than they expect, it's because they're measuring the wrong thing. If you find coding easy, then writing 90% of the code doesn't equate to 90% of the work. Polish is very hard, and in most cases it isn't 10% of the work, it's more likely something about half the work. After all, that's exactly what distinguishes your product and makes it worth using. Not sure if thinking about it that way makes it feel better, but at least for planning purposes, consider calling the polish phase 50% of the work.
Why should Eleanor care about the things you mention?
Anybody can suggests fiction authors who write in this style - sane text morphing into gibberish and probably back to sanity?
> What's the reasoning behind implementing a ring3 driver for an IM Client and a custom network stack for a torrent client?

To fight against rampant keylogger and malware in China.

Once you starts Thunder without speed limit or concurrent connection limit, your whole LAN suffers.
I believe he said that in his original post. AppMiner.com
That seems like a fairly cliché series of dichotomies. Life isn't black and white; if choices were always this clear-cut then they wouldn't be hard.
yeah i think that's basically it. Find a business model that works and repeat it over and over in different geographies or markets. Or even: do it once, sell, do exactly the same again (e.g Hutchinson Whampoa with Orange (sold to France Telecom) and now 3).
Alexa, Compete for keeping track of competition

Stackoverflow and php.net for technical stuff

Google* for email, maps, translation etc.

Delicious for bookmarking

Mashable, Twitter, iGoogle (RSS-feeds) for news

Digg and Reddit for fun
To be fair, the ActiveX encryption requirement only applied to domestic credit cards. If you were paying by foreign-issued credit card --- even if you were buying stuff from a Korean shop for delivery within Korea --- it was perfectly legal for the merchant to skip the ActiveX junk (and resident registration number verification, the other major nightmare for foreigners) and just use good old https.

Unfortunately, few ever bothered. Kyobo Books deserves some props at this point for getting this working early --- ordered stuff from them at Christmas with a foreign credit card and foreign billing address, and everything worked perfectly. Their competitors like Aladdin and Yes24 deserve a collective smack upside the head.
The phrase you are looking for is "fiduciary responsibility". You can just Google it: http://www.efmoody.com/arbitration/fiduciary.html
(Sorry, I only now saw your response). Of course coke will not erode your teeth overnight, but I never said that. It will cause dental erosion though, irreversible loss of tooth caused mostly by drinking acidic drinks like soda and apple juice. The Snopes article is too optimistic about the protective effects of enamel and saliva. See (the references at) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_erosion
Hey Paul,

I wrote a pretty long blog post on that a while ago, maybe it is of use to you:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/How+to+get+better+at+estimating+s...
Sure, there are banks et al that suck your soul away.

But I've managed to keep successful career in Silicon Valley/SF with startups and SME-sized internet companies doing interesting things.

My point is there is a a lot of middle ground between the insular world of Google with it's average pay and the suckage of banks.
Canadian here. Been in the US for two years doing grad school. When I went back to Canada once the Canadian customs told me I should declare myself as a "US resident visiting Canada". I am a resident of US for tax purposes obviously. I think the IRS and the CBP have different standards for residency, the one that benefits them more.
AppMiner.com and iApper.com are both showing listings. A Google search shows up some other sites, but the mentions seem to have disappeared now.
I think the fact that git forces you to learn how it works is one of its greatest strengths.

It's not like it's rocket science either; git's internals are remarkably straightforward considering what it can do. By having a rudimentary understanding of what git actually is, even supposedly "advanced" features like rebasing and partial commits (git add --patch) make perfect sense.

Git is a tool that will be used constantly. It pays to learn it thoroughly.

The UI of the command line tool is sometimes iffy (git rm --cached?), but that I think is a separate issue. The other VCS systems, being so "user-friendly", don't seem to encourage one to actually learn them. Mercurial's branches still don't make sense to me (bookmarks are better), and SVN I can use almost solely because I've learned some magic incantations that work for what I need to do.
Sorry, what?

http://cl.ly/6d3c5bbf3dc88653693e
Ask HN: Where does GAP and A&F get their blank t-shirts from? 
I read somewhere sometime ago that they use the same suppliers/wholesalers. I was wondering where or how one might go about finding this info out.<p>Even better, if someone here at HN already has this info...
Assuming you mean community in the sense of employee community/camaraderie than I think you are astute and absolutely right with your observations.

As an alternative to a gigantic payday or not, though, I wouldn't want to be part of the Google world. I interact with it directly and it seems very insular and elitist (I have friends who work there, I'm involved with a number of Google initiatives, I visit the 'Plex a few times a year, etc.).

My experience is that Googler's end up down a rabbit hole of their own self-importance and loose touch of the rest of the professional world. A bit like college students at an Ivy-League school loosing touch with the real world.

Yes, even without a gigantic payday, I'll take the option that isn't the 'Google community'.

Money and material good are not 'strictly' my goal but I think everyone involved in entrepreneurial activities has to be focused on wealth creation as a considerable driver. I'm also double digit years into my career and done the "big co" thing already.
Yahoo gave them some server space in Seoul at one point.
The thing with those is, as you go back you'll notice a fair few that aren't nearly as interesting now, they were just topical/the right thing at the right time. Many of the truly great articles I've read on HN scored well, but not that well.
me too, the term is a bit ambiguous
> All of which argue from a base of scarcity which doesn't exist in the venue he's suddenly found himself.

Sure, his analogies fail at some point, just like most analogies. But that doesn't make his point invalid. Or yours valid, for that matter.

The problem still remains that his time is scarce -- no matter how easy it is to copy the media he uses to distribute his work. And that's what copyright is about: Not the scarcity of the media, but the scarcity of the time needed to create the master.

Or can you snap your fingers and have beautifully designed, perfectly written, and bug free software appear on your hard drive?
Art. Only for people with money.
I agree with your interpretation, and I was just extrapolating and making some logical jumps in the process. The point is that, from this point of view, a person can't rationally choose to be good. She can go through the motions, but if she doesn't have the gift of unconditional love (agape, the original Greek word), she's just losing her time. My take from this is that the act without the gift (which is internal and emotional, hence "feeling") is just as moot as the gift without the act (as described in Matthew 5.)
Lots of iPhone clones & Gucci bags on the subway last time I was in Shanghai: when the device is mostly a fashion accessory UI & hardware quality does not matter all that much. Not sure if the iPad is a fashion accessory in China yet though.
> Anyone here could start a "community for fish tank owners" and make a ton of money from it.

I highly doubt that it would as easy as you make it seem.

Communities have critical mass and if you do not have a very good reason for people to switch or tap in to an existing userbase then you'll be surprised how hard this really is. I'm actually surprised that you think that 'doing it well and putting your all in to it' would be enough to make it work, that's suspiciously close to 'built it and they will come'.
Mother: Eleanor, dear, do not steal from our neighbors, they don't like that.

Eleanor: Why? Why should I care about that? They weren't using that stuff anyway. Not that I'm admitting to that. Because I'm not.

...

Mother: Please don't sneak into our neighbor's home when they're gone. Even if you don't take anything, and even if the back door is unlocked. It's not nice.

Eleanor: Why mom? I just want to have fun. Why is everybody always picking on me?

...

Mother: Please don't throw bubble-gum on the sidewalk dear.

Eleanor: I was done with it. Why do you keep pestering me. (pouts)

Mother: Because dear, people walking by may not see it and step on it, getting on their shoes. It's very hard to get off, and kinda gross.

Eleanor: So? Why should I care about that? Why should I care about any of the things you mention?

Mother: sighs Somebody I hope you'll understand dear. I really do.
Some of the comments are just wrong:

> You have to live at least 6 months in the UK to open a bank account or apply for a credit card.

I moved to the UK and this was not the case. It was difficult to open a bank account but not because you need to live here 6 months but because the banks require all sorts of identification which you normally don't have as a recent immigrant (stuff like proof of address).
Are you on MacOS? You can sync your address book to gmail contact without using a paid app. Add you gmail account in address book preferences and use iSync...
>Dangerous, you really don't want your students thinking you are lying to them every lesson.

Except this is very often going to be exactly what you are doing. Take nearly any scientific subject you had in school. How much of what you learned still holds? Not to even mention that the text books the children are reading often contain information that has already been disproven.
Ask HN: Agile - Pros and Cons?
Hi all,

The company I work for are on the verge of introducing the agile project methodology to our coding process.

Having read Steve Yegge's Good Agile, Bad Agile - http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_27.html - I am somewhat skeptical about it being anything more than an unnecessary fad.

What are HNer's experiences with agile and would you recommend/advise against it?

UPDATE: Changed title to something less black and white :-)
If you are interested in the subject, you should check out Origins of the Specious: http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Specious-Misconceptions-Englis.... It also addresses this.
Richard Dawkins: We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
Facebook Engineering Puzzles - http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php
Wasn't arguing that his time wasn't scarce, that he shouldn't be paid, or that the "teenager" was the one in the right. Just pointing out how their cultures misaligned and that their arguments missed each others minds most cleanly.
The Tyranny of Happiness
"Otherwise it would be in your best interest to care"

That's still assuming anything matters. So maybe there is a god that hurts me if I don't do his bidding. What is hurt (just some electrons choosing other paths than for pleasure)? Why should I care? What does it matter, if all I can do is what a god wants me to do?
Ditto. What does it do??
Dude, you don't have ADD. You aren't bipolar. [..] join the Army [..] you'll probably be doing more good for the world than any ten Peace Corps volunteers. Yes yes, I saw that Collateral murder video. Wikleaks is a bunch of liars.

Another perfect diagnosis, Drill Sergeant Schoeneman.
I would choose to be a mensch. That's what I keep striving for.
Planck telescope reveals ancient cosmic light
And plenty of tripe scored way more than it should. But the 'best' page is definitely a page worth visiting when you're looking for good stuff.

some stuff I really liked:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373046

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1362423

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1360065

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1355977
Bollywood Movie Release Dates in July 2010
Here is the list of Bollywood Movies going to release in the year 2010. This movie calendar is updated regularly with announcement of new movie release dates. Some dates may also change as films get postponed for various reasons. Here you will see latest list of Upcoming Hindi-Bollywood movies released in July 2010 and Upcoming Bollywood Movie Lists: I Hate Luv Storys – ( July 2 ), Milenge Milenge – ( July 9 ), Red Alert: The War Within – ( July 9 ), Lamhaa – ( July 16 ), Tere Bin Laden – ( July 16 ), Udaan – ( July 16 ), Hello Darling – ( July 23 ), Khatta Meetha (2010) - ( July 23 ), and Once Upon A Time In Mumbai - ( July 30 ).
They are most likely made to their own specification. They choose wholesale fabric and then design their own patter for the clothing.
digital goods can be copied
No tool is 'bad' per se or 'good' per se, agile is not different in this respect than a hammer or a compiler.

It's not a religion, try it see if you like it (or parts of it), discard it if you don't perceive any benefit.
thanks a lot jacques, that's a big help.
i'll be about half-way through my ten year plan.
William S. Burroughs
Many HN readers are chasing happiness through entrepreneuring. I thought this piece was relevant because it investigates the nature of happiness. The idea is that happiness is merely relief from things that make us unhappy. That is, there is nothing that makes us happy, there are only things that make us unhappy.

My view on this subject is that you can be happy by distracting yourself from the things that make you unhappy. I find being in The Zone (that place where you go when you concentrate on something and forget about everything else) to be a great example of such distraction. Unfortunately, it is difficult to get into and stay in The Zone.
I think the Santa Claus analogy is a poor one since the story of Santa Claus or his existent doesn't solve any know problems. God solves a lot of problems, like where do we come from.

To me agnosticism is being open to possibilities and admitting at this current level nobody has all the answers.

Why would they want to Cop out? In most people's mind Atheist and Agnostic are the same thing.
[Edit: If you are downvoting it will be helpful if you post a reply]
Foursquare May Be Buying Thing Labs (Brizzly)
> http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Best article I've read in a long time. That was amazing. I wish I could vote this comment up many times so that other people are sure to see it - I feel much, much more informed as a result of reading that.

Thank you.
Your code stash sounds interesting. I'm always interested in code that hackers come up with to get stuff done quickly.
All of the above. It could be a person from anywhere without a distinctly regional accent. The news person is the common example. It's what Veronica Corningstone refers to in Anchorman when she says, "But while they're laughing and grab-assing, I'm chasing down leads and practicing my non-regional diction."

People that think they have this accent or that someone else has this accent will often refer to it as "no accent". It's not an ethnocentric viewpoint. Now, I definitely think the average person is not aware of how distinctive their accent really is and mistakenly think they have a non-regional one. But I do think it exists.

Just to give an example off the top of my head: take Conan O'Brien. He's from Boston, went to college in Boston but does he have a Boston accent? Maybe you could pick it out of his voice, but the average person probably wouldn't and he certainly doesn't have a strong one.
I think more can be accomplished when people cooperate voluntarily.

There is nothing that says people cannot voluntarily enter into contracts to cooperate on many things often seen as things coercive governments must manage. For example, one can enter into agreements with other property owners in an area that could govern all kinds of things. No one need be forced to do anything, other than keep their agreements.

Freedom is not being free from all commitments and all arrangements. It is merely being from having them imposed upon you by physical force or threat of it.

But some of the things on your list no one would ever agree to. For example, paying someone when they don't have a job, something they have a lot of control over and which simultaneously gives them the means to not have to take a job. We're better off if people learn to save their money. Most can certainly do that.

Likewise, deposit insurance takes away all reason to evaluate where you put your money and has certainly subsidized a lot of reckless banking. I think people who make decisions should bare the risks. People who have nothing to do with it should not be forced to bare such risk.

Other things on your list would continue under a more private system. People would still fund long term research; companies do that now too. Perhaps you've heard of Xerox PARC, HP Labs, IBM and Bell Laboratories.

And if you've got a private highway, you're going to require people know how to drive on it. Why wouldn't you? You lose money when there are accidents. You'll probably even come up with a way to keep drunks off of your road.

The wealth concentration you fear is frequently empowered by the very government you think prevents it. The corporations control the government now.

Who handed the lands and right of ways to the railroads? Who stood by as they lied to farmers to get them to move out there where they only lifeline was the railroad? Who told BP their liability was limited to $75 million? Some might even go as far as saying it is no coincidence that the rise of big business parallels the rise of big government.

And as for being less liberty protecting, I really don't see how a government that fiercely enforces individual rights will not be protecting them.

Just because things have been done a certain way doesn't mean things can't be done in a better way. But I certainly don't expect people to drop the current approaches without having those alternatives being demonstrated as better.

I see things as very incremental. A lot of things have gotten bad because of whole series of less than optimal choices. We can certainly move towards better systems incrementally.