skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Who (in America) is working today?
I've just found out that a company I worked for, who we wont name, but is a company owned and operated by a different nationality has people working today at their North American call center.

Evidently, this has quite a few people steamed, since it's not the first National Holiday they've had to work (I was subject to this myself a few times), but it is evident of the cultural disconnect of how the two nationalities view work. This is an interesting thinking point for another time.

So I'm curious: is there anyone here today, a workerbee of the 9 to 5 that had to come in on the 4th?
http://www.gmbhnews.com on my mobile and all webkit browsers

http://www.mcsquare.me on my desktop

hacker news
Frank R. Nicholas
Ah, I assumed the college was Ivy League or Oxford/Cambridge. I want to get seriously off topic here with questions about cramming for the JEE. If you'll indulge me there is a mail in my profile.
You know why people make stuff like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg

Because you can't just get an Android phone and use it and be happy with it. There's always some hipster or yuppie or desperate-to-be-cool nerd that'll start going on and on and on about how amazingly great their iPhone is, was and always will be and how they have taste which you, as a non-Jobs product buyer, obviously don't. A lot of people like me switched from the iPhone to Android because we like it better, get over it. Also, there'll be more people that like and use Android than iOS, get over that as well.

And since we're reaching for snarky old jokes (ie desktop linux), how about this one: What can Android users do that iPhone users can't? Shut the fuck up.
And how words get adapted into foreign languages that happen to write phonetically.
I just build a mobile webapp http://www.gmbhnews.com with these tools, looks good so far.
Well, there's Tangier, Virginia:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E

Which has an accent thought to have remained unchanged since Colonial times.
show me the fuckin receipts. fewer linguistic influences? between the french, dutch, spanish, portuguese, central african, west african, native americans, and british there are very few places in the world that have such of an unique stew of languages. safire died but the knowledge of american language did not die with him. upheavels? thats another post. but lets refrain from throwing around ignorant barbs and passing them as facts.
I <3 that Thinkpad X200 too. It's actually better than the new X201 since the latter is no longer available in hi-res.
Globals can make sense. In C it isn't unusual at all to see a variable that is global in file scope only, which is similar in effect to how class variables are treated within the class definition in a variety of OOP languages.

The problem is PHP's scoping rules don't lend themselves well to this kind of thing. If you were to use a PHP library, for instance, that used the same practices you are using, say a parser, you might find that depending on the include order $look_ahead now means something different.

This kind of "all I did is include a file and everything broke" error is really annoying to find. Constants are useful for this, because at least it will flag an error/warning. Now that PHP has (is getting? It's been a while) namespaces, you can limit its scope and make it less likely to collide.

For the case of databases, it is fairly common to use PHP's builtin functionality to reuse the database connection without having to rely on a global handle. Again, if someone shares your practices the variable could end up getting stepped on. Throw in autoloading and maybe it only occurs when some confluence of events leads to some specific file being included that usually isn't.

So there's a reason for concerns about globals. Putting everything in a singleton with static variables is not really different, but in my mind mostly just namespaces it so your globals don't get in trouble with someone else's globals. I've found in practice that I've only rarely needed global variables or singleton classes housing global variables. This probably largely depends on your style of coding.

I haven't written in PHP for years now so if I've gotten any details wrong please forgive me. Hopefully though you can see some ways that frequent use of globals can lead to hard to find bugs. A lot of programming techniques (OOP, closures, for example) are designed to help pass around state in ways that don't lead to these kinds of problems.
Most of the slang is also Australian, and some, like "Chavs", is becoming more recognised outside the UK.
However, I'm sure it would only take a few years living in one country to pick-up local slang. With globalisation comes comes a greater migration of the work-force, after all.
If Adobe were smart they'd do a big advertising campaign for it heh.
Well, to be fair, the same guy also make stuff like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAOtC9QfXac
It's a style built out of a community of skeptics design to encourage further skepticism — so RoG is right on the money, right?
Founders of the web
In general, it doesn't seem like designers have much of am interest to do design work for free for open source projects. This is unfortunate, because it means that many open source projects that look rather horrible and are unusable. I think any open source project would be very receptive to a designer looking to help out.
Ireland has a distinct accent for almost every county too. The fine differences can be subtle, but sampling Cork/Kerry sing-song, Northern Ireland ("Norn Iron"), northside / inner city Dublin and Dublin 4 / southside are all quite different range in the spectrum.
The BBC has recordings of various dialects from the U.K. that you might find interesting:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/
Try being a Brit without an accent. It's so bloody boring I have to fake the Queens English to get laid. ;)
The hatred of linux on the desktop is terribly cliche, especially on a site targeted towards hackers. Linux on my desktop is the greatest development environment I've ever used, having played extensively with OSX and Windows as well. I can easily install new libraries and "apt-get source" allows me to tinker with existing software easily and immediately build and execute the results. All of the development environment is thoroughly documented.

But now, some influential people start saying how much better their version is. Specifically their closed, sealed-off, experience-driven version. Arguing "ease of use" and "shiny end user experience" rings really hollow to me. I use vim -- think I care about easy to use or shiny user experiences? -- and I use it because it's a powerful tool for its job. I just don't get it when hackers start telling other hackers that they should use a more restrictive environment because it'll make them feel better or is easier to use. Instead, ask yourself: is it the most powerful tool for the job?

So sure, tell your parents and siblings to buy an iPhone. Hell, use your iPhone for anything you can -- it's a fantastic device. But stop telling future developers that it's worth giving up control for rounded corners and subtle shadows. And stop comparing its competition negatively to an environment that I, and others, find superior to any other.
Ask HN:what to improve again on my mobile webapp, care to help?
My mobile webapp http://www.gmbhnews.com is in a beta state, after valuable feedback from HN, I've made some improvements and will welcome your feedback once again. The site is optimized for webkit browsers.
Re: the iphone and android points, i completely agree. Android will get there in time and it's a great alternative (before android it was BBos or symbian, yuck).

As far as linux desktop goes, it's more of an OEM problem. Ubuntu is getting really close to being consumer friendly. Even if it WERE 110% consumer friendly, there isn't even one OEM who produces a great linux machine. I'm not talking Dell loading it on one random machine or other guys like system76. Someone needs to step up and be the "apple of ubuntu/linux" (don't charge the high high premium though).
> I have a couple hundred sites in a folder that I open as a series of tabs a couple times a day, quickly zipping through them after they’ve loaded to see if anything new has been posted.

... how does this guy get anything accomplished?
Looks like a nice batch of new features added.
Css3 : one more step towards flash and js.
clickable: http://www.gmbhnews.com/
What do they consider studying though? Is paper writing counted as studying? Is online homework or problem sets counted as studying? Because I can tell you from personal experience that often those things take up much of my time, and tend to burn me out a bit so that when I have free time, I hang out with my friends and work on personal projects that I enjoy rather than studying the material I just did for homework. If I had more free time available, and less work to do, I would most likely read my book more thoroughly, especially in classes that I enjoy.
Quite simply it's the twist in the last line. With an Asimov short story, you expect a twist anyway that forces re-evaluation of the characters and events, but The Last Question manages to transcend this and forces the reader to re-evaluate the nature of the external world (ie. outside the story itself, with some inter-textuality to the Bible thrown in).

The execution of this idea was also first-rate, IMO. The question 'can entropy be reversed?' acts as a brilliant 'hook' for the story as he fleshes out the history of the universe. He took a question usually too remote to be worth consideration in literature, and humanized it. And finishing on the Genesis quote was a stroke of brilliance.

'It takes control and slowly tears you apart.'
How about taxing follil-fuels to internalize those externalities? Seems better to me than picking winners by subsidizing certain sexy technologies.
The Linux on the desktop comparison feels right to me for a variety of reasons but there are two important differences that create a more level playing field: 1) Android comes preinstalled on the devices 2) People don't expect 10-15 years of legacy compatibility from SmartPhones. When you erase those two barriers there's a lot more room for choice.
High yield money market savings.

Question of my own now: what is with this spur of people wanting ultra fast turn-arounds on small amounts of money? Genuine question, as maybe I come from an antiquated method of thinking, but if you want to invest with a turn around of two years, you might be investing for the wrong reason.
Bring that accent to America and you might land yourself an endorsement contract with a condom maker.
Robin Hanson has been on this subject for awhile: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/05/why-schools-test-often...

Also: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/school-attitudes.html
Hey, thanks for pointing out the enlightenment. I read your post now and I could totally relate to it. I'm very glad I got the confirmation that I'm onto something now, so thanks for that ;)

Figuring it out on my own was deliberate as I like to decipher how things work, including myself. I don't intend to become a successful competitive swimmer so I could easily afford the time I spent on that. And all that time has been fun as hell!

Of course, like I said, I'm only in the middle of the more recent phase, thus I only get into the "flying mode" occasionally; it will take more practice to be able to stay in it. I'm certain that it will come in time.

One thing I've noticed is that glancing sideways at the passing track markers keeps me better in the rhythm (in breast stroke): I can see exactly when my momentum stalls or would stall so I can adjust my timing accordingly. It's becomes much harder if I keep my head straight ahead, due to the lack of immediate visual feedback.
http://www.asymco.com/2010/06/10/the-next-100-million-ios-de...
Fixing this is a minor rototilling exercise. Just change the print statements to something more sensible and submit a patch.
The next 100 million iOS devices
if you want students to study then you should eliminate grades. grades simply encourage them to game the system. of course, gaming the system is a very valuable real world skill.
But I've seen this sort of crap in all sorts of "standard" lib's in Python, and it never seems to get cleaned-up...

... I really hate having to use Python.
I agree with everything, but couldn't disagree more strongly with the notion that they shouldn't be compared to each other. Big picture, it's MS, RIM, Apple, and Google in the smartphone market. It's undeniable that they will be compared in reviews, in consumers' minds, in businesses' when deciding which platform to go with internally.
Insight meditation, a.k.a. "vipassana", has made big strides, thanks to Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts and Spirit Rock in California, as well as S.N. Goenka's centers around the country.

Regarding Zen, koans are a feature of Rinzai, whereas Soto centers on just sitting.
From the article:

Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. That’s not too surprising.

Really? Because that surprises the hell out of me. Americans were an ocean away from Britain for maybe a century before 1776, and the accents still hadn't diverged?
I read somewhere that before 1960 less than 50% of italians spoke Italian.
It's nice to see this referenced, but in essence this is a write-up/rip-off of Andrew Lipson's web site:

http://www.andrewlipson.com/

An index page of his Lego work is here:

http://www.andrewlipson.com/lego.htm

This submission really looks more like blog-spam, and I refer you to the guidelines:

In Submissions
...
Please submit the original source. If a blog post
reports on something they found on another site,
submit the latter.

From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Comedy Central, namely The Daily Show and Colbert Report
Just because iPhone doesn't have a physical keyboard - doesn't make physical keyboards evil. Similar logic for trackball.

I have tried using physical keyboard on Blackberry and I felt pretty comfortable. I bet other manufacturers would come out with better physical keyboards. My flatmate has a Thinkpad with a trackball. Initially it was pretty tough to control it. Trackball and physical keyboard isn't bad just because I think it's bad.

So much from a Tumblr lead dev! I expected better.
I use digg, reddit, HN, Techmeme and a hell lot of forums.
I'm happy with my x10 mini from day 1.
It reads like one long self-congratulatory article to me. "Look! I use open source!"
Oracle wont make or break Java?
> Because you can't just get an Android phone and use it and be happy with it. There's always some hipster or yuppie or desperate-to-be-cool nerd that'll start going on and on and on about how amazingly great their iPhone is, was and always will be and how they have taste which you, as a non-Jobs product buyer, obviously don't.

This should only be a problem if your happiness completely depends on seeking validation from others.
Depends on the problem I'm attacking.

If I'm planning out architecture, I'll write code for an hour or less and then go get coffee and write notes. Basically I "ramp up" to a complete implementation by starting out on something and seeing if it has a major flaw.

If it's coding up something deep and algorithmic(e.g. recently I started implementing a small scripting language and associated type inference engine), I'm going to be buried in it more-or-less continously for however many days it takes.

If it's debugging the deep algorithm, I'll work on it off-and-on(the stage I'm in now with the type system project) in blocks of an hour to a few hours at a time. This is the stage where a lot of insight is needed so I don't push myself too much to "force" solutions to appear.

If it's a "trivial features + fixes" type of thing, I'll procrastinate a ton and then take the hour or two needed to finish. Since this is most of what I do I spent a lot of time procrastinating.

In the rest of my (working) time I'm mostly focused on game design tasks. I'm working with two others on a Flash/iOS game, and I'm taking the lead design/implementation role. We meet occasionally, several times a week; so I don't own a startup, per-se(one of my partners is in charge of the business aspects), but I'm doing something entrepreneurial just the same.

Outside of work, I mostly try to relax(walking and some body-weight exercise), clear my mind(some occasional meditation), and learn a little(reading). My social activities are mostly online, these days. When I have time, my friends don't. And when they do, I don't. So I only get to hang out occasionally.
Do libertarians not believe in externalities?

Some libertarians like to cry rivers about our roads today because of the traffic cogging that happens since congestions are not priced.

So you want to tell me that libertarians do not believe in externalities?
I'm not limiting ideas to investing in an traditional since. I was thinking more along the lines of, I have 10k, how can I best leverage that 10k to make more money. For example:

I have some programming skills, so i make an iphone app spend 5k on development tools and then another 5k on advertising. Selling my app for $10 and trying to make 10,000 sales. I think 1-2 years is a reasonable timeframe for this. To me this is what business is all about. Finding a way to take a small amount of money, applying your skills and turning it into a larger sum.
Apple fanboi.
Check out restkit (http://github.com/benoitc/restkit) - much better then urllib/2 or httplib/2
Sad, but probably true. One of the classes I remember the most was one that was set up to give engineering students an introduction to the workplace. So, you had business-like tasks (most of which were centered around Excel) and you were graded by whether you met, exceeded, or didn't meet expectations.

In one assignment, I made a really fancy Excel spreadsheet (it was a producer/consumer type problem, and my 1s for produced units actually moved across the page). But it had a bug, and the numbers it created were pure gibberish. I found the bug but had no time to fix it. I documented this fact somewhere in the fine print and talked about how I would fix it if I had more time.

It looked cool though, even if it didn't work at all, so I got "exceeds expectations." I had known how demos work long before that, of course, but I think it was my first real demo.

As for studying, well, maybe they should ask what happens to it after college? I didn't think we were supposed to stop. Which reminds me, I should fire up Anki and review.
"Humies:" awards for human-competitive results from an evolutionary algorithm
Also, like in UK, you can find like twenty different accents only in Spain. Even in Canary Islands, with 7 main islands, have huge difference between them.

Not to speak of Catalonia, Basque Country, Andalusia, Madrid, Zaragoza or Galicia (closer to Portuguese).

Spain has now 6 official and co-official languages: Castilian/Spanish, Catalan/Valencian (Catalonia, Balearic Islands, Valencia, South of France), Basque (Basque Country and Navarra —Pamplona—, South of France), Galician (Galician and nortwest Castille), and Asturian (Asturias/Leon) and then Occitan (North Aragon, North Catalonia, South of France).

Also, in Melilla and Ceuta (Spanish cities in North Africa) there are two "branches" of arab that are in the process of becoming co-official, "dariya" or "moroccan arab" in Ceuta and "tamazig", some sort of antique Bereber language in Melilla.

So, that's 8 languages, also Portuguese and a myriad different accents in a peninsula with less the area of Texas.

Edit: Bereber is older than arab, so it's not an 'arab branch'.

Edit2: Add English to the list, as official language spoken in Gibraltar (UK colony).
Interesting how the interface on that version of "tennis" has a user interface sophisticated enough (3 analog knobs for both players) that it would be hard to emulate the game in a playable manner even on a modern pc. (I guess a gaming console with an analog knob and two analog triggers could do the job reasonably well- I think all three current-gen consoles have this.)
Every language and library has its warts and Python is no exception. By and large though, I'd say that Python's standard library is the best part of the language. Sure there are a lot of things like this out there, but for the most part, the standard library "just works" the way it's supposed to.
Maybe he thinks I'm making a mistake, it just sounds like PC bs to me. I actually admit this kind of thing all over the place. It does two things, it makes you interesting, and it weeds out the wet blankets from the room. Just start saying the truth it's much more fun than pretending to believe a bunch of pc bs. Who doesn't like young and attractive women? Maybe peter cooper should tell elon musk he shouldn't be seeing the new wife because she is young and attractive.
You know why people make stuff like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAOtC9QfXac

Because you can't just get an iPhone and use it and be happy with it. There's always some hipster or yuppie or desperate-to-be-cool nerd that'll start going on and on and on about how amazingly great their Android is, was and always will be and how they have features which you, as a Jobs product buyer, obviously don't. A lot of people like me switched from the Android to iPhone because we like it better, get over it. Also, there'll be more people that like and use iOS than Android, get over that as well.

--

Transcribes quite nice to iPhone too, don't you think? What you have explained is the concept of fanboy, which I believe both exists in the iPhone and Android community.
> But I've seen this sort of crap in all sorts of "standard" lib's in Python, and it never seems to get cleaned-up...

I assume you meant to write "I've seen this sort of crap and written patches for it"?
I've always figured that if I had to study for a test, there was something wrong. A test should judge if you know the underlying concepts, not how many facts you've memorized.
I was with him until this:

"Dr. Norman Doidge ... describes how pornography causes re-wiring of the neural circuits. He notes that in a study of men viewing internet pornography, the men looked “uncannily” like rats pushing the lever to receive cocaine in the experimental Skinner boxes".

So if the subjects resemble rats to the observers, that proves it's the same as cocaine addiction?

He started off well, but the axe he brought to grind was too heavy for him to lift.
What do you live on during that time?
I think there is a place for both! The latter is certainly more politically tenable ;). But seriously, funding research doesn't need to be thought of as "picking winners." For example, I think the NSF does an admirable job of funding longer-term research using peer review to decide which ideas are funded. Some wild ideas are funded when proposal authors can make a good case for their research, others are not. Many ideas fail, but the externalities of the research process are positive - Ph.D. students learn to be effective researchers and many will contribute later in industry.

But I agree with much of your statement:
1. Governments shouldn't pick the winners, particularly too early in the process. (but I don't have a problem with funding promising ideas to promote their development)
2. I also agree that a fossil-fuel tax would be a good way of enlisting the power of private industry to find good solutions to the problem. But in the short term, it would surely draw the ire of those unaccustomed to paying for these externalities.
What's wrong with httplib2?
Congrats guys.

Maybe somebody in the f^&$ing Visa office will take note and help @jon get over here.
How soon until "Ask HN: I have 50 cents. How can I turn it into a million dollars by tomorrow morning?"
Httplib has caused me headaches in the past (admittedly due to a very specific and convoluted architecture).

But I wouldn't call it bad... the point made here is simply an issue of not considering scale - in this case easily fixed.

I would call it slow.