skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Make plans for when the Chinese bubble pops. I'm quite confident they are in one, but regardless of your own feelings on that topic you can't rationally put the probability of that at 0%. When it pops, I don't know what would happen and there is another non-0% (and IMHO significant) chance that it might not be pleasant to be a foreigner at the time, especially a Westerner. If something looks to be popping I would make sure I could get the hell out of there.
Some thoughts on reading that log:
- have a look at the stats on that:
8x US Killed IA (in action)
23x US Wounded IA
3x Afghan National Army KIA
10 x ANA WIA
2 x ASG

2 Enemies KIA

11 x GBU 31 (2000 lb bombs)
26 x GBU 38 (500 lb bombs)
1 x Hellfire
3 x 20mm strafing runs.
19x 105 (AC-130) attack airplane

- illiteracy (in the moment, it's excusable) aside, the level of organisation and effort that went into that brief moment in history is truly admirable. But one can only imagine how it could be better spent... these aren't just dollars being spent, it's serious, high quality, highly organised man hours; intense effort, training and organisation. I realise these are personal politics, but really: it makes it hard to enter arguments about welfare state resource wastage when you think about warfare stage waste.
DuckDuckGo and Quora: Two Companies That Could Wreck Google Search
To add to your point on bribery, let's not forget that many countries have laws against bribing foreign officials. In the US it's the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act). I'd assume Europe has something similar (Wikipedia brings up a missing link to a European "Criminal Law Convention on Corruption", but I haven't looked into it).

Even if the host country is somewhat lax in its own enforcement, laws like this could make returning home rather dicey should one find themselves paying "unofficial costs".
Not a statistically significant sample, but I've asked for this in (almost?) every job negotiation, at both bigcos and startups, and it has never even been considered.
Computer Science != Writing Code, not by a long shot.
Paul Krugman: Mysteries of Deflation
I left reddit for HN a year ago (yes, I'm a late adopter in this regard), and believe me: HN is no reddit.
Their educational system focuses more on memorization. Creativity and problem solving are not taught very much. This is going to be a huge problem when hiring programmers right out of university. They will be looking to you to tell them everything they should be doing.

Why do you believe this is different than in the US? While I've never hired programmers right out of university, most of the students I taught in university strongly objected when I demanded independent thought from them.
Only the copyright owners have standing to sue. Android uses a Linux kernel with original Google code on top.
he mad.
I started using F.lux a month or so ago to help with insomnia. It's helped a lot, thank you for writing it.

I've been holding out on buying an iPad to read in bed, precisely because F.lux has helped me so much on OSX. Is there a flux equivalent for iOS? Is it possible to write one?
I have over two dozen clients running on WebFaction right now with excellent results. Django and Plone mostly.

When I need more control over the environment, like caching or long-running background processes, I go right to SliceHost or Linode (sometimes EC2).
Privacy issues aside, I'd love a co-occurring votes / collaborative filtering based approach to HN. The problem here is that a fixed threshold of votes is a coarse estimation of quality and relevance.

Imagine a system where each HN vote is weighted according to your similarity to that voter. That way a vote by people with whom I have very little in common would also be worth very little to me.

I'd love to view a HN where I don't see the highly-voted Gruber/Apple/Facebook posts but I still see the stuff about Clojure, Steve Blank, and patio11.
An efficient, purely functional algorithm for matching regular expressions
Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.
-- Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming
Does the Web remember too much — or too little?
PHP: Bug #52435 ... please pay me my farmville credits
Big business draws in billions.

My local high school pays millions each year just in payroll. (And that's an underfunded and understaffed high school of 2500 students.)
Sure, it happens in the US too. It's just more prevalent in China. When it comes to cultural differences, you can find the same examples in every culture. People steal from their companies in the US too. It's a matter of if these aspects appear more or less than in your culture.

At least you were trying to teach them independent thought. Teachers and parents do not do this much in China. The sense of hierarchy and obedience to authority appears more in China so the teachers/bosses/parents take advantage of this and just tell students what to do while students do not question them. Again, this is all on a general level.

My opinions were formed by talking to people about it, not from my own experience in the Chinese educational system.
I will chime in with the chorus and say I've been using F.lux for at least a month and it works great! Thank you!
Would be possible for an application to mimic Flux, but there is no way (except on a Jailbroken device) to do system wide Flux.
Could be a nice niche for a browser or RSS reader though.
The S&P 500 Speedway
Still holding out for a version that uses Readability to include the full linked article directly in the feed :)
I think if you encounter any of these titles (except maybe Business Analyst?), you should run. Aren't business analysts the people who talk to the end users of enterprise software and try to extract their needs? That at least seems somewhat valid. Bla bla Architects on the other hand are the people who draw UML diagrams instead of programming.
Creating custom fields in Django
I think if you trust your family and friends and they trust you, an NDA is a bit of a slap in the face. I share my ideas with close family and close friends... because they're close family and close friends.

Also, if you get them to sign an NDA and they still tell somebody, what are you going to do? Unless your answer is "sue them", then your NDA doesn't mean anything anyway.

Regarding your second point, I still don't think it makes much sense. If there's something in it for them... maybe. But if people are helping you test a product and you're not paying them, why on earth would they sign anything? They're really just doing you a favor.
U.S. Government to Explicitly Allow iPhone Jailbreaking
Net Promoter Score
How do you gather the data to calculate the Net Promoter Score?

Survey on the website? Mail?
How many times do you make the surveys?
How do you follow up the detractors?

Real cases/examples are well accepted.

Thanks!
I am not in China, but have an office in Asia, it's an adventure.
Uh, I disagree. One of the tenets of journalism is to minimize harm. There is probably information in those documents that could legitimately be used to kill people.
Interesting. There's a link to the actual ruling at the end of the article: http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions%5Cpub%5C08/08-10521-CV0...

"Because the dongle does not protect against copyright violations, the mere fact that the dongle itself is circumvented does not give rise to a circumvention violation
within the meaning of the DMCA."
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Your company is young and your period of profitability is relatively short-lived to date. It seems unwise to have taken a business which appeared to be working well and overhauling it completely to (possibly) reduce costs which did not need to be reduced.

Do you have a 'plan-b' to allow you to quickly revert your company to its previous state if things do not go as planned?
There actually isn't a lot of prerequisite knowledge before you can learn Rete, just general knowledge of graphs I think.

I did spend a lot of time trying to understand how it all works with pen and paper, reading the original Rete description and the wikipedia article, it's a bit annoying because it seems descriptions of Rete are very few AND they use different terminology and approaches to explaining, AND there are really a lot of implementation choices to make depending on the specifics of your problem, so I had a lot of difficulty wrapping my head completely around the concept.

In fact, the first implementation I made was very contrived and I unknowingly bypassed a lot of problems and I didn't even know my understanding was still incomplete. It's only when I tried to make another implementation for a more difficult problem that I realized and fixed my lackings.

Now that I really understand it though, it really doesn't sound that complicated to me anymore, it's pretty "simple and intuitive". If I didn't remember all the pain I had to go through to understand it, I might think that it's in fact a pretty simple algorithm. I think the way too abstract and obtuse descriptions of it are to blame for much of the difficulty because there really isn't a lot to the fundamentals of the algorithm (though the explosion of implementation choices can get messy to sort through).

I guess about now would be a great time for me to start a blog. ;)
Can Facebook be considered a utility?
Apple Employees on Twitter
In this area dollar
"I realize that this isn't going to be a popular opinion around these parts, but no, you can't. Smart as you may be, you're utterly ignorant when it comes to this stuff, and you haven't got a chance of beginning to understand the intricacies that go into interpreting the data that these companies are giving you. More importantly, you don't have time to understand"

Granted. Do I not have the right to get my own body analysed, and then decided who to trust to interpret the data? Why should I trust a federal agency over a private entity? Remember, this agency would be under the control of a government that thinks it OK that I can drink alcohol, and smoke or chew tobacco, but not smoke dope. There's peril no matter what; that's life.

It's not a like I'm planning on camping out at the library pouring through organic chemistry and biology books in order to decode this data on my own. I simply want the option to a) have people collect data on the body I own, and b) freely choose who can see this data and provide feedback.

What I don't want is some bureaucrat preventing this kind of self-examination because he or she thinks some people will make poor choices. I still want to see laws regarding fraud enforced, and would want to see a high level of transparency form the companies doing the testing. That level of transparency would be a key part in deciding who and what to trust.
Thanks! To be fair, Michael Herf ('herf' here on HN) did most of the work, I just made a pretty GUI :)

Man, I would love a F.lux for the iPad! Shame that's not possible unless Apple built it into the OS themselves.
You can just get the SV VC's to pay for all that. They'll invest in anything.
Imagine the following scenario... one of your testers tells a media outlet or competitor about your app. Are you going to sue them? If not, having them sign an NDA is pointless.
It's using an appindicator, which is (for now) a Ubuntu only thing. I really hope other distributions pick it up, because it's absolutely wonderful.
Pandora Internet Radio Hits 60 Million Users
Today, at the New Music Seminar in New York, Pandora announced that they have surpassed the 60 million users milestone. They had announced 40 million in December, and 50 million in April. Not bad for an online radio service, eh? Keep reading for the details!
The last version of XFlux I used reset the screen brightness every second, which made the screen flicker uncontrollably during fades (eg on lock, logout, screen saver etc). Does that still happen?
Hmm, but:

I’ll use misdirection to get the opposing counsel thinking I’m heading in one direction

This is the wrong lesson. He's good at exploiting the legal system, that's all. It's not about who is right, it's about who has the cleverer lawyer. All this guy's "experience" is zero-sum, he's creating no wealth, he's purely parasitic. He's like a salesman who sells you something you don't want just because he's good at persuasion. Why would you want to teach the next generation of lawyers to milk their clients more effectively?
Venture Pimp: Transloadit wants to raise the bar on file uploads
I think what he is talking about would not work well in an interview, but rather book (or maybe a couple chapters of one). Interviews are great at passing on a couple "big lesson" points, but beyond that it needs to be in some other form to digest.
If it has appindicator support, it'll run. I'm not sure if any other distributions already support it though. If you could let me know if you can get it to work on openSUSE/KDE4, (email in my profile) that'd be great!
I like your point about dog-fooding.
Not really, at least not for cholesterol; not right now. [1] Hopefully in the next few years, yes. But genetic data, since our knowledge is limited, does not increase risk discrimination beyond family history. It does, modestly, increase risk classification.

Edit - Link didn't work initially. I was not trying to just snarkily link to pubmed - I had a specific paper in mind. Sorry!

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18354102
Is there a version for Jailbroken devices?
Can anyone comment on what would be the 'prereq' for this? Are the video lectures available anywhere (he seems to have taught a class by same name before)? And, approximately how much time would it take for someone going over it as self-study? I know the answer to the last question probably depends, but hopefully a ball mark estimate can be given
Yes, you're right. I've placed it there now if you notice this dreadfully late comment.
How ad format change doubled the CTR and revenue (Android)
I live in Shenyang, Liaoning province (northeast of China) since June/2009. Drop me a line if you want to talk. My email is on my profile.
Well, $250,000 for a non-executed idea isn't a bad payout.
Good idea. I'm also doing my startup in Shenzhen, China. If anyone's interested to get in touch, my contact info is in my profile.
----SPOILER----

Absolutely agree regarding throwing out the labyrinth in favor of a fight scene. Throughout the entire movie prior to the snow-dream I had really been looking forward to, what I hoped would be, a thought-provoking or mind-bending maze through the world of dreams and subconsciousness. To have that pushed aside in favor of gunfights was incredibly shallow and disappointing.
I really don't like biometric authentication. As has been said before it's kind of like using your username as your password. Simple ownership is presumed to be enough data to prove you belong.

Additionally I (personally) think it's a problem that the authentication method can't be changed. You can have new keys cut, you can change your password, but it's unlikely you'll ever get new handprints.

For me there's also the factor that it places the access holders at additional physical risk. I read an article a while ago about a guy that had a car with a fingerprint scanner installed... Carjackers wanted his expensive car, so they cut off his finger, stole his car and left him. Personally I would rather someone just took my keys.
Unless you are a very unique case, you'll should be able squeeze a book this size into your daily life. Let's assume that given the content and the font-size, an average HN reader would require an hour to read 10 pages (that's underestimating most people's reading speed of course). Then the book would require, on average, about 12 hours to read. If you dedicate 2 hours a day to it, you'll have finished it before the week is over. If you take the time to solve all the problems presented, it may take you a few more weeks, but it's not a major project like reading and doing all the exercises from SICP.
What interviewing users can/can't tell you
They merged it with their family.com's go green section so they have 500k subscribers with 4k+ people coming in each month, so not really a bad deal.
I wish this were possible, but the difficulty in doing this is massive. If you are not U.S born, it's QUITE difficult to simply walk in and start a company in the U.S.

How do all the Chinese/Korean/Indian people in the US do it?

I often read on Hacker News about how difficult it is to start a software company in the US. But then I live in Brooklyn and people who don't speak english are always starting laundromats, bodegas, fruit stands, hardware shops, restaurants, and so forth. 3 out of the 4 businesses on my block were started by FOB immigrants. The only one that wasn't is a bar.
Google misses deadline for L.A. city e-mail system
Erlang SMP is successful on one axis (ease of writing correct and reliable concurrent problems), but it seems to me that the argument in the article was about the performance costs of the model. And, at least as of a year or two ago, Erlang SMP did _not_ have good performance. There was a minimum factor of 2 overhead in total CPU usage just by turning on SMP, and heavily concurrent programs could run massively slower (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=ch...). At least part of the problem is that there's no affinity between Erlang processes and scheduler threads (and, therefore, CPU/cores), so you've got constant cache misses. There's probably other issues as well. As the author says, it's a hard problem.
Email is sent out as attached powerpoints

That's a thing I've noticed in the commercial world too. With most non-technical managers, if you send them a long email, they'll ignore it. Well not quite; they'll see it in Outlook, then their eyes will sort of slide off it and go onto the next one (I have observed this). Sometimes they will even phone the sender and say, you sent me an email, what's it say?

Put exactly the same content in a Word doc or a PDF and in the email just say "please see attached" and they'll perfectly happily read it, or even 10x as much text. Very, very weird.
It does this if you're running more than one instance of XFlux, they, uhm, seem to fight with each other ;). F.lux for Ubuntu prevents you from starting the app more than once :)
A Simple Rule for Pricing Newbs Who Got The Fear
only because groupon said they were going to launch a business with that name, so the owner couldn't launch a similar business with the same name. he could have still squatted on the domain with an ad-filled landing page.

if they tried to claim the domain (via an arbitration panel through the UDRP) by asserting ownership of the trademark, they would lose because the domain name was registered before the trademark was applied for.
Absolutely. However, it's an edge case.
UfXtract - microformats parser used by Guardian & Stackoverflow open sourced
Alright, in a normal state, there is either a majority of democrats or a majority of republicans in the legislature. Either way, the state is able to use typical party based agreement to get a budget passed. This works well in these states: If taxes get too high, fiscally conservative, tax cutting republicans get office. If services get too incomplete, public policy creating, program creating democrats are put in office, in the majority, and their party can make a budget, and taxation to go with it to support their plans.

The people get control over this process by booting state legislators of the wrong party when the state runs to excess in one or the other area.

Now in California, with this bonehead 2/3 rule, one party can get a majority (50% +1) for sure, but rarely a supermajority. That's where horsetrading comes in. People have to give things to the other side of the isle to get them to vote for this. And one of the things they can give to the other side of the isle would be votes to stay in office and money to run for re-election. And that's where the magic of special interests come in. They can cause their interested members to vote for these people who only will vote for the budget if they get something out of it. They're now getting votes/campaign contributions, so they get to keep their legislator job longer.

If you got rid of the 2/3rds requirement, when repubs got in office, they'd cut services, when dems got in office, you'd get new ones, and you'd match the rest of the states in the union.

While it turns out voter amendments turn out to often be hijacked by the special interest groups as well, that is not the huge problem. The property tax freeze is not the problem.

The fact that 1/2 the legislature has to give away the farm to get the remaining 1/6 of the legislature to pass a budget is the issue. Get rid of that, and public unions, and every other special interest in California will feel its powers go down greatly.
The place I usually go for my MRIs bills $1600 for an MRI of the L-spine with contrast (this is Phoenix, AZ, USA). The only other place I am aware of cost wise is a local hospital that performed a full central nervous system MRI with contrast for $7000. All of the other MRIs I've had were either inpatient or wrapped into the cost of a larger treatment plan so I do not know of the cost.
India has a fairer legal system. It offers a great balance between what Max wanted and what you describe. I'm curious why didn't India come up as an option for Max.
Is there a doctor in the network?
I don't think they are in a bubble. Atleast not one that's going to pop. They have the advantage of developed and undeveloped markets. At the moment more of their money is going to fund internal investments since foreign investments have dried up. They have billions/trillions in soveriegn wealth funds so if they need capital they can break open a piggy bank.

Hopefully, if they've learned anything is overinvestment can be just as bad as underinvesting. If controlled properly they can coast on internal projects until the US and Europe exit their recessions. Then things can go back to business as usual.
While legal, wouldn't this still void your warranty?

It's a step in the right direction, but next we need a law prohibiting manufacturers from voiding warranties for installing mere software.

Bonus points, if there is a law preventing manufacturers from unilaterally locking general computing devices down in the first place. It should be required to build in an open mode for whoever wants to use it. Locking a computer in a default state for security reasons is fine, but give users the option. It's in the consumer's best interest.

The very restrictive app store approval process, under which an app can be denied because Steve Jobs doesn't like the way an app looks (or more realistically, interferes with Apple's business model) is among the most evil thing Jobs has ever done. It's genuinely evil.

Good first steps from the US government, but we still have far to go.
My experience with surfing tells me that you don't paddle towards where the wave has been, you wait and position yourself for the next one. The basic assumption is very sound, in a global world economy repositioning may be very interesting. I too agree that Europe is mostly dead for innovation and startups, but China is probably over-rated and too much bubble-prone at the moment (not to mention corruption, cultural shock, state bullying, etc).

From the big countries that will probably fuel the world economy for the next 50 years (China, India, Brazil and Russia), I would bet my horse in Brazil. There are problems as well (education, poverty, corruption), but none of the BIG ones (terrorism, crazy state rules, dictatorship). There is definitely a trend (World Cup, Olympiads) and I am considering it as well, but timing is paramount: you don't wanna be the first to jump ship and deal with all the crap, but you definitely don't wanna be too late.
Now legal in the U.S.: Jailbreaking your iPhone, ripping a DVD for education
IPhone iPad Jailbreak is now legal