skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With the obvious caveat that you can't generalize about people, there's still a problem you have to deal with when operating in a lot of third-world countries.

I'll use Lebanon, since I happen to know it somewhat well and am spending a month there now. Corruption and dysfunction in government and private industry are rampant, as are smaller-scale violations (most of the drivers are horrible and dangerous, lots of people butt in line, etc). Basically, it's easy to get screwed.

Why? I don't think it's because the people are inherently mean, because when you meet them, they're wonderful. I think it's actually pretty simple. In plain old evolutionary terms, the society selects for screw-you behavior and against cooperation. If you're the best, nicest driver, your reward is that you never get where you're going. If you always refuse to bribe government employees, your prize for your integrity is watching someone without such scruples get more of what they want, faster.

(I'm making it sound like a backwater. Despite all of the above, it's actually a wonderful place to visit.)
I care about consistency of impact as much as I do about the magnitude of impact.

BINGO.
This is sort of neat. If you look at the statistics, most of the people are still running with 2gb/1gb ram, =< 256meg vram, IE: an older system. I've got a 2007 imac with 4gig. and I'm slightly above the curve wrt ram.

So the takeaway seems to be target 2-3 year old computers. The fact that it comes from casual users (the mass audience) makes it even more potent.
The Smashing Book is good
The way this should work out in capitalistic theory is that those affected by panic disorder should fund the research into its cure.

> Economically speaking, finding a more effective to regrow hair in bald men would probably be a lot more profitable than finding a cheap cure for any number of diseases ravaging Africa. Doesn't mean it's more important.

The problem with this line of reasoning is the implicit assumption that it's your job to decide what's important. (BTW, you could probably send the money you spend on internet access each month to Africa, and save a child/mo. Be sure to reconcile that fact with your world view)

Many of the problems with pure capitalism stem from the fact that in practice, things don't work out as well as in theory, often because people aren't rational and information isn't symmetric. You should still try to understand how it's supposed to work.
(This was an intentionally vague question, but I'm talking about visual design of websites and applications. That could be anything from principles/theory to reusable elements/templates to Photoshop/HTML/CSS tutorials. There seems to be less trash floating around in the usability world.)
Ask HN: What is the best learning and development experience that you have had? 
There are "self-development" seminars, off-site's, etc. all over the country. I'm curious to find out which ones have made the biggest impact on you. What ideas did you take from them that were formative? etc.
Nobody was really serious about web search prior to Page & Brin.
I don't agree that the point of charity is the warm fuzzies that I get when I give - it's a means to an end (improving the lot of others) which is more effectively accomplished,in my and many others' case, through the government handling it.
Thanks for the heads-up. Is C really that different now that I need to worry about it? I have done some work in C++ before, but that was many years ago and I've grown accustomed to high-level languages...
Whoever said I was at the start? The prototype is nearly done, and already working in the meantime.
I have frankly come to believe that the landing page only approach is a non-solution to validating the idea. In a landing page, you are testing how well you can convince visitors to contact you, signup or download a whitepaper.

Real relationship with a customer start when he actually gets to try out the service you are offering. That is the real reason why trial -> paid conversions are usually low. In a landing page MVP, you are not validating your idea, you are validating your ability to convince for a particular idea. It is quite easy to get false positive or false negatives here.

Rather, what I prefer is to get hold of people and email/call them to actually hear about their pain points. Old school but works like a charm.
Taste of Buffalo 2010
Fair enough, but I want to know the key principles about how these are intended to be used. Or are you saying I should just read Stevens?

The major point I took from the articles is that you should let the kernel manage what's in RAM -- it's going to do it anyway, so don't fight it -- and instead of building complicated paging and caching mechanisms, focus on laying out your data to take advantage of how the kernel already does it.

What I want to know is, what are the other such major points?

p.s. Good luck tomorrow :)
Let's not forget the IT-specific "pilot project":

http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/work/special-tech.asp
The airplane could be momentarily upside down and passengers would not know.

At some point I suspect gravity would override the masking sense of motion that he talks about.
Apache Web Server Logs
This is why china is making quick inroads into Africa. They don't have this blanket perception of Africa, they rather work those spots that actually make them money.

I betya in some strategy meeting in paypal, it was decided to shut down all African countries. Someone clicked some buttons and that's the end of access from Africa.

The Chinese would work differently - they'd still try to squeeze whatever juice can still be got out that. Africa is increasingly becoming Dubai/China focused, and at some point the west will realise that a huge market does not recognize them as viable business partners anymore.

Consider Dubai as a pivoting point for India/China and Africa. That's a new center of the world that is developing independently of the west.
"Would you buy it again?"

Yes, absolutely. And I think I'd buy the same model of 16 Gig Wifi/3G that I bought this time. Thus far, with some music and a good selection of HD WWDC 2010 videos, I'm still only at 8 Gigs used.

Watching these videos (I8n, UIScrollViews, CoreText so far) in a comfortable setting whilst feeding the baby have been the killer app so far.

The iPad is not a laptop, it takes up much less space, much easier to handle, doesn't get hot, doesn't have a fan. Though more limited, its relationship to laptops is similar to how much of a jump my 20" iMac was over a regular PC desktop. Less space, less noise, less heat.
> "by the time I'm getting into my car, usually someone is already waiting for the space."

then this wouldn't be _that_ useful :-)

the user has to manually tap that the parking space is free, right? bummer.
Apple buys ads on competitor's keywords
> But the bible itself isn't a good philosophy book

Well I just interpret "philosophy" more broadly. Before we can act, and indeed before we can think, we must somehow plant our feet - we can't stand "nowhere" in a sense. And philosophy is just the search for a good place to stand, a "will to locate oneself" perhaps. And if we habitually stand in the same place, we're religious! We can no more be beyond (super) philosophy than we can be beyond (super) religion than we can be beyond (super) man. In this sense, the authors of the books of the bible are philosophers like the rest of us. If it's dissimilar in style to Plato, Aristotle and so on, there you go. So when you say it isn't a good philosophy book, to my mind you're just saying you don't like the philosophy it evinces, which of course is your prerogative.
Oops... May have gotten that one wrong, but the point stands. Even if Jython is the only GIL-free implementation of Python, you can run your thread-heavy code on it.

There is no such thing as "You wouldn't be able to do [cool-multi-core-product] in Python because of the GIL"
If the centrifugal force in the upward direction is 2g, that is, twice gravity, then passengers will feel like the plane is flying exactly upright and parallel with the earth.
Well, that's all pretty reasonable, including the harsher penalties for people who run the border for a business, but still, seismic sensors and UAV overflights? That's just too close to home for me, I don't want a militarized border if it can at all be avoided. Aside from the monetary cost, I think it's detrimental to society -- is immigration such a bad problem that it requires that drastic a step?
for those who'd like to learn more about generating functions, one of the best books on such, generatingfunctionology by wilf, is available as a free pdf online at www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/DownldGF.html
Ask HN: Anybody used GrowVC?
Hi All,

Has anybody had any results using GrowVC.com?

I'm looking at closing off an angel round and they were suggested. I don't mind paying the monthly plan but wanted to make sure they were able to deliver results.
She has more liabilities than assets. She may have a high net income, but she's not wealthy.
(Sorry for not including the link to that one.)

Can you expand on this? What do you think of the article's argument and how does it relate to what you studied? Perhaps this should be in its own thread, but I'm really curious about this because, right or wrong, what he's advocating is not a common design style.
There's something for PHP and CodeIgniter called Turnstiles: http://github.com/dhorrigan/Turnstiles
"The way this should work out in capitalistic theory is that those affected by panic disorder should fund the research into its cure."

But even if they found promising lines of research, they might be too nervous to provide enough funding...
How long should you wait to have sex?
You'll probably find some in Japanese or German robotics research labs.... good luck buying some off the shelf!
You don't think throwing up a 300x250 banner on the front page from somewhere like RightMedia could get a premium site like reddit $2 CPM? I bet even low traffic quality sites like icanhazcheesburger or cracked are getting more than $2 CPM.

By the way, reddit can really learn from Demand Media sites like Cracked, who are very very good at monetizing the same type of low quality social media traffic.
China is making inroads into Africa as part of their plans for resource security. They're aiming for minerals rather than revenue.
More like HOA's are a way to privatize many of the functions of local government, even allowing them to make rules (through contract law) that would be unconstitutional or unpassable in real government. The private police force in Robocop doesn't seem so far-fetched anymore.
can you tell me in details about GrowVC??

http://www.technologiez.net
> This is why china is making quick inroads into Africa. They don't have this blanket perception of Africa.

I disagree. After all, Africa in Mandarin is feizhou, literally "wrong continent". (USA in the other hand is meiguo, or "beautiful country")

China is going to Africa for resources because that's the only place they can trade peacefully, without relying on the military, like the US does.
In the future, could you please remove the #more-... anchor from the links? They jump you into the middle of the article, which is somewhat annoying.
How I remember to use a CSS ID or Class
You're wrong. That's what the west wanted in Africa, and that's why the west would send machines and one or two foremen there to simply extract the stuff and ship it back.

China is shipping a lot of people to Africa, building a lot of infrastructure. The contracts they are signing are not as exploitive as the contracts the western countries signed. They are not doing the same back-hand deals with dictators.

China is playing a much different game, and it's easy to say that they want to exploit, but it's not quite as simple as that.

For example, the chinese are building refineries. The west had little interest in building refineries, they wanted to only extract.

Basically, let's put it this way: The west had more than 40 years of exclusive access to the African mineral industry. It resulted in little development in Africa, and a lot of wars. Whatever china does, it can't be worse.
I don't agree that the point of charity is the warm fuzzies that I get when I give - it's a means to an end (improving the lot of others)

For me, the merits of charity is also about their voluntary nature in addition to the "warm fuzziness feeling".

On the other hand, I suspect that our disagreement is in respect to both utilitarian merits and moral/ethical philosophy.
Those names for Africa and the U.S are not modern inventions. See my reply below about China resources.
Building a Rails 3 and Devise (Authentication) App, Step by Step
I'm not interested in running a casino. And medical research is far more noble than Doctors Without Borders.
Yes it is. Read it again.
No it's not that different. GCC still compiles 1978 C.
This is what I learned in biz school. Africa is the place to be -an emerging market.
Of course, if government had not intervened during the S&L crisis, the precedent of "too big to fail" may never have been set - ignoring for a moment the full ramifications of financial collapse.

The financial sector no longer operates under standard free market rules given TBTF and thus the outsize profits that continue to attract highly educated graduates to Wall Street are secured by fear of total financial collapse.

Under the same rules that all other businesses play by, collapse would wipe out the bad players and free up tremendous resources for new enterprises to start - something that did not occur in the case of Wall Street.

Thus, aspects of Wall Street shape it to appear as another form of government funding/regulation that crowds out real free market enterprises from hiring those brilliant mathematicians.
A quick question: the book (at least early on) advocates this for main:

# implied int; implied void
main() {
# whatever
exit(0) # or EXIT_SUCCESS
}

Is this simply a stylistic choice (rather than a more explicit int main(void) and return(0)). I'm mostly curious, but I know that how to deal with main can be a sacred cow.

Edit: And sure enough clang (by default) and gcc (with -Wall) both issue warnings.
This looks like a straight up request for charity. As they say in their blog post, they will not be able to offer any new features, at the current time, in exchange for you subscribing. I would feel uncomfortable with that business model, if I was them. Admittedly, National Public Radio survives that way, but then, NPR is registered as a non-profit, and donations are tax deductible.
You are promoting simplistic views.

Also, communism and socialism is, by far, not the same thing.
I've worked on similar tech before (not for a robot though), and found the best option to be a DC motor + optical feedback sensor. It's also the most cost-effective solution.

Something to keep in mind: tiny servos (and even stepper motors) can provide the blazing speeds you need...... but not with the torque required. Speed and torque are commonly traded-off against one another. You'll need to first determine what sort of resistance/weight the motor will be pulling/pushing, because a lightning-quick motor that will turn in-place the minute any counter-pressure is applied is way worse than a middling-speed motor with decent torque.
This is the ugly side of bayes rule. In some situations, it isn't possible to gather enough evidence to overcome the prior.
"you need hundreds of pounds to make a gram of cocaine"

I think it's actually 125 grams of leaf makes one gram of cocaine. And a cup of coca tea is like 8% of a dose of cocaine, though it gets absorbed about twice as slow. So it's actually really not that much different than doing cocaine, in that the difference in dosage is only an order of magnitude, although somehow the difference is enough to make the tea completely safe and harmless as long as it isn't abused.
I agree. I would be interested to see some sort of analysis of quantity of fraud per thousand transactions on a country by country basis. I think it would be much more useful than the percentage of global fraud that each country is responsible for.
Whatever china does, it can't be worse

The Chinese, due to their domestic policies over the last few decades have a huge surplus of young males, in the sense that the male:female balance is badly skewed. Something like 50M young men who can never get married. That's a powderkeg situation. China is shipping these young males to Africa hoping that they'll meet nice local girls, settle down, and effectively found Chinese colonies.

Now I'm not saying there's anything right or wrong about this. But if you want to understand why China is going about resource extraction so differently, you have to look deeper. In other words, minerals aren't the only resources...
Jobs in the Real World 101 & Software Engineers
What language and what will i be performing if i go into the computer programming field? I am heading to college next year and I want to get some practice before then.I have been going to monster.com and typing in software engineers. I want to practice doing real world programming and seeing how it is. Can someone give me some tips on what languages most companies want employees to know and what jobs they will performing. What languages do you recommend me learning for the real world in the job field? What will I be doing in the job field?
I spent some time at a startup in 2006 that was trying to build a business around what the OP is calling dry testing. It's very easy to cross the line into deception. If you're implying that the product or feature exists, I think that's deceptive. Why not just explain that you're testing to decide what you should develop, ask for the relevant feedback, and let people sign up to be notified if you build it?
You make a good point. I took 5 different philosophy classes in college because I was interested, but never was really that satisfied. For me, the authors that were really eye-opening were Ayn Rand and Thoreau, though I feel many here would scoff at them.
The Apress book (VanderHart, Sierra ) is out, it's pretty well done:

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Clojure-Experts-Voice-Source...

and Manning has 2 MEAP books in the pipeline

http://manning.com/fogus

http://manning.com/rathore
What about the Hubble, or supercolliders?

what about them? the billions invested in them could have given us some tangible benefits in saving lives, directly or indirectly.
I bought one, but don't use it.
While I'm also not too fond of the deception - especially when you come back later to the same people and admit it was a ruse of sorts, he did seem to get good results and publicity. These posts have definitely garnered far more attention than some of my startups' own posts that linked to our idea and asked for feedback on what is the exact same idea.

So Reputely: kudos, good luck, and game on.
Very nice, but the description of Focault's pendulum, near the end, is incorrect.

> ... though the pendulum appeared to change direction as it swung, in fact the plane of its swing remained constant ....

Nope. Unless you're at one of the poles, the period of the rotation of the plane is not 24 hours; the plane can hardly be fixed.

Wikipedia says a bit about this:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Focault_pendu...

And there was a nice article in the American Mathematical Monthly some years back, which I found here:

http://geomsymm.cnsm.csulb.edu/courses/451/foucault_pend.pdf

But the basic idea is something like this: Say you're in the Northern Hemisphere. As the Earth rotates, your path essentially pushes you to the right (where "forward" is west). If you have a swinging pendulum with you, then the plane of its swing will rotate just as if you were on a flat surface, walking in a very large circle. The closer you are to the equator, the less you are moving to the right, the larger is this theoretical circle, and the slower the plane turns.
Why not?
Do you consider it misleading, or just too simplistic? If the former, fair enough (though I'd love to hear details; I quite enjoyed Sophie). If the latter: I'm a big fan of light overviews. You can always go deeper into the areas you find interesting, whereas it's easy to get lost if you dive straight into the in-depth stuff.
> They don't have this blanket perception of Africa

They never have in 600 years of trading with Africa, starting with the spice routes and, even before, silk road.

> at some point the west will realise that a huge market does not recognize them as viable business partners anymore.

That was probably the history of slavery, colonization, and then Apartheid that was going on before that precluded the viability.

> Consider Dubai as a pivoting point for India/China and Africa. That's a new center of the world that is developing independently of the west.

Interesting, because I see the center being much further east. Think Hong Kong, Singapore, or Shanghai.
Sounds like an excellent idea. In the UK the open rights group should be pushing for this sort of legislation, to replace the Digital Economy Act.
Maxon is a Swiss company that makes very high power-density motors that are commonly used in high-end robots.

(I don't know if they're the quietest.)

http://www.maxonmotor.com

I suspect most of the noise is generated by the gearbox. That makes this seem hopeful: http://www.maxonmotorusa.com/media_releases_maxon-Koax-Drive...
Ha ha. This has to be the biggest community of uptight nerds on the entire Internet.
Didn't Schmidt leave after Apple turned its thumb down on Google's Google Voice app and for good measure banned all the 3rd party ones?

Schmidt could have stayed for any of a number of reasons including trying to keep the Apple-Google relationship from breaking down like it has.
A pretty sweet site our design intern pointed me at was:
http://siteinspire.net/

It has some really nice designs that are more trendy now a days than ever before. UX less tried as usual, but looks visually cool and super modern.
It turns out the code used the Redis native expiration, but it wasn't compatible with Redis 2.x. So I fixed both problems. I sent a pull request. We'll see if it makes it into main.

http://github.com/subwindow/moneta

As a side note, the library is pretty simple at this point. The way the tests are set up is pretty excellent as well.
Wall street is one of the largest recipients of government support, via cheap money from the Federal Reserve, bailouts, &c, and is in fact another example of the exact same crowding effect: government money draws bright minds away from more productive pursuits - absent government money, certainly some of those quants would be entrepreneurs or scientists instead.

> contrary to the article, not all goods are private goods

Funny that you decry my quoting you, then credit the article with claims it does not make. What economic thinker believes there are no club, common or public goods? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods#Terminology.2C_and...
congratz! i also graduated from AHS, but back in 2001 =X I'm old.
No-knock raids should be all but eliminated in this country.

I can only think of two legitimate reasons for such - matters related to national security and active hostage situations.

Do some detective work, gather your evidence, and arrest these dope dealers, even murder suspects, on the street (away from sleeping families) and then serve a normal search warrant on the suspects home.

The end result is essentially the same. Yeah - maybe some drugs get flushed down the toliet while the cops wait for the door to be answered - but at least a kid or family pet doesn't get a bullet.

And if they raid the wrong house, no one gets terrified and innocent homeowners don't get gun downed while defending against "masked intruders" aka police in the middle of the night.
I believe the point the article is trying to make is valid, but it would be much better served if the point of view of the article didn't sound so slanted.

If you want to have an influence on people, you need to start from their current viewpoint, and work your way up from there. Right now, only people who already share the opinions of the article are even going to read past the first few paragraphs.