skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The wikipedia statistics above were for native speakers.

I live in China and have spent most my adult life in a Mandarin/Hokkien language environment. Spellings and usage here generally follow the US, but very few people could even be considered to be fluent speakers. Hong Kong does still use UK spellings, but Taiwan and Singapore have considerably more US (and in the case of Taiwan, Canadian) influence. Japan and Korea also favor US spellings. So do Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and a lot of other places you may never have visited.

Maybe you see the attitude as "provincial" because you haven't seen much of the world yourself!

In any case, from a purely pragmatic view, the US usage is standard. I know the minority of native speakers on the other side dislike it, but let's face it. Just about everyone on earth is exposed to Hollywood and US television. Even in former UK colonies such as HK or India, North American usage is widely understood. The same can't be said for Irish/British/Welsh/Australian dialects.
Something reminded me of this manifesto and made me think about what a "hacker" really is. Things have changed in the past 25 years.
Anyone notice the BP or whoever spokespeople deliberately referring to it as "Hydrocarbon release" rather than "Oil volcano" or "oil spill" now?
"uncontrolled hydrocarbon emission" and things like that..... that MUST be a deliberate PR move.
It would help to distinguish between (1) antenna detuning because of bridging between the antennas and (2) attenuation because of having a lump of human body next to the antenna. I don't know that that would be directly useful in itself, but it would be interesting. Obvious further experiments: what happens when you add some impedance (resistive and/or capacitive) to the connection between the antennas? what happens if you put a conductive thing, broadly similar to a human hand but better controlled, in various places near the antenna? Etc.

The results of doing a bunch of measurements like this could make it much easier to answer questions like: What is it about your hand or your grip or whatever that determines how much you impair reception on your iPhone? How much of the problem would go away if you put various things (kapton tape, rubber bumper, etc.) between the antenna and your hand?

Just playing around with actual human hands can give some information of that sort, and if you're only going to do a small amount of investigation you probably get more information that way. But for a deeper understanding of what's going on, you'd want to be more scientific and try harder to decouple different failure mechanisms.

(Of course talk is cheap. I haven't done any of that. Not least because I happen not to have an iPhone.)
An Italian company wins the Techcrunch Europe Summer Pitch Battle
I have looked at this a few times - nothing but some hopeful ideas.

It would be great to have a solid open source implementation, like we have Hadoop for map-reduce infrastructure.
Yes it is: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflo...
Another good site for expired names is http://www.snapnames.com/
I guess more specifically I meant control in that your emotions aren't making the decisions rather your "self" is in control. Its hard to explain with language... imagine if someone is completely consumed with rage... or lust... we don't usually say that that person is in "control" of themselves.

Thats all I meant by it.
There are platforms as service like Heroku emerging with no need for staff at all
If the interview is adaptive (increasing difficulty till you can't handle it anymore), strongest candidates may end up feeling it went terrible, while weak candidates may feel it went very well (not being aware they were culled out early).
Epic journalism fail: the EPA not unreasonably requires waivers to discharge oil into the sea; unreasonably (that's one reason the general paradigm and specific theme of this article is taking the oil and water mixture back to port), they are only granting them under severe duress (like the type of publicity Costner is generating) for the various types of separators that have been available to clean up the Gulf from day 1 of the leak. Like all the ones offered from foreign countries like the Netherlands that we flatly turned down (due to the Jones Act as well; this was partly remediated by installing machines on US flagged and crewed ships/boats/barges/whatever).
Platforms as service don't work as well as advertised once you get past a certain point.
Palintir Heatmap Detecting Detroit Mortgage Fraud
Save My Life: an update (Celiac biopsy negative)
One point I'd like to make, don't use the same password for this as you do for HN. Now I don't think anything bad is likely to come of this it's just not a great idea thats all(using the same password that is).
Ask HN: Help section & duplicate comments
I can't find a 'help' section outside of the guidelines & FAQ so please let me know if there is one and I'll head over there.

My problem is that my comments are appearing in duplicate, so I have to remove the 2nd one if I get there on time. I'm not clicking on submit twice but I may leave the page & come back to finish the comment.

If anyone know what might be happening, I'd appreciate the help.

Thanks
This is a fair point, that being said, i do generate a random salt + hash the password properly.
They only forget 37 Signals has over 3 million customers paying an average $50 monthly fee without any investment, with less than 20 employees and no offices at all.

Really? 37Signals is generating $150 mil * 12 = $1.8 bil in revenues per year? At the stated 20 employees, that's $90 mil in revenue per employee. I think 37 Signals is an awesome company and I have the utmost respect for them. But I find these numbers hard to believe.

More likely they have 3 mil customers using free accounts. and a few percent of that -- I hear 2% is the average conversion rate for freemium, but let's be nice and say 4% -- or 120,000 as paying customers. At $600/yr, that leads to $72 mil per year in revenues or $3.6 mil per employee. Which is both amazingly great and within the realm of believability.

P.S. 37 Signals does have an office in Chicago.
This looks cool, I'm way into this. Unfortunately didn't work for me and I didn't do anything particularly screwy:

> CDbCommand failed to execute the SQL statement: SQLSTATE[42S02]: Base table or view not found: 1146 Table 'hackernewsers.userSkills' doesn't exist

I'm in Hong Kong until early August if anyone is around and wants to grab a coffee. Vietnam after that, probably China sooner or later... also if anyone is doing general Asia travel and wants a perspective, it's what I've been doing this year while working off laptop. Drop a line, I'm friendly, email is in profile.
Is A New And Improved Mac Pro Coming Later This Year? Likely.
Interview of Paul Laudenslager, Dir Cloud Strategy
I'm of the opinion that as far as information being free goes, it's not going to go away. It's possible that it will for the vast majority of people -- but the vast majority of people aren't using the internet as an educational tool.

The people who understand and implement the things that make the internet work are, by and large, people who want information to be free.

I'm of the opinion that we're in the middle of something akin to the 2nd industrial revolution, and that we'll have quite the upheaval in the way people provide for themselves assuming that we don't end ourselves (in fact, we've already seen quite a bit of change in the possibilities for providing for oneself, especially in the "Western world".

I would be extremely surprised if there wasn't a fair amount of resistance to the coming ubiquitous nature of the availability of information, but frankly that's more of a cultural issue (and a power issue, but that's another topic) than not, and will die out given time. Hopefully quickly.

The current barrier to getting useful information on the internet is the willingness to seek and search and think critically. This has always been the barrier to getting useful information on the internet, and since we can't assume that everyone is going to put valid information out there (not to mention that we can't assume that people are actually willing to teach themselves), we need to assume that this will always be the barrier to getting good information on the internet.

I don't think that the newfound ability of the common person to educate themselves about damn near anything is going away, or getting any harder. I don't think that any sort of actual attempts at regulation of the internet will be successful -- although I do think that we shouldn't ignore them.

Anyhow, I'm stopping now. I'm not quite awake yet.
I read his blog post (the entire one, which is unusual for me) and he writes, early on, that Google discovered him via his prolific presence on Stack Overflow.
Even an unsuccessful claim could cost tens or hundreds of thousands to defend.
Firefox/Chrome/Safari - Beautiful Examples of Objects
The Male Minority
Fantastic site. I like the aggregating map, did you make that yourself?

I've almost given up finding fellow hackers in Geneva, CH, but who knows...
I think organizations to get men into teaching and nursing would be valuable. Teaching especially. When an industry is slanted towards a gender, it really exacerbates groupthink.

I think you're mostly making a strawman argument. I don't know what your opinion on the matter is, but I think that most self-described feminists would agree that a dearth of men in teaching is just as much a problem as a dearth of women in engineering.
Hi, how did you get to that error? Was it from the registration page? I've made a change, could you tell me if it's still occuring? thanks.

edit - never mind, it appears to be fixed now, thanks
Erm... Did Carnegie state his goal was to give away money before he acquired massive amounts of it or was it after being labeled a robber-baron?

It's easy to say that being a nice guy was your goal all along after you get caught.

Not that Paul Allen is not a nice guy. There seems to be no evidence on the contrary.
Echoing the other 2 commentators, especially kls, if this damages your changes at a particular startup "you do not want to work there", just as long as you can convince them you'll be happy to also work for others (in a startup environment) as well as being the top dog. Heck, it's likely to be a mutual learning experience: you and the company you're joining will have things to teach each other. One weird thing I helped a number of startups I worked for was real estate (in their case leasing office space), based on what I had learned while growing up from my father and grandmother.
Are your users not on the web at all? If you're selling software in 2010, I'd certainly expect so.

I'd recommend you take a look at Patrick's "Bingo Card Creator" posts for inspiration-- he's been successfully selling software (up until recently, non-web-app software) to about the least net-savvy bunch of users most of us could imagine.
Is a virtual machine for Cocoa programming inevitable?
This sounds like a question used judge character. I'm not sure it makes sense to be doing such a thing at google, but sometimes these kinds of things are asked more to judge your reaction rather than your answer. I'm sure you replied confidently, but others may get flustered, which could be a sign of how they act under pressure.

And of course there are those who would answer take a best guess stab rather than appear to not know the answer which would be undesirable as well.
woops, broke it.

Here's the pastie with the error and what I was doing.
http://pastie.org/1047130

Otherwise it's nice, I like it.
I never said I didn't know where to get one, or to actually write it. In fact, you can do it way simply with getline(). It just always pissed me off when I hack a little something and there is no split.. I then need to either include boost which is huuuuge compared to my 200 lines file.. code it myself, get a snippet from internet.

The point is: in C++, there are so much things.. It's like a fuckload of thousand of features to satisfy everyone. How the fuck can there be no split? Ruby, split, python, split, java, split, php, split, C# split, C++ -your-20-lines-function-which-only-support-splitting-on-a-char-but-not-on-a-string.
i used it before on one of my other sites, http://trackmycv.com IIRC the original example came from the official google maps examples
There wasn't a Brad in the group of people we were with. Where were you sitting in the 5-8 Club?
What gjm11 said. I've read reports of both (1) and (2) being a problem. The idea that it's just shorting two antennas would is the more favorable since then "all" we'd have to do is insulate the antenna. It could also lead to all manner of fun conspiracy theories like the fact that Apple came up with the bumper cases late in the game because they knew that the first batch of the new phones would be defective and needed to provide some sort of a solution. If the problem is (2), I would not know how to solve it in any cheap manner (who knows maybe there is a way. For example car key fobs are specifically detuned and only get to the correct frequency if they are held by a human hand, thus using you as an antenna.)

EDIT: Also, we don't know if the steel is insulated. Has anyone tried to measure its resistance? For all we know it is insulated and the problem is (2).
(naive) Answer: VCs and investors are institutions, per se, they apply to the Clay Shirky principle.

"The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions (like a company, or an industry) can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem."

Their job is to spend (invest) money, so they must, are forced to find a way to do it.
They probably are taking a company to a 'next level' with unnecessary costs like excess in staffing, office etc.

There are many examples when a company hit large profits without VC money by staying lean instead following the Fat model advocated by large VCs like Andreessen & Horowitz
Steve Vinoski on Erlang and Rest  [[video interview]]
Why I wouldn’t use Symfony for a new project
I could totally see asking someone that question if they said that they were intimately familiar with some distro or another. Outside of that context, it seems like a really bad question. Maybe there was another purpose to the question (like seeing how you reacted to bad questions), or you just had a shitty interviewer.
Indeed. He was the best of the early Microsoft.
Is that even necessary? It already is XY Combinator -- only 14 women out of 450 people in ycombinator total -- 3.1%. That's pathetic.
Moore gives a case-study of how Quicken got started (in crossing the chasm, in ch 6 define the battle - p.139, rev. ed.). Sounds very relevant and useful, and I commend it to you, even though it's about a later stage (providing the whole product ie. to actually salve the pain; and positioning with respect to other ways/attempts to fix it).

Of the people who have the problem that WePay solves, there is a continuum of how bad the problem is, how important it is to them to fix it and so on. But there is also a continuum of those people's attitudes towards change. Psychologically, some people like change and some don't. It is these early adopter that you want - that are a subset of the people with the problem who are suffering acutely.
Google Maps Advise:Walk from Netherlands to Belgium...via England
this should be fixed now, please could you check, many thanks.
Sounds like they have an extremely talented tech team. I'm not sure I find what they are doing to be particularly groundbreaking or interesting, though.
10 things that drive me crazy about current operating systems
Yes that was the hype in me, they say "people" not "customers".
Which is better?

Just giving away money or targeted investment on critical research/development and social needs to inflict a lasting change (without taking any profit)?

Would you drop few billion dollars on Africa or would you make investments to create long-term industry that will give people jobs and help them help themselves?

I think what Paul/Gates/Buffet and others are doing is great, but I think we have to start looking at ways to make maximum impact instead of feel-good philanthropy to non-profit organization.

IMO ofcourse.
Short version; a simple rubber bumper around an iPhone 4.0 would eliminate the antenna problem.
Anandtech did at least some testing with a multimeter:

“Gizmodo reported (and iFixit followed up) on some users claiming that newer iPhone 4s had a different coating on their stainless steel band that mitigated the signal attenuation issue caused by tightly holding the phone.”

“We found an iPhone 4 produced in week 28 of 2010 (digits 4 & 5 from the left of the iPhone 4’s serial number indicate production week) and took a multimeter to it. There was no measurable difference in resistance between it and our older iPhone 4s. In other words, the band was just as conductive.”
I realize I'm going outside the context of the discussion here, but just wanted to comment on this.

> a language which inherently uses many lines to express an action is a language which inherently expresses little per line

Depends on what you an action is. It's nice working in a language where each thing does one thing and one thing only. A single line that does numerous things at once can get pretty crazy, with magical processes spreading pixie dust over your data.
Some places do that, and they're generally not places you'd like to work for.

Places that cold-call will do bulk hirings with the expectation that most people will leave. A lot of the time these arrangements allow employers to force a lot of work out of their employees with questionable tactics.
Very cool! I really liked the registration process, very smooth. I also like that you made it clear that I could delete my account if I wanted on the front page, before registration: that made me much more likely to sign up.

One point: your Google map uses custom icons, which are cool I suppose but I'd prefer the standard ones for the sake of consistency. More importantly, I'd like to see an info box appear when I click an icon on the map: it took me a bit to realize that full info was being displayed below. Otherwise this is a great tool!
> It would help to distinguish between (1) antenna detuning because of bridging between the antennas and (2) attenuation because of having a lump of human body next to the antenna.

It is, without doubt, #1. Any confusion stems from the variety of ways in which it can fail to happen (variable conductivity of people, for one), or fail to have dramatic results (being in an area with strong signal).

If you're sufficiently conductive, there's a good chance you can reproduce the problem by walking into an Apple store and trying your hand. That's what I did, and there was a dramatic difference between bridging both antennas with just an inch of finger vs covering the left antenna with as much palm as possible. That wiped out any remaining skepticism I might have had.
My understanding is that all phones suffer #2, and the iPhone 4 is not obviously much worse in this respect than its rivals.

But, of course, even if you do something that fixes #1 completely, there will always be people saying "Boo, Apple hasn't fixed the problem! When I hold my phone like this, I get less signal, just as I did before!" -- when in fact the same would be true whatever phone they used.
P.S. 37 Signals does have an office in Chicago.

Since today: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2456-thank-you-coudal
While this is true, isn't quite unlikely? Why not just invest the time into becoming a /good/ developer.

It might be unlikely for people applying to google, but I can attest that people will memorize what they think are details that will make them sound like they are competent to get through an interview.

The software development industry is one where you can really make it into a position with decent pay by bullshitting, and then surf the wave of nothing-getting-done-because-of-corporate-policy for a while, while making yourself appear like a magic technology man if you really feel like it. This probably isn't going to happen as much with a company whose hiring process is filled with competent software engineers (but there's also the opposite problem...)

It sounds like hell to me, but I'm concerned with writing code and feeling intellectually fulfilled, not just with making stacks of cash.
Some examples:

Even though Winograd's algorithm (matrix multiplication) is theoretically faster than Strassen's, the constant is so high that Winograd's is only faster in matrices so large you can't practically compute in the first place.

Quicksort is a more familiar example. Although its worst case complexity is O(n^2), many techniques have been invented to avoid the worst cases and execute in just O(n log n) (average case), and it's usually faster than merge sort in practice.
very clever. why don't you turn this into a service? if you have no interest, send me the code and I'll do it. :-)
Ok, but spending millions on infrastructure?
Why don't companies just hire people after a quick discussion at 50% salary for the maximum of four months and see how they do.

Having an incompetent (or malicious even) developer on your team for four months is likely to cost your company much more than 50% of their salary for four months.
Il y a en effet pas beaucoup de monde dans le coin.

Nyon, CH
You don't have to build these libraries from scratch every time. You could store pre-compiled binaries in a shared drive for every possible configuration, and developers can simply copy them to their machine. Not that big a deal.
Every Doctor Who villain since 1963 - as a spreadsheet and visualised
Comments serve a completely different purpose. While the article reflects the facts, the comments reflect the sentiment of the people. That's what they add to the story

Except they don't reflect the sentiment of "the people", only the small subset with the time and inclination to comment. This usually winds up being folks with some kind of extreme opinion or other kind of bonnet-dwelling bee.
The future of news, as I see it: traditional media mostly dies, leaving a giant vacuum that part-time enthusiasts can't fill. People don't know what their local and regional government is up to because research is mostly boring, and who wants to do boring stuff for free? Corruption increases until investigative media outlets rise up to do full-time research and exposure. Frustrated citizens value this enough to pay for it. Paid-for media rises again, albeit in new forms, supplemented by volunteers.

In other words, the pendulum will swing back and forth as fickle humans change their mind, just like in politics and most other things in human history.
Thanks for the clarification. Well I'm certainly happy to be the first guy to join in this dance. :)

http://sivers.org/ff
Annoying as I made something similar with the same objective last night - but a much better implementation than mine (largely because most of the time was spent figuring out PHP's crap SQLite3 class). May have to take you on :)
I get
htmlspecialchars() [function.htmlspecialchars]: Invalid multibyte sequence in argument

when trying to access the homepage?

http://i.imgur.com/K390I.jpg
I'm not sure how that affects the economy, but it certainly is a bad thing for a country. Not everyone can be a white-collar button-pusher; if no labor-based jobs exist anymore you'll make a significant portion of your citizens very unhappy
So what's the technology behind your website ?

For an afternoon only, that's quite a nice job.

Edit: didn't see the FAQ (Yii PHP framework)
I believe the penalty for overstaying your six month visa in the Dominican Republic is $28. I have a client who is doing precisely what you propose doing. He is happy. Two small kids, a wife, and decent internet access. He is making a good living. Watch out for your US tax filings though.
You'd also might be surprised at the difference in numbers between one javascript-based analytics package and another.

(For example, definitions one what constitutes a "visit" can vary)