skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And if America had Germany's laws, there would be much higher crime rates. America did have soft crime laws before the 1990s, and it did have much higher crime rates. That's why the US got tough on crime and Germany didn't.

The countries just aren't comparable.
I think Apple is actually behaving completely reasonably about the antenna issue. I wouldn't have thought so until I realized that during the last few weeks, while I've had my iPhone 4, half a dozen strangers have approached me in public to ask me about my iPhone. Every single one of them had the same concern, which is if I had antenna issues and/or dropped calls. I never had a single person walk up to me and ask about any of the previous iPhones I owned, but now people regularly ask me about the single issue of the antenna. I am surprised to say it, but the antenna publicity put a big dent in the iPhone 4's reputation and Apple is definitely going to have to do some work, like posting lots of videos showing that other phone have similar problems, if they are going to minimize the bad reputation iPhone 4 got with some people.
I think, however, that the Chinese government itself pays for americans to teach english in China.
How PE and VC Funds Grow the Value of Portfolio Companies
You might find this page useful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_langu...
[Ruby and Python are not] equipped with better libraries

I disagree strongly here; Perl has a lot of little utility libraries (LWP, etc) but lacks the mature and amazing frameworks like Rails and Django -- and since you can use the database components separately (at least in Rails 3's case), it's lightyears ahead of Perl's DBI. The whole point of Ruby (I can't personally speak for Python) is not just that its grammar is better-constructed and solves problems better. It's also the libraries that make me wildly productive, in a way that Perl has never allowed me to be.
Useless in the US. Suppose a mistake is made, or even just a bad outcome occurs.

Lawyer: "Big Medicine, as a cost saving measure, employed uneducated people like yourself to maintain equipment so they could pay unsympathetic shareholders more money. As a result, a sympathetic young child has died."
Actually they were doing the Droid X a favor here. The lockscreen for the Droid X is so hideous Ars even featured it as an example of hot-messness.
Perhaps you meant to say that the framework used in this example is not ready. I didn't see anything about Clojure the language that makes the example complicated.

As far as the framework is concerned, the example shows how to build a production deployment of the application. The author is not showing a toy teaser application. There are a lot of details there, but these are things that you would want to know if you actually want to run a production server.
But indeterminacy is not what most people have in mind when they think of free will. A random action is not a free action.

It's not a sufficient condition, but it does seem to be a necessary condition. A determined action is also not a free action.
You'll be surprised.. I've seen 3 people per room, 9 people per apartment, many times. NYC is a strange place.
Despite any teaching efforts I don't believe they will be _learning_ it soon, especially the written form. It takes years longer to learn any Chinese dialect than to learn English.
Well there is no formal place, but you could create a wiki for your self learning, similar to what I have done, to log your learning and create credentials for what you learn.

I did come across one website which could hep you organize your learning log - http://curiousreef.com/
Alas, HyperCard (1998)
* Perl has one of the most featureful object systems in existence *

That's an overstatement. Perl is in no way actually object-oriented. It's a feature that's tacked on, but it doesn't help you write better code. If you think Perl's object architecture is featureful, take a look at Ruby. It'll blow you away.
Honest question: is that not the app used to make calls on the Droid X? If it looks overcomplicated, how is that anyone's fault but Motorola/Google?

Apple certainly didn't design the interface for placing calls on a competitor's device.
Do we need to explain every joke? Of course it doesn't finish. But its output is still very well defined: an infinite string of 9... So my argument was that in a suitable language, I should be able to call atoi() on that string.

I concede this hypothetical language would be somewhat abstract. Maybe it's called maths?
Thanks, how did you make the link clickable?
How many of these kids will actually achieve any sort of fluency in Mandarin? When I was in school, everybody took easy languages like French and Spanish, and almost none of them ended up with any sort of fluency. How are they going to handle a hard language like Mandarin?

I'm not against learning a second language (I took 4 semesters of non-required elective language classes and then learned over 2000 kanji on my own), but if you go into it half-assed it's a waste of time.
Apple is selling iPhone 4s faster than they can make them. I hardly think that qualifies as desperate.

Droid X specifically markets their phone in ads as superior to iPhone 4:

http://phandroid.com/2010/06/30/droid-x-ad-tears-into-iphone...

"And most importantly, it comes with a double antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like and use it just about anywhere to make crystal clear calls."

I think they opened themselves up to fair game by advertising their antenna design in this way.
It takes years longer to learn any Chinese dialect than to learn English.

Do you have any proof of this? It's not like Chinese is inherently more difficult than English. You are underestimating the difficulty of learning English as a second language for a native Chinese speaker.
Well, non-determinacy is a necessary condition, but that doesn't mean indeterminacy is. Non-determinacy can be divided into at least two things, indeterminacy (i.e. determined stochastically) and agent-determinacy (i.e. determined by the actor).
I suspect that Google used email addresses because they already have tools for managing that namespace.
I'm not sure how I feel about this video campaign, but I am confused why geek.com lists Apple as “desperate”.

They're selling a lot of phones. No one is returning phones. The bad PR about the death grip is mostly settled (I don't hear it in the news anymore). Hell, Scott Adams wrote a very popular and widely circulated article about how good Apple's press conference strategy was. They're just going to continue to release these to make Consumer Reports look increasingly ridiculous in the eyes of the public.

Where is the desperation in all this?

P.S. Especially given that recent data suggests 77% intent-to-reup-handset among iPhone customers and only 20% intent-to-reup-handset among Android customers. (buried here: http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/23/technology/iphone_4_att/inde... )
> If Twitter were not worth investing in, they would not have been invested in. Several of the world's biggest VCs have not gone collectively crazy.

I am intrigued by your views and would like to subscribe to your newsletter. I would be particularly interested in any issues that discuss the dot com bubble circa 2000-2001, or anything with a sidebar on trying to destroy the entire global economy by lending money to people who had no realistic chance of paying it back circa 2007-2010.
Why are PMs at technology companies often the corporate drone types that only pretend to add value by retweeting status from the people who really know what's going on? Without understanding, they play a destructive game of telephone and buzzword bingo.

Shouldn't engineers with leadership gifts lead more projects where engineering plays a major role? Am I being too engineering-centric to think that suitably gifted engineers could grok the non-engineering aspects of a project better than a spreadsheet pusher can understand the engineering component?

Maybe I've just never worked with a good PM.
In the 1980s, we used to get articles about how we'd all better start learning Japanese. Now it's the Chinese.

I'll believe it when I see it actually happen.
Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah 'worse than Hiroshima'
These articles are getting old and tired. Comparing Apple to a terrible ship's captain who is senile and over the hill is a bit ridiculous, don't you think?

I get it, there's a lot of anti-Apple hate on the interwebs, but why in the hell should I waste more than 30 seconds of my life skimming this tripe?
The problem with this (at least in theory) is that unless US schools devote as much time to learning mandarin, or spanish for that matter, as chinese and taiwanese schools spend teaching english the effort is useless. I have studied mandarin for several years and traveling to anywhere outside of rural china makes my efforts seem largely pointless. There is always a chinese person who speaks far better english than I do mandarin. Essentially unless these schools plan on starting kids in mandarin from kindergarten an going through high school and using it for at least 3 hours every school day, these kids are never going to catch up to chinese children's second language proficiency.
Get Out Of Your Seat Or Die
Emacs is used by many lispers but not all of them.The most famous non Emacs lisper is Paul Graham. I don't mind using Emacs and Slime on Linux but for a visual type of person they suck compared to modern IDE's. I rely a lot on visual clues and speedbar is a poor man alternative. Franz and Lispworks are making good ides and many commercial organizations are buying and using them. The implementations you mentioned are all open source and don't have resources to develop proper IDE since there is no big company to back them up, such as IBM financing eclipse. So they choose proper course of action of improving their implementations with Emacs + SLIME as their programming environment.
wo zhi dao zhong wen
I would too.

But I don't think most people would take to that. For the vast majority of iPhone 4 users, the death grip problem is not as significant as those "touch with one finger to kill" videos (which, I confess I am still having a hard time believing).

The complaint itself is essentially childish: “Apple does almost the same thing everyone else does! They're lame! #lolrecall!” I'm not sure a mature counter-strategy would actually be effective in the face of that. Especially given how incredibly invested into phones people seem to be getting these days.
Another anecdote: I moved to the city in late March. Since then, I've been in five sublets while I looked for a suitable permanent place to live. (Moving in tomorrow!)

One of those sublets would have been legal under this new law.

The first was a vacation rental business, very well run by the owner of the building. I stayed there two months, so it wouldn't fall under this rule, but I was the exception: most of his business would.

Another was a young professional who rented out her tiny one-bedroom in the East Village to help pay for her vacation.

A third was a friend of mine who was out of the country for a few weeks. A win-win situation, I paid her rent and got a place to live.

The fourth was a room in a shared loft with three roommates. The guy renting the room was a photographer who spent the two weeks in Haiti documenting the recovery. The rent money helped fund his trip.

The fifth, the one I'm in right now, was another friend's place. She moved out at the first of the month (due to the availability of her new apartment and her new roommates' schedules) but was obligated to pay the rent through the end of the month. Again, win-win. I help with her rent and have a place to live.

Tomorrow, I move into an apartment of my own. There is a specific no-subletting clause in the contract, and I'll honor that. But I wouldn't have made it moving to the city if this law had been in effect four months ago.
We should learn X language for X reasons!

Seriously though, it's like saying that you should get a liberal art education. Most people will just goes around carrying quadratical equations, biology trivia, bad impression of Shakespeare and biased historical views and other sort of random information. Now we will remember random Chinese characters and Chinese phrases too. They are certainly useless to the average Joe because they're just a bunch of disconnected facts.

There's no emphasis on teaching people to be rational thinkers who can make use of said random information or learn to cope with imperfect information. It's hard to teach anyway. Can you imagine finding 6 million teachers who know these kind of stuff? Never mind launching a serious Chinese language program so that we don't get people who only know random amount of stuff about the Chinese language.
Do you want an actual degree or simply the knowledge that comes from a computer science education?

This may be helpful:
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
Sure we have free cases. But what we don't have is Steve Jobs begging us to take them.

Not to mention Apple dragging the upstarts... you know, the other multi-billion dollar companies, into the mud.
But what determines what the actor determines?

'agent-determinacy' just seems like a synonym for the idea of free will rather than anything that can justify it.
Moreover, the Chinese do not want to speak Chinese with you but would prefer English.

That said, this is only true in certain circumstances and among the younger generation. Among bureaucrats, for example, you will be hard pressed to find good English spakers.
Are we naturally lazy?
Ok, I was not aware of this difference in terminology. Thanks.
My local council has political enemies on it but we don't frisk them for weaponry when they come in. Given that China is benefiting more and more from trade, do you think it's more or less likely that they will attempt to destroy their trading partners? do you think that they dislike having better, more comfortable lives, and will want to throw it all away?
It's a very common thing to hear that eventually Chinese will become the language of commerce. I think this is wrong for a few reasons.

1. Chinese is relatively hard to learn

2. English is relatively easy to learn

3. English is part of the standard curriculum in most of the world's schools and therefore has immense momentum.

4. Despite America's economic troubles, I believe we're still the leaders in technological innovation. It's my impression that China's economy is fundamentally based on manufacturing and exporting Western products. How many original and innovative products have come out of China in comparison to the US?

I think Chinese is a good language to learn if you're involved with manufacturing and international business, but English will remain the language of technology.
I lived in Japan for two months. I've been to China for a week. I'm fluent in Japanese and I've taken a Mandarin class.

There is no doubt in my mind that English is the superior language and we'd all be better off if the Chinese would learn English rather than the other way around.*

* We'd probably be better off still if we all learned Esperanto, oh well.
I agree with the feeling, but a lot of the time, scientific software is just not ready for real usage. My software at least is completely useless most of the time (you have to open it in the interpreter and type the right incantations, and the data has to be in a non-trivial massaged way, filesystem paths are hardcoded everywhere, etc). It takes some effort to turn a works-for-me research tool into something releaseable, and this effort might even hinder future research, since the fluidity of the hacky code is sometimes necessary for further tweaking. Also, there are usually dozens of dependencies, some of them patched to work with that software, with different incompatible licenses, etc.

I think, however, that most journals should at least ask for a shell script that downloads the code and data, runs the experiments and regenerates the graphs and tables as seen in the paper. This is not always practical (a lot of papers deal with over a terabyte of data, for example), but it is so more often than not. At least for my papers this is a nearly-attained goal.
Sharp IP decision on why copyright law shouldn't be used to stifle competition
That was a long story just to say that Apple is being petty with the Droid X video.
> random renters through more wild party's [sic]

Really? Can you back that up. Data please.

It's an anecdote, not data (but still more than you've got): In my four months being a random renter I've thrown exactly one party. It was a brunch, and two people came. Not wild at all.

I've been to a number of parties that were much "wilder." All thrown by regular tenants. The wildest was attended by the building's doorman.
We get a large number of complaints that the compass in our iPhone app doesn't work when the user is in a car or on a bus.
I believe it is inherently more difficult -
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
Source code publication along with the paper is a great idea in theory, but there are several problems with it in practice.

The reason CS researchers do not usually publish their code has nothing to do with dishonesty - nobody is trying to hide their code because it does not really work, or anything like that. It's not even that people are worried of scooping, though that sometimes happens.

The main problem is that any time spent on cleaning up the code, packaging examples, writing instructions, answering bug complaints, etc. is time not spent on things that matter in academia - doing research, presenting it, and teaching students.

It might help if some conferences required source code submissions - but people might just submit to different conferences instead. The only real solution would be if funding agencies like NSF required that any projects funded through them have to release source code. This makes sense from a taxpayer's point of view, and would make the extra work acceptable (since everyone would have to do it).
For those interested in the topic, here's some more from an ejection of an F-16C Air Force Thunderbird (#6) at an Idaho airshow in 2003. (Not only cool pics, but a bit about the technology as well.)
http://www.ejectionsite.com/thunderbird6.htm
Relevant and informative comment instantly downvoted by Droid fans. Nice.
According to agent-causal views, at a certain level nothing else determines what the actor determines.

I don't here want to argue which view of human action is the right one, I just want to point out (or argue, since even this is contentious) that there's a three-fold alternative: determined, random, and free. The "free will" in this paper is actually the second and not the third alternative.

In the paper they actually protest against this move, arguing that the kind of randomness involved in entanglement is importantly different than stochastic randomness. I only dimly understand the the Kochen-Specker theorem so I can't follow all the details of the argument in this paper, but the resulting view still seems to fall under indeterminism.

So alternative title (and subtitle) for the paper: "The Indeterminism Theorem: If Humans Act Indeterministically, Then So Do Fundamental Particles."
I may be wrong, but I think he's talking about Moose, not Perl's native OO style/system. (Though I suppose you could also argue that the native system is pretty nice too, if it allows you to create Moose on top of it.)
I see. The message I got from Flipboard app made it sound like they had exceeded their time-based quota of Twitter API traffic, but it makes sense that perhaps it is the Flipboard servers that are getting too much traffic.
Ask HN: Consumer oriented sales startups
What are some of the popular consumer oriented sales startups today? The kind whose primary revenue source is from visitors paying for something?

The immediate ones that come to mind are deal sites (groupon), dating sites (match.com) and software sites (37signals). What others can you think of? Examples?
You mean like the US government funded Peace Corp, who do teach English in China? To quote one statement, "Currently 114 Volunteers are teaching English in more than 62 universities, including five medical colleges and four vocational colleges".
1) My kids.
2) My health (and I couldn't have gotten well without the help of my kids).
3) Time spent getting to know some really interesting people who broadened my horizons.
4) "Travel" (well, more accurately, living different places).
That is a lot of physical infrastructure for a company with little revenue and a single business offering.
I have read Moser's essays before and agree that passable written Chinese (have to be able to write the characters correctly) is harder to learn than passable written English (just get the spelling close enough and the reader will probably figure it out).

However, giardini said "It takes years longer to learn any Chinese dialect than to learn English", and I'm also referring to the spoken language. In many ways, spoken Chinese is easier to learn, especially at more advanced levels, than spoken English. One reason is that most of its word roots are native. For example, the word for computer literally means "electric brain". In English, OTOH, most advanced/scientific terms are derived from Latin/Greek roots, which makes them much more difficult to remember.
zfsloader. Sweet, I can boot off of it now!
There is the defence of necessity. For example is someone threatens to kill you unless you do something, then you wont be punished for that something you did.
"Yeah, I know we just made the thing you're doing illegal, but no worries, we're not going to enforce it." doesn't reassure me much. Read the economist article posted yesterday about all the people in prison for pretty similar stuff.
Many people are rightfully pissed at BP for cutting corners and creating a huge clusterfuck in the Gulf.

Many of these same people are totally off base being pissed at BP for not fixing the broken well faster. But, hey, the screaming makes them feel better. Also, smug and superior.
> pretend to add value by retweeting status from the people who really know what's going on?

They are communicating, while you are coding. This is of course unbalanced.
But personally, the last thing I want to have to do is to update any random person on how things are going, while in the middle of a crunch towards the deadline.
The dark side it that I have to deal with a PM who doesn't understand the deep technical aspects and is the 'key' player of the decision process.

> Shouldn't engineers with leadership gifts lead more projects where engineering plays a major role?

Some very talented soft engineers that I know are trying their best to stay away from project management. It's how things are.
You can thank people like Mark McGranaghan for taking languages that "aren't ready for X" yet and making them so.
Art's Bold New Direction
Google trends issues hot media: BP oil rig's fire alarm was switched off
Lots of people have a compass on their car's dash... what's different about those that they work? (Yeah, I'm a software guy for sure...)
I have been in the need of a project management software too. Would love to hear all the good options that are out there. Especially ones that are not very expensive.
1. Chinese is relatively hard to learn
2. English is relatively easy to learn

I think that depends on what your native language is. Certainly I know that Chinese people struggle with English.
> why waste ad dollars on communicating your equality with other vendors ?

Because Consumer Reports singled out Apple's iPhone 4 as the only phone with such issue, and presented it as a dealbreaker.

In that situation levelling with others is step up for Apple.