skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"A video on the web usually has the camera focused on one person and the screen doesn't completely change too often (if at all)."

On the bright side, those videos should compress much better.
I'm starting to think there's something to the idea of a national culture - nothing genetic, but a set of high-level assumptions and attitudes about life that inform the vast majority of people in a region, across the political spectrum. I've personally run into vast differences in attitudes about privacy and government between Americans and Germans, and I've been thinking a lot lately about Heinrich's 'WEIRD' paper (which finds differences between Americans and other Western nations - and Western nations and the rest of the world - on psychological tests.)

I suspect that because of certain prevalent American values (autonomy, distrust of authority, a bit of the Horatio Alger myth) they've naturally optimized to the work environment best suited to them. I further suspect that America could only switch to a German system very, very gradually. The country's just not currently suited for social democracy - they'd be terrible at it.
Reinventing the remote for iTV
A Flat fish Does Not Mean a Flat Line
102 paragraphs with no sections, organization, or even an introduction to the article?

A title that immediately puts you on the defensive?

Quotes like this? “I don’t know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan,” Gates, an investor in IV, once observed.
I think the real management myth is the implicit mental model most managers out there (in my experience) make use of, based on ideas of what a worker is, sourced from the 18th/19th century - i.e. that they are a. doing an unpleasant job they'd rather not do and b. are likely to try to cop off as much as possible.

This works well for factory jobs, but not so great for software development.

From this derives all the stuff about dressing in uniform, good timekeeping (introduces discipline and routine), the need to see the workers doing what the manager understands to be work (i.e. coding window open, typing out code), it's what smacks down on anything perceived to be procrastination from a distance, what maintains a level of suspicion that the staff will, where possible, do as little work as they can get away with.

This whole model seems to be (though almost always not quite consciously) the universally accepted approach most everywhere. That, combined with the fact that many IT managers are not technical themselves, results in a lot of the stupidities within the industry I think (especially so in internal IT).

Software development is extremely sensitive to ability level and environment I feel, so the typical suspicion and focus on things utterly unimportant to the job itself really, really take away from the task itself. What is especially pernicious is the desire to see work as the manager defines it done, i.e. sitting down and coding. Software development consists of many things other than coding including planning, thinking about the problem, etc. and that attitude not only takes away from the process which actually results in good software, it promotes those developers who just sit there coding out crap and punishes those coders who want to think things through more clearly.
Women Accusing WikiLeaks Founder Maintains Charges of Sexual Misconduct
It's hard to get my 93 year-old grandma on Skype.
How can I possibly distinguish between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola?

If only PepsiCo had been sued out of existence about 50 years ago for "trademark" infringment, we would never had this problem.
Many Americans don't distinguish between 'socialist' and 'social democracy', since there hasn't been a strong social democratic tradition in America for generations. You should just swap out the two terms, and then (hopefully) the conversation will feel a bit less weird.
clean for such low level C

Do you think it would be cleaner if it was in perl?
SiagaNews.com - Hubungan Memanas, Para Hacker Indonesia Serang Malaysia
20+ Most Expensive & Luxurious Houses | Bloggs74
Avoiding religion in programming
That makes two of us.
I presume you mean "Heroku", who already do node.js http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/4/28/node_js_support_ex...
Except most of the oil-riches are stashed away, not spent as it is in Saudi Arabia.
The Evolving Internet: A look ahead to 2025
Fort Lauderdale Real Estate Luxury Homes
Fort Lauderdale Homes for sale and rent presented by Prime Real Estate Collection the leader in luxury Fort Lauderdale real estate.
I've made one for 10K too http://10k.aneventapart.com/Entry/235. Mine is SVG based. The code is on GitHub http://github.com/NV/color-blender.
My personal experience with Germans is that they are hard workers for several hours, then they take off and play. During the time they are working they are focused on getting work done.

Americans will put in long hours, but then during the course of the day will play in the form of checking personal email, talking around the water cooler, etc.

You can cross ref. this with NASA's finding that programmers who were only allowed to work 5 days a week of 8 hour days were as productive and had less bugs in their code than those allowed to work more hours.
Permanent link: http://em386.blogspot.com/2010/06/its-2010-and-your-browser-...
The good average performance numbers are especially impressive when you consider West-Germany absorbed the underdeveloped East-German economy in 1990, and still provides massive subsidy transfers (afaik). You must be doing something right!
This really illustrates the diversity of hardware Android manufacturers are using - both the versatility of Android and also the burden of developing for a diverse (and constantly growing/changing) system specification.
In my experience, class in the UK is primarily determined by who your parents were, not by who you know - with there being notable regional differences in the permeability of the class distinctions.
25 Percent of New Worms Designed to Spread Through USB Devices
Samsung Galaxy Tab gets video preview in Korea
If You Don’t Eat Asparagus Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later
Well, if I remember correctly (I'm no expert on recent Norwegian history), Norway had a tradition of social democracy for a couple of decades before it discovered its oil reserves. I suspect they also had a high degree of income equality, even back then.

I'm only arguing that today their social democracy continues to do well - and isn't under the same pressure of other European states' - because of their wealth.
MLA Research Paper – Humanities and Arts Topics
It is very important to know how to cite your sources correctly. Out of all formats used, the MLA research paper format is the most common. The bibliography is an important section of the research paper. Therefore, it is necessary that you know what details you need to include in it.
we don't stigmatize ... upper class who've become poor

Of course we do. Just not any more than other poor people.
Schneier on Security: Detecting Deception in Conference Calls
It's certainly a factor, but where you went to school is probably more significant. Or more accurately, where you picked up your accent.
You don't need anything like 10000 hours to attain reasonable fluency in any language:

http://learnalanguageortwo.blogspot.com/2007/12/how-long-doe...

I think it's mostly a matter of motivation. In my experience, Native English speakers are much less likely to learn a foreign language even when they're living abroad. In Japan, most non-anglo foreigners will learn Japanese to some extent and in fact they might communicate among themselves in Japanese. On the other hand, many anglos don't need to speak much Japanese in their jobs and, in their personal life, would rather restrict themselves to the tiny English-speaking population than go to the trouble of learning Japanese.
For a software error, UAV MQ-8 reaches restricted airspace near Washington DC
Ah whoops - that was a mistake. But my point still stands that to advance equality can require that a group organise under the banner of an -ism or of x rights.
Pirate Bay Receives Notice To Keep a Torrent
Would you mind providing a few examples instead of citing an amorphous large list?
What type of boat is your startup?
On the health care front, both the OECD and The Commonwealth Fund give the USA low marks compared to other Western democracies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_system#Cross-countr...

No comment on the 'luxury' claim; that's too subjective for me.
For example, HDI (Human Development Index, used by the UN) measures three welfare factors (life expectancy, level of education, standard of living). Nine Western European countries rank higher than the US, six Western European countries are ranked lower (including the far more US-oriented UK). Some Southern European countries (Spain, Italy) are almost at US-level.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Deve...
I welcome your position, but could your provide examples where Apple has failed in the "attention to detail" department?
I've always operated under the assumption that equal wealth distribution ('fair' is a loaded word) has an economic cost, since inequalities in wealth (+ economic freedom) encourage economy-expanding activities like entrepreneurship. Therefore I've assumed that relatively equal wealth distribution is only sustainable when there's a whole lot of wealth to go around.

I could be wrong, though. Can anyone come up with an example of voluntary equal wealth distribution in a country relatively lacking in resources? (I say 'voluntary' because in poorer countries this sort of scheme has usually been enforced by dictatorships.)
It is not as simple as that. There are many countries in which the official work day is less than the real work day. As an example, in Japan no-one leaves before the boss leaves (so it can be longer than the official time).

Also, in some countries there are many people working for themselves (such as in small businesses). These people generally work more than the official time.

I had a family member work for 14 hours a week (10 hours saturday and sunday) while starting their own business (this went on for two years).

Small business owners break the law a lot and work more than the allotted time.
A boon to the "interoperability" bit, but not the "freedom" and "open standards" bit. VP8's obviously a mixed bag, but I don't think this makes H.264 any less dangerous to hitch the HTML5 cart to.
Non dummies guide to customer discovery
European societies sacrifice a bit of growth potential and individual freedom to get better living conditions for all.

Economists can tell you that this can't scale up to the whole world. Paul Graham's article explains it very well. (The following is all quotation; I'm not italicizing, in the interest of readability)

If you want to reduce economic inequality instead of just improving the overall standard of living, it's not enough just to raise up the poor. What if one of your newly minted engineers gets ambitious and goes on to become another Bill Gates? Economic inequality will be as bad as ever. If you actually want to compress the gap between rich and poor, you have to push down on the top as well as pushing up on the bottom.

How do you push down on the top? You could try to decrease the productivity of the people who make the most money: make the best surgeons operate with their left hands, force popular actors to overeat, and so on. But this approach is hard to implement. The only practical solution is to let people do the best work they can, and then (either by taxation or by limiting what they can charge) to confiscate whatever you deem to be surplus.

...

At a minimum, we'd have to accept lower rates of technological growth. If you believe that large, established companies could somehow be made to develop new technology as fast as startups, the ball is in your court to explain how. (If you can come up with a remotely plausible story, you can make a fortune writing business books and consulting for large companies.)

Ok, so we get slower growth. Is that so bad? Well, one reason it's bad in practice is that other countries might not agree to slow down with us. If you're content to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest of the world, what happens is that you don't invent anything at all. Anything you might discover has already been invented elsewhere. And the only thing you can offer in return is raw materials and cheap labor. Once you sink that low, other countries can do whatever they like with you: install puppet governments, siphon off your best workers, use your women as prostitutes, dump their toxic waste on your territory-- all the things we do to poor countries now. The only defense is to isolate yourself, as communist countries did in the twentieth century. But the problem then is, you have to become a police state to enforce it.

http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
Http://aircelpocketapps.com/
Could've used two lights to recreate the effect of eyes sleepily almost-opening, blinking and closing.
(I am not the original poster, but I thought I'd provide some info).

As he pointed out it's difficult to find objective data. But you can check:

* Human Development Index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Deve...): the USA is at position 13. It includes things like life expectancy and education.

* Satisfaction with Life index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfaction_with_Life_Index):the USA is at position 23.

* World Health Organisation ranking of health care: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO%27s_ranking_of_health_care_...): the USA is at position 37

* Education index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index): the USA is at 19

* Income inequality (Gini coefficient): (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient) USA has a score of 47 (out of 100 for maximum inequality). EU has an average of 31

I am sure there's many other indices. And I am also sure that a lot of complains could be thrown on each of these. But I think overall they paint a pretty consistent picture of the USA.
Randal Schwartz used to give out the "Useless use of `cat' award" to annoyed posters in comp.unix.shell because of the relative obscurity of the `<' operator.

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=Useless%20Use%20of%20Cat%2...

(actually his main point was that most unix commands take a file as an arguments, but for the ones that don't you can just slurp it into stdin with `<')

Nowadays, we could say the same thing about useless uses of `echo', given the modern `<<<' operator.
The Three Key Elements of  Irresistible Email Subject Lines
Sweet Computer Case
5.2ghz is slow
I may be slightly biased as I work for Localphone, but we pride ourselves in delivering a quality service for a reasonable price. The cool thing about this that Google have opened up is that you can call any of our (Localphone) US access numbers for free from your Gmail inbox, and then take advantage of our cheap rates to compete the international leg of the call.
I don't believe any discussion of FizzBuzz can be considered complete without a link to David Langford's classic monograph on the subject:

http://www.ansible.co.uk/ai/pcwplus/pcwp1989.html#jul
> There isn't even a single post here in this thread (and there are 171 right now) that says something to effect of "This LED thing is cool, but Apple drops the ball on <insert xyz widely known problem>".

Uh, yes there is. My post, which is currently right below yours (edit: well, it was), explicitly acknowledges that fact. I also wrote another comment about a Mac OS menu behavior that I dislike, which has been voted up, not down. mkramlich also mentioned his problems with iOS 4 on an iPhone 3G here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635018.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that Apple fans "religiously ignore" problems with their products. Do you actually spend time on the support forums, or various Apple-centric sites? I've never met an Apple fan that thought Apple was 100% perfect. Does every single thread appreciative of something a company is good at need to prominently feature criticisms of everything that company is bad at as well? Of course not. Your criticism is silly, and smacks of typical, petty anti-Apple resentment.

> Instead we get north of 170 posts, all breathlessly agreeing that they wish Apple could have their child.

You lost any pretense of trying to provide the voice of reason here.
This will sound harsh, but on the off-chance that someone reading this would hire you, why don't you have your contact details in your profile? That shows something of a lack of initiative.

And that's what will never lose - showing initiative. An employers wants to know that you have some skills, are smart, don't need constant supervision, can learn on your own, will ask questions when it's the most effective way to proceed (overall, in general and in context), and that you'll do what's necessary to add value and get stuff done.
There is a world of difference between the social status of the grandchild of an aristo who gambled away the family fortune, and a chav single mother. The former has access to contacts, a peer group, a social network (call it what you will) and even people they deal with every day will treat them with more respect. This at least is nothing to do with actual spending power.

But our hypothetical ex-aristo would be rejected immediately if she tried to become working-class (tho' probably she could become a chav).
While this story certainly isn't great for discussion (for the points you mentioned) I disagree with your last statement.

Comparisons are useful, especially when they're disentangled from the politics. I don't really care about how Swedes are ethically superior because they have more mandated vacation and a shorter workday. What I care about are the effects. Is there a lower occurrence of burnout? Are Swedes more productive during working hours? Are work-related injuries (and related costs to employers) lower? etc.

These things are intertwined with other socio-policial factors, of course, so it can be difficult to divorce them... but not too difficult.
I'm interested that this question has got so many votes without any replies.

In my view there are times in start-ups (I've been involved in two, once as a co-founder) there are times when you do have to go that extra mile (or ten), but I don't think coding is the area where this is really obvious.

For example, if there are a handful of people in the company and you try and get VC investment that takes a huge amount of effort so you end up having coding time round about other tasks. So even though your total code output doesn't go up that much you end up doing piles of other stuff (e.g. planning for a major deployment at a customer) thay someone technical has to do but which isn't coding. Something has got to give - so you work longer hours, not because you want to, but because you have to.

Looking back do I think expecting employees to work crazy hours makes them any more productive as developers - absolutely not. But as a founder/exec you have to do it.
3 teens on Facebook hit list killed in past 10 days
Ask HN: Do you think I could feasibly sell my webapp?
My webapp is http://todoneapp.com/, a very different kind of "get things done" app. It's not rocket science, but has a small user base that likes it quite a bit.

Traffic-wise, in the last 30 days, it's had 1994 visits, 5426 pageviews, avg time on site 2:47.

It's had a couple major traffic events such as being featured on LifeHacker etc.

I also keep fine grain statistic on unique users who have at least created one todo (so this is throwing out drive-by traffic):

Active users in the last 24 hours: 15
Active users in the last 1 week: 62
Active users in the last 2 weeks: 78
Active users in the last 1 month: 109

Total users who have supplied email addresses: 2127. Total users who have not supplied email addresses: 7804.

App is Ruby on Rails.

Do you think I could feasibly sell this on Flippa etc? And if so, for how much?

Thanks!
Investing based on macro-economic trends.
Facebook sues start-up for using 'book' in its name
"If you get regular Facebook updates, Twitter updates, or any other kind of updates which steals your attention, even if its just for a few seconds, I'm willing to bet that you're working at 50% of your full capacity."

Leechblock is incredible for this reason, its saved me so many times. Great read although I disagree with cutting out tea, forcing myself to take tea breaks every few hours of the day has lead to some great discoveries.
"This article is pure speculative narrative. That is, whereas most essays make a thesis, then present evidence and arguments to support that thesis, this article presents a whole story spun out of thin air, involving FDR, national health insurance, vacations, the Chinese."

Huh. Maybe we're being A/B tested, because the article that I just read began with a clear thesis ("European social democracy – particularly Germany’s – offers some tantalizing solutions to our overworked age"), provided multiple lines of evidence and arguments to support that thesis, and didn't mention the "FDR" or "the Chinese" at all (it mentions, China, at the very end...but only to say that China isn't our enemy). If the article that you read is speculative and theoretical...well, perhaps you've got something from the Cato institute stuck in your browser cache?

It's also pretty interesting that you would lead with that statement, when your counter-argument is an assertion: "we will never be Germany". Maybe you're right, but I'm missing the part of your comment where you provide evidence and arguments to support your thesis -- or even an argument as to why we need to be Germany to adopt some of their ideas. Must be the A/B testing.
I have to wonder if that ever would have held up in court. It seems pretty clear that for all the devices that record in H.264, the vendors did not do their due diligence to explain that the user did not have a license to distribute that video after 2015. And the whole concept is just patently absurd anyway, that file transfer infringes their patent when they've already been compensated for the encoder and decoder.
Keep Your ORM Out of my Controller
I couldn't agree more. Every time I see a question like this, I have to hold back a rant. What, didn't they teach you to read at your liberal arts college? How many classes do you have to take before you see the pattern? Here's the syllabus, read the book, go to lectures that rehash the book (except for the occasional, exceptional class), do some exercises, review for a mid-term and a final? Don't know what book(s) to read? What, didn't they teach you to do any research, or use Google?

Worried your education is incomplete (How could it not be?) or unknown unknowns? Do some research! (Research? Again?!) Every CS program in the world has their curriculum online. See what they think you should be learning. You had to pick classes, right? Didn't you consider the options then? Find discussion of CS curricula. This post by Philip Greenspun springs to mind:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2004/10/02/what-would-an-...

Oh, wait. Holding back a rant. I guess I didn't this time.
Apple Doesn’t Target Markets. It Targets People
Have you tried FlashDevelop?
Norway is similar to the UK in a way, they both had lots of oil and natural gas reserves in the '80 and '90s. The difference is Norway saved the cash to immense proportions, while the UK spent the cash and used the excess fuel to live cheaply.

It is a basic difference between long term and short term thinkers being in charge. I think that's the true difference between countries like the US, UK and even those in Southern Europe, compared to other Northern European countries like Norway, Germany, Sweden etc.
I should also mention that I want to sell it because I don't have time to give it any love, despite lots of feedback on Get Satisfaction. It's running on an EC2 server costing me $60/mo (overkill), and I feel bad just turning the service off for the existing users.