skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To clarify.

You could have (for example).

Chinese growth will continue.
China will fall into a large recession.
America will have high-inflation.
America will have deflation.

Then as evidence you could take demographic data.
Monetary policy decisions that are taken in the past & their reasoning...

I might have to do this.
Useful Chrome Extensions for Web Developers
> If GodTube.com, a religion-centric video site can exist, then so can TeachBook.

Arguably, Youtube has lost its claim on "tube" by not defending its trademark:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark#Avoiding_...

If Youtube had sent cease and desist letters to Godtube and other "-tubes", and escalated to court if the person hadn't ceased and desisted, it probably would have worked. (This doesn't get into the morality or cool/uncoolness or business strategy or PR aspects of it, it's just trademark law)

> I don't see how any company can own generic words when used as part of a phrase, even when the industry is the same.

Actually, that's exactly what a trademark is. Owning generic words and phrasings in the same industry.

> I can certainly create a company called MicroChime or YouChime or ChimeSoft.

Debatable. MicroChime would probably be okay if you sold small chimes. If you sold operating systems and business software, you'd absolutely get a cease and desist, and you'd almost certainly lose if it went to court. Again, this doesn't get into the morality of it, just how trademarks generally work these days.
It would be really cool to see CMYK support - I prefer HSL to RGB to find good colours that work together; but I prefer CMYK to even HSL

It would also be cool if multiple copies of the tool could dynamically be added to pick multiple colours at a time - with, say, up to eight blocks at the top showing the current colour for each selector, and a text box to easily copy the various colours...

Thanks for sharing - this is nice!
This was discussed at some length yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633106

Long story short: PerfumeBay lost a case for diluting eBay's trademark; Victor's Little Secret lost a case to Victoria's Secret; Charbucks appears to be on its way to losing to Starbucks. Famous marks can (and may be obligated to) defend themselves against dilution from similar (but not identical) marks.
The remote works just the same on ITV as it does on the BBC, surely?
As long as we are speculating.

What exactly is wrong with learning from the examples and failures of other countries.

True, maybe we can not generate the same economy as Germany. However, perhaps we could find a way to copy or mimic what is that makes Germany so effective.

The article would argue that is their social polices. It is probably a mix of harmful and beneficial. I'd wager their free healthcare doesn't contribute as much as their free education, ext.

The United States shouldn't strive to be any other country. However, effective methods are effective methods and we should embrace what is rational.
I really like being able to select two colours like that - and the in-between colour is even better. Love that.
Why FourSquare worked and TV 'check in' apps didn't
Wow. Not big fan of Gnome personally & haven't used Linux desktop since 2006, but that GUI looks definitely elegant. (Hopefully they have gotten things right under the hood, too.)
What worries me isn't anything about the feature set, it's this: I don't know if I should ditch this and go start another for fun or if i should stick with it.

Doing a startup can really suck and the difference between success and failure is often just a stubborn, pig-headed refusal to quit. This is why people say it's so important to be really, really passionate about your startup's idea.

I think you'll know when something's your startup when it's something you care about so much that there's no possible way you can stop working on it. Your project sounds like it could be a successful startup, but it doesn't sound like it could be your successful startup.
Somehow Firefox became the slowest kid on the block, simply by not improving as fast as others (FF4 is better, but unfortunately change is smaller than I hoped for).

Which is really pity, it's still my primary browser and has a lot of good things going for it.

What's actually worse than FF canvas rendering performance (which, in fact, is not that bad if you measure it) is its memory management.

FF does something very weird, code that works ok in other browsers causes huge memory spikes followed by frequent garbage collection (e.g. what makes tens of KB memory use oscillations in Opera/Chrome makes tens of MB oscillations in FF).

Even something as simple as assigning repeatedly random numbers to fixed length array grows memory in FF. Canvas operations do the same, causing memory use to grow at an alarmingly fast rate.

So if you do animations (or anything which gets executed repeatedly), you get relatively fast rendering which is triggered erratically and paused due to "behind the scene" memory management (which slows down everything).
Not to sound snarky, but (especially given recent events) I shouldn't have to. Which is precisely my point.
Two interesting points from your comments.

First, Americans can work any kind of work week they want. There's a book -- 4-hour-work-week -- that a lot of folks are trying to make work. In technology teams especially. I tell my teams that I don't care how much you work or don't: what matters is productivity and predictability.

Sure, lots of others don't feel that way, but it's up to each situation. If there were some good lessons to be learned from some example? Bring them on! I'm all for it.

Second, complex systems of hundreds of millions of people do very poorly as an engineering experiment. Or -- you can't decide how you want things to turn out and then pull some magic lever and have it turn out that way. It's never that simple. So discussions about huge generalizations are premised on a really bad flaw: that somehow we can massively change everything at one time.

[edit]As an example, you couldn't decide in 1970 that you wanted every person to have a notebook computer by 2020. You could decide to train more people in hard sciences. You could decide to make incentives for investing. But you can't take one complex system as an example and then tell another one to conform to it. That's just not the way complex systems work. And that's not meant as a political comment. That's just a rule of complex systems.[/edit]

It's much better to take all the new information you can find and incorporate it from the ground-up. Want a society with 20-hour work weeks? Cool. Go build one. Nobody is stopping you, and if it's wildly successful then others will very quickly copy it. This is a very easy thing. Actually from this angle I don't even see the point of the article.

The only other angle is that someone or somebody -- one presumes government -- should tell us how to do our work. From my own experience, technology is one of the few areas where we create our own reality. And time and time again, we make it sucky on ourselves. But it's our reality. I wouldn't want to take that ultimate ownership away from us, no matter how good the cause.
Proves the old maxim: When you stare into the MBA, the MBA stares into you.
That is Flash.
Blogging and Venture Capital
I used to subscribe to your point-of-view, but don't anymore.

The traditional teacher-pupil relationship is well over-rated, and may be more efficient in the very start of the learning curve. Once the basic toolset is available, I'd much rather transition to deliberate solo practice and a mentor-mentee/craftsman-apprentice relationship.

In my experience, during any kind of medical/surgical training, these "wet-fingered" surgeons/mentors are the really ones that are sought for, not the big names who are famous on lectures halls and congresses. I believe this is also true for other complex skills as well, such as in startups. YMMV though.
Hmm, in Chapter 10 ==> means one thing and in Chapter 11 it means something different! CHapter 11 (Testing and Quality Assurance) being the buggiest so far...

Oh dear.
I agree with the caffeine comment. Believe it or not there is a balance when it comes to coffee. Having a cup of tea/coffee every day is not the same as having a cup every 2 hours. As in everything, it is not strictly an on/off switch.

Other than that I totally agree that sleep exercise and food make a great difference. Eating fat with carbs for 3 meals a day will not help you get the mental focus either.
We're fortunate enough in first world countries to have the luxury of having forgotten what hard work really means, and most people are too lazy to really dedicate themselves to anything.
This really seems like a lot of hassle to go through to protect your software. Why bother really? The people who are getting cracked versions of the software aren't going to pay for it, so its not like you're losing a customer to the cracked version.

I've always thought the 'nag screen' software seemed like the best solution-let the user buy a key to turn off the prompts but leave full functionality enabled for non-paying customers. However-throw up a nag screen when commonly used functions are activated. Click the 'Save' button? Throw up a nag screen for a variable amount of time between 5-15 seconds. Long enough for the user to see it and be reminded, but not long enough to really irritate them.
You could say the exact same about any "open" project. Open Access journals, open textbooks, Wikipedia, open source software. All redirect money from the people who are getting it now, all have been accused of being lower quality (most loudly by those in the previously getting money faction), all are dismissed as only being of interest to those who want something for nothing.

So lets look at the other side e.g. schools can easily download these works. It's not just the initial purchase money, though that would be enough for many poorer schools to simply not bother, it's dealing with physical CDs, or DRM'd downloads or accounting for licences when the licence holders group comes knocking, giving copies to the kids to use at home or on their iPods, letting them score an animated movie or documentary they are making. Once things are "free" options open up that are difficult to imagine when there is a fee, no matter how small.
yes i just did that, lots of good feedback
Are they providing a data persistence solution as part of their stack?
A math formula helps you to book cheaper flights.
It's not really an article, it's a book extract. A demo to get you to purchase the book and it fills the paper.
The point is that this discussion here is about the specific posted story and related stuff. Anything else is OT here.

In almost every case, when some positiv story A about X is posted, some people feel the need for some reason to point out some unrelated negative stuff B about X.

If you want to talk about B, do that in the specific HN post, not in the unrelated post about A.

If you have the feeling that people have talked to less about B in general and there is no good post on HN about it, write an own story and post it.
The exciting part is that there are so many _potential_ worthy successors even when Jobs leaves. The same can't be said of many companies with rockstar CEOs.
Isn't it incredibly difficult for non-EU citizens to move to Sweden to work/live?
The key to victorious research paper writing
Research paper writing is an important element to academic success. In order to submit excellent research papers you need to know how to go about doing so. These include topic selection, extensive research and clear writing etc. With the proper knowledge you will be able to write successful research papers.
I agree with most of the article, but this –

"But in the time he has booted to his Desktop I've already answered 3 emails [..] Vanity slows you down, whether its your choice of VM, OS (read: OSX or Windows) or anything else".

– is hardly an argument when choosing desktop OS.. just put your PC to sleep and next day it will "boot up" instantly, especially OS X.
Apple is wonderfully mimicked, never really copied. The company's aesthetic is truly unique and standard setting. We cam both be best friends over that. My mbp gets far too much use for a 4 year old piece of hardware. And it still resumes from sleep better than my brand new dell studio running win7 does.

I'm actually impressed that you can bring yourself to acknowledge minor bubbles in posts like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634581. But that same post waxed on to almost absurd levels of pseudo philosophical anthropomorphism. And that's the type hystrionics I'm talking about.
>The people who are getting cracked versions of the software aren't going to pay for it, so its not like you're losing a customer to the cracked version.

This is often stated, but is actually not true. There is a really old article where a guy a shareware program such that when it was installed it would randomly choose (with equal probability) whether it should be a fully working version or it should print every 4th page with a registration form, rather than the page the user wanted to print.

His experiment proved that significantly more users paid for the program when it was crippled than when it wasn't (I think it was 100% more, but I am not entirely sure).

So no, people who would otherwise be willing to pirate your program won't do this if you make it difficult enough.
What would you suggest this be changed to?
As is Helvetica.
Grading scale for teachers
Useful for grading evaluations (only numerical scales).
On the (somewhat new) T410, there's a ring around the power button that does the breathing blink thing when the laptop is in sleep mode.
Dell raises 3PAR bid to $1.6bn, trumps HP
But you do not need to take off Saturdays, which counts as part of the weekend for most (this depends on your employer). If I want to have a week long holiday, it's five days.

Generally, if you live in the southern part of Germany, you also get several catholic hol(i|y)days, no matter if you are catholic or not.
Polygamy was part of Jewish dogma at one point but the Rabbis came up with an interpretation that forbade it.

http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/558598/jewish/...
It's somewhat implied in Sweden that if you hire Lief Silbersky the defense lawyer, it means you did it and that you stand a good chance of getting away with it.

A detailed, chronological account of the women’s alleged encounters with Assange—which in both cases began with consensual sexual contact but later included what the women claimed was nonconsensual sex, in which Assange didn’t use a condom

I'm confused I thought non-consensual sex was rape, or is there a law in Sweden that says women who regret their sexual encounters can now withdraw consent retroactively?
Ignoring the fact that I prefer to multi-task--- I do not have 5 minutes of downtime with context switching. If I'm thinking about a certain problem--- it helps to stop and skim my twitter feed for a couple minutes while thinking about it.
A huge list, and it's already way out of date (from July 2009 last year).

This is proof that developing for Android has to be device agnostic. Query the device for what's available and assume nothing. It's not quite the fragmentation nightmare people make it out to be, but it is something you have to be aware of.
AdGrok (YC S10) is out to replace the 'craptacular' Google AdWords interface
You could try drinking decaf tea.
It's not a German thing. It's the same across Europe, certainly in countries that don't have a popularly elected head of state (the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, ...). Maybe it's just a Presidential thing? An election with one winner is probably more entertaining than an election where the most exciting outcome is party X gaining a slightly higher percentage than expected.
> ... you see the pattern? Here's the syllabus ...

I didn't mean to say that's the best way to learn. But it is certainly A way to learn, and one that should be (utterly) familiar to you.
I am tired of this hand-waving crap. These guys are making money by pushing flashy contrarian views with half-baked theories and little to no actual data. IMHO, this stuff is to science what FoxNews is to politics.
Study Links Chronic Fatigue to Virus Class
This is a rare occasion - Britain at the top of a chart that's measuring something good! I suspect the scope and influence of the empire might be what just pushes us over the top, though I guess that doesn't explain Denmark too well.
1. Get around 7 hours of sleep every single night:
10+ is better
2. Avoid caffeine entirely (coffee & tea):
Blasphemy. Please remove this item
3. Maintain your tools:
100% agreed
4. Dont be vain:
Be vain when it counts. You don't want the perception of your work to suffer when it's among people who don't quite understand technology.
5. Avoid Social Networks:
I hate to say it but avoid hackernews also. You can sink hours into this site. Hackernews is entertainment not actual work. Good entertainment though!
6. Work off a TODO list:
100% agreed
7. Use a tiling WM:
OK
8. Use Emacs for Everything:
To each his own
9. ...Use Conkeror for the rest:
DITTO
10. Always keep looking:
100% agreed If you do something the same way every time you will be left behind
I think it would be even more useful if it were inverted, so it was organized by feature value instead of by phone model. It's like web development: you don't do browser sniffing, you sniff for features and specialize your code for that. If you're developing for android you do the same thing, you code for specific features. Some you simply require, some you require a certain range of value/capability, some are optional, and some you don't care about.
coffee, vim and screen do it for me :-)
Mentors. Get a good mentor, and learn to communicate (aka LISTEN).
I took it to mean that the author is either on or off with such things, and couldn't merely cut down. I'm the same way. One cup of coffee a day is an impossible dream for me, I'd have to totally quit instead.
I do pay NI, but I don't class it as a medical expense. It's basically a second income tax and payroll tax mixed into one.
In regards to number 7:

>7. Use a tiling WM

I recall reading a Plan 9 pdf on the Acme editor (sorry cant find it right now). A unique feature to that text editor is that it is heavily mouse-based. This is contrary to many peoples (myself, at the time, included) belief that both hands on the keyboard equals increased productivity.

I used to be 100% dwm. The euphoria of navigating around with your home row was great (vim + vimperator + dwm). When I purchased a MB, I left my tiled-wm ways and have not really missed it. Switching my hand from keyboard to mouse feels more natural than a lot of awkward <Ctrl+__> or <Alt+__> commands. Plus, most TWMs I have used require a decent amount of time upfront to become accustomed to all the keybindings. The time difference in switching between mouse and keyboard vs just using the keyboard is so trivial that it really isnt worth the plunge in my opinion, though if you think you might like it better, by all means try it.

Something such as a unified desktop (OS X, Haiku, Gnome, KDE) will make you more productive rather than a window manager that optimizes for pixel real estate.
They wouldn't loose the right to facebook, only to book.

So somebody could make sexbook (properly already could if it was not a social network, but, say, a book about about porn) but they couldn't make facebookofsex.com
Nicely done. I had intended to do something like a color picker or CSS layout tool, but instead I started working on a game and got way carried away (shameless plug: http://10k.aneventapart.com/Entry/154)

My first time using <canvas>. It's really a lot more fun than I expected. Reminds me of the good old days of messing around in Basic.
Using an ORM does buy you some abstraction, though. You get to worry about your business objects and fields instead of your tables and columns. (Depending on the language/situation this can be a big deal)

You're right that it doesn't provide all the abstraction you probably want, but it easily gives you a toehold on which to build that abstraction. Doing it from scratch, by hand is often a much worse place to start.
I don't think it's out of date - it was started in July 2009 but seems to be decently updated.

Agreed, though, hardware fragmentation is a chore, but the assume-nothing-and-create-layouts-for-all-three-resolutions seems to be the wisest way to stay sane.

I wonder if anyone's gonna start offering an app testing service across a massive range of hardware for those apps that are targeting a truly broad userbase...
herbal tea does not contain caffeine, although its not really tea, it is delicious. I make a mean blueberry + orange combo
I'm not sure why I'm getting downvoted. Y chromosomes are smaller and have less genetic information. Having XY vs XX would lead to extremes as opposed to balanced out genes--exactly what he was talking about, heights/intelligence/violence. I may not be a geneticist but I'm pretty sure this generally what is happening."Because males have only one X-chromosome, they are more likely to have an X chromosome-related disease." From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_chromosome
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.

I find that assertion illogical. If I raise the income niveau of low wage workers, income inequality does go down. I don't have to keep the top down to reduce inequality, that's just nonsense.

The interesting question is where that money will come from. Increasing lower wages take away from the income of the companies they work for (those people are usually not self employed). So what we will see is a little less income for large companies and their owners, who form the very top incomes anyway. Also, note that the incomes of the top 1% do not really affect the median (and also the average, to a lesser degree) income all that much.

I don't see how that is fundamentally keeping innovation from happening. Founding the next MS might be a little less profitable, but I don't think it'd have kept Bill Gates from doing what he did if he had a billion less by now. Also, Microsoft is quite the counter example: they pay their workers comparatively high wages.

As for the practical effects: I think we can see that Europe (and in particular the more egalitarian Northern Europe) does not necessarily fit his description of a poor country only offering raw materials and cheap labour. There is also lots of innovation happening, not necessarily in IT, but in other sectors (machine engineering, medical, the whole car industry, ...).

So, I think the theoretical point is illogical, and practice shows the effects it predicts do not happen. Colour me unconvinced.
My code was not bad, but not superb. There was good architecture behind and a hundred of unit tests, but still time to market was top priority. So it was good enough and I think it is a waste to write perfect code for startup, since future is unknown.

When product proofs itself, it is time to refactor and maintain perfect code base.
Funding Your Startup: Are You a Zero or a One?
Because 3 men from modern history are utterly insignificant to human evolution.

The argument is Evolutionary Psychology, which is a rather soft science. So is economics, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful.

However, in order to make it useful you have to think statistically about the behavior of humans in LONG LONG period of pre-history.
Why don't you elaborate then instead of just giving some smug answer? Hacker News would be a lot better without pointless contrarians like you.
Ask HN: What is the word?
A coworker suggested that there is an engineering term that describes a decline in quality (in a product or process) to a point where there can never be a recovery to the initial state. Anyone know what the term might be?