skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would the physical location of a company matter if that company provides online services?

While trivial, it's not good marketing.

The only instance I see country TLDs as being actually useful is for localized versions of said sites ... Google already does it, but it's not like it is useful for an email address to end with "gmail.ru", quite the contrary.

A better suggestion would be to use custom TLDs based on some category your website fits into ... like ".fm" for radio, or ".info" for hosting your personal resume, or ".doc" for archives of documents, and so on.

Sure, people are very accustomed to .com domains, but who's to blame for that?

Also a brand is a brand ... say you have the luck of registering "google.nu" ... most likely Google can take it from you by force ;)
Respectfully, this is a classic liquidity trap. Falling government spending is exacerbating the collapse of demand in the private sector. If this were simply an issue of inefficient government activity "crowding out" the private sector, austerity cuts would have stimulated an increase, not collapse in private sector economic activity.

The problem is that Greece has very few policy options given its existing debt burden, and inflating out of the crisis is not an option given its need to support the Euro. As with the US government, what Greece can afford to spend on social programs in equilibrium depends largely on what it spends elsewhere.
On the other hand, you can exploit much smaller pockets of profitability as a small time investor.
This is extremely shocking to find out when you personally know the facts of a situation they're covering. It would be funny if not for the damage.
That is probably what it all boils down to: destructive verses non-destructive recycling. In short, aluminum is better if you always break down the container before remaking it, but glass is better if you try and preserve the form of the container. That is a shame, and makes the recent effort by beverage companies to make aluminum bottles make more sense.

What’s disgusting given this realization is the recent popularity of Mexican sodas as a pushback against HFCS. Guess what containers are still in use south of the border? Guess we shouldn’t have dismantled out returnable bottle infrastructre so soon… /-:
I think what tptacek is getting at is programatically describing the button which then gets created in an automated way rather than manually creating it using a graphical tool such as photoshop.
Someone pretty much has, it's called chicken scheme.
If you know something about the probability distribution of x and y, that might work out better than you expect.
We appreciate this concern and we want to address it completely. The "intended" use for this device is to capture the impromptu nature of brainstorming sessions. It will be branded and sold for such purposes. Yet, as with any tool we cannot dictate how it is used. That is what the law is for. The onus is on the person who is recording to make those around aware they are being recorded. As is the case with any recording device.

Glad you think it's a neat idea! Any ideas on how we can ensure it's used in the intended way?
Port 83 is free as far as I can see, I'm game. HPTP?

Or Content-type: text/hyper-postscript?
Hmm, this trend of replacing bitmap images with CSS vector graphics is interesting but a bit strange. Is SVG on the browser dead, and CSS is replacing it? It has the advantage of better support and a simpler spec, but much worse tool support than SVG, not to mention really not being designed for vector graphics.
Clojure makes some things that are hard to do in other languages much easier.

I once heard it put that "Functional programming makes all problems equally hard." When taken figuratively, it does make a lot of sense: the things that are hard to do functionally tend to be things that are easy to do procedurally (e.g. UI stuff -- the code obviously, not the design).
The problem with that method is it'll make the initial page load really slowly.

Often multiple http requests are avoided because browsers only make a limited amount of requests to a server at the same time. The best way to fight this is with image sprites and css source files stored on another server. I believe a simple sub domain would be enough to trigger more requests at the same time. Something like files.domain.com that even points to the same site as www.domain.com should do the trick. Load your site from www. And css/images from file. Subdomain.
Einstein was an atheist who only identified with Judaism from a cultural perspective:

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/word-god-is-product-of-...

What is there to debate? There is nothing to debate and we waste time even entertaining the thought of doing so, which is why you rarely see Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al. doing so.
Did it get a native compiler all of a sudden? I thought it just translates into C.
Why I Became an Entrepreneur at 12 Years Old
Thank God for RVM! I'm soooo happy not to have to deal with distro ruby versions anymore.

Ok, so maybe I should thank Wayne instead ;-)
You're totally right. All they had to do was keep things simple. Good luck to anyone wading through the (international) product line:

http://www.asus.com/AllProducts.aspx?PG_ID=7dDelmkESu9DXgVB
There haven't been any yet that I can recall, but they have cannibalized popular third-party Mac apps before — try searching for Watson or Konfabulator. And their rejection of that picture frame app seemed to be on the basis that it trod on ground they wanted to cover themselves.
Milan-bound night train ends up in Zurich
"I don't see too much bitching about land-owners that don't want to sell"

Actually, there is, and with similar arguments to the domain name problem, only on a larger scale. Just imagine you manage some large-scale development project, but there's an old couple sitting in the middle of your projected building site that refuses to sell at any price. It happens a lot more often than you realize. (the large scale developer usually bullies its way in, which is not as easy with domains I guess).

One local example to illustrate my point:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

You see the green patch and the house in the lower left of the parking lot? The people there didn't settle with the supermarket owners, so they simply routed the parking lot around it.

There are lots of cases of inefficient land use, and land/house owning incurs in much higher fixed costs than U$ 7.
Having never heard of Justin Bieber, I just tried listening to the original track. Bland.
Just go to the UK afterwards. Those evil socialists have the NHS.
I think the argument would be much, much stronger if the writer were to tie in what he claims he is being told, with relevant snippets from the executive profiles on Nvidia's site.

For instance, Frank Fox, SVP for Consumer Electronics Engineering, has this in his profile: "Fox spent 14 years at Digital Equipment, where he led the EV8 Alpha microprocessor design team. He is co-editor of the book "Design of High-Performance Microprocessor Circuits." He holds a BE degree from University College Cork, National University of Ireland, and a PhD in engineering from Trinity College, Dublin University."
> First, the amount of profit per customer visit is not necessarily constant, and can depend on things such as gas prices

Given the scope of the company doing this kind of analysis, I don’t think variance is going to be significant. Given a large enough sample or pool of data, some kind of “regression to the mean” effect is going to kick in. Remember it is all “estimation” in the end anyways, and I can see the value in having some kind of observable data as opposed to data based on “honest” reporting by those you are trying to study.
(Russian) search engine with some advanced features
Check the links, although the text is Russian, demonstration videos and pictures speak for themselves. alternatively translate the page with Google.

Some more URLs on that site to check:
http://bit.ly/cSjrf8
http://bit.ly/15xoMb
http://bit.ly/giJDe
How about having a dummy-demo. Basically give the user a taste of the UI without the functionality, ie. just send the user a static html page to get a feel of the interface and how it would work. Of course, it depends on what you are offering.
Cambridge/Boston Thinking Society
I like it. Smart. Simple. Functional. I've been using audio recorders for years and always wanted a simple way to record conversations and ideas I'm having with friends. If you can connect your ideas to and post them automatically to twitter, blogging and social networking API's it will blow up! Hopefully you guys go with a hipster IKEA look.
Liberal and orthodox in one description feel kind of funny.
CSS3 Transitions and Transforms in Gmail for the iPad
I disagree. Nothing was going to create immediate improvement in Greece so they were going to be in this mess no matter what they did. No one is going to invest in Greece right now regardless of how much the Government spends. So I don't see how the austerity cuts are "causing" this.

They are clearly not helping yet either but keep in mind the current cuts were only enacted in May of this year.

What the government is trying to do is send a message to the world that they'll be prudent with their finances from this point on. That's why they've gone above and beyond what was required of them as far as austerity cuts go. It's a long term strategy that will hopefully draw private investment back to Greece in the future.
Although text is Russian, demonstration videos and pictures speak for themselves. Alternatively translate the page with Google.

Some more URLs on that site with interesting stuff:
http://bit.ly/cSjrf8
http://bit.ly/15xoMb
http://bit.ly/giJDe
Things need to get worse before it gets better. Seems like the best idea is to ditch the Euro, deflate the currency, and wait for companies to come back when prices are cheap enough where its worth doing work there.

It'd be painful, but at least it'll be over eventually and things will start to grow again.

Right now it looks like they are on the path to perpetual stagnation.
If any Hacker News readers are in the Boston/Cambridge area and like to discuss intellectual topics in person, this could be a great meetup. Sign up so that we can get it going.
Greece is a good example of what happens with an over-reaching government, high taxes, and expensive social programs.

You are joking, right? Greece is a good example of what happens when the state fails in two of its most important functions: efficient tax collection and an incorruptible civil service.
Windows won because DOS was already everywhere. It wasn't
the best product. I would argue OS/2 and Macintosh were
pretty significantly better.

No, they weren't.

The hardware requirements OS/2 were higher, Windows had better drivers support and provided better tools for developers. And the real battle was in '94 when IBM released OS/2 Warp. In '95 it was already game over.

People weren't using OS/2 for the same reasons they wouldn't go for Win NT 4. It was technically superior, but incompatible with what people wanted.

Win 95 had the same quality as Mac OS ... both were pieces of shit that got the job done, the difference being that you could get Win 95 for a better price and that it was future-proof (Win NT was already on sale for businesses).

IMHO, with Windows Microsoft only had 2 fuckups ... Windows ME and Vista. For all the other versions Microsoft just provided what consumers wanted.
Also mass tax evasion, which is ignored for obvious reasons.

http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/world/europe/02evasion.htm...
Anybody can have a psychotic stalker. Nothing on that TechCrunch comment page is actionable and HN doesn't acquit itself well by linking to it.
Sorry, I can't follow your calculations on the BTU and the information I took is from DoE (Department of Energy)

"Thus, lighting was approximately 8.3% of national primary energy consumption, or about 22% of the total electricity generated in the U.S."

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/ssl/tech_reports.html
That is a nice idea. Another way to reach the goal of an alternative native (non-JVM) Clojure would be to build something on top of Racket or Gambit-C Scheme.

BTW, my favorite aspect of Clojure is the common "seq" API for lists, vectors, maps, trees, etc.
Have you ever looked into Lua? It's a nice language in its own right (somewhere between Python and Io), and it was designed primarily for use with C.

Chicken Scheme is good, too.
Ask HN: Anyone else getting the new annoying Google arrows?
As usual, Google decided to use me as a guinea pig in their quest for interface perfection. What do you think of this new design, http://imagebin.ca/view/xIfOEwuQ.html I personally hate it.
A carbon tax is more free market, because it just puts a price on the externality and lets the market decide how to respond.

Ryan Avent, an economist who focuses on these issues and writes for the, um, Economist, claims that there are no significant differences between the two policies: http://www.ryanavent.com/blog/?p=2011 I haven't heard your explanation before though, so do you have any experts who support this claim?

I agree with Greg Mankiw that cap and trade equals carbon tax plus corporate welfare:

Um, do you really think that the US tax code is generally free from corporate welfare giveaways? If you don't, then why exactly do you think that we could pass a carbon tax that would not have corporate welfare exemptions included? Do you think that corporate lobbyists are particularly powerless when it comes to changing the tax code?

It seems that giving away permits initially is superior to including an exemption in tax law. The giveaway is a one time cost; but exemptions live forever.

Beyond that, I agree with conservative economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok that Mankiew's analysis is naive and incomplete: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/05... ; that might be true for the ideal carbon tax with no exemptions for anyone that everyone agrees could never pass Congress. But there seems to be no point comparing a realistic cap and trade bill against an impossible to pass carbon tax.

From the conservative wonks I read there's a surprising amount of support for a higher gas tax

Interesting. I'd be curious which conservative wonks support a gas tax increase.
You're going to have a hard time trying to not let your views of this person be coloured by things that you probably shouldn't have known about them until they volunteered.

What someones political views are should have nothing to do with the hiring process. I'm pretty sure that you're not alone in doing this, in fact I think it happens all the time but I don't think you should go around and check up on the private stuff you can dig up on your hires. If it's work related that's different, but facebook profiles are for the most part family and friends. If someone lists their FB profile on their CV that probably changes matters a bit, that's more like volunteering but even then if they list any political affiliation there it should never be used against them.
Not exactly. Sure, Greece has all those things, but also: extremely shoddy regulations and high levels of tax evasion.

High taxes and expensive social programs seem to work in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, ...
According to PALPA, those single-use bottles do get returned (89%) nearly as well as the sturdier ones did. They just aren't reused as such but in production of plastics.

Finnish numbers:

Aluminum cans: 92% recycled (Germany 96%, Belgium 93%)

Glass bottles: nearly 100%

Plastic bottles: 89%

To reuse a aluminum soda can you need only 5% of the energy used to make the can.

97% of beverage bottles are recycled in Finland. Glass bottle gets reused on average 33 times.

Finland seems to be the world leader in this area.

Joining the Finnish beverage recycling scheme is very expensive. The industries own PALPA. If you want to join, you'll have to pay upfront your share of the investment expenses which the other have paid previously. The bottle stock is also very expensive. Materials plus 0,20€ per 0,33-0,5 litre bottle, 0,40€ for 1-2 litre bottle or 0,15€ per aluminum can. For example the German retail giant Lidl chose not to join this scheme. They do recycle their own bottles, but you can't return their bottles anywhere else.
Owning Virtual Worlds For Fun and Profit
How does Clojure account for the JVM's lack or TCO? Does it do it in code and then compiles it? Does it add some special kind of goto before compiling it? Just curious.
Good points, esp re email. I'm not particularly wedded to either side of the debate really, but:

> generating text inside images

oh, nonono, I was thinking more in terms of INPUT.button{background-image: url(btn.php?button_attributes_in_json);}

> adding an icon inside a button is far simpler with css buttons

depends what wonderful CSS you're using to create your button.

> generating images programatically on the server is easier

you say 'programmatically' like I'm suggesting something beyond taking a few pre-made slices and combining them into one image before serving it up. I'm not.
Thanks. We hope that such a device will further lower the barrier of capturing and publishing those often elusive moments of insight and humor we have amongst friends.
Why doesn't Greece default on hits debt if things are really so bad as the article makes it out to be?
Second Chance Romance ebook Review
"So OO is not a well defined concept." Hmmm, last I checked OO was pretty well defined. The implementations of so-called OO languages, on the other hand, that's another story.

If Jonathan or Paul have any doubts on the concept as it was originally conceived, they don't really have to go far. Just ask Alan Kay. He's still alive!

http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay...
When American Express was indirectly involved in fraud (salad oil IIRC), the stock tanked, because analysts sensibly realized that this public litigation would shake consumer confidence in them - arguably, trust is the very thing that a credit card company sells.
But Warren Buffett went down to the supermarket to observe what consumers were actually doing - and saw that they were using them as normal. So he put in most (IIRC) of his wealth into it and more than doubled it (IIRC).

This satellite imagery analysis is doing quantitatively what he did qualitatively.
The comments on that article are fascinating.

If you start with the link above, you'll see a bunch of really brutal comments about Yarlagadda (they seem suspect, but there are so many of them, it's hard to tell). If you continue through the pages, though, you can watch as the thread becomes an outlet for Skype employees angry about the decision and discussing what happened culturally at Skype after the guy was hired.

Skype employee responses: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/06/skype-recruits-yahoo-engine...

Here's a post from "Anonymous Designer" that is telling:

"Two engineers gave notice today and another one quit earlier in the week. I am sad because it looks like Madhu is quick to have a negative impact on our company. The engineers here are not happy with this recent hire and have been very vocal. HR is talking to each and every engineer 1:1 so that they don't loose anymore over this. While I am in design and less impacted the environment is very tense. Makes me question whether it makes sense to stay working at Skype. I haven't talked with Madhu but he is definitely rubbing a lot of people I respect the wrong way and quite obviously doesn't understand our culture. Hope there is a resolution soon so I can focus on pixels and not whether I am wasting my time."

And another from "Skype Developer":

"Madhu presented yesterday for an hour and didn't say anything. Didn't really address comments here and didn't show any technical depth. Josh what have you done? Are we really follow this guy? May be Dan was right to leave. Look out for good Skype engineers on the market.

The only exec I saw at Skype that admitted a mistake was Dan. And he did it in front of his whole org. Josh it is your turn. Convince Dan to stay. Fix this. Is the board listening?"

----

The later responses -- which were posted several days later -- discussing internal Skype politics lead me to believe the brutal comments are at least partially genuine.
Am I missing something, or is Winer unaware of the EP101TC? My uneducated bet is that at <$399 it will be the non-iPad iPad to beat.
You'd be a minority shareholder by the end of the first quarter.
Visualizing the Wikileaks War Logs
I disagree. American culture still idolizes the self made man & entrepreneur more then any other country in the world. Countries like Greece tend to have decades of influence telling them that the community will provide you a job, and the government will help with your problems.
Looks nigh-identical to a talk they gave, what? A few months / a year ago?

Yup, Google does this a lot.
Because they share a currency with most of the rest of Europe and defaulting on their debt would cause the value of that currency to tank. Which could very well tear apart the European Union entirely.

That's the big reason why the IMF was willing to bail them out.
This might be completely rational if there was an excess of perfectly good used cars out there, but there isn't. Cars hold their value incredibly well compared to almost any other consumer product. We're not talking about $30 DVD players. Any used car worth a damn will get sold and bought up. There is almost always someone willing to take up the slack and keep a car running for decades. Therefore, by buying a new car, you're simply decreasing the demand for used cars slightly and lowering their price, which will just mean that someone will just get a better deal.

The only way to effectively reduce carbon emissions on the production side is to drive less person-miles. Buying used or new doesn't change much.
Www.hackhow.com
I was talking about over diagnosis which is anecdotally an issue and is the conclusion the authors of this study drew.
Transmeta failed because they tried to compete using inferior products. All the revolutionary technological underpinnings imaginable won't save a platform from shitty execution. Transmeta's processor architecture was developed to meet specific goals, but it was launched without meeting those goals. After failing in the market they turned to patent trolling. I have no pity for them.

They developed some really cool technology, but unfortunately they fell victim to the idea that it's easy to compete in the market with a v1 product using a revolutionary architecture. Often that's not the case, especially in a realm such as computing that has seen so much optimization everywhere.
$10 per issue is insane. i'd love to order the subscription but this is just too much.
DHS scrambles to cover up FOIA scandal
It's easier to switch from paid to free than otherwise.
Sweden is a good example of what happens with an over-reaching government, high taxes, and expensive social programs.

Denmark is a good example of what happens with an over-reaching government, high taxes, and expensive social programs.
SVG didn't gain the needed momentum as it's approach was more revolutionary instead of evolutionary. Also Internet Explorer, although I'm not sure how it fits in this situation as it surely can't support all that fancy CSS required to do advanced graphics either.
I haven't heard this before. How was their tax collection inefficient? Are you referring to tax evasion?
"A California-oriented paper
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/3986_CAautocar...

states that direct tailpipe emission of CO2 accounts for 68% of the average vehicle lifecycle carbon emissions, with 21 percent linked to production and delivery of fuel, and 11 percent are due to manufacturing, including materials production."

So 11%. Pretty far off.