skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Read to the second page, especially this:

Global companies like Caterpillar, General Electric, General Motors and Siemens — as well as scores of others — are making a more aggressive push into China, in some cases moving research and development centers here.

I am, personally, familiar with the movement of R&D to China. This, alone, makes me believe that this is not a flash-in-the-pan, but a genuine long term trend.

Also, as I recall the original estimate for when China would become #1 auto consumer was 2012. They beat that by 3 years. So, I would hazard a guess that it won't take them all the way to 2030 to become economy #1. What will be really interesting about that, though, is that due to population size alone, they will still have a far, far smaller per-capita income than the U.S.
I see Oo around London pretty often, so I don't imagine the question is about his personal location. I suspect it's more about why a continent is being written off.
I'm always surprised by the hard lines people draw between technical and business cofounders. 'Technical founders' mock the business side's naivite and reject the notion that any less than 50% of the work in building a business is programming. 'Business founders' think they have all the right stuff and see 16 year olds building facemash or yousquare, then assume anyone can program with a book and an afternoon.

Truth is, if you can slot yourself into one of these classifications that easily you're probably not going to be a very good startup cofounder. A startup requires people to wear lots of different hats, with some being in the technical side and others being on the business side. While normal people, aka business and technical founders, can wear one, maybe two hats at a time, start up founders need to be 12 headed hydras.

I'm not saying that there's no specialization on a startup team; it's necessary. But how will your programming ninja respond when an investor asks about how your branding fits the specific niche you're targeting? Or what will the business dude say when questioned about what stack you're going to deploy on?

Maybe it's time we stopped thinking about business/technical cofounders and started evaluating people as startup cofounders.
My issue with both of the articles, true though they are, is they don't represent the partnership model that most often succeeds: you know, people who are actually friends, who work together and trust each other.

The blind "hello, please believe in me" model seems commonly believed in, but I've yet to hear of tangible cases where it actually worked. (business person recruiting techie at an event).
Our knowledge is incomplete, but it's far from useless.

Our knowledge can also be harmful. I don't know that much about these tests but I would make the point that unreliable tests in general are not something to screw around with.

If a cancer test produces enough false positives, it can do much more harm than good. It's easy to take a position for your self that "I can make a rational decision no matter how much noise I'm getting on a sketchy subject". But if you start giving out sketchy data and interpretations to a large number of people, the statistic say you screw people's live up.

... Uh, what they are withhold isn't "your DNA" but their very crude analysis of it. Thus I don't see rights coming into this... but I'm sure others will.
il, I'm the same, but I think it helps to at least be on that side of the fence - a hacker turned to the dark side - than be the proverbial "Here are my mockups in PowerPoint, now build me a website" clueless/exploitative 'business guy'.
I don't disagree with your points in the abstract. I could envision a highly logical society in which learning that you had prostate cancer didn't prompt an immediate desire to get that cancer treated.

Even then, why get the test at all if it won't change management? In other words, if you're not going to do anything differently based on a positive or negative test, the test is simply a waste of money, and potentially harmful.
You've heared it long before, and it hasn't impacted tourism, it was still THE destination back in the day. Law is strict, but should one respect it when chooses to come there. The Gulf as a whole is not for everybody, for sure.

Notice how most of the stories you read about people arrested for moral code offence, concern Britons. I'm not so surprised, as some of them forget it's not a UK colony. Once I've seen a British woman making fun of arabic incenses in a mall, made stupid facial expressions, laughed off, etc. A local approached, calmly showed her how to use it and then angrily said "it's our land, our culture. not yours". Hard to argue with that.

Dubai has dozens of dark sides, but if you agree to live by the code, I still believe it can be lots of fun.
Look at some of the customer development stuff that's come up recently, though; I've seen companies with very very little actual code/product (in some cases, none!) iterate extremely quickly through wizard-of-oz smokescreens and the like.

I agree that fast execution and the ability to turn around and change what you've done (some hackers I know are very change-resistant, note) is important - that's why my last startup didn't do as well as it could. But a lot of that could have been saved with more customer-development methods as well as faster, better code.
Do you want a high credit rating, or do you want money in your pocket?

If you don't need to borrow money, then you don't need a credit rating. In this day and age, a house is no longer a given (since they have proven to be extremely poor investments at times), so you don't necessarily "need" a mortgage anymore. If that's your situation, then your credit rating means a lot of nothing. You don't need a good rate on your mortgage. You need cash in your pocket.
You can't scroll across the Pacific, you can't even see the lines across the Pacific as whole with both ends. But Bing maps can do that, what's wrong here? It's quite a problem with this type of map.
Hi, I wanted to know what the procedure was for bringing on potential team-members during the three month funding period? In other words, if they are not the founders then how will they be incorporated during our time with YC? Thanks in advance.
I started university in 2000 and still haven't even started paying my $20k UK student loan back. shrug
Is there any danger to English as a universal language for the internet, business, education, and research?

Will we need to learn Chinese in a decade or two?
>I did the unthinkable and worked full-time for both my undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Distance learning?

I've done an undergrad level diploma over 3 years with the Open University (just over one-third of a B.Sc degree IIRC) by working 4½ days and studying in my spare time. But I could never have done my undergrad degree and worked full-time - lectures started at 9am, lab days in until 5pm, other days there would be reading to do, presentation prep, course assignments, tutorials (oral study classes with a postgrad or lecturer doing questions and going over course materials). Do 9-5 (not that uncommon) and then do a couple of hours of reading or essay writing; when do you have time to work for money?
Well, I wonder if there is some specific latitude where there's more land than sea, of course, except Antarctica.
I agree. "What you business guys should be thinking about is this: what am I bringing to this business?" Yes. I think some business people way over-estimate the value of their contribution.

(By the way, I found your gender-specific language a little distracting: "business guys" and "man up". Just sayin'.)
http://www.mcsquare.me/ , http://www.techcrunch.com/
I haven't and I'll take as long as I can do to so. The interest rate is so painfully low that it's dumb to pay them off.
I've always wondered this as well. Are they contained in pipes or something? How do they deal with mountains and cliffs in the ocean? Do they go right over them or around them? Does anybody have information about the physical characteristics of how this works?
Dubai strikes me as the ultimate endorsement for agile development. Even seemingly unlimited investment, near dictatorial power, and a war room stocked with the smartest development minds in the world could not turn a small patch of desert into a world class tourism and financial center. None of the pieces made sense, yet they charged onwards to some higher, more perfect vision only Dubai could see. Could've been a lot easier if they'd just failed early, and failed fast.
There are much more compelling reasons for Chinese people to learn English than there are for foreigners to learn Chinese, though it certainly won't hurt your job prospects. For one, if you learn to speak Chinese you get improved job prospects vis-a-vis two countries. (Yeah, I went there, PRC.) A Chinese person who learns English gets instant access to the US, Anglosphere, Japan (well, cough, theoretically speaking), Western Europe, etc etc.

(Same for Japanese, too. I get "You should have studied Chinese!" all the time, as if these islands had sunken into the ocean after the bubble burst and do not still outrank every European country in trade with the US.)
"I just want to speak the language, understand what is hard and when to call bullshit or just how to ask better questions."

I'm working for a client who did this and it's awesome. When things get technical I don't have to force it into layman's terms--he understands. He also understands the nature of coding and how some things that are easy to conceptualize can be difficult to code (and vice versa). His decision to learn about programming has made it possible to have a great, trusting relationship with good communication and great results (this is the most productive I've ever been).
Pretty interesting stuff. I was hoping to correlate some of my traceroutes with these cables to figure out how my own international traffic is routed, but it seems that with the rise of optical routing, not enough intermediate hops show up for me to figure it out. For example, San Jose to Copenhagen seems to be a single hop for me, so I have no idea what transatlantic cable my data takes:

xe-9-3-0.sjc10.ip4.tinet.net
xe-1-2-0.cph10.ip4.tinet.net
> his book, in the end, plumps for intellectual property as the biggest single spur

"A Farewell to Alms" goes into great detail that very few people involved in the industrial revolution got wealthy. It's a story of inventors and industrialists coming away with extremely modest financial gains, despite huge accomplishment, over and over. Greater fortunes were made in completely low tech and un-revolutionized businesses like pottery.

The idea that the industrial revolution was a matter of legal frameworks and financial motivations is not particular plausible in light of the financial facts. The people who drove the industrial revolution never much profited.

"A Farewell to Alms" argues the industrial revolution happened in Britain because to a degree unique to Britain, the most productive and responsible people had the most children for several generations. It is documented in great detail how this was the true. Through eugenic forces, the British worker and the British engineer had become driven enough to create the industrial revolution.
Hey, let us know if you find anything that piques your interest.
A Hint Of A Chrome OS Product With Verizon
No. The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system. Consequently they are all learning English so they can work with foreign companies.

You need to keep in mind, China has few natural resources so they are reliant on everyone else. Because of this they will be forced to learn English. Chinese will still be the main language of China, but it won't become the world language the way English has.
You can see one at http://www.itnewsafrica.com/?p=3111

And yes, they are laid on the floor, mostly. In shallows they may be armored against sharks or plowed in to protect against anchors.

The Neal Stephenson, WIRED article is an excellent read, but honestly unless you have a new Safari or some bookmarklet to extract the content from the surrounding flashing lights and popping ads you will probably go blind before you finish it.
Because software engineers don't work on your ideas for free, they work on their ideas for free.

That explains open source.
How would YC read second, third and so-on submitted application form?
Should I submit as much as I can whenever I fill a chunk so that they would have more time reading("Early submissions have a significant advantage"), or would this just make them read less on further submission?
Why is there a 5TBps line from the northern part of mainland Norway up to Svalbard? Is there much telecomms there?
hn-api: Python API for Hacker News
Downvote if you like - it's simple mathematics. Money (especially government-subsidized money) is damn near free today. Rushing to pay it back at near-zero rates is foolish.
Even then, why get the test at all if it won't change management?

Well, quite a few genetic tests do change management (Warfarin sensitivity, antidepressant response, various differences in activity of various enzymes.), but I even want to know about test results that don't. I want to know if I have ApoE4 or some other gene that highly correlates with currently-incurable diseases. If I have a better idea of my life expectancy and my future quality of life, I can change my behavior today. I would live my life quite differently if I thought I my brain would rot in 20 years.
An implausibly illustrated introduction to HTML5 Web Workers
Arts & Letters Daily. Lots of great long-form stuff:
http://www.aldaily.com/
Vibram Fivefingers Men's Classic Blue/Gray
Provides varies of vibram fivefingers shoes.7/24 Online shop.High quality and low price.Free shipping and professional servies.
Wow, I can say the same of Argentina! Except for the Mafia level and now the supreme court is more independent.
I love how it's talking about china being #2, with a $1.33 trillion gdp, then it drops US's $14 trillion gdp, as if it's an easy to achieve milestone.

I have no fears that china will outpace the US, for a number of reasons.
Yeah, perhaps I'll write something that once we have a bit more experience with server-side PS.

Interesting what you say about foo.bar; PS originally did that, and I was one of the people who lobbied against it. It does make getting started a little easier, but interferes with macros down the road. For example, if you want to do anything like transforming foo.bar to foox.barx, you end up having to parse the symbols to split them, which seems wrong. Since Lisp-style metaprogramming is pretty much Parenscript's raison d'être (well, that and interoperability with CL for the crazy few who care), it seems foolish to do anything to compromise it.
Smooth-Stone aims at Intel
No, I went to class on campus every day/night.

http://www.utdallas.edu/
And they'd be right. The precious idea is practically worthless, the work to make it happen is invaluable.
Yeah, they changed the rules around the significant discount just as I started paying it off, which was a nuisance. More so for my beautiful wife, who's paying off a law degree (more expensive again) with no incentive to do so earlier.
I accumulated $77,000 in student loan debt during the first three years of college, and paid for the rest (another 4 years, two degrees) directly.

I paid off that debt before any of the loans entered repayment with the income from my businesses I started while in college.
Usually 69 millimetres (2.7 in). They are slightly thicker near the shore where they have an extra layer of protection.
Hmm,

His inability to find and keep people doesn't seem like testament to his skills as a recruiter.
The Darker Side of Competitive Gaming
It sounds like the previous system was stacked against the corporations. Why shouldn't the system be designed to discourage frivolous suits? Stockholders are people too.

If a person brings suit and loses, their lawyer should also be held accountable.
Manolo Blahnik Slingbacks
I think it's an opportunity, but not for expanding to the West - I don't know how many ideas that can "make it" in Africa are readily translatable.

Rather, since isn't even on investment radar at the moment, as a local startup you can expand across the continent and have a big head start on foreign companies that try to enter the market when you're already established (viz. QQ, Taobao, Baidu in China), if the African market starts heating up.

Whether your startup will be an internet startup or not, is probably the question.

In nominal terms, the GDP and number of people on the African continent is roughly equivalent to India (numbers from Wikipedia), though it is true that it is spread across numerous countries.

I find it hard to believe that it will not become the "next frontier" at some point, if nations across the continent start electing technocrats.
summary: user buys ridiculously cheap hardware, is offended when it dies shortly after warranty runs out.

I guess I can see that... I mean, if consumers complain about things choking when they are shortly out of warranty, it's more likely companies will put more effort into preventing such a thing. but, on the other hand, considering the price point and target market, I would not expect a netbook to last as long as a real laptop. Expecting your Chevy Corsica to last like a Toyota Camrey is just irrational. (which isn't to say you shouldn't complain and put pressure on Chevy to do better if you do get stuck with a Corsica)

It would be interesting to see more MBTF statistics for netbooks, though, if such things exist. I imagine getting such statistics beyond the warranty period is really, really difficult, just 'cause I imagine that for most users of cheap netbooks, well, if it fails and it's out of warranty, it's garbage. just counting repairs would not give you a fair number.
Hacker News RSS feed that includes the content of the linked article
Also the British imported early capitalism and improvements in agriculture from the Dutch.

Without the improvements in agriculture, around 80% of the population had to work the fields, just to feed everyone.
Verbose as it is, even Java doesn't employ that many ponderous mixed metaphors.
Perhaps not, but it certainly says something about the fragility of the US monopole mentality. Even if they get to just half of the US GDP, it would be a major coup for China.
Even better, get a roommate and halve the price. Having a roommate doesn't really require a college lifestyle. The more people you have, the more the per person price reduces. So a big, nice place where everyone gets their own room can actually be cheaper than what you pay.
Ask HN: Where to look for contractors / consultants?
Well... pardon my self interest here. But I am a recruiter for a small firm and I often receive requirements for IT jobs (Java, Weblogic, ETL, SQL, Oracle) in the Bay Area. What resource or website you think is the ideal source for me to gather resumes and contact local consultants specifically in the Bay area ?
I have an Economist subscription. Reading on paper still beats reading on screen.
My loans were subsidized (stafford) and locked into a VERY low rate for 10 years. I could have paid them off quickly, but my plain old savings account had a much higher rate of return than what the loan cost.

It took me 9.5 years to pay them off (I got emotional and just paid off the last 6 months to be done with it.)
Ask HN: advice for a college grad starting a career?
Hi HN,

I'm starting my first real job tomorrow and was wondering if you have any advice? I know that the community really values self-employment, but I also know that a lot of you work for bigger companies and have a lot of wisdom to share. What do you wish you had known when you started your first job? What do you like seeing in the new employees at your company? Thanks in advance!
Or maybe just look at deleting names which happens every day and pick one which actually means something... pool.com, namejet.com and snapnames.com.
> people consider defining new infix operators to be on a whole new level compared to defining `ordinary' functions

It has nothing to do with the concept of defining new infix operators. It is to do with hacking the language in a way that is unexpected and (initially) confusing.

Hacks like this are clever and interesting, but not Pythonic. Doing this over using an "ordinary" function just makes Python harder to read because it is not conventional and not idiomatic. Any programmer competent in the language should be able to dive in without having to understand which set of hacks have been used. It doesn't matter whether it is mythical or not; it should not be used because it is a hack.
One example of CouchDB offline replication:

http://one.ubuntu.com/
Understood. Yeah I've also discovered it's hard to come up with a name which is both (a) cool, and (b) accurate, and (c) not already being used! Here's some random name brainstorming I'll donate:

YATL: Yet Another Template Language

YATS: Yet Another Template System

Webplates (meaning web+templates. though WebPlate.com & WebPlates.com both have a scummy adverlink squatter)

Minplates.py

HTemplates.py

PyperText (pyper = python + hypertext something)

PyperTML

PyTML (Python Text Markup Language?)

PyTML (Python Template Model Language?)

AntiTemplates.py

GenHTML.py

GenH.py
Hacker News app for Android
More to the point, mandarine will not become the language of international business for the same reason French WAS the language of international business up to the early 1900s; the french were involved with business everywhere even though the british and germans had most of the consumer population.

Furthermore, English education is already an integrated part of the chinese (and asian) education systems.
wow, you must be good!

I've been told that starting university at age 13 and winning the Putnam competition support this hypothesis. ;-)

Your scholarship paid course fees and living expenses for 4 (?) years [...] What's your subject? What was your dissertation title, which Uni?

As an undergraduate student, I received a $20k entrance scholarship; about half of that went to fees, and the remainder was plenty to cover my living expenses since I was living with my parents. This was at Simon Fraser University and I was studying mathematics. SFU doesn't have undergraduate dissertations per se, but the paper I published in Math.Comp. is rather equivalent: "Rapid multiplication modulo the sum and difference of highly composite numbers".

As a graduate student, I received a scholarship worth tuition + about 700 GBP/month (the amount was adjusted for inflation each year) -- the total value worked out to somewhere around $100k. This was at Oxford University (but the scholarship was funded by the UK government) and I was studying computing. My thesis title was "Matching with Mismatches and Assorted Applications".
Study finds that low fees are best indicator of mutual fund performance
I think youre attributing bad intentions where incompetence would suffice.
Also since the main selling point of Java was portability I think Sun was correct in going after implementations which diverged significantly.
Sun might have fumbled on a lot of different things, ethics doesnt appear to be one of them.
$1.33 trillion is China quarter GDP, $14 trillion is US yearly GDP. And the second includes many trillions of financial "product".

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=ny_gdp_mk...