skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obama declares war on US Citizen engineers
The US Government is spending 45 million dollars to train programmers, and establish outsourcing companies, in Sri Lanka and Armenia.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/integration/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226500202

I was taught that we are a country of "citizens", and that our government representatives were supposed to work only for its citizens.

Corporations are legally considered persons, however they are not citizens, they have no legal voting rights.

Technically, this act appears to fit the standard definition of treason.

"Treason is the crime that covers some of the more serious acts of betrayal of one's sovereign or nation".

"A high crime is one which seeks to injure the country to the profit of an individual or group".

It appears that this act is compelling that high crimes, and treasonous acts are being committed against citizens of the United States.

I am a U.S. expatriate Citizen, and have lived in Vienna, Austria for the past 8 years.

I voted for Obama. I am a calm and objective rational person, who feels that this issue must be discussed.

Please provide objective, unbiased (non political) compelling evidence and statements either for or against this stated thesis.
They've all (I think) individually been posted here before. It's fine to post links to your own blog, but at least have some real content.
Have you been blown away by Ubuntu? Wait until its next release and watch your hardware and/or software stop working.

If I was Microsoft, I wouldn't be worried that much. GNU/Linux is not a business, thus MS products will keep having a grip on gray suites for a long time. Microsoft has the resources to look after its OS. Startups thrive on free-software, but once the pointy haired bosses outnumber the hackers in them, the switch to enterprise friendly software is unavoidable.
IMO it has always been Office that has been the key to MS dominance

I completely agree. Excel is the thing that keeps me tied to Windows (and no, the Mac version of Excel isn't the same). It is by far the best software I have used for small to medium complexity data analysis (at some point you have to pull out the really heavy lifting number crunching tools, but they have even less open source competition), and it is the only software I have used that meets most of my needs and is also approachable to relative beginners.
According to a book I read about game testing it's common for commercial games to be run through a test of simply leaving the game on for hours or days to see if there are bugs that only show up in this way.
Yes. The chart in the post shows how low the correlation is for tf-idf. I believe the original also showed similarly poor results for LSI etc.
Company Stock And Bond Ratings: Skill and Influential Forecasts
Maybe make the desktop application open source? That may remove a lot of the headache for you if you can find a keen customer to develop/support it.

Good luck taking on mapmyride. Mapmyrun (the runner's equivalent) has got worse and worse over the years, I'm sure you can do better!
But will this stunt eventually sell more phones?

Perhaps there are some areas in the world that don't unequivocally consider this bad taste?
Its an amusing one because its easier for foreigners learning mandarin to say then cantonese speaking chinese who then learn mandarin to say.

In my chinese class in the north they just it as a way of testing southern chinese ability at speaking mandarin.
Flawed iTunes Stands Out Among Apple's Products
"Most of all, I love that neither Apple nor any other company can tell me what I can and cannot install on my phone."

though on the other hand, I hate, no. HATE, the fact that $CARRIER$ can tell me what application I have to have installed on my phone without any ability of uninstalling them.

Android is not all sunshine. I might post more comments as I continue reading the article.
If it helps, "quine" here sounds like "wine," not "queen."
Look, I voted for the other guy, but "The president committed treason" is not a good opener for an apolitical debate. It practically commands "Flag me for tendentiousness."

There is no textual or historical support for the notion that our government representatives are supposed to work only for its citizens. For example, the Constitution of the United States and several hundred years of practice gives the President, with advice and consent of the Senate, the authority and moral responsibility to conduct our foreign policy. This will, frequently, benefit foreigners. If it doesn't, he ain't doing it right.

Relatedly, "President declares war on X" has a very specific meaning if one is attempting to be objective, apolitical, and full of that non-emotional rational goodness stuff. It typically involves Marines.
Don't you mean "not everybody lives in Honduras"? There aren't many places in the US where you can live for $2k/month all in, and the Bay Area would be the last place I'd expect to do so.

I meant "pays your rent" quite literally. As in, taking the biggest of your financial worries away and leaving you only needing to deal with the spending money part. So you still can't live on your income, but you can coast along for an entire year on $10k savings.

Up to that point, $10k in the bank meant you'd better start scrambling to pick up a contract in the next couple months before you run out of money.
The RAM/CPU specs are close to my netbook. I'm surprised that JIT compilation isn't standard for a Java-related language, it's pretty old now.

The fragmentation is a concern, for market size (for apps), though it will sill be massively larger than for Apple. The appstore deficiency is a greater concern - google need to buy a startup for this, they suck at UI.

The Oracle suit does scare me though. Why invest sweat equity if it might all be washed away? That's the idea, I guess.

Regardless of what happens to this particular platform, the hardware is just about there, so something fantastic will soon be here.

reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/dafec/android_first...
don't fall foul to the "SaaS is pure profit!" syndrome.

I wrote a little bit about this here:
http://yongfook.com/saas-is-not-pure-profit

In a nutshell, to get to 200 members you are not going to be operating on 100% profit margins unless you happen to be extremely fortunate.

The reality is more likely that a decent chunk of that $2k per month is being spent on customer acquisition costs. You won't get 200 customers just by existing. You need to advertise.
Synchronet BBS List (current)
I had the exact same thought. "Makes 1m/mo" != "Generates 1m/mo of revenue for the company."
Oh My zsh
Yeah, really, here in Pittsburgh $2k/month is enough to live pretty comfortably.
Fast dynamic casting [pdf]
...that's what Shi said. :-)
Should put some sort of mesh\screen on the front label airports. Otherwise your cabinet is vacuum cleaner for dust.
At least not in all niches.
They are the claims that don't reference other claims. All the claims are bundled together towards the end of a patent.
A Facebook Bill Of Rights
I think this is a good principle. It's easy to get confused about what a function is/does unless you have a guide. (For experienced developers, experience is that guide.) The samurai principle seems to be what functions were originally for... At least in the OO world.
There aren't many places in the US where you can live for $2k/month all in

$2,000 / 160 = $12.50, which is substantially higher than the minimum wage in all fifty states of the Union, so I'm guessing that there exist at least a few people who are somehow making do...
Pets Acting Like Chameleons
Same origin policy would stop it from scraping MMR's site unless it was hosted there.
> "Most corporate CEOs in companies with corporate jets are REQUIRED to use those jets as their ONLY mode of travel ..."

That would make getting a cup of coffee from the local café a serious PITA. I guess that's why they have executive assistants?
Not Quite Missile Command :)

I know it pretty well as I'm friends with Bill Carlton - the guy that's tried to beat the Missile Command high score a few times. The game isn't as straight forward as you might think, there's a game crashing bug for instance which has burned Bill twice now at 40 hours+

http://www.highscoremovie.com/

Watching Missile Command is pretty fascinating. I watched Bill's last attempt live as it streamed it on Justin.tv
Thanks a lot. Really helpful!
Looks like those soviets knew how to have fun.
Ultralight startups: little capital, just computer
congratulations! when barmstrong was down here in Buenos Aires, we talked a lot about universitytutor.com and it's cool to see him just make little tweaks to the site and let it grow slowly and steadily. very inspiring!
The post would be more interesting if we knew what questions were asked in the survey.

Edit: I meant how exactly were the survey looked like, including the service description. If it's a paid service, I highly doubt the 73% figure.
I personally don't think the government should be doing this, and our national debt is just outrageous as well as the health care plan, etc. The U.S. may be partially socialist already, but we don't need to make government any bigger.

However, on point, if everyone else is outsourcing, why shouldn't our government be allowed to? It sucks for sure, but it's hardly treason. It's just their attempt at good business, although they will suck at it, for certain, because there is no accountability.
I think the point of this article is that simple things -should- be done by machines, and humans should be used for things that require originality. (Of course, there are still some manual labor tasks that we haven't invented the machines for, yet.) Those jobs let people actually contribute to society, instead of merely holding the line.

I'm not sure why this is such a hard concept.
cool. My girlfriend had an idea about startup and we started discussing it.
At some point I told her 'lets stop hand-waving and look at some data' .
For ~10 bucks we got 110 good responses to 11-question survey on Mechanical Turk. It really gave us new perspective on some of our problems. That was much easier than asking our friends for feedback (which we did too).
It's right there in the post:

I gave a brief description of what the website/service offering would be then asked the users:

Gender
Age
Would they use the service as described above
Give me 3 examples of how they would use the service.
General feedback or ideas on the service, why they would or would not use it.*
Addressing The VC Seed Investor Signaling Problem
Ironically, when pronouncing this you don't move your tongue at all.
It's not clear from the article what kind of business model the Startup in question is planning to use. This is relevant, as the fact the 73% of random strangers said they would "use the service as described" doesn't give any indication that they'd be willing to pay for it.

Clearly, the author got his $27.50 worth; how much that's really worth, though, in the long term, remains to be seen.
Strange use of Mechanical Turk if you ask me. You could've spent about the same in Google Adwords asking people to take a survey. At least then you'd have a survey of "people who are searching for important keywords related to my topic of interest" rather "people who are so technically capable that they are using MT".

"I also found out to my surprise that more men than women said they’d use the service. I fully expected it to be the other way around." 200 people is not a large sample size and I would caution you against making sweeping decisions about the future of a company based on this small size. It could be that the MT program attracts more men than women? I don't know how you set it up but you said earlier that you didn't really do any segmentation.
Last year I was in a reasonably nice 3 bedroom apartment on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Rent = $600/month.

If you don't have too many other expenses, then you could definitely get by on $2,000/month income.
Can you enforce this? Here in Italy some websites forbid crawlers. I guess an user can always run a software over a website, especially on data entered by herself, can't she?

Isn't a browser a scraper, too? Just make the user load a page and then harvest data from the DOM.
I'm not saying memorization has no purpose. On the contrary, it's pretty much required if you don't want to have to re-derive everything every time you go to use it.

Also FTA:
In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room.

This says nothing about studying in the way I defined it.
True, it is also good to have an idea which tone means what. As far as I know it's: high-level, raising, falling-and-then-raising and falling (the shape of the dashes over i gives the hint) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_phonology#Tones
Is that what passes for a rational argument? I'm not assuming anything - I don't know where you got that idea from. I've seen women being ignored, excluded or put down first hand, often savagely, so it's not just idle speculation.

edit - some meat to my point:

One case that I'm thinking of involved a woman making a fairly reasonable technical point (something involving Apache, I think - it was a while ago) in the hallway at a conference, but then got lectured for ten minutes by a guy who took exception to some minor pedantic point. Totally condescending, rude and thoughtless - he didn't do the same to the other male developers in the discussion.

There was another incident at a Developer conference here in Australia a while ago, where a developer put up pictures of hot chicks in his Perl presentation. Again, unnecessary and stupid.

Do you still think that I'm assuming things?
or whether people in the target market were remotely likely to be found answering questions on Amazon Mechanical Turk...
game credits and download at http://www.baconoppenheim.com/projects/conduit/pitsi/
take care
I've done the open source app thing before. It can be fulfilling on some sort of karmic level, but unless you happen to crank out the next Apache or Linux, it is almost certainly not going to be a way for you to make any sort of living. At best, you'll get to claim it for credit on your résumé.
People who use AMT for earning money may not necessarily be the right audience you are looking for.
Ask HN: How do to what you don't love.
How can I motivate myself to start and work through something that I have no desire to do?

How would you do it for yourself? Or am I the only one who is struggling with this :/?
Even though it was tough to go through slough in the snow, I ploughed through without a thought.
Is there some catch all term or concept for someone saying "my new thing (or a thing I tried out for a short period) is different from my old thing and therefore uncomfortable to me with my expectations and habits and so I declare it inferior"? I get the feeling we're going to hearing that a lot as the iPhone early adopters shift to Android and after reading so many worthless Windows->Mac, Windows->Linux and Mac->Linux switching stories that just repeat this error at great length it would be good to be able to put a name to this concept and short-circuit it this time.
Limitless Options, Limited Time
Every time I read an article of simplicity in products, they seem to miss something:

Every user wants different features.

That's why products get to be so complex. Each individual user only wants a few features, but they're different than his neighbor's wants. Since it's inefficient to design a device for 1 person, they're designed to incorporate as many features as possible to capture as much of the market as possible.

For instance, I only ever use 1 setting on my toaster. It's slightly to the right of '2', IIRC. (It's an analog dial.) There are some buttons that I don't even remember what they do. You could sell me a toaster that only toasted on that setting and I'd be really, really happy.

I doubt anyone else uses this exact setting. By making it an analog dial, they've managed to catch many more people. But some people don't just want to make toast. Some want to thaw bread that's been frozen, or other things that I haven't considered. There are special buttons on the toaster for these things.

The designer of my toaster has done a pretty good job of keeping the complicated functionality away from my toasting process. It's not simple, or I'd remember all of it.

My microwave, on the other hand, managed to complicate things. If I have to use 50% power, it's a weird combination of button presses, in the correct order, to make it happen. It's also different on every microwave I've ever owned. This is really annoying and could have been made simpler, I'm sure.

If I had designed the microwave, I'd have the user enter the numbers for power, then hit the 'power level' button. Then enter the numbers for time and hit the 'time' button. Then hit 'start'. Power level would be optional, but time would not be. This arrangement works well because we're used to entering information and then hitting a button to make it stick. (Alternatively, hitting the button first, then the numbers, could also work, but seemed less intuitive.)
Why use zsh ? (IRC) (2005)
Why Facebook is doomed and how you can profit
This may be a naive question but: why did the error get accumulated over time? The original system clock was correct, and if they read from it every time and converted, the error would have remained at 0.000000095. Could someone explain how exactly this happened?
The latest version of Android (Froyo) supports JIT.

Not sure I agree with the "They suck at UI" comment. Most of the rest of the Android UI is really well designed. The Market Place app needs improvement though yes.
When pensions (and social security) were invented, we didn't have the technology and knowledge to handle everyone doing personal investments for their old age. Instead, we had the companies and government do it for them.

Things are changing, now. We're starting to expect people to handle it themselves, since they're able to... And since it's become such a monstrous job that the government can't handle it correctly.

Phasing out things that don't work in favor of things that do isn't a bad thing.
Don't waste time writing tests
Might be a bit off topic, but does anyone know a good alternative to MTurk for people outside the US?
I've actually been kicking around the idea of making a web app similar to Instapaper, but specifically tailored for the Kindle. I was thinking of adding priority articles (articles you want on your kindle next), with other articles as filler (ones you want to read, but will be bumped if you find a more important/interesting article). Does Instapaper fill this need for most people?
It is still waaaaaaaaaaay better than asking your family and friends.
Nice downvote - want to back it up with some argument?
Set modest goals and measure your progress.
What is your favorite mobile device for business Apps?
I'd take the next logical step: integrate it with a shell, much like zsh's zftp module does for FTP sessions.

I may have to write this now.
That is awesome! Illustrative diacritics, who would have thought? I still would love to hear the sentence spoken.
So, once again the police will ignore what the people what

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Well, here SCUD (a technology obsoleted by 1960s) certainly worked, while the head-to-toes digital Patriot didn't.
Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory...Ain't
That's an AWESOME dating service.
Startup Weekend in Toronto (Sept 24-26)
I successfully used http://www.crowdflower.com to submit jobs to MT from outside the US.
I've seen weirder use for mechanical turk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_CC5r5Wfm0 So, I guess why not?
We’ll never agree about online audience size
> I voted for Obama. I am a calm and objective rational person, who feels that this issue must be discussed.

Then you are receiving exactly what you asked for, "hope" and "change". Next time, consider the lack of material behind the mesmerizing rhetoric for the weak minded before casting your vote.
Hi zumda, I have used http://crowdflower.com before. You get an account manager to help you which is neccessary as there is no supporting documentation and the interface is a little confusing / unhelpful when things don't work out.
Um, is it really worth it? You add a level of complexity and anyway at the end of the day, if you have all your articles on the Kindle you can always access the TOC of your Instapaper issue to jump to the ones you want to read. Personally, I would not need such classification system.

Note that usually I only have a handful of articles to read, so I am probably not the right user for such improved system.
Nosotek -- North Korean software development
An article from the the heart of the java community promoting writing open source iPhone apps. Interesting.
Hyper FB Traffic Review
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4 tips on managing your personal profile at work
You know what they call a content driven site without any good content? A load of bollox.

This.
The most incredible part is that they developed two mobile phone games, "Big Lebowski Bowling" and "Men in Black: Alien Assault"... for a company that later became part of News Corp.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-06/kim-jong-il-bowls-f...
To avoid drafts, dirt and pests. To raise the height of the mattress, making it easier to get in and out of bed.

(So says Wikipedia.)
I have a huge back-log of articles in Instapaper, but there are definitely articles that come up that I want to read right away, so I think the priority system would help for me. Another thought was to add RSS feeds as well, with priority filtering on them as well.
Initially, the major cost for customer acquisition should be founders' own time. Writing articles, pitching to blogs and news, promoting on social media, SEO and all other organic means should be the methods to get initial customers until you hit significant revenue (or get funding) to start using paid acquisition methods.

The cost of customer acquisition can be very high for a bootstrapped startup to afford. For example, Constant Contact (for $20/mo subscription) spends $375 as cost to acquire one customer. Spending a major chunk of $2k to acquire just a few paying customers may or may not be a viable strategy (depends on numerous variables, of course).

Source of data: http://investor.constantcontact.com/annuals.cfm
There's a good video available "How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters" by Josh Bloch. There's a selection of slides to accompany a version of the talk here http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf [PDF].
Gates mostly bet against John Sculley, Mike Spindler, etc.
Why not link directly to http://joshduck.com/periodic-table.html ?
Google Privacy Concerns
Not a book, but Trolltech (makers of Qt) has nice recommendations for API design:

http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq13-apis.html
I expect more from Linux Journal.
I think it has to do with our tendency to overcorrect spelling rather than use the simpler ones (at least when the native speakers comment here). I believe it's exploited in etymology - i.e. even literally authors made errors in spelling but these are thought to come mostly from trying to be more correct than neccessary
Alcohol may make you sleepy. But it doesn't make for better sleep. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_use_and_sleep
Here is a gist of of the JavaScript file that helps to create the experience: https://gist.github.com/eeae3d6aa1ac04f074cf

At a glance, it looks remarkably simple. It also looks as though Google is using parts of the Closure library as well.
Really? I've managed to live on a little over $2k/month in even the NY metro area with a reasonably comfortable lifestyle.