skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My first day back in New York after a year in Berlin, I got on the subway and found my end of the car dominated by an obscenity-shouting black man with a crutch and a suitcase spilling garbage.

Apparently she has never met a homeless Roma on the U-Bahn. Except in Berlin people won't stop to help her when she pretends to fall getting off the train, they'll spit at her or throw trash.

My friend David Abraham, a historian and legal scholar, gave a fascinating talk at the American Academy in Berlin in which he suggested that the European welfare state is linked to ethnic homogeneity: people are more willing to share with those who seem like themselves.

Muslim immigration will be the moral test, and not just for Germany but for the rest of Europe as well.

I know the article is about Germany. But there's ample, recent, evidence that when the welfare states of Europe have problems, it's blamed (fairly or unfairly) on immigrants. Similarly in the U.S., anti-immigration proponents often blame the drain recent immigrants have on social services as part of the justification for extreme policies.

Recent mass deportation events in France show that this sentiment is probably true. Likewise, in the time I've spent in Germany, many people expressed discontent with the wave of Muslim immigrants and the subsequent strain on the welfare state of all these new, poor, undereducated people suddenly showing up to the new promised land.

Europe is undergoing some massive growing pains as it has emerged as the new go-to place for the poor unwashed masses of the world. These massive waves of immigration are very new to the continent (and especially to the individual countries).

But I think the American experiment can show that in the long run, relatively open immigration policies pay off. Everybody forgets that the poor unwashed masses from a foreign country that suddenly show up on your shores are there for primarily one reason...to work and to work hard. That kind of free, positive, energy needs to be harnessed. In two or three generations it pays off with so many ways. If it's not harnessed, it goes someplace else, often not in a constructive way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Riots
Especially for a native, who will have about 12~ years of learning before they start reading newspapers, it's really not a big deal.

Assuming the 12 years of education happen! Consider that the amount of education one needs to be literate in Japanese is more than the amount of education it takes to be literate in, say, French, English or Spanish.

Note I'm not saying one is better than the other, just that they're different.
When we finally get AI to work language of legacy websites won't be a problem.
They don't say what they were selling them for. I want to know what the difference between cost of the gold and price of the coin was.
Email has been free since the beginning. People are used to it, that's why I think senders would hate having to use it, even boycott the service. It would also set a dangerous precendence that email doesn't have to be free.
We script everything so that it is an automated script further all of our process is managed in JIRA. So when we do a release, the production manager decides whats in and what out via JIRA, based on that, our script takes those ticket numbers, goes to our source control system and moves the associated code into a release branch, tags it and automatically deploys it to a testing server, the release is verifies and tested. If good, the production manager then goes back to Jira and marks it as tested. The system then deploys the release to production and once verified merges that branch back to the head.

OK so what happens in the actual release? We do a rolling release in which the script goes to the router and re-routes traffic to the other servers (basically takes a server off line). The script then deploys to the server, brings it up verifies it and then turns traffic back onto the server.

A couple of principals that we live by are that are back end applications are REST services, we don't do Java, or RoR, or .NET apps, we do REST middleware with a language, ours is Java but it could be any. This is a huge distinction because it means that we don't do JSP, JSF or any of the other server side frameworks. This makes our server side very easy to mange.

Also we don't use session. All of our services are stateless. Which means we can drop in a new service or section of an overburdened service to dedicated hardware with out all the implications of session. This allows us to handle traffic without having to deal with the context of that traffic. If we experience heavy load on the profile service we can drop in 4 new boxes with the profile service on it and route request to those boxes. We don't have constraints that require them to go back to the same box they have a session on or complex session management infrastructure to ensure context is there for a user when a request comes into that box. Basically any request, at any time, can be services by any box, with no need for external information from outside the request. It is completely stateless.

On the database side all developers write delta scripts that take the database from A to B. We also take the cumulative patch set apply them together and generate a clean version x.x DB script that is more efficient. when a release goes out the scripts are run against a DB that is taken off line and that DB is brought up in unison with the app server that is at release x.x.

As well with the DB, we have a script that exports fairly static information that is in the DB out to static json files on the web server.

Finally, we don't template html files on the server, we write JavaScript UI apps that pull data from the json files and the REST services, we use a CMS to do templating and the CMS exports static HTML to the web server. Dynamic info is overlaid on the client side via JavaScript. This makes the web assets deployments drop dead simple.
It Isn't Just a Myth: A Little Thanks Goes a Long Way
A box of sweets for a logo. You'll probably get only bad entries and in the end there will be another OSS software with a bad identity that looks like some programmer made it up (in most cases they do).

My suggestions is that you must know some graphic designers in person, or your local University must have a Visual Communications department. Go ask them if their students would make logo as a part of the course brief. They get a credit on working on an actual client logo, that can be quite a thing when you are still at Uni. Other options is to as you local friendly designer to make it.

Just my opinion on the matter. And I contributed design to a local FOSS community, but they asked nicely and you get feedback and can talk about identity and brand and usage. Here is like a pop quiz and brands don't get designed that way.
Could you define "insane", please? I've read the "Free Software, Free Society"[1] compilation, and Stallman appeared to me as very balanced and cautious (at least when it comes to his political views).

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf
For hackers: this works the other way too. Let your SO describe what they do to you, even if it puts you to sleep. They'll appreciate it.
if someone's wondering how he displays chess symbols that's how :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_symbols_in_Unicode

ps : also it's better to beautifier the code to (try to) understand it :

http://jsbeautifier.org/
You may like these AS3/Browser JS benchmarks: http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/712
"Why did the Royal Canadian Mint make the world's purest and largest gold bullion coin? Because we can."

That and because they probably made a decent profit from the sale of each coin.
Title is wrong: it's 1014 bytes.
If you think about it, normalization in RDBMS had such a major role because storage was expensive

Umm, not really. Two words: referential integrity.
In that scenario, you're not a BA you're the customer because you want your idea developed. So hire a competent developer to make that idea come to life. The core problems with being a BA are the same, you'll skew the implementation with your own pre-conceived notions of how you think things should be done. Given you're not capable of doing the work, you really shouldn't have any input on that.

I don't tell my accountant how to do their job, despite having numerous opinions on how things should be structured. She takes my input on board, and tells me what I should actually be doing.

How you decide to remunerate them is an entirely different problem.
In the frontend of the cloud we have rain, while in the back-end area, the steam keeps coming in.
Smokescreen. I like Newmark more than I like newspaper companies, too. And I know craigslist could be making hundreds of millions of dollars if it weren't for their pesky ethics.

But I don't believe for a second that this recent drama is related to craigslist's impact on the news business. The formula here is simple: the news media (and political candidates) likes eyeballs. Eyeballs like stories about sex. It would be professional malpractice for CNN not to run these stories.

And why should I feel sorry for craiglist about that? They walked right into this. Prostitution is illegal throughout almost the entire United States. Without those ads, their service isn't one iota worse for the vast majority of their users who aren't in contact with the sex trade. The adult services section of craiglist is practically a political statement.

Which, fine, but if you make a political statement, you steel yourself to handle the flak you'll get. If you make a political statement that involves flouting the law, you get to deal with law enforcement, too.
Ask HN: Rate my MVP (Newspaper iOS App for the Guardian)
Link is http://todaysnewsapp.com

Based on the concepts of Phil Gyford's Today's Guardian http://guardian.gyford.com
That's actually a more impressive achievement, since Z80 assembler is far less expressive than Javascript. And all the display output had to be in that, too!
Show HN: My Food Pairings Mobile App
I read "The Flavor Bible" and was inspired to make an app that adapted its ingredient recommendations as you built your recipe. The result is my app for android/iphone. The iphone link is below(made it free for today) and the android app is called "food flavor pairings"
Clickable link: http://todaysnewsapp.com
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPfSLfViHsc

Itunes link: itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/food-pairings/id388447570?mt=8
There are basically 2 kinds of situations where the words 'business plan' gets uttered. The first is in sales. The typical example is selling your business idea to investors. In these scenarios your 'business plan' is a sales letter. So to answer your question: when you need outside investements of some form or other.

The other general function of a business plan is to establish clarity. You know, getting clear about what you want to do. What is your vision, your goals and so on. A good place to start is IMHO after you worked a couple of times on your project. You will know these things by then, now establish clarity by putting them in writing. This will help you making decisions along the way.
Privacy is the new Buzz word as Google has to shell out $8.5 million
Feel free to improve on it.
This is an excellent overview of the evidence for the various models of reading. It is far better than the parent article. Submit it on its own!
Throw out the tools you’re using

I'd like to underline this about a thousand times.

(disclaimer: I teach agile to teams) What I see over and over again is folks picking up agile and a) getting too religious about it, and b) immediately making it 5 zillion times more complicated than it has to be. Usually with the use of tools (but creative minds have been known to create manual monstrosities)

If I could eliminate people who already know everything (either pro or con) and folks who for some reason want to complicate everything? Life would be a lot easier for agile teams.

I saw a guy once -- no shit -- that had created a 20-tab spreadsheet to "do" agile. Each sprint close he forced the team to sit down while he went through each item on a projector. Their backlog had 600 items in it. It was like taking a big dump truck with manure and just covering the team in it. I insisted they move to a physical storyboard, and when I checked up with them a few weeks later they had this storyboard that looked like the wiring diagram for a 57 Chevy. Colors and lines and tags and color-coded cards.

Agile is easy, but it's possible to screw it up if you keep trying hard enough. Start simple and then add what you need.
It's always entertaining to read an article by someone who hasn't got a clue about the subject they are writing about. I was truly amused to read that most people in India speak "Hindu" and that French is not spoken in Asia (I guess Viet Nam is no longer part of Asia). It's also interesting that an article about the relative importance of various languages could mention "Hindu" but not Spanish.
Ask HN: When are you allowed to quit a startup?
Hi Everyone--
Long wall of text ahead, sorry, but hopefully details will help.

I've been working at a startup since the beginning of the year. It has been good thus far -- great environment, great people, great time. I'm the only programmer and our products absolutely require this company to have a programmer on staff. I'm very much enjoying the work -- this wasn't in my area of expertise before (the business end) but I'm really getting a knack for understanding how our product fits in the field. And further, I've been able to really develop my skills to be a versatile programmer/dev. ops. guy.

The problem is that I'm looking at the calendar, and listening to all the conversations about sales and what not, and thinking: "Man, this company is probably going to go belly up around Christmas." And while in this part of the world, it wouldn't be too hard for a programmer to get work -- even freelance work until the post-Christmas doldrums -- I'd really not want to be out of work around Christmas. I have mega bills (student loans) and am very fastidious about money.

At this point, I'm trying to keep the whole thing very un-personal even though I'm really good friends with all of the founders (CEO/CFO/COO). But, I think it should be noted that as we launched one of our first products a few weeks back, all three founders took vacation the week/weekend before the launch -- it was assumed that I'd get the project done on time, so I ended up canceling mine. So, at the end of the day, I'm wondering if the Godfather quote comes into play -- "This is business not personal."

Further -- the company is trying to figure out how to stay afloat, and one of the ideas is to start doing consulting. Which sounds fine, but I came from a consulting/agency background specifically to leave that type of work; so while I would gladly help these guys out if we were doing it while working on the core products, this new model where we give up the core products for five or six months is just not very appetizing.

I know there are other startups interested in me -- they've reached out to me -- but I'm just not sure what to do when the boat is sinking. I understand if I was a skin-in-the-game cofounder, then like a captain, its down with the ship. But what if I'm just one of the first employees, who still has no equity (that discussion was had and they decided I'd get a "big" share, once we became revenue neutral) and who has enough bills and student loans to not be comfortable with the idea of one day paychecks just stop coming?

Thanks for any insight or personal experiences...
Compendium of Useful Information (in case of emergency)
It was recently updated (colors and anti-missile-spam feature):

http://js1k.com/demo/670

Also cool to see other HNers participating (I made two 1K demos and one tweet).

Some of my favorites (not mentioned yet):

Wobbling tunnel: http://js1k.com/demo/15

Quaternion Julia raymarcher: http://js1k.com/demo/49

Twister: http://js1k.com/demo/213

3d snowman: http://js1k.com/demo/224

Hypnotic patterns: http://js1k.com/demo/266

Cute cartoonish platformer: http://js1k.com/demo/635
All of us have perpetrated the occasional drive-by solo-practitioner open-source project, but frankly such projects aren't that useful. What's useful are the projects that have stuck around for a while and demonstrated their utility by acquiring a community larger than one.

So consider spending your time testing or fixing bugs or writing docs or generally helping out with an existing open source project that is looking for help. There are lots and lots of those. They can really use the help.
Sounds great! I signed up.

When will the app actually be available?
I bet you can't make Duke Nukem Forever in JS that way.
Suffrage only passed as a result of a curious alliance between hard-left socialist feminist types and hard-right temperance/religious purity movements. The left's goal is obvious. For the right the fantastic thing was that most women were actually fairly conservative and would dramatically increase their base for stuff like alcohol prohibition.

A similar trend was responsible for the fall of the Spanish Republic in the '30s and the rise of Franco's regime.
> says the memory usually works in the opposite way, with traumatised people reliving experiences they would rather forget.

I don't see how this contradicts the notion that there could be people who would repress memories. If anything it seems to suggest that repression would be a successful strategy if it could be managed. By their argument there could be a substantial population or 'successful repressers' that never seek therapy and could resist all efforts to stimulate memory of repressed events. It would only be the population of 'unsuccessful repressers' that they would ever get to see. That could, of course, then be further confused by a population of people who, for whatever reason, experience faked memories.
If you can't trust public visitors from the internet, who can you trust? Executing user input as commands inside the operating system is the most direct way to get things done, and that's what matters most. Isn't it?
Update: I'm down to 2.85K. I might just get there.
I miss the dew-dew-dew-dew sounds, lol.
Some pragmatic notes on CSS3 matrix3d transforms
We're aiming to submit to the App Store in 7-10 days. The iPad app is done, we're working on making it universal and testing on multiple devices.
And thank you for signing up :)
fyi: iTunes shows the iPhone app price as $3.99 for me.
Regarding class sizes, I refer you to the recent news about Gates Foundation findings regarding class size, versus teacher quality. Large numbers of poor/mediocre teachers and small class sizes are not necessarily better than good teachers with larger class sizes.

South Africa's densities are low because of apartheid planning. Segregation trumped density or sustaintability.

Freight rail has indeed declined in South Africa, partly because of corruption, but the neglect started many years before. South Africa's railway rolling stock is, on average, decades old, so the lack of investment in rail, and promotion of road transport, started long before the present government took over.

The lower life expectancy is due to HIV/Aids and it is similar to neigbouring countries. In the (highly unlikely) event that the Apartheid government had survived, I doubt that the life expectancy figures would have been much better. (And the AIDS epidemic took hold under the apartheid government).The infant mortality rate remains better than the world average.

The Apartheid regime was not viewed as a benevolent dictatorship by the majority of South Africans (or the rest of the world), so comparisons to Singapore are spurious. Instead, Apartheid was an organised state policy to further the interests of white people, at the expense of all others, monopolising the wealth and resources of the country, while throwing enough crumbs at a deliberately dumbed-down black population, to keep them docile.
Some good stuff in here, but I was reminded of Paul Buchheit's classic statement: limited life experience + overgeneralization = advice
Why You Can’t Work at Work
A startup founder in San Francisco told me that if an early stage investor needs a business plan, it's a really lame investor.
Chess is damn impressive, but so is Tetris ( http://js1k.com/demo/663 ) or a Jump'n'Run ( http://js1k.com/demo/635 ). There are also a lot of very beautiful graphic demos like http://js1k.com/demo/171 or http://js1k.com/demo/49

Shameless plug: My syntax highlighting Quine: http://js1k.com/demo/223
Let's review: you're not a co-founder, and have no equity. Vague promises have been made about you "getting a share", but no commitments. The co-founders all went on vacation immediately prior to a launch, but you cancelled yours to get the product ready. The business is foundering, and you're not convinced that the co-founders are responding to the challenges in the right way, and you suspect the company will run out of runway before Christmas.

Is that a fair summary?

If so: why are you even thinking about staying, if you've got other options?

If you've got a plan that you think will put the company on a firmer financial footing, I'd pitch it to the co-founders, and ask to be brought in on the equity side.

Otherwise, I'd walk as soon as the right offer came along.
Anyone wanna have a stab at explaining how it works?
Community is More Than a Buzz Word
How could it be possible? Let's assume that a "small effect" is something like a character change. Consider:

if (a == b) ...

And,

if (a != b) ...

One character difference, exactly opposite meaning. Is it possible for such behavior to not exist in programming languages? I can't prove it, but I doubt it. I suspect it's inherent.
I'm getting empty character boxes instead of chess symbols, even if I force UTF-8 in Chrome or IE. Any ideas?
4 Ways to Instantly Improve Your Error Messages (Plus a Killer Bonus Tip)
Acta: Latest draft
Sorry, I disagree. Sending email has almost never been free.

Most of us pay for internet access. Email has been a non-itemized portion of this, but we still have to pay.

Part of the cost that we are paying are the amortized costs of spam, which costs each ISP a fair amount of resources. These costs are passed along to consumers, of course.

I can't imagine individual users boycotting ISPs that used a service like this, as it would result in reduced Internet costs and reduced spam. If you are not sending unsolicited emails, you'd never have to pay, and even if you are sending small amounts of unsolicited emails, the new costs would be more than offset by the savings passed on by the ISP.

The only people who'd be against it would be the spammers-- and once a critical mass of ISPs implemented, they wouldn't really have much of a choice: they'd either have to pay to send, or lose access to a large percentage of mailboxes.
I checked out his getrichslowly.org stats on alexa -- seems his site is getting 150-200k uniques per day. Is that considered high enough for a blog to generate decent income?
I really do like the idea of positively "completing" a task every day. Outliers-wise 10,000 hours is a lot, the sooner I get started the better.

The only thing I'd add, besides the request for OpenID love, is that the FAQ needs to put "we won't spam your twitter" higher up - that's what I wanted to know _immediately_ after signing in for the first time(the serious faux pas being "My streakficiency is blahblah, what's yours?").

Besides that, just one detail:
the FAQ(which is great, btw) wasn't in the first-login "we're very beta" notice at the top, which would have been easier to find.