skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know about HN comments, but there indeed seem to be some studies suggesting that.

http://rru.worldbank.org/Documents/PapersLinks/280-nenova-ha... suggests that the private-sector economy in Somalia did OK during its period of anarchy. (Arguably it's still in anarchy, but less so than before 2006.)

http://www.independent.org/pdf/working_papers/64_somalia.pdf claims that Somalia's economic performance and standard of living "improved during its period of statelessness". Cautionary note: this paper was put out by a libertarian think tank; I don't know enough about their level of integrity to know whether that's worrying.

http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf says that the government of Somalia before its period of near-total anarchy was so awful that anarchy was better.

The main takeaway from all this is probably that a sufficiently bad government can be even worse than anarchy. But it also suggests that Somalia was in such a terrible state before its government collapsed completely that any troubles after that have a plausible explanation other than the evils of anarchy.

So, "Welcome to Somalia" was arguably unfair. On the other hand, there don't seem to be a lot of better examples of anarchies available for inspection...
From Wikipedia:

The analytical engine, an important step in the history of computers, was the design of a mechanical general-purpose computer by English mathematician Charles Babbage.
Or expecting that new things will work with everything immediately, and be perfect.

His main gripe here is that the server's javascript and the browsers' javascript isn't 100% the same, and that current libraries don't run on both.

Jeez, give it some time. Or better yet, work on it.
Well, you could start with adding some more info about what the site actually does on the homepage. Looking at it, I'm at a loss what to do. You're probably losing a lot of potential users because of that. Just give them a couple of sentences on what they can do and what you can help them achieve.

Like others noted, subtitles sound like a major opportunity.
Because if something goes wrong the pilots have a lot more of time for a corrective action during flight. Not so much during take off and landing.
I'd really like to know this since none of the startups I've been involved with have had positive outcomes (buy out, IPO, merger etc).

If you're part of the 10-20% employee ownership, assuming that you have an "average" stake, what percentage of the overall deal do you usually walk away with?

I'm expecting this number to be painfully small and hardly f#ck you money, but I'd like to hear from those who have direct experience on this.

NOTE: I'm not asking about founder exits, because those are adequately covered in the media and other places. I want to know about all the folks who are in that magic 10-20% of employees. Outlier anecdotal evidence (e.g. Google secretaries, Microsoft mail room folks) need not be mentioned. :)
That's a very nice write up of that kernel exploit. One question — it says at the end that "subtle bugs like this are very difficult to catch via code review." Shouldn't the checking of eax when the very next function uses rax to index a table have been a red flag? Obviously there is more to the exploit so it still wouldn't be obvious, but shouldn't that have been enough?
More than once, when I searched the documentation, the top result was a link to the very search page I was on.
He's right on the money. The documentation is horrible. The 1 app I wrote that used the Facebook APIs convinced me never to do so again. Even the simplest things required hours and hours of effort, mostly by trial and error, just to figure out the important details that the documentation left out.
I like how Twitter has versioned their API, and I wish Facebook would do something similar. With 500+ developers and deep knowledge of backend changes, they should be able to handle the minor discrepancies instead of off loading that burden to platform developers.
For the two most important dates in the history of software, I nominate:

September 26th 1983 : Faulty Soviet software almost ends the world.

September 27th 1983 : Gnu Project announced.
Nope. Why force people to turn off their kindles but not close their books?
Let's see if the topic that Apple dominates the news will dominate the news for now...

I personally think this can give a good call for more usable products and a good striving between programmers. I'm curious where we will be in 5 years.
We can all agree that a four-seater Cessna and 767 are very different, but for nav/comm they all use the same instrument systems.

Unlike a Cessna, a 767 has a fly-by-wire system supported by a data bus (e.g. ARINC-429) running the length of the aircraft, often close to the passenger cabin. Presumably, GSM/CDMA signals could interfere with this.
Liquids are banned because there were rumours of terrorist plots involving liquid explosives and it was important that something was seen to be done about it.

Carrying 100 mobile phones in a switched on state that have a small probability of interfering with navigation and communication systems would be a ludicrously impractical way of attempting an attack, so airline regulators funnily enough haven't accounted for that possibility.
I think your view is spot on. This was large companies engaging in collusion to artificially hold down wages in the labor market.

The article mentions that employees should know their worth, but doesn't mention how? The only way to know is to either actively seek a new job and get offers or be approached through cold calling. This ruling clearly helps the employee.
He states that all freemium games will have to get credit cards to validate the age of their players.

That's not true!

They'll only have to do that to Californians. Nobody else has that law.

And for that matter, why can't they do just like videos online and ask their user's age? If the user lies, is that the fault of the game's creator? To buy anything, that user will still have to have a credit card.

There's also the matter that someone isn't a 'customer' until they've bought something. Can you be forced to restrict usage of your product from someone when that someone hasn't paid for anything?

How does this apply to free games? Open source games?
I think a lot more people will start considering this possibility seriously the day Google announces it parses Javascript.
Part of their new 'commitment' to developers (Facebook apparently created an internal Games team several months ago) is a stated paradigm shift towards more and better documentation, but it seems so at odds with the way things are currently done that I'm pretty skeptical.

It does seem as if someone over there is aware that the current situation is pretty awful, at least enough to say "we're working on it".
How a billion points of app data shape TripAdvisor's website
This looks like translating academic or corporate English into plain English. And in your example omitting that leading clause from the English translation changes the tone and content (for better or worse) so they do not say the same thing.

Or is there really no shorter way to say "the global finacial crisis" in Portugese?

There may be cultural inclinations for people to dress up their writing but I don't see that one language is innately more terse or direct.
It sounds like the problem he's having isn't with Node, but with the libraries people have built on top of node.

He's arguing that somehow using libraries makes it a "different language" than the one you'd use in the browser.
Letters also get lost. No system is 100% reliable.
So true. I live in Boston and I've been to these events, and he's hit the nail on the head. You would think having Boston be ranked the #1 spot for innovation 2 years in a row would inspire the community to rally together and keep its young talent.
I think the underlying problem is programmers who aren't very good at programming. That means they're constantly on the look out for some magic potion that will make it easier for them.

Of course some things do make it easier - frameworks, libraries etc. But they often only make it easier at the start before your project gets complex and needs custom out of the box things.

Programmers should just knuckle down and try to improve their skills rather than chasing the latest fads.
Do the cellphones even work in airplanes? I mean, they are pretty far from antennas, even over civilized area. They also move quite fast, although I do not really know how much Doppler effect affects the phones' transmitters and receivers. The plane is also a Faraday cage, thus it may greatly reduce signal.
Perhaps this is because the other side is not well defined. In particular, you cannot expect them to follow the whole debate, merely excerpts and the general lines of it. So to keep the debate going, you have to debate most of the whole point every time, and you have a length restriction to boot. So what results is summaries and anecdotes, with memetic evolution making sure the summaries are resilient to amendment.

I wonder how they really do it. I've seen a lot of paper near politicians; perhaps they have the time and focus the audiences don't.
Understanding finger and ssh will not be required to use thimbl, only to set up thimbl service for your users, which we imagine will be the same people who set up the email and web for there domain: the sysops. Wether the sysops microblog or not is irrelevant ;)
The reverse is also true, some (not all) people think others are intelligent like them (or close to).

This is optimistic thinking. It never ends well.
Making the transition from a business founder to a technical founder
thimbl.net store no user data. Not even a key. Nothing.
What about the "radio" stations you can listen to if you plug in to the headrest. I never listen, but do they stop at takeoff and landing? I can't remember if jetBlue turns off your tv during takeoff and landing. I know they turn it off for safetey announcements.
Kichler Bathroom Lighting – Tips How to Improve
Cheap, glasses-free 3D coming to i-devices
Well some of the libraries out there are glue for C++ code. I think that is what he was inferring anyways.
Yeah, I forgot about the need to register on battle.net
Yes, but one good point here is that showing them something is very useful. By making them answer the question, "what problem do you have that this doesn't solve" they found the minimum they needed to add.

Conversation goes best when it is two-way—of course you need to listen and understand your customers' needs, but often they don't know them themselves and need you to suggest things so they can realise what they actually need.

Or, to quote Justice Stewart, "I know it when I see it."
May be I wasn't clear earlier, what I meant was not freewheeling but gravity pulling the PERSON forward which makes him/her lean forward and hence the segway style acceleration.
I don't really know why this is still a discussion - Digg failed because its an old dinosaur that had a high amount of upvote politics, superhuman power users...ALL voting on useless content or content that was pushed by major news publishers. Reddit is open and curtails to its users..how is this still up for debate?
Consider this: you're on an eight hours long flight and you need to make a really urgent call. There are no technical reasons why you wouldn't be able to do so, but it is forbidden because some people would abuse it and wouldn't be considerate to other passangers. It's not the phone that should be banned, it's being an inconsiderate prick that should be disallowed.
I disagree, I've been at a company where we had ~1500-2000 applications for graduate developer roles, so we had access to a substantial percentage of CS graduates. About 20% got through CV screening (which is basically have anything on your CV to show you're competent - good uni, an internship, challenging uni projects, open source projects, etc).

Of that 20% most of them failed to be able to handle fairly basic CS questions (implement a linked list, describe how hash-maps work, reverse a string, basic algorithm questions, fizzbuzz, basic language questions on a language the candidate claimed to know). About 5% were able to pass this stage, and of that 5% we made offers to most of them.

We weren't expecting people with a deep grounding in practical programming, we were expecting a decent knowledge of CS and some basic ability to actually produce code. There just aren't enough competent CS graduates on the market.
I think it's right to be strict on this given that the labor market is so asymmetrical even without anti-poaching collusion. Employers get detailed resumes, credit reports, references, and often salary history before hiring. Employees are expected to believe the company's marketing about being a great place to work, get no references, and the salaries of others at the company are kept secret. Hopefully sites like http://www.glassdoor.com can help to even out this imbalance.
Tech companies dodge DoJ antitrust action (as expected)
agreed. My first bigger node project (http://tempalias.com) works without generating even a single byte of HTML dynamically on the server.

It's all plain HTML and JavaScript statically served and talking to the server via a REST API.

This way I don't have to "bolt on" an API that might be incomplete. Instead, the frontend uses exactly the same API as any prospective client would.

When I started the thing, I was using the Express framework, but soon began to feel exactly like the original poster. Express was porting Rails to Node and I wanted something else.

Hence I moved to paperboy to serve the static files and did the (simple!) API on my own - plugging paperboy into an existing node server with existing endpoints is incredibly easy (or I could serve the static files directly, but I wanted the code to work without external dependencies to help the community to get a service of their own to run).

If you are interested in the development (tempalias is MIT licensed and available at github), I would recommend you either the development journal (http://www.gnegg.ch/tag/tempalias) or the talk I gave at jsconf.eu (http://bit.ly/b4gsrL)
And "pedant" comes from French.

:)
I for one am super glad he "broke us out of the geek ghetto" ( http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=209 )Do you all remember how terrible it was with the Gestapo beating down our doors? Oh wait. -_- ESR is just full of himself like many other public figures. That said, The Art of Unix Programming was actually a surprisingly good book. I think someone must have edited all the crazy out of it.
Your ideas since this (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=898947) have been an eye opener to me. Definitely this just seems to make most parts easier and more testable and more distributed.

I'm thinking how the several parts web frameworks implement would work in the "Client/server 2.0" model. One of the parts I can't quite figure, probably because frameworks like Django hide it completely, is how would we implement sessions. I'm thinking about the user closing a page, then reopening and wanting to see their cart there, for example.

I'd love you if gave me more links to read to understand how I could implement this. I'm starting to write code for my startup and this model seems a perfect fit.
Weblocks and Parenscript and CL-WHO and hu.dwim.perec and I write code in only one language too.
I'll admit that I wasn't aware of this, but on the same token, would that portion of the electronics not be shielded as well?
I don't see how the argument is any different than saying you have to use a "different Python" for web development and client-server development.
Google parses and executes JavaScript already.

http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started...

that's where that exclamation mark in the hash of the URL in recent sites comes from (like new twitter)

Edit:

Look at this query:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

it finds the existence of that word on my privacy page that gets only loaded via AJAX. So it must be able execute the javascript (sammy, basically) that intercepts these links to load the correct page fragment.

Edit:

Explanation is wrong. It takes a little bit of server side magic to work. See comment below. I completely forgot about this after implementing it in April :-)
It makes you wonder if there would even be enough space on the surface of the earth to replace Google's or Facebook's modern day servers with the equivalent computing power of these analytics engines - my guess is no.
Two things:

1. Using a mobile phone isn't generally dangerous providing everything else on the plane works fine and nothing would be interfered with if it wasn't.

2. Cell handovers at 30,000ft with an air speed around 500mph are really, really hard.

The reasons for turning your phone off during takeoff and landing are wide and varied, but the long and short of it is that it effectively counts as security theatre. Take off and landing are the two most dangerous bits of any flight. If anything goes wrong they do not want people tweeting "OMG IM GOING TO DIE!!!!", they want them focused on bracing for impact. That's not the only reason (or necessarily a major one) but you get the idea.
"Shut that damn thing up" - How to minimize or eliminate PC noise
How To Become a Hacker
They take bottles of water or cans of coke off you because you might be able to crash a plane with one. They don't take your mobile phone off you, ergo they can't be that dangerous.
To further clarify, we're not using WordPress MU to power our clients. It's a custom system which allows us to deploy an instance of a customized WordPress install from an image when a new user signs up. We can bake in more security, curate plugins, and control the entire experience this way.

We don't actually stop anyone from installing a plugin, we simply suggest the best of class.
Change Your iPhone's App Icons Without Jailbreaking
What’s (real) the cost of a Gigabyte in the Cloud?
The "a death is one too many" argument is completely fallacious. If anyone actually believed it, we would all drive our cars at 10 MPH and never fly in planes. Every day we sacrifice human lives for small (or big) conveniences. It's not nice to think about, but it's the way our world works.
I think this is more related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, where incompetent people are very confident in their competence (inversely, competent people are not confident).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I flew a plane for the first time yesterday, it was only a tiny two seater, but with modern electronics. My instructor was using his iPhone during the flight and he didn't seem worried.
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+1. I've actually gotten a handful (3 or 4) of people here encourage me to apply various places.
Active.com Wins Best Demo at Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon
I won't. The web for me is URLs and HTML. JavaScript is for providing user experience enhancements on top of that. I don't want a Web which can only be understood by running a JavaScript interpreter against it.
If that were really the point, wouldn't they have expanded this to more companies? Microsoft? Oracle? Yahoo?
This is a little off topic but I was a little taken aback at the elitist attitude regarding University graduates. Look at these quotes:

"Rather shocked that someone who had, in fact, gone to university and was working for a major corporation, considered it okay to blatantly copy someone else’s article"

"I don’t know which I found more appalling: that someone had made it through university and into a major corporation believing it was acceptable to plagiarize"

What about "going to University" imbues someone with automatic moral virtue? Does this person believe the unwashed masses think it's absolutely acceptable to plagiarize? While the elite University students are somehow above that?

Maybe I'm just over sensitive as someone who didn't go to college but it really bugged me.
The correct link:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep...
I understand what you're getting at here, but eating meat isn't associated with the risk of causing 400 other people to die with you in a fiery plane crash.

Now whether or not such a risk exists is another question entirely.
You can use the sysinternals junction tool on earlier OS's: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.asp...
Some thoughts on the WPEngine itself (or at least, the site). These are in order of thought, not importance. Also, these are purely my opinions so take with a grain of salt.

1. When I was starting my own blog, I looked around for exactly this. It didn't exist, or at least not in any form that looked worth doing, so I ended up (painfully) self-hosting.

2. Having said that, for a beginner like me, $50 is way too much to spend on the blog. I'm sorry, but I can host my not-making-a-cent blog on Dreamhost, and get the first year of hosting for $20 (the whole year, I mean). I really hope this is just the initial price plan, because I honestly believe that as you grow, it will make sense to let people host smallish blogs for less money.

3. Someone on the blog post mentioned that "one-click staging" is confusing, since the "one click" part is not important. I agree.

4. I think there's a small alignment problem with the prices in the pricing grid (they're top-aligned, not centerered). I'm on Windows XP + Chrome.

5. (This one is really nitpickity): on the pricing grid, the "explanatory" sentence in the first and last column have end-of-sentence punctuation, but the middle column does not.

6. I'd give more details and make it more obvious how to export. This will be a sticking point for people, so one of the major features should be how easy it is to import.

7. Make it really obvious that you can use your own domain name with this. This is important to people, and isn't obvious.

8. Part of your tagline is "We make WordPress fast, secure, and scalable". I would actually stress the "easy" part more. I can make WordPress all those things myself, I just don't have time/knowledge. Stress the idea that this is a convenience thing.

OK Hope that helps, just some of my thoughts.
I'm hoping this kind of attitude isn't the norm - I equate this to telling a current employee they are "replaceable."

Employees are replaceable; so are jobs. The important thing is to remember where you are in the process.

Take a look at what you wrote: it sounded like the perfect opportunity, I felt this position was perfect for me. Remember that they person on the other end of the phone is not interested in if the position is perfect for you-- he's interested in if you are perfect for the position.

If I were you, I'd make sure that I was sending out a vibe of "this is how I can solve your problems", not "what can you do for me?" If you can convince them you are the best guy for the job, getting the relocation paid won't be a problem-- trust me. I've hired employees from far-off countries, at great expense and hassle with visas, because I felt they were the right person to do the job.
I found at times that I got more info from the depreciated wiki than any form of new documentation they had up, and my use case was pretty damn simple, just implementing a half decent usage of facebook connect which runs with SSL and plays nice with a modified wordpress user system.

I found myself at times resorting the trawling through js source to find how I could use certain button images that were very simple in the old version.

I feel your frustration and am glad I don't really have to do much in the facebook space at the moment.