skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An interesting argument I've heard wrt to "high" western birthrate countries is that it has more to do with the societal roles of women. In both the United States and Sweden, women are generally told they can have both a career and become mothers, and while this view is not universally held in either country, it's a widespread belief. By contrast, in western nations with lower birthrates, the social views tilt towards women being told they can have a career OR become a mother, and that trying to be both is detrimental.

What tends to happen in nations when motherhood becomes an either-or proposition is, women opt to either forgo childbearing or chose to only have 1 child and then continue on with their career track. Whereas in countries with a broader view of motherhood, women who want both aren't guilted by society to stop at 1 or, and likewise fewer women face the choice of forgoing or limiting motherhood to pursue their career ambitions.
Here's what you need to know about India and Athletics:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/spo_sum_oly_med_all_tim_pe...

Here's what you need to know about Cricket: Sleeping pills are cheaper, pleasanter, and won't bore others.
perhaps. perhaps they have more seeds specifically for that. with the apple, you want more flesh, less seeds. with pomegranates, since the seeds are encapsulated in the stuff you want to eat, more seeds = better. so perhaps they were bred to increase seed yield.
I have little experience when it comes to startups but from what I've read so far I think you'd be better off with a tech co-founder rather than a outsourced developer.

If your plan has trivial technical needs maybe you should try checking local universities etc. (There was an article about a guy who was selling bowling balls online and was paying 2 college guys to code the website for him, his business was in good shape)
If I had to do a cross-platform app, I would make a shared core in a language that can run on all platforms[1] and than a native UI in whatever language/toolkit is used for the platform. This way, the only duplication that is needed is the UI. And honestly, cross-platform UI toolkits never quite fit in properly anyway.

1. I'd personally use C. But, thats only because I'm more comfortable in C than any other cross-platform language (C++, Java or any other JVM-based language, etc).
Ask HN: is C# Evil or Not?
I'm a C# guy, and though I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, I find some (see: some) of the things they do rather helpful and occasionally reasonable.

I'd like to ask: Given the fact that C# is/has been an ECMA Standard, and now its an ISO lanaguage too, Why do people still think its /Evil Inside/? I realize RMS and his friends have made it look oooh big and scary, but really, what's the point?

some of the arguments I've heard are:
- Not totally free
- Microsoft, therefore, EVIL!
- RMS said it was evil therefore, EEEEVIL.
- Changing standards
- not native code (therefore, EEEVILL)
- Its worse than java

What's the HN take on it? Purely technical, please :)
Researchers Develop Location-Enabled SMS Standard, Launch Android App
You broke my record 191 bytes!

http://coldnose-sloth.livejournal.com/1024.html
Mi2N.com - Kings Of Flow On Air @ 95.9 KIIS - FM Youngstown
I'm Jon Ursenbach and Windows 8 didn't have my idea.
NP. Give a few different posts a listen as he tends to pick a theme and run with it. Also jump back a few months, he was in a super ambient (aka, Biosphere-esq) phase for a while there and that might work better for you.
This is the most obvious answer. Taking it too seriously and upvoting articles like this will only ensure /b/tards find out about it and initiate an even bigger trolling.
So do they just figure they'll ride the gravy train until it completely breaks down? Do they acknowledge this is a problem or do they just think it's fine?
Whether it matters depends a lot on how competitive the market is. If your app is head and shoulders above the competition in functionality, users will put up with a little UI ugliness. If most of the apps in your market basically do everything the user wants, they're going to decide based on what is prettiest/most responsive, which is usually the native app.

I still remember discovering uTorrent. I'd tried about 4-5 Bittorrent apps before then, including 3 wxPython-based ones and Azureus. They also basically did what I needed - they let me download, they let me keep track of existing transfers, and they let me throttle bandwidth. The difference was that uTorrent didn't take up a few hundred megs of RAM and didn't peg my CPU. The developer accomplished this by doing an end-run around all the layers of abstraction and keeping an eye on performance; it's much harder to do this with a cross-platform library in the way.
I think the problem is integrating family life with the rest of your life. Right now both concepts are completely orthogonal, so when you start a family suddenly you have a much bigger management problem.

(I Am Not An Anthropologist, but) My understanding of traditional hunter gatherer societies is that women would keep on working even with a small baby. The baby could be strapped to the womans back, or simply kept close by, so that the woman could keep working but still have quick access to the baby to nurse it when needed.

When the child got older, they would have the entire tribe looking out for them, so there wasn't a need for constant micromanagement. We have daycares, but that only lasts half the day. After work the parents are expected to dedicate the rest of their night to supervising. That's a big (and unnatural) time commitment, in my opinion.
Ask HN: Error reporting software
Can anyone recommend a service that monitors your website and notifies you if any errors occur?
Ps. Thanks in advance!
I discussed a tax increase simply because it made things simple, but you can assign a dollar value to any of the items you've mentioned. How much would you, personally, pay to legalize gay marriage?

$50,000? If so, repeat my calculation. $100,000? If so, then voting is worth $0.001 to you. $100 million? Then voting is actually worth $1 to you.

A much simpler explanation of voting behavior is the expressive value of voting. People devote great effort to cheering for their team and signalling allegiance - just look at sales of $50 Yankees pinstripes or $80 Paquiao jackets. Most people don't wait in line for 10 minutes just to donate $1 to a good cause.
Transmission follows this approach somewhat, it has Cocoa, Qt, Gtk+, Web, and console frontends. All frontends use a shared 'backend' in the form of libtransmission (in C).

http://www.transmissionbt.com/
What is your source for this version of events?
Khan Academy currently heavily depends on examples. Anything that you can teach by example is probably fair game. For example (ha!), his history stuff right now, while perfectly fine, I find no more engaging/effective than reading about.

That doesn't mean it won't work, just it probably won't be as effective for some other stuff as it has been for math and such.
I don't know about Austria, but in the Netherlands there's a similar monetary compensation you get for each child; however, AFAIK it's not meant to "encourage" people to have more children. Rather, it's meant to make up for the increased cost of living once your family expands.

(There's a Dutch politician quoted in the article as saying that Dutch women should have more babies... it seemed awfully odd to me. Upon closer investigation, he was talking about cranking up the birth rate from 1.7 to 2.1.)
Scary perspective. Once Facebook becomes the social layer in every application out there, they will become too powerful. And I don't think Diaspora is the solution (in its present form).

By the way, why isn't OpenSocial, OpenID, etc. getting traction outside the tech community?
Immigration flows (which, indeed, involve people leaving one culture and entering another) do a lot to show that there probably are some genuine advantages to democracy over the other forms of government that have been tried from time to time. So far there isn't any fast-growing dictatorship that has achieved long-term prosperity greater than that of the various democratic countries around the world.
What books would you recommend to the randomly interested?
Well, part of the cleverness built into the constitution is a meta-rule describing the process for changing the constitution. Every system accumulates cruft, but if we have a mechanism to apply patches, then we can (in theory) accomplish some refactoring without an upheaval.

The only issue is that modern politics in America is a lot more like trench warfare, with lines drawn and and fixed. Opinions on every issue fall along party lines, with a few exceptions.
young girls aren’t as encouraged to get advanced math/sciences/programming education

I hear this a lot, but isn't it possible that the payoff is simply just not as worthwhile for a woman? It seems to me that at least part of the problem is that there are skilled employment options for women that they find more rewarding or inspiring than programming.
Probably depends on where in management you happen to be. If you're in charge of, say, Office, and the huge profits that that makes, why change what you're doing? Why exert the effort to integrate your product better, or take a short term hit to profitability in the interest of a larger goal? It reads from the outside like a real incentive mismatch problem. At the level of the people who do the work, I think there's great awareness of the fuckedupedness, but that's matched by their total lack of ability to change things. Honestly, I don't really know, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft incapable of stopping their slide into irrelevance.
Wasps are amazing creatures. well over 100,000 species of them are parasites. Here's another complex insect parasite video involving caterpillars that stowaway in ants nests and the wasps that lay eggs in them, from Attenborough's Life in the Undergrowth BBC series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCo2uCLXvhk

Also other species hijack acorns growth to lay offspring within, and are then in turn preyed upon by other wasps: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzXccvoJThI&NR=1
I can argue to the same effect that Baseball is equally, if not more, boring .. however, nice bit of research there for us on the advantages of sleeping pills over cricket.

and as far as the medals go, we're atleast not last ;)
C# has advanced more as a language than Java has in recent years. The JVM has made great strides in terms of performance, and Scala, Clojure, et al., have been success stories of the Java ecosystem, but Java itself has sort of just lingered. The main difference that people call out is that C# supports higher order functions, lexical closures, and other constructs from functional programming, whereas Java does not.

My experience has been that using C# means vendor lock-in, which is lack of freedom from the tools you use to the types of projects you work on. The language is great but the politics, licenses, and toolchain built around it suck for tinkerers/hackers. All substantial changes to the platform come from on high in Redmond. There was a great post on this on HN last week: http://whatupdave.tumblr.com/post/1170718843/leaving-net.
I don't believe I'm "owned", but I sometimes feel like one of the characters in an Ayn Rand novel(1)

"do you-the-asset-itself appear on a balance sheet? "

Er, yes, on the IRS equivalent (DGI)

"Is your tax rate 100%?"

Nope, about 60% (they don't want me to starve, they just want to relieve me of my "excess" wealth).

About my "owners", why, it's the Government itself, it's about 8% of the working population but about 50% of the population depends indirectly on it, so it has the voting power to perpetuate itself.

(1) I'm not an uncritical Ayn Rand reader, her ideas are too extreme and her characters were almost a parody, but I do agree with some parts
You're not taking the increase in the number of servers into account. Seven times as many hard drives requires seven times as many servers[1], and those extra CPUs and power supplies and cooling fans and motherboards and the extra RAM will consume far more than any power savings SSDs may give.

[1]I was talking in the grandparent post about optimising for online gigabytes per watt. I'm assuming we still are, because SSDs are a huge win except for this instance. If we're talking about performance, SSDs are so much better than mechanical there's basically no comparison. Optimising for online gigabytes per watt, your servers will have the maximum number of hard drives installed, always.
I think a large part of what it is, is the want for more. Once you reach a certain point of wealth, you realize just how possible it is to get just a bit wealthier, but doing so means putting off your kids for a couple years. And you get there, you now have a BMW... but now you want a nicer house, and everyone tells you about being living within your means, and the way everything looks right now, if you play your hands right, you can get that new house in just a couple years, if you put off your kid again... and repeat.

I have no actual proof of this, but it's just a generalization of some human behavior I notice. Namely, you get much more interested into a "game" once you invested a certain amount of effort/have a certain position. For example, someone of average fitness doesn't really care about shaving 20 seconds off their 5k, or that extra 5 pounds of benchpress. But the person who is waay more fit will invest incredible amounts of effort/time/focus into those goals.
Well, if Java means Swing, you are extrapolating from a very bad example. For instance, the Qt library looks pretty native on most platforms, and with some platform-specific code (e.g. proper support for application menus for OS X) Qt programs can also feel native.

I wrote some small Qt GUI applications (mostly frontends to scientific tools), and most people don't notice it's not native.

Also, this depends a bit on your market. Some markets are more sensitive to nativeness than others, for instance, by operating system:

OS X > Windows > Linux/UNIX

In OS X people are quite used to polished native applications that conform to Apple's HIG, they will also expect it. Windows is somewhere in the middle, there are some widely used applications that do not look native. Linux/UNIX users seem to be completely oblivious to nativeness, since they are used to having a mix of Qt/Gtk+/Tk/Lesstif/whatever applications.
1969: The World's First Artificial Heart
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury."

You only have to look and see what is happening to see that it is true.
OpenID and OpenSocial aren't getting traction anywhere.

OpenID because it's a non-solution to a non-problem, and OpenSocial because Google didn't provide developers with the primary benefit of the Facebook Platform (distribution).

Plus the social networks that implemented it were lame and didn't monetize well. OTOH, Playdom gor their start on MySpace.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/27/playdom-acquired-by-disney-...

If Google built a "game center" and let people send invites through gchat, we might be talking.
Some, they are usually more obscure, e.g.:

- D

- Haskell

- OCaml

- Various Scheme/Common Lisp compilers

Some of them have Qt bindings (e.g. QtD and QtHaskell). Though it may be harder to hire programmers for any of these languages.
So does Java Swing, but that never stopped Java from sticking out like a sore thumb everywhere.

Users become very sensitive to the details of the windowing system, and when a program breaks their expectations, they often consciously recognize what's wrong with the program, they just get frustrated. I'm thinking of things as subtle as whether you can create and rename folders from within a Save As... box, or what the tab order of fields in a dialog is, or what cursor shows up when you drag & drop items. It's very easy to get the look & feel 99% right and still have users feel that something is still very wrong with the app.
First time Iv'e heard the term 'creepy line' from Google:

"The end of the interview turned to the future of technology. When Bennet asked about the possibility of a Google "implant," Schmidt invoked what the company calls the "creepy line."

"Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it," he said. Google implants, he added, probably crosses that line."
Beautiful. Absolutely Beautiful.

It would be wonderful if it was implemented here on HN. Instead of having a page full of "Angel-Gate" stories, there would be only one, and it would include all the others. Similar for every other duplicate submission.

At the moment, I believe HN has a very much simplified and inaccurate version of this concept implemented. If an exact url is submitted a second time, the second is simply added as a "vote up" for the previous submission of the same thing.
Should we point out that the United States isn't a democracy at all?
Android Apps Caught Sending Private Data to Advertisers
Mark Zuckerberg's Most Valuable Friend
Subtle bug in Google can get you banned
I just had my IP banned from google and I couldn't understand why, after enabling the 'google toolbar'.

The toolbar is useful because it allows you to see the pagerank of your pages, after enabling it the browser will restart.

And that's where the problem will occur, if you have a large number of browser windows or tabs open when you do this (or if after a browser crash you do a recovery) google will interpret the flurry of toolbar requests when the browser comes back up as an attempt at automated requests to their servers and will block your IP accordingly.

Highly annoying! Effectively the use of one (luxury) google service disables the use of another one that is far more essential.

I hope there is a way out of 'toolbar induced google purgatory'.

update: I can use google again (after 15 minutes), but the toolbar still does not function.
Google is too insulated to know exactly where the "creepy line" is. Take Latitude, for example, or the more intrusive (because it was made opt-out rather than opt-in) Buzz.

Instant is just an extention of what they have tried in Chrome or with Suggest. If Joe Average Consumer knew how these things worked (e.g., that every keystroke in Chrome's unibar ends up going to Google, often associated with his Google account, so that they know he frequents fatchicksinpartyhats.com), I think most people would be fairly creeped out.
The problem with one entity running everything is that eventually they will make that one mistake that will bring it all crashing down.
There's no point in putting it to "hard numbers" if you make terribly impractical guesstimates.
If they actually strapped an iPhone into the capsule, then it would have been interesting to capture accelerometer data too.
I used to crack sharewares and commercial apps as a kid. Of course I haven't seen anything like that, nope, no sah!

[Edit:

Ok, I have started hacking something up as proof of concept. Leave an email in your profile or shoot me one.

]
this is the same crap we used to hear about myspace and friendster.

Techcrunch needs to lay off the crack...facebook might be a billion dollar company...it might even be a 2 billion dollar company...but there is no way it'd beat Google.

They compare it to Google revenues...but Google's ad product is a lot more effective. On Google the user is searching for widget, and Google tells them "hey widgets are 90% off at this site". With Facebook you are reading your friend's profile, and Facebook tells you "hey, I know you are busy, but this might possibly be of interest to you"

The rate of return is a lot worse with Facebook, because you can only target by demographics...not intent
I would highly suggest watching the Walter Lewin videos from mit. They are what got me through a mediocre at best, terrible at worst teacher in physics. I used him heavily for electricity and magnetism and some for the classical mechanics stuff. Excellent teacher!

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-01-physics-i-classical-...

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-02-electricity-and-magn...

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-03-physics-iii-vibratio...
Yes, a big one, as the article explains: if you have a massive number of old people living on pensions / versions of social security, but not a lot of younger people working to produce goods and services, those old people are not going to be able to survive at the standards of living they'd like and b) over-taxed young people are going to be incentived to not work or leave.

These are not good things, especially because they have recursive aspects, as discussed.
That is the most fun link I've seen all day!
It's having enough intelligence(or education/awareness) to know that high cost of living would put more pressures on the parents and even the kids, if more kids were to be born, coupled with the existence of free will to take a decision/action (that is, not to have children) based on that awareness - which is causing the low birth rates.

A pattern that stuck me, across different countries and even different states within a country - the higher the education level generally is, the higher is the free will (or the desire to express it) and the capability to take independent actions to external pressures, the lower is the birth rate. Of course, this is putting it in simplistic terms.
Doesn't look like there is one - maybe it's a boxee specific thing. This was the closest I could find: http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/06/14/opencourseware-on-boxee/ but it's a bit light on detail.
By the way, why isn't OpenSocial, OpenID, etc. getting traction outside the tech community?

Regarding OpenID, you sometimes have to enter a "URL" as your username. Absolutely bonkers.

--------

EDIT: You know there's a problem when you need a giant how-to to login to your service: http://openid.net/get-an-openid/start-using-your-openid/

Don't get me wrong, the idea behind OpenID is awesome. Its implementation is not user-friendly, however.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"

I think Eliezer Yudkowsky strongly disagrees - http://lesswrong.com/lw/ih/absence_of_evidence_is_evidence_o...
I think most people actually do know how influential lobbyists are, as evidenced by candidates' perpetual battle to portray themselves as more resistant to special interests than their opponents.

But the mobile phone comment is even more indicative of how out of touch the guy is. We don't need to record Congress with mobile phones: we've had C-SPAN for years. In fact, you can get videos from it online from a number of sources.
I think mostly its because of ideological difference (small government, national debt, non-republican government) over actual rational opinion on economics (This is not to say I support or disapprove of the bailout).

If this was a non-ideological/political position we would be having a civil war over bushes spending during his term.
مسلسل اوس وتيمه محور العدالة الحلقة 6
Its certainly available. I'm working part time right now doing Java and JavaScript development. My employer has stated that they'd be happy to have me full time any time I'm avaliable, but they're also happy to have me at 20 hours per week. I work at a ten-person company which probably makes some of the difference. One of my previous jobs had similar circumstances.
Cool thanks! I have a test coming up this Wednesday on the first chapters: Motion in a straight line and Force and Motion. I understand the basics/theory behind it but i need to solve more problems. :-)
Please explain which of my approximations you believe changes my results significantly.

(By "significantly", I mean "increases the odds of your vote mattering to a number greater than, say, 10^{-86}. )
seems like the professor is setting up a straw man and knocking it down.
Alas, Thursdays are the one day I can't make it. Maybe next time. :)