skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Inconvenient facts this article doesn't mention include the baby booms in France and the UK since 1998. Given that post-natal and social policies have a huge impact on birth rates and are set at a national, not EU, level, this report needs to be taken with a bucket (not a pinch) of salt.
Haven't been near Silverlight and never plan to. Did tell someone to install Moonlight once so that they could watch ITV (UK) online, but the only alternative there was to pay the BBC a license fee for watching other people's channels (get_iplayer is perfect for the BBC's own)
All sorts of apps sneak it onto my computer, just like Growl(which I had anyway). I just stopped bothering every time. So I think I'm using the version that shipped with Flip4mac on the last update.
I thought you were european? The DMCA safe-harbor laws don't apply to you.
They did invent overlapped windows, and clipping efficient enough to get away with it. They thought they had seen overlapped windows at PARC, but those were actually just tiled.

Also auto-configured network clients.
Singapore's rise as an economic power is also something to be marveled at. The country was nothing till 1965 when they achieved independence, and separated from Malasia.

I dont remember where I read this- Singapore government had a similar policy of choosing extremely qualified people as their top level politicans- Look at what they have achieved in such a short time!

Would love to learn more about what shaped Singapore politics and their economic miracle-Please post links, if you have any.
More likely a subset. Just because you can read up on what other people have done and implement their ideas, doesn't mean you can come up with your own, better, ideas.
"Open Source projects offer you a chance to work on something that you want rather than something that others want you to work on."

As far as I am concerned starting my own project is more what I want rather than fixing bugs in other people's complicated code which code might also be philosophically very alien to me. To take compromises there is my day job. To work on cool things I start my own project/startup.
i remember thinking the same thing when i saw this:

http://xkcd.com/768/

maybe they cost so much now because there's only one engineer left who remembers how to make displays that crappy
"But they use those words themselves" leads to treading on pretty dangerous ground. There are many words which have a history of being used as slurs to a particular minority - those words might be 'reclaimed' by the minority and more or less acceptable to use if you're within that community, but would almost certainly be read as a slur if used by someone outside it.

Over-sensitive? Perhaps, but (as a gay guy) if you've grown up with those words being shouted at you, you quickly learn to associate them with hostility.
AFAIK netflix requires silverlight nowadays.
I know that. I'm asking if anyone has seen a similar unobtrusive Flash widget that provides a JavaScript API for accessing audio input.

UPDATE: After a bit of searching around, it looks like there are no convenient APIs within the Flash player itself for recording audio to any kind of object that could then be uploaded - instead, you need to have an open network connection to either Flash Media Server or Red5 (the open source equivalent) and then get the server to encode to MP3.
Theoretical computer science cheat sheet
I'm not sure "spend more money" constitutes a clever idea.
I think this will become more and more common. So publishers and book writers would have to focus harder on making the physical object worthy of taking up space.

It's the tactile feeling that differentiate books from OCR scanned pages in a PDF. And wise publishers would use this differentiation to sell books when e-books is more popular.
anymore left? i've been looking for something like this for forever and would love to try it out!
Nigerian Internet Entrepreneurs Meetup.
From what I hear, it's basically their dev platform for WP7, in the same way that Apple hasn't canceled CocoaTouch and google hasn't binned Android. HTML5 is not the be all end all of the internet (yet).
Vocational colleges in Scarborough
Searching for Vocational colleges in Scarborough evergreencollege.ca/ is there for you for the best.
we are working to do this via perf requirements - slow down the OS, get penalized

In other words: "Code your crapware better" ?
I have a degree, but it is 10 years old by now. I can't even remember much from it. I don't think you learn that much useful stuff - real learning is learning by doing.
They could be Linux/Mac users who solely boot into Windows to play games.
Who's hiring programmers that know organic chemistry? It would be nice to put my chemistry degree to work.
Just spoke with Chris Anderson at TED :) Well done, everyone. You certainly got their attention.
Now I feel less guilty for refusing to install Moonlight on my Ubuntu laptop and downloading Feynman lectures from isohunt torrents instead.
A story of use cases and forklifts
The W3 are working on standardising a proper (i.e. non-Flash) audio/video capture API for JS to interact with: http://www.w3.org/TR/html-media-capture/
BitTorrent might be faster than scanning for a lot of books. Still, props for getting down to work.
Discount realtor
Discount Realtors save you money. Hire a Discount Real Estate Realtor. Inexpensive Cut-Rate Commissions are economical. Cheap Real Estate Realtors deliver great results. Use Reduced Fee Real Estate Realtors.
The Value of a Liker
I have it. Deliberately installed it as the UI people where I'm contracting insist on delivering UI mock-ups in something called SketchFlow - which doesn't seem too bad.
I've had an account on SDF for years, even paid for the lifetime membership, I don't use it too much but it is useful from time to time and it works great.
"Funny that that's never been my experience with Flash. Flash sites are horrible and I avoid them if I can, but Flash can socially engineer its way onto my machine through cool little in-browser games, whereas Silverlight just wants to "enhance" my viewing of MSDN."

I have played quite a few Silverlight games. Why the attitude towards something that adds more functionality?
What if we have multiple computers?

I have a computer with Silverlight. Odds are that if you need Silverlight, the computer I'm sitting at doesn't have it. What should I vote? (I voted yes.)
The biggest problem with contributing to [edit: established] Open Source projects is the barrier to entry. As someone who gets paid to work on a popular open source project full time, I can tell you it's often way harder than it's worth to get involved.

You need to download and get the code running on your computer, and configure everything to run correctly. You need to learn the ins and outs of how everything works. You need to install and learn about the code the project depends on (and, most projects will have numerous vendor libraries). You need to get acquainted with the main developers on IRC, so you don't step on any toes. You have to learn how they do bug ticketing, and you need to find bugs you can do. And your first code review? Trust me, it'll be painful. It's not easy to get started.

If I left my job today, would I continue to contribute? Sure. But only because I already have a foot in the door, and know my way around.

All that being said, I truly believe universities should require students contribute to at least one open source project- it's a great learning experience, and the projects and their users benefit from the volunteer labor.
This applies to HN-types just as well as any others, by the way. Everyone just wants fast, simple, and concise answers to the question they have. Look at Duck Duck Go and WolframAlpha -- both are based around this idea of presenting the information you want as quickly and unobtrusively as possible.
Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside (2007)
Start The Engine
New survey on sex in US, biggest since 1994
So I guess we can thank Bill Gates for personally financing ("Tuva project: powered by Silverlight") the nice argument to avoid Moonlight and Silverlight: there's still the DRM (not included in Moonlight) to worry about. Even if he fixes the mentioned site, I hope the awareness remains.
The 100 greatest books of all time everyone must read http://bighow.com/news/the-100-greatest-books-of-all-time-ev...
So far I only encountered 1 site that required silverlight to work (onet.pl public video streaming), I have linux, so I installed moonlight, it almost worked, but then I've learned that they also use some DRM that only works on Mac and Windows (also - it told me firefox is not supported :)).

For me using silverlight is like telling people to keep away.
i made something similar except with airplanes and cars

http://flylikeagsix.com/hackernews
I only get bored if im to tierd to do something real then I watch old The Big Bang Theory or How I met you mother stuff and go to bed.
This might be true for big projects, but most smaller open source projects are a lot easier to get into and their maintainers are usually grateful for any useful contributions they can get.
The rise of China will most likely prove the communist model to be the best model of governance.

The growth that China has seen over the last 20 years has surpassed anything that any other country has ever achieved - even the US.

And if a country throws up a George Bush for 10 years and then an Obama who doesnt seem to deliver much, democracy has already lost. Similarly with India, democracy simply does not work, and Singapore where communism has done wonders.

Somehow I have always seen an American corporation as having a communist structure and rarely experimented (mostly unsuccessfully) with a democratic one.
SaaS and Cloud Computing questions of the week
Carter was also a nuclear engineer in the Navy.
You could use DJVU (arguably better than PDF for scanning books - supports OCR). There are a couple of scanning solutions for DJVU format.
China is not a Communist country, and is not following a "communist model." Not to mention Singapore -- who on earth are you?

Moreover, China's growth is nothing compared to Japan's economic miracle. The fact of the matter is that China has far better national resources than Japan ever did, and should have succeeded decades ago. It was the early leadership that held it back.
For me, as a designer, contributing to Open Source is a great exercise. But as gkoberger states, it's hard to get 'a foot in the door'. And getting your GUI implemented is also a long process.

How could this be made more lucrative?
Why would somebody create a website that requires Facebook to work? Why can't you just upload the image using a form, and have facebook as a secondary option? Retarded.
France Removals
If you're about to move house to France, take advantage of our dedicated moving service to help you organise the move professionally.
Regardless, it's almost certainly within the purview of individual states to regulate this.
Chinese here.
Did you know that China is run by assholes with an engineering degree?
Seriously, Chinese officials tend to buy a degree to make themselves look more educated.
Yes and developing for it
The I Ching is not exactly a text, it is more like a beautifully organized list of named symbols, with their first-hand commentaries (attributed to Confucius), and comments on these comments (like in HN threads). The overall picture draws an interesting landscape of evolving configurations, but I fear some comments on the symbols may have lost their meaning, so no, I can't understand I Ching.
having lived in Singapore for 6 years now, i can tell you its a fascinating story.

Start with this book: http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Lee-Kuan-Yew-Singapore/d... - It's basically a free ranging interview with Lee Kuan Yew, the man who essentially engineered Singapore.

if you dont want to get the book, just google him and read. Lots of very interesting articles.
Nike Dunk High All White
Yet another affiliate-marketing app. I personally do not have the itch to know what others are buying.

I'm more interested in what people are creating.
Somehow that way of coding makes my head hurt.
http://riastats.com/
lol: http://cakesy.com/810610580.jpg
This lecture was given to students to start to understand how real software development works and get an edge on their classmates while applying their technical skills.
Top Blood Transfusion Risks Patients Should Be Aware Of
The Chicken Gazette - Issue 6
It bothers me that I have to click the tiny page arrows at the top and bottom, rather than the stack of pages image at the right, which was my first instinct.
Java as we know it is over. Time to fork?
I was looking for an app in this category and had seen Dayta before but didn't buy it because it looks like it only tracks daily events? For some things that just doesn't make any sense - like, for example, going to the gym. I want to go 2-3times a week not 1 or more times a day.

It doesn't seem possible to track events aggregated on a weekly basis?
Once you've perfected the sweatshop and found customers willing to look the other way, it would be hard for any form of government to fail at showing massive economic growth. They're raking it in because anyone who treats workers like human beings rather than robots is at a competitive disadvantage in the race to the bottom.
Another Asian tiger, Taiwan is democratic and had one of the fastest and most sustainable growth stories from the 60s onward.

Their government picked some key industries like semiconductors and invested a lot of resources towards training a workforce and stimulating business. It has paid off in huge dividends. All done democratically.

Additionally their recent environmental push is driven by local people and very democratic - individual recycling rates have skyrocketed. It will be interesting to see if they can do the same with renewable energy.
Technocrats understand that technology is the only thing that reduces cultural lag, more or less. On the other hand, artificial scarcity keeps it going strong. These two processes are inversely proportional in respect to time, meaning the effect of artificial scarcity will eventually become trivial in effect on cultural progression as it follows the rate of technological advancement.
The relative starting points of China and USA are very far apart. Post-WWII, the United States has had top notch science, commerce, inventing, trade, entertainment, and been a very desirable location for emigration to. China went a little differently.

The Japanese attacks ravaged a lot of the wealthiest parts of China, then the Chinese civil war destroyed a lot more infrastructure, and then the cultural revolution killed millions of talented people. Deng Xiaoping inherited a real mess, very little, and it's amazing how he turned it around. Probably the greatest statesman of the last 100 years, Deng Xiaoping.

The United States is still ahead of China, but USA is trending slowly downwards where China is trending moderately quickly upwards. Still a lot of advantages for the United States, and it could get turned around. But yes, a government run by lawyers and lobbyists is not a sustainable governance model. We'll see though, things could get turned around pretty quickly in America. Still the best place in the world for technology, inventing, entrepreneurship, and research, which is huge. China seems to have emerged as a legitimate world power though, no doubt about that.
It is funny, Microsoft people are quite willing to chat on the net about all the great stuff they are doing, but as soon as someone points out something incredibly stupid that they are doing, they all disappear.
Hear hear. Perhaps not the poster specifically, but many companies wonder why they can't get good engineers but offer nothing in the areas you identify.
Top Best Android Games | Technorox
The obvious reason, it cuts down on spam by a huge amount, and you get accurate data. Let facebook do all the hardwork, this way you do not spend as long checking the data.
>>>then they won't stay with you for more than a year or two once they're competent.

Only true if you keep paying them like juniors and don't advance their career appropriately to their personal/professional development.
Ok. But then I don't understand the squirmyness about using numpy (and possibly scipy). Not using numpy in such cases will always give you less-than-decent performance.
The programming contests should be fun! If they aren't your thing, then you are right to opt-out of the process as there likely won't be a good culture match. However, I think it is a little off to characterize them as somehow extorting job applicants.
Maybe not now but it certainly will be in a few years for the simple reason that they rebuild everything from scratch and can leapfrog technologies. China doesn't care about being backwards-compatible: they'll just tear down & rebuild whole districts every few years. And they still have the cheap labour to do it at a far faster pace than any public infrastructure project in the western world.
" We're run by a combination of lawyers and lunatics; how could a society run by wise engineers not surpass us?"

Well, first of all the "lunatics" running the US (and for that matter almost all democracies) at least don't kill their own citizens for disagreeing with them. Quite an accomplishment in my view.

Besides you have to put Chinas growth in perspective. They started with an economy that was closer to the mid-ages than anything. Growing from this base makes it much easier to get high percentage growth rates over the years. The GDP per capita ist still more than 12 times higher in the US than in China which as a whole is still a developing country (according to the IMF).
I think at one point the survey listed the number of samples; now it just seems to be percentages which isn't as useful. Anecdotally the survey has a lot of respondents (as in, a majority of the Steam userbase) but you never know.
I expect that in future there will be more automated programming, based upon a vague description of the problem. However, I've seen very little progress made in this domain other than a few applications of genetic programming and the use of Wizards or UML templates.

In the early days of my software career I encountered plenty of situations which had resulted from the use of Wizards to generate database applications by non programmers. The results were always quite disastrous.
I am going to think about a problem, and if I come up with a solution I am sure is correct, I shall implement it. If I do not, I will search the web for a solution. If I find one, I will make sure it is correct, and then implement it. If I do not, I am going to ask some friends of mine about it. If they do not know the solution, I will temporaily loose the constraints and implement a solution that is "good enough", then I will make the problem my next research problem.

Implementing an algorithm we are not sure that works correctly is not only a waste of time -- it is actually harmful, for it is possible to ship an algorithm that only seem to work correctly. Test cases will not prove that a solution is correct.
The only advice I'd have for this sort of question - and it's a tip that I find has really helped me in both academic and non-academic contexts...

Don't get too hung up about remembering what you've learnt. Just push on with the next thing and really just move forward as fast as you can. What I find is that I very rarely remember the content of what I learnt before, but I do remember where to find an easily accessible resource that refreshes my memory quickly.

The rationale behind this approach is that a) the brain (at least mine) is fantastic at indexing information - but not so great at putting it in its long term memory bank. And b) that it probably works this way because it doesn't want to store in long term memory stuff that it doesn't have to. So it takes a note of what it's seen, gives you a little index to let you find it again if you need it - but discards the rest. It'll store in long term memory the stuff that you come back to over and over again...

It's also important to bear in mind that particularly when you are starting out in a learning endeavor you really have no idea what of the basics you're really going to have to have memorized in a rote fashion. So don't fret it. Learn it, take a note of it, move on.

edit - part of what I hate about schooling in general is that they force you to rote learn heaps of stuff you probably won't ever use. And the brain hates it. No wonder kids in general hate school.
The Corn Personality Test: are you modular or integrated?
It obviously depends on where you start.

I'd say you should start by contributing to a small project, where there usually isn't a lot of red tape to learn. And most large projects have extension mechanisms, so if you want to contribute to a large project, make a small stand-alone extension. Or contribute to someone else's stand-alone extension.
Forget clever. Try providing a place people want to work, doing interesting stuff, with reasonable pay, working with smart people, with the hardware and software needed to get the job done, along with a sense of mission, excitment and purpose. Take a humble attitude to recruiting them instead of requiring people to "prove that that want to for us". Give people a job that the want to rush to in the morning to get started on. Demonstrate during the interview process that your company is smart and understands software development, by asking smart questions that reveal meaningful insights into the candidates capabilities as a coder. It's not all about you - ask them what they want - take an interest. People want jobs that make them feel a sense of mission and purpose, along with reasonable reward for their skills and experience.
Driving theory test : The Highway Code - Motorways
Never lived in Singapore but read about it. The trick is apparently to keep the Confucean culture alive and open it to new technologies. It is exactly what Chinese reformists wanted to do one century ago, but failed. China is a bigger stone to roll than Singapore...

Confucianism is not very cool: it's all about respecting your parents, your spouse, your boss, your friends, and educating well your kids. Not a trendy form of gouvernment, as it may not allow open rebellion against authorities, but it worked not so bad for nearly two millenaries, before collapsing under its own weight. In China they would like to get it back somewhat. NB: Confucianism is only very remotely related to Confucius' actual teaching.
I think one of the big mistakes is the assumption that one can get away from symbols and language by using gadgets, windows, or flowcharts. Even if you succeed at some level, you end up with a different language, which still requires programming and abstraction skills, but the language usually ends up being inefficient.

I find that written symbols are very efficient. At least, as long as I have this keyboard in front of me.
Why are Ethics Important? [video]
Nike Zoom Hyperfuse Shoes
Yes.

But also performance tuning and administration and interviewing new employees and understanding their business and suggesting new software for them and telling them not to buy new software.

It's whatever you are better than them at and they will pay money for.
Yes, I second that (living in China, they redo ring roads overnight here). I also heard that in China in one year they currently build more kilometers of bridges than in US they build kilometers of highways. (No link to back that, just a hearsay.)
Rate my startup: Server Impulse (web based monitoring)
I am creating a web based monitoring tool for Windows servers.

It works like this: A small agent collects status information about your Windows server (cpu, events, updates, etc.), Server Impulse displays this information in your online dashboard and sends you alerts (by e-mail, sms and rss).

Please let me know what you think about my project. I really appreciate it.

http://www.serverimpulse.com