skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Definitely agree. Even if there was a normal sounding human voice, people generally don't sing driving instructions to each other. If you're going to deliver driving instructions using a speaking voice, it's probably best to turn down the music prior to listening to it.
They don't own the land, the federal government does, and leases it out to them to log. They don't have an incentive to replant.

Having said that, they do replant, but generally replace old-growth forest with faster-growing, weaker monoculture pines that take less time to mature, so they can be harvested again.
CSS is actually the tweakiest part of the frontend triumvirate. The syntax isn't hard (selector + bag of key/value pairs) but putting it together so it reliably renders on all browsers takes weeks/months.

I'd recommend doing sass/compass instead which both provides an abstraction layer and a library of working code. If you're starting from nothing, the SASS syntax will probably be easier to work with than the default SCSS syntax. You can dig into the libraries if you really care about how things work, but it's always easier to start from something that works than to try to figure out stuff from scratch.
I hate a lot of the tools/libraries/frameworks/software I am forced to use on a daily basis, because a lot of it is complete crap, or has some very annoying misfeature that I run into constantly and there is no way around.

I'd wager that this is part of the reason many people hate Microsoft. They are or were forced to use windows at work, programming apps for windows using Microsoft tools or languages, etc. And many of them probably found it a pain in the butt.
Is it not the case that as money moves around the economy from one person to another it is taxed over and over again many times? Why do some people only think of capital gains as "double taxation"?
If you're a success before 30, you probably haven't failed enough to make the success meaningful.

I'm well on my way to having a nice portfolio of failures before I hit 30, and it's looking like I'll find success at < 40. I've learned too much from my failures at 26 to think that you could get a good sampling before 30.

Humans live too long to worry about rushing it.
I would trust google to spend its money more efficiently than any government. People tend to talk about government as the only socially responsible charity in town and the money not forcibly taken is somehow wasted in some black hole.
Unless Microsoft decided to approach it as a phone first and a tiny computer second, and from the homes screen being ~50% phone features I'm guessing they did. Information density on a phone can be extremely low.
I believe there's some sand boxing issues on one hand. But usually the problem is how to make the UI for c-p non clunky and non interfering. Well, that's the same spiel that companies always give us.

Anyhow, c-p support is coming with the first OS revision of WP7. As anand stated, it already works on test versions of the revision.
(disclaimer: I'm straight but I suffered from the nerd bullying from ages 5 to 14)

So, not to dump on this idea, but I heard this again and again when I was a kid. It didn't really help me feel better. My position was "That's fine, but life really sucks now"

When you say to a 7 year old "it gets better when you're 14" you're saying that he has to go through a whole second lifetime of suffering before he gets out. That's not helpful.

Better to say "It gets better when you're older and here's why. And here's how you can get some of those things early. Here's how you can find a healthy community now, which will help now."

Although to be fair, I'm sure Dan Savage et. al. would completely agree, and be the first to offer that kind of advice.
Sounds familiar...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1227543
Nice write-up, though it does seem to skirt the notion that for many businesses users are not the customers, they are the product. User data is sold to to the real customers.

Also thanks Pete for not using the word "monetize" since I read it right after breakfast.
Meebo looking for Node.js Developers?
I noticed meebo bid on "node.js" in adwords.

http://www.google.com/#q=node.js (at the time of writing) shows a meebo add

There is no mention of node.js on the jobs page though.

http://www.meebo.com/jobs/openings/secretjobs/

Node seems like a good fit for a service like meebo though, so maybe they are.
Google will get taxed if it brings any of that cash back into the US (repatriates the money) to pay dividends or acquire domestic companies.

The same goes for Goldman, et al., unless congress passes another "repatriation holiday" in the name of stimulus.
Returning the maximum profit for shareholders is moral only for the very narrowly focused or the short sighted. Am I being moral if I return maximum profit for my shareholders by working my workers to death? Or by polluting the land so that it cannot be used after I am done with it? How about by returning value to them with one hand (the value of their shares, dividends) and removing it with the other (the increases in individual taxes required to make up for the shortfall I created by not paying)?
What you say is true and I think you both make good points.

When someone above asked "Why would Google want to pay a higher tax rate?" I thought, they would if it was in their best interest- I think we all agree on this.

Now here is the crazy part of my post- A company like Google which could conceivably bring in billions of dollars by changing its tax setup, should have some bargaining power. I don't think anything like this exists anywhere, but wouldn't it be cool if Google could get lawmakers to state that x% of Google's tax dollars will set up schools that focused on teaching 'gifted' children technology? And y% pays for technology infrastructure? Wouldn't that be fukken sweet? It would give Google an incentive to keep money in the USA, give back to what gave birth to it, reduce its burden of finding and educating new hires, reduce it's burden of setting up infrastructure, and benefit society across the board without having to wait for a some Google Billionaire to have a ethical epiphany in his old age and attempt philanthropy.
Someone could have disliked Netscape back then, but dislike Microsoft now.
Judging from this downvoted comment -- this discussion is overtaken by libertarian crowd (which I'm part of).
Still it's not a good idea to down-vote comments that you do not agree with. Down-voting is intended for boring/offensive comments which you do not want to see in further discussions.
Edit: You completed edited your comment since I replied... the new version is a lot more reasonable. Here's what I originally wrote, which doesn't 100% apply any more:

Did you actually read my comment? I think you're reacting to something I didn't say - taxes are fine, and you'd wind up paying for services you use in property taxes.

Land, resources, military, police, roads, bridges, dams, banks (really shouldn't be government provided as that causes all sorts of problems like we've recently seen, but that's a side discussion), schools - those are all local-based services. You'd pay for where you were using them, when you were using them.

> PS: If you disagree you can always leave and renounce citizenship.

Totally unnecessary and counterproductive to a decent reasonable discussion.
Oracle's friends are Fortune 500 executives with small minds and deep pockets. That is to say, people who are willing to shell out for Oracle products and services when there are considerably better and less expensive alternatives available.

AFAIK Oracle still charges license fees for Oracle per core, while Microsoft charges per socket. The result is a HUGE price disparity... and the less expensive product is also the one that's far easier to deploy and maintain, and has vastly superior tools for developing and optimizing code.

Honestly, I don't see how Apple would be on Oracle's radar at all, since they serve such vastly different markets.
Can someone explain why companies should pay taxes at all? Their shareholders should and they do pay taxes according to their income but what's the purpose of an extra taxation to a legal entity?
"Google's board and executives are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value. Shareholders can sue otherwise."

Common fallacy. No they're not, and no they can't. See, eg

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1013744
OpenStack: An Open Cloud Initiative Makes its 1st Release
I was asked to contribute to a telecom's "ideas"-section, article not published
So the headline could have been "Apple chooses form factor, power usage, and OpenCL performance over newer generation CPU in MacBook Air". The words "saddled" and "gimped" probably get more page views.
There is nothing more up to date than checking out the recent commits: http://github.com/rails

http://peepcode.com/ is always great.
How Powerful Are Exact Match Domains? Is Their Time Limited?
Yes. Though geographical location also plays a huge role. There's a big north-south divide. Some Realschulen in the south are better than some Gymnasien in the north.
> It's like saying I need your sandwich more than you do. I'm hungrier, I could make better use of it, therefore I should get your sandwich. Even if I could legally take your sandwich. It's still not okay. It's your sandwich! If I take it, you go hungry.

Really, the same reasoning could be applied to the government with regards to taxation.
You've got what there, 10^16? That is certainly a very big number. But then, the article is claiming that the chance of becoming complex is a very small number. Is it less than 10^-16? (Is it even knowable? At a minimum, the author thinks he can say something about it.) You'd be surprised how fast these numbers get small if you need to brute force yourself away from a local maximum and over a valley.

I don't care how big your bignum is compared to everyday experience. Bignum * Smallnum does not automatically equal certainty, impossibility, or feasibility. It means do the math.
I agree with you generally, but how much mathematical thinking will help you still depends extremely on the kind of job you are doing.

In my experience the single thing in which mathematical thinking can help you best is going meta. When you reason about the program as the program were data. It is not a coincidence that smart people with mathematical talent wants to go meta: they love to write frameworks, new programing languages, compilers, (graphical, database) engines.

But most of the programmers have to write good old application logic (so called business logic) using languages, frameworks, engines, technologies made by other people.

I go further: most people have to use bad programming languages, programming languages which are not their choice. Most people have to maintain bad quality code created by other people.

For these tasks mathematical thinking is really secondary. You have to have other skills: very good memory, finding your way in a complex mess, etc... If you are mathematically 'smart', you will find patterns, you will be bored, you will go meta, and they need to find another guy for the mundane task.
It's a curious thought, but I actually think I'd prefer to be a subject of Google than Her Majesty's Government. Larry, Sergei, if you're reading - please make a bid for UK PLC. It's weighed down with debts and the current management are a shower of shite, but the headquarters are pretty swanky and I hear there are some great engineers on the payroll in Cambridge.
".. boxers wear heavily padded gloves, they end up throwing and receiving many (less powerful) blows in a fight because it doesn't hurt your hand to hit someone in those gloves."

No. While it is true that their hands are injured less, the gloves allow them to deliver _more_ _powerful_ blows. The use of gloves brought brain injury to boxing in a big way.

In the days preceding use of gloves, knockouts and concussions were less frequent, fights lasted much longer and required considerable endurance as well as fighting skill.
Oracle's products are available for OS X and they need Java for their installers / management consoles.
I see this story delivering a full dose of irony that will be lost on so many people. Google is a company that chose to affiliate with progressive causes and personalities almost from the start. And one of the central tenants of progressivism is business and the wealthy should pay their fair share of taxes (meaning a proportionally higher share). But this state of affairs can never really be reached. (Please give me a pass on this assertion, the argument is long. Doesn't this story provide an iota of supporting evidence?) Ultimately people pay taxes, and there are many more poor and middle class than rich.
Lots to test, so I'll just give my initial impressions after a brief look:

- Red "Required" error text after submitting an incomplete form frequently overlaps <input> descriptors

- Seems like secondary main nav li items should be indented and have text-decoration:none

- I might like to see Projects and Customers/Support segregated somehow from Employees. Ordering in the main nav doesn't seem to reflect priority.

- Important secondary nav buttons are sometimes grey, sometimes blue. ie- "New Task" @ Home > My Tasks
Yes, I agree. GA is being used more and more as an ad-hoc analytics data store these days, and hopefully with some creative uses of the GA API we'll see more interesting uses that negate the need to use Excel.
> Developing software is getting to be like fashion. Keep those old skinny jeans and workarounds in your closet. Sooner or later, they'll be in style again.

Or is developing software like business? Sell those skinny jeans and workarounds when they are in demand, then buy some back when they go out of style. You're now ready for their comeback and you have some mad money in your skinny jeans' pocket.
This claim is absurd. In the last few years Microsoft has done more to advance the state-of-the-art in programming languages for practicing developers than any other organization.

In terms of industrial languages, C# and the .NET framework are a huge advance for client-side programmers developing Windows GUI applications compared to C++. They sponsor the open source development of IronPython and IronRuby and make a genuine effort to maintain compatibility w/ the reference C implementations.

As for functional languages, they largely sponsor the development of Haskell by paying Simon Peyton-Jones who works for Microsoft Research (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/), and have released F# which is by far the best commercially supported functional language.

Of course the trade off is that their languages work best, or only, with Windows, but if you are stuck programming on Windows, Microsoft is going out of its way to give developers a lot of options in languages.
I've emailed Patrick, so let's hope he can bring it back up soon.

It's a shame sites can't handle HN-level traffic automatically. My own site got borked when I put it on here without knowing much about web server configurations. Are there some standard practices which one should know?
Why is England mentioned in this comment? Google Ireland is based in the Republic of Ireland, which is not related to England.
And every other website in the world that might make advertising revenue off of turkish customers and have no censorship contacts?
Web service Licorize: Social Bookmarks plus Project Management
I would use this immediately. Scattered across my apartment are notebooks with hand-written definitions (words & phrases) I have recorded with the intent of incorporating them into my vocabulary. The problem is I cannot regularly recall the words because I cannot regularly access the list.

The app would be great if it provided incentives for legitimately storing the words into one's semantic memory.
There are quite a few places (i.e. Grand Canyon) where fires are not allowed. Too heavy for lightweight backpacking.
We'll have to see how this plays out. It's been very nice that Java's already available on all new Macs, but then there's been the dreadfully slow progress of incorporating updates, security fixes, and so on. On the other hand, OpenJDK has been building well on OS X for some time in both 32 and 64-bit forms. The only real missing pieces are easy ways to get OpenJDK builds installed (helped by Apple's restructuring of how they configure and locate Java installs) and the Cocoa-based backend for Swing (if you're using or building GUIs).

In any case, there's lots of vectors to getting JDK/JRE on OS X, and this might actually make it easier to choose which vendor and version you want for your OS X Java install.
The NHS employs a lot more people than Google and carries out research and development into saving people's lives. Sure, what Google does is great, but I'm really not convinced that thinking up ever more creative outlets to display targeted advertising is necessarily a better outcome for society than spending the money on the UK public sector, which has many worthwhile projects of its own. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that sometimes multimillion sums are better spent on schools and hospitals than buying startups to wind up (big companies, like governments, have a tendency to overpay and make some blunders). The original article pointed out that Google owed its very existence to that paragon of state-sponsored inefficiency: the research university.

Calling it "evil" to carry out their fiduciary duty by legally shifting tax burden to the less well-off might be a stretch, but it's equally a stretch to suggest that we're better off because Google pays less tax. It's not as if they'd be dirt poor if they paid a tax rate comparable to that of profitable startups...
It's TUESDAY Nov. 9th, that's fixed now, sorry.
Moms for Pot: Marijuana Initiative Gets a Surprising New Ally
Ok, you tell me. Why do you believe low corporate taxes are the cause of Ireland's problems?

Before making your argument, keep in mind that 12.5% of something > 33% of nothing.
The more cores you have the more important dealing with failure becomes. Multi CPU super computers have been dealing with these issues for a while. 2-3 CPU failures per day is fairly common and losing a rack in the middle of a job is way too common.
Do Intelligent People Drink More Alcohol?
Sure, but this one was the 800 pound gorilla. Most of those companies don't have the power to really screw us over. Microsoft did. To some extent, they still do.
Tips and Lessons learned on Software selection
But individuals do take advantage of tax loopholes. What you are talking about is that entities with more money have more options on how to minimise the amount they give to the government.
For a different perspective, there was a huge opportunity to make a killing with damping during the recent flash-crash.
Sounds like dotCloud - or at least their "end goal", as I heard it pitched at SUS2010.
And in fact this has happened in the past: http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA07-192A.html

Seems like a good reason not to ship it with the OS.
How many German households have opted-out of Street View?
What do you think lobbying is?
Thanks for the feedback!

You're correct about the issues with "page load" time. The approach in the post is really measuring the amount of time that the browser spends processing the page. However, for many modern web apps, most of the time is spent in these internal aspects of your page such as loading CSS, running javascripts, fetching images, etc...

The web timing API (there's another post about that here: http://blog.yottaa.com/2010/10/using-web-timing-api-to-measu...) we can get more detailed timers that count not just the browser time, but actually the full amount of time between typing in the URL into the browser (or clicking a link) and finishing the load of the page.

The linear trend line was created by excel automatically so I can't vouch for its accuracy other than my implicit trust of that feature.
I've read "Mind Performance Hacks" - it's a cool book. The author put up a great wiki on this stuff too: http://www.ludism.org/mentat

Though I went right ahead to Dominic O'Brien's stuff first - he's the world's best. Like any skill though, it's tedious to get the system down first, but once you do, it's a life skill that gets better w/ practice.
> Erm... you can download for free compilers from
> Microsoft or the Visual Studio Express editions.
> Or you could get all of those above things for
> Windows. You get IIS with Windows.

Maybe you can now, but when I was getting into programming you couldn't. Things have changed, but consider a more recent example. I use a Windows laptop when travelling because I can no longer be bothered with the hassle of dealing with customer support who have no clue that anything other than Windows exists. If I have touble connecting to someone's hacked up, third-rate wireless internet, I'd better be using Windows or I'm screwed.

But I use Open Office. Oh, look, Microsoft now has a docx format, and half the world assumes everyone else is running the very latest version of Windows, and Word, and now I'm being sent documents I can't read.

At the time this started I checked, and I looked, and nowhere could I find any way to read or convert these files without paying for a new version of Word.

Time and time again I have these problems, and when I do, they seem to be associated with Microsoft.

I don't hate them, I just avoid them. Most of my computing pain in the past 30 years has come from them.

And in truth I don't care, and don't think about them. I have better things to do.
What about children? You wouldn't keep them around if they're making you feel bad? 8 year old's acting up, send him off to the shelter?
"Was Java that big on the Mac?"

The precursor to Mac OS X, Rhapsody, had three environments, treated as equals: classic MacOS, Java, and OPENSTEP.

Schematics here:
http://macguild.org/rhapsody.html

Obviously, OPENSTEP/Yellow Box/Cocoa won out.
You'll enjoy it. It may be over 400 pages long but it's a really quick read. You should be able to read it all in 1-3 days.

Zeldman makes tons of link references throughout to a bunch of excellent resources, oftentimes the original sources explaining a new idea in web design. Make sure to check those links out, they add a lot of value and context, especially the A List Apart references.

The last chapter in the book ties everything together and walks you through building the Agenda from NY Mag in HTML and CSS first and then using JQuery to add behavior:

http://nymag.com/agenda/?f=agenda
>If the laws are ultimately chosen by the companies and the wealthiest...

At least with respect to the US, politicians are still needed to pass bills into law. The solution to your concern falls out of the simple realization that politicians can only sell the powers they have been delegated by the people. Grant them the power to make and break whole industries, and don't be shocked when those potentially affected come calling.
How about corporate loop holes of the form "We'll give you a tax break [or low interest loan, or other incentive] for the next 10 years if you agree to locate some of your operations here, with the understanding that you'll be employing XX people here over the next 5 years"?

The jurisdiction offering that "loop hole" is encouraging what many people would agree is beneficial behavior (encouraging local employment). The jurisdictions standing to lose that (current or prospective) employer may see it as unwelcome competition, but I'd rather permit jurisdictions to compete freely, such that each local government can tailor its services and governance/taxation as it believes will best serve its consituent population.

Beyond simply believing that such a system is "proper" and "right", I don't think any other system is "stable". Should California be able to dictate that Nevada CANNOT pass a certain type of law or adopt a certain taxation structure? Should they be able to do the same to Ireland? If so, under what theory of law or even theory of basic fairness?