skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is up with the Aussies and quarantine? Going from the US to SE Asia, you fill out a little slip declaring if you're carrying snails or orchids, and if you say you are not, you sail right through. No worries!
You need to make it clear this is something that is volunteer work. You don't want potential employers calling and asking about you and they say "We don't have an employee named xyz", red flags.
Which IRC channel was that on then?
I will not refer to an economy bubble but to a general trend, so this won't be a direct answer to your question.

More & more startups are build around shuffling data between few existing big players in the social media market. The question is: are these "base" players really offering its customers something which would improve the quality of their lives? Other than a warm fuzzy feeling of being "connected"? Personally I doubt it.

The example:
Flightcaster: a concrete quality given to its users. This is, as PG reminded few times, called: wealth. Congrats here.

Some startup X which does something with your Twitter or Facebook data: well it may be cool according to the current fashion, but its real value is very volatile, unmeasurable and virtual.

So if you're in the first group, you're safe.

If you're in the second group and base your value on a virtual value of other services who in turn are based on some premise or belief, my guess is you're doomed.
Without a 50kiloword post it's difficult to fully respond to your complaints.

However, I will say this, which I hope will help. Often times it is difficult to get a cohesive understanding of the changes caused by technological change without the distance of history or an external perspective. Change is chaotic in the short term, and it can be difficult for any individual human who is compromised by biases, limited knowledge, and an undue focus on the very immediate past and very immediate proximity to extract meaningful information about long term change from that muddle. More so when those long term changes are rather subtle (as they often are). More so when only an observer from the future who has had the benefit of immersive familiarity with what in the present are novel paradigms would be able to look at our time and pick out the teeniest inklings of those changes. To us those new things are still new things, and not even fully formed yet, and thus all the more difficult to define, understand, and recognize.

Moreover we have a natural desire for change to manifest rapidly and completely. We want everything to be resolved utterly in the 5th act of a 2 hour play. But that's not how things work in the real world. In the real world it's always 2 steps forward, 1 step back, and then 1 forward and 2 back, and then 2 forward and 1 back again. Slow, incremental, subtle progress, often too slow, incremental, and subtle to be very satisfying. Worse yet, advances such as the present one (exposing previously secret underhanded schemes to the public at large) may seem like setbacks, because even though the result is greater transparency (forcefully made) in the process something bad was exposed.

In short, I don't think it's possible for anyone to fully understand the changes that are going on in the world (or even in the US) right now, let alone to forecast how those and other changes will manifest years and decades down the road.

I do think we are at a turning point in history at the moment. I think we will either tip into a period of greater individual liberty, richer freedoms of expression, greater individual autonomy, etc. on the one hand or we will tip into a period of diminished individual liberty, more authority in the hands of the state and big organizations (corporations, unions, NGOs, etc.), and a de facto division of hierarchy of rights between a new effective aristocracy and commoners. However, I think it is far, far too early to say which way the scales will tip, and there are promising signs that it will tip in the direction of liberty.

Consider this story in and of itself. Sure, there were nefarious plans for "sock puppet management", but not only do we have no clue how well such things would have worked in practice (I'm skeptical) but the plans have been spilled all over the internet for the world to gawk at, which will likely cause a huge backlash against anyone attempting to do this sort of thing as well as keep people on the lookout for instances of the phenomenon.
Antti Vilpponen: A Nokia failure may mean growth for Finnish startups
Brazil isn't part of the Visa Waiver program and felt that its citizens were being treated unreasonably. Thus, they began being rude to Americans. (IIRC)

Kind of an asshole move, but highly entertaining to watch from the outside.
Only the Oxford English Dictionary app comes to mind, terrible (content aside, hence managing to retain “killer” status) and ugly as it is.

However, it in no way stands as example of either good design or the strengths of Flash.
> this sounds very over-the-top

It is from reddit, which pretty much thrives on over-the-top, especially if it's about how EEEEVIL the US is.
They had a small problem with imported animals and plants in the past ...
Why designers are vary of criticism
A thing to note here is that at that time probably almost everyone that mattered in Italy had heard of Leonardo da Vinci's past works. So yes of course he could leave out past achievements.

In short I don't think this is good advice to people that haven't made sufficient name for themselves yet, or that are coming from other fields... Though focusing conveying value offered, is of course a good idea.

(Disclaimer: I am no expert on resumes)
Fantastic job, that is exactly what we need:

1-Stop contributing to society.
2-Start living as parasites from more hard working, efficient people.
3-Eliminate freedom to choose what to do with your salary money, so nobody wants to work, everybody wants to parasite.

Totally brilliant, what could go wrong about that?
Jitter: Continuous compilation and Growl notification for CoffeeScript
We've got one of the most isolated agricultural systems in the world. To even ship grain to or from Australia you need specially accredited ships (I have a friend in Maritime law and it causes her no end in hassles trying to find these ships).

Because of the isolation, we don't have too many pestilence problems (gross oversimplification) and we want/need to keep it that way.
I think there’s a big difference between a site whose visible product is discussion, such as Hacker News, and a site whose discussion is only in support of the visible product, like Wikipedia. Newcomers to a discussion community can easily see practices and norms at work, because the process and the results are the same thing, and are completely transparent by definition. Since much if not most of the process of writing Wikipedia is reorganizing and rewriting and cutting and polishing, without any one user having responsibility for an article, it’s not obvious just quite what contributions are most helpful, or even helpful at all.

I think the feedback (reversions with edit summaries, discussion on talk pages, comments on users’ pages) are okay, but it’s an inherently different kind of feedback than you’d get from, say, HN or Facebook or Twitter or Stack Overflow. Just comes with the territory.

I think Wikipedia could do a lot better, especially if it had more programmers working on technical improvements. But I wouldn’t guess the systems used by discussion-oriented communities could be usefully easily transferred.
Yes i've touched briefly on CPAN vs stdlib approach before (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2088040). They're just different approaches and neither is better or worse than the other.

BTW... I believe all language repos will have darwinism acting upon it. I see it in Ruby & Python as well as on CPAN. Its Perl philosophy and CPAN size that just stirs the pot a bit more!
When Obama met Zuckerberg, caught on camera
Lightweight Markdown in your Rails models
There have been some attempts to make a line oriented XML format so that shell tools work; doing the same thing with JSON is possible too; there are a few ways to do it. Have been meaning to give it a go at some point. In my view it makes more sense than building a new set of tools, especially as the Jshon ones do not really seem to compose properly.

References for XML:
http://www.lbreyer.com/unix_xml-1.html
http://www.ofb.net/~egnor/xml2/
http://gnosis.cx/publish/programming/xml_matters_17.html
>> all Americans were out of a sudden required by the Brazilian authorities to get pictures taken at the Brazilian customs

I'm curious why this would be such a hassle. I work in China right now and every time I go through customs, there's a little web cam there that takes a photo of me while the customs officer looks at my passport and stamps it. I think both foreigners and citizens experience it. Adds no time to the process at all. I even see my photo on the computer screen if the screen is angled right.

Unless Brazil simply doesn't have the ability to set up this kind of tech....
ICC Cricket World Cup 2011  Cricket Tamil news
Presenting ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 news, Tamil Cricket News, Cricket Tamil News & Updates which consists of venue, schedule, Points, ticket, Teams,
Don't accept the protocol! It is degrading, the scanners pose a health risk, and it is all a waste of money with no benefit to security. America spends several times more on TSA that the entire FBI counter-terrorism budget.
Can you explain were the concurrency is used?
Yes, there is no boom!!! WTF!!
I also live in China.

1. In China the system is set-up for that. The little web-cam and the system are integrated with a push of a button, and the process is very quick. In Brazil they didn't have anything. They were taking pictures with off-the-shelf digital cameras, and I read an article saying that they did not even have a system set-up to transfer the pictures out! It was really something implemented overnight, clearly just to piss people off.

2. Sorry if I was not clear, but my point about the hassle was not much the picture itself, but the fact that Americans were singled-out and placed on a different line. This is borderline racist IMO.

Note: Brazil eliminated this stupid policy a while ago. I mentioned it just as an example.
It seems bizarre that Google have let Bookmarks gather dust. If they integrated it in to Chrome (instead of continuing to support the weird Chrome-only bookmark sync they've got at the moment), and then produced official plugins for other browsers it would breath some life in to the service. Guess I'll give Xmarks a try.
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You're just too much of a flight risk - they see you as having too little at stake in India. I've had some friends have similar issues (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851287). I myself returned to India after 8 years in the states partly because it was practically impossible to start my own business without a green card, aka 4 years of indentured servitude.

For future reference: Try to show assets you own (real estate, homes etc) that incentivize your return; Bring literature about your conference, maybe ads etc (they need to see that its purpose is not an immigration scam); if you're married or have kids, that helps a great deal. Good luck!
Really interesting. This reminds me of OKCupid's correlational questions[1]: If you want to know if your date puts out, ask if they like beer. If you want to know if they're liberal, as if they like complex people in their lives. The idea of building social networks around interests seems so intuitive, yet I've never seen anybody really do it before. Hunch seems to be a smarter StumbleUpon. I'm intrigued.

[1] http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-best-questions-for-fir...
I wish there was a video to go along with it, but very interesting none the less.

Kind of off-topic, but I liked this slide: http://cl.ly/3r1F1l141g2g0T3v3929

It's important to realize that there are different types of chicken and egg problems.

OpenTable, Monster and AdWords don't create a sense of community. There's a strict buyer/seller differentiator between the users.

AirBnB and ebay create something in the middle, where many of the sellers are also buyers (especially in the beginning).

Lastly, sites like etsy and dribbble have a strong sense of community because creators are mostly "selling" to their peers.

An interesting exercise is to take a successful company in one of those columns and bring it to another. In one sense that's what AirBnb did by taking the couchsurfing concept and turning it in to a "hybrid" with a stronger buyer/seller differentiator.
Here in Uruguay* we have a reasonably good solution, it's a "flat tax" (currently U$ 50/month) that includes healthcare as a benefit, which makes it very useful for a one-man business - for example, most window cleaners, car parkers and other "almost-beggars" pay this tax (the maximum income for the business is U$ 25.000 gross yearly).

It's called "Monotributo", if you speak Spanish look it up.

(*I believe the same works in Argentina)
I think that's kind of the point. The unpleasantness is institutionalized in the US, whereas it's random/haphazard in most other places.
My live-in partner went home with me to Denmark for Christmas. The border crossing in Copenhagen Airport was pleasant and completely without incident.

What was maddening was the process of applying for a visitor's visa. In addition to forms, it required around 25 pages of auxiliary documentation, including her most recent pay-slip; a print-out of her bank balance on the day of submission; a letter addressed to the embassy from her employer attesting to her position, her monthly salary and her length of employment; a travel insurance policy covering the length of the stay; a round-trip plane ticket; a letter of several pages from me, accompanied by evidence such as photos, describing how and when we first met, when I most recently met her, the total amount of time we have spent together face to face, etc.

That was for a two-week stay over the holidays. Fun.
"For example: After an incident involving an American in Brazil [1], all Americans were out of a sudden required by the Brazilian authorities to get pictures taken at the Brazilian customs. The situation got so ridiculous, that at some point the airports ended up with 3 lines: "Brazilian Citizens", "Foreigners", and "Americans". In other words, Americans were singled-out from the rest of the world. Would the OP describe that as a "pleasant experience"???"

Why should Brazil treat US citizens any different, than the US treats Brazilian citizens? If the US harasses Brazilian citizens with such procedures, it is IMO perfectly OK if Brazil does the same to US citizens.
The original question has a link to a Scientific American that explores the same idea:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dark-knight...

I like this quote:

How many of us do you think could become a Batman?

If you found the percentage of billionaires and multiply
that by the percentage of people who become Olympic
decathletes, you could probably get a close estimate.
The US just became unaffordable, it was probably not a choice on the OP.
why your product over indinero or mint?
i don't store your bank credentials on the server. i store it optionally in an aes encrypted cookie on your computer.

the user interface is more intuitive and designed similarly to gmail's interface.

updating transactions is much faster; connections don't go through yodlee.
The Cloud Jobs
This man just shattered all our dreams.
Thanks for your comment. I brought a lot of documents with me during visa interview but didn't they see a single document. It's true I am unmarried but getting married just to get a US visa is too much to ask for :)
Barack Obama 'friends' Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
US President Barack Obama has met Silicon Valley bosses, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.Apple's Steve Jobs and Google chief executive Eric Schmidt were also present at the private get-together in California.The president had been seeking the views of technology leaders as he works to turn around his country's ailing economy.
Australia is very stable geologically, apart from a bit on the S.E. corner, which is why it is flat. It is very old and hasn't had the evolutionary disruptions caused by mountain raising and flattening. The animals have evolved quite distinctly in their own niche. Foreign imports could seriously disturb the balance. See, for example, rabbits, foxes, cane toads.
If you haven't already seen it, you might want to look at http://www.ilounge.com/ an ipod site that started off as a blog, built a community, then sold advertising for a free buyers guide amongst other things. As I understand it, it is (or rather at least was a few years ago) quite profitable.
Boost your Link building Campaign with Link Wheel
Link Wheel- It is a network of interconnected 2.0 websites with high Page Rank that not only link to a main site but also among themselves thus forming a wheel like structure. The Main purpose of wheel linking is to increase the quality and quantity of links for websites and to improve the search results in search engines results pages.
By that logic everyone that uses Helvetica in Black on a white background should be sued by American Apparel.

As far as I know, trademarks can cover the proportions of the logo. So, if I created an orange square, put a lambda in it (using the same font) and ensured the padding around the lambda was pinpoint accurate, that'd totally be infringement.

About the only thing that I'm being sketchy on is the use of the Y Combinator name. I tried to use Y-Combinator, when referring to math, and Y Combinator when referring to the company, but the line is a bit blurry...
I went on a rugby tour there from UK around the time of the last foot 'n mouth outbreak... australian immigration were very concerned of the mud on our team's rugby boots so they cleaned all 26 pairs! I'd never played with such spotless (and disinfected) boots!
I always wanted to make a quine t-shirt, something like

A t-shirt with the following sentence followed by its quotation: "A t-shirt with the following sentence followed by its quotation:"

but the line is too long to fit confortably in a t-shirt (and it's so nerd even I would not wear it)
I'd like to work in software. I went to college with the idea that I was going to go into banking or consulting, but then found that I didn't like the type of lifestyle these jobs involved. I did a lot of programming in high school, so I want to go back into the tech world. I'm just worried that now I'm incredibly behind and employers will balk at a BA in CS from a school that offers most of its CS degrees as a BS.

But I'd also like to add that "tech world" doesn't necessarily mean actually being the programmer. I could also be on the business or law side.
Or use App Engine and get pretty URLs, stats, etc as well:

https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/static-appengine-...
Ideas aren't entirely worthless, but execution is so significant that it can kill a good idea or rescue a bad idea.

Consider what would be necessary to fully detail an idea so completely as to make it difficult to screw up the execution. You would need to provide a lot of material to fill in all the details, thousands of words perhaps.

Consider an example of this: the adaptation of books to movies. Books are ideas that are enormously thoroughly detailed, far more detailed than the vast majority of ideas in business. And yet, what is the success rate of the translation of good ideas (in book form) to good movies? It's pretty spotty, and utterly dependent on good execution. How many excellent books have been executed as mediocre or horrible movies?

Good ideas can help (some of the best movies ever have come from books, for example), but they can just as easily be a length of rope from which to hang oneself.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2232357

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2034790

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2194110

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2193075

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2115146

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079237
No one tell those "punch the monkey" ad authors... at least not before html5block is out.
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1870

Apparently there should have been approximately 2 dinosaur Batmans (Batmen?)
Brazil has a well-known tit-for-tat policy in foreign matters. They will apply to a country's citizens whatever policy that country applies to Brazilians. So Americans were singled out because they singled out Brazilians. It's called having balls.
Importance of regular, consistent release schedules in webdev.
Clickable: http://elastic-detector.secludit.com
Se my comment above, you completely ignore the reason for that policy.
F5 Friday: Two Heads are Better Than One
I want to know why any tech company would still be doing resume reviews on paper ?

Page breaks are much less meaningful when you're scrolling through a document.
32 bit key? That seems a bit small.

It doesn't say what banks it supports.

If it hadn't been linked to from HN, I probably wouldn't have clicked through the slideshow.
If you have a U.S. passport at least, my experience is that bored immigration agents wave you through. I actually immigrated to Denmark on a 3-year temporary work permit, and showed up at the airport as a single male in my 20s with three giant bags, and nobody asked me a single thing about it. I had the work-permit documentation, but they didn't even want to see it; just waved me through.

Supposedly you get more attention if you're Arab-looking, though (I'm rather white), and there can be visa hassles if your passport isn't from a western country.
good feedback, thanks for the perspective!
That sounds a lot like the Working Tax Credit in the UK - which has had a lot of problems:

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

[NB I think the problems were more to do with the poor implementation of the scheme rather than the idea itself].
Chrome Meets Opera In Version - Dev Channel Upgraded To Chrome 11
As mentioned in the article, the book "Becoming Batman":

http://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/ecom/MasterServlet/GetItemDet...

(Man, that's an ugly URL)
Clickable link:

History: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1960437
One of the more surreal conversations I've had while entering the US was one guy who wanted to know why I've been to Turkey/Egypt/Morocco so many times - he just seemed to refuse to believe me when I said that they are really nice places to go on holiday and that they are very common holiday destinations for Europeans. I actually had to explain what it is that I like about them!

Note - I'm from the UK.

[Edit: Note that I really enjoy visiting the US - the country is great, its just that the experience of getting in can be a bit odd, although I have to admit that the last few times were all perfectly pleasant].
I suppose its another rite of passage like making template modules/frameworks which you see in abundance in all language repos :)
Great tool, was thinking about writing something like that myself. I especially wanted a tool that would print the value of a specific key to STDOUT with a syntax like

echo "{ 'a': {'b': {'c": 0 } } }" | json-tool "a.b.c" # echos 0

Maybe your tool does that but I missed it
ShorthandSQL aka LazybumQL - A proposal
Just out of curiosity where are you from / what race are you?
The intriguing thing is that out of about 15 US trips only one had a bad border experience (and that was a work trip where we took our own equipment, which was understandable).
Google Crawling and Indexing Tips
The Quora thread is great. Thanks!