skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Liberal ?

Relative to the rest of the Middle East, yes, absolutely, by leaps and bounds.

> Asians in most Gulf countries including Dubai are treated like dirt and the labourers are almost modern day slaves.

This is also true in their native countries. The poorest Indian laborers live bad lives at home or in Dubai. They go to there because, in theory, you get paid 2-3 times as much for similarly bad conditions as back home.

> A lot of them have their passports taken away by the employer forcing them to stay in dubai.

This shouldn't happen, and it's criminal when it does happen. Hopefully they crack down on it and throw people in jail that do that.

That all said - yes, it's still one of the most liberal places in the Middle East.
Let the sin begin
Wikileaks + Facebook = LeakFace

http://leakface.com
It's such a pain in the ass to sell stuff on Craigslist. Even in NYC.
Is This the iPhone 5?
If he has funding of $1,000,000 seems like he could afford to pay you an actual salary. Maybe somewhat less than market - but not way below market.

Stock options are lottery tickets.
Where are you guys pulling the business open hour data from? (I hope not Yelp since they're hours and filtering are all wrong in my experience).

This is something I've been trying to look for, for awhile now, especially late nights (not so much during the day for more obvious reasons but it does have some use during the day in some cases).

Few things to note. Since you have location and neighborhood set already, I would probably get rid of the request for location upon arriving. This will annoy a lot of people and you're only serving up SF to begin with, that doesn't seem like there is a need for that even if it maybe useful later.

The second is if you're planning to expand to other cities, why choose opennowSF (emphasis on the SF) in the domain name. Why not go with a more generic name to begin with rather than rebrand later?

The design isn't bad but I would maybe rethink the blue font for the results and have alternating background color for each result so its not blended so badly. I like that it displays how long before the business closes but I'd also like the business hours for the entire week listed so I can get a quick overview.

Also if the website has an online menu or website, include that. Not exactly sure if I'd use the share feature which btw I didn't even know was meant for sharing X restaurant was open till I clicked on it. First impression was I thought it was the twitter or facebook page for the restaurant. Also maybe have a simple sorting system such as sort by name (alphabetically) or by remaining business hours, etc.

Hope these help.
Watch Live SXSW Interactive Sessions Thanks to PepsiCo
I'm in the KC metro area and not a developer, but looking for a statistician/analyst position. Most of my analysis is done in R and Python, though I also use SQLite, MySql, Perl, RapidMiner, and Hadoop (basic).
List of resources: Article text extraction from HTML documents
> Speculation has had negative effects in practice: The tulip crisis

Guess who got hurt in the tulip crisis?

...

The speculators. Their harm tends to be self-contained.
Well you have to start somewhere!
If you've never coded and come from a non-traditional background. You can start learning using a simple, open source, language called Processing. Processing can be downloaded for free.

www.processing.org

The best part of it, in my opinion is the associated learning community. When you're beginning it integral to have a support system to help you trouble shoot. Processing also has amazing reference material and sample code. Super necessary.

If you're like most ambitious people, you probably itching to dive into developing iPhone apps immediately. Baby-steps. The Pyramids weren't build overnight.

You'll get there. It just takes time and dedication.
QE1 and QE2.
Cheaper? Yes. More effective? Debatable. If a news organization is just trying to put articles online, then sure, that approach works. If they want to push the boundaries of what's possible in online journalism, you're not going to be able to accomplish that by sticking the cheapest cogs in the machine.

Armstrong users will only have to maintain their templates and customizations. This is a requirement no matter which CMS you pick.
My version[1] of wombat[2] is in the next version of emacs, if anyone likes that color scheme. It's dark, so I don't know how well it fits with Ambiance, but I thought I'd plug it here anyway...

edit: Oh, and very nice theme, by the way! I used a similar one before when I was in a light theme phase, will save this one in case I flip again.

[1]: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=23adf1...

[2]: http://dengmao.wordpress.com/2007/01/22/vim-color-scheme-wom...
from the latest post on your blog:

> "I think the majority of the world is basically hostile to ambition and wealth and achievement."

> "Want more, build more, do more, get more, be more, have more, live more.

> More. And no apologies."

i think your reaction to this article has little to do with concern about ignorance, and much more to do with having critical eyes turned on the profound failings of unbridled "more".
I don't have direct examples but as a long time marketer, I can tell you the elements on a page is more important than if the site looks pleasing. Ugly designs can convert extremely well as any good looking design. It's more a matter of the details in button shapes, color choices, etc etc that matters in my experience
Kleiner Perkins Already Selling Its Twitter Stock
Well, guess what, there's a lot of shit in this world. Go tell people to stop talking bad about Husni Mubarak, because after all, he's much better than Gaddafi and Saddam.

The fact is, people think Dubai is awesome. It's good journalism to uncover the truth about this supposed awesomeness.

Your only problem is that there are other places that are worse. As if suddenly everybody stopped noticing all the other bad places just because there's an article about Dubai.

The fact is, rich gulf states treat foreigner workers like slaves.

An interesting thing to note is how their youth are practically bullies. The same kind of bullies that PG talked about in his "nerds" essay[0], and his analysis of why people become bullies applies quite well to Dubai's situation. They are spoiled kids, they have no responsibilities, their lives are pretty pointless.

(EDIT: Lest somebody thinks I'm being racist: I'm an Arab myself.)

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Also:
My family bought my Dad (a retired molecular biologist) a macbook and he can do this. Trust me, this is saying a lot. Fear Not.
Is there a reason why the font/css settings on that page make it practically impossible to read the text?
Excellently clear breakdown. Quite a nice read, and even a good skim (you can pick up nearly everything just by looking at the pictures and reading the intro paragraphs).

I think it really only applies to books which seek to be decorative objects as well as literature, however. The wide outside margin allows for side notes or decorative borders, and the bottom is similar to how pictures are matted for display in galleries - "heavier" bottoms have a subtle but important impact. It also creates room for detached footnotes or larger decorations. The thinner inside margins help keep text on a readable level due to the book binding techniques (remember, books were typically thicker when scribes did the work).

But without that decoration, I'm pretty sure the small blocks of black text would act as an optical illusion, making them appear smaller than they are. Without things filling those areas, I'd think it would make the book look empty, overly white-filled, rather than balanced.
That's maybe a bit too unfair. Nintendo as we know it has only really existed since Hiroshi Yamauchi became CEO and took the company public in 1962. Prior to that point they were merely a card company, and from what I've read feels like they were a very successful card company. They were the largest, and first to create durable plastic coated cards. They also had a successful licensing deal with Disney.

Yamauchi certainly deserves credit for realizing that playing cards was not going to be a growth area in the future and for experimenting in new areas that eventually led to toys and then to arcade games.
> This is also true in their native countries. The poorest Indian laborers live bad lives at home or in Dubai. They go to there because, in theory, you get paid 2-3 times as much for similarly bad conditions as back home.

Not true. A lot of them were cheated. Dubai government turns a blind eye to these practices.

--------------------------

From the guardian article:

"All of these men are part of a huge scam that is helping the construction boom in the Gulf. Like hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, they each paid more than £1,000 to employment agents in India and Pakistan. They were promised double the wages they are actually getting, plus plane tickets to visit their families once a year, but none of the men in the room had actually read their contract. Only two of them knew how to read.

"They lied to us," a worker with a long beard says. "They told us lies to bring us here. Some of us sold their land; others took big loans to come and work here."

----------------------------

From the independent article

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-har...

Since the recession hit, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison."

This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are meant to pay on time, never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat – but I met nobody who said it happens. Not one. These men are conned into coming and trapped into staying, with the complicity of the Dubai authorities
Have you considered using Neo4j with the batch inserter as a write-once-read-many DB in place of ElephantDB?
TRAP: One of the Most Powerful Debugging Practices
Interesting if true, but worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of Atlantis hypotheses (even assuming it isn't a fictional or amalgamated story), and this one in particular has been a line of inquiry over the past decade or so without a lot of consensus as far as I can tell. Wikipedia has some links to previous proposals of this location: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_hypotheses_of_Atlantis...
He has an article in which he gives an explanation of what happened at TMI in his own words. Being a nerd for this stuff and having read the report of the president's commission (which he claims to have been on) I was... shocked to say the least.

Its hard to imagine he was actually on the same committee as the people who wrote the report. His explanation had elements that mirrored the report. For instance, there was a particular warning light discussed in both. But what function the light served in the plant, its behavior during the crisis, the operators' response to it, or its overall role in the incident, on these Crigley was dead wrong.

I suspect he got assigned to the president's commission for political reasons, or because he was a 'public media personality,' but that he actually contributed nothing. He remembers an indicator light because he sat there dumbfounded in the meeting where the smart people on the committee discussed it. He then incorporated that into his incredibly child-like and incorrect mental model of what happened.

Suffice to say, regardless of his experience on the TMI president's commission, his understanding of nuclear power is even more comically incorrect than his understanding of computers.
Some of the video of the Japanese tsunami made me immediately think of Atlantis. A person seeing such things 4000 years ago may well have described it as "swolled by the sea".
I still encounter people who try to teach long multiplication to kids by saying "add a zero in the ones place". And college students who fail to describe why they add those zeros (typically liberal arts majors (no offense. They just rarely minor in math, and many quit doing math entirely after they get the minimum to graduate)).
Kindof reminds me of the movie Forbidden Planet. When the leverage (money) gets too high, all the unformed ideas that are normally too vague become feasible. Like "Let's make the world's tallest building." Usually that's too vague, but if you throw a few tens of billions of dollars at it, it might happen. But it will happen in a vague, ugly way.
Corporations Not Entitled to Personal Privacy Under FOIA
In my experience, Dubai hardly ever gets bad press, certainly not a disproportionate amount of bad press compared to other countries. This is just journalists doing their jobs. I don’t see the problem.
Hasn't it been demonstrated very thoroughly that Atlantis was a hypothetical city Plato & co. used in their dialogues, and was never meant to be considered as a physical place?
This statement is necessary because the normal way people approach this problem is to declare one food the culprit, cut out that food, perceive that the problem has been cured, and declare success. There's a placebo affect, for one thing, which would be transmitted from parent to child through the parent's mood and expectations, plus there are random fluctuations in the child's behavior from day to day that will be attributed to whatever is foremost in the parent's mind, which in this case would be the alteration in diet.

People do this stuff all the time when cutting out gluten, starting to take fish oil, etc. It's really weird how someone will choose one thing at random out of all the alternatives, because that thing was pitched to them at just the right time by just the right person, and immediately start to believe it is a powerful force in their lives. There are dozens of dietary "miracle cures" for ailments ranging from depression to acne, and for each one, there are many people who swear by it. A trained doctor can be helpful in tempering expectations, reminding parents that short-term changes can't be taken seriously, and forcing a patient approach.

For instance, if peanut butter is cut from the kid's diet, and two days later the kid has a really bad day at school, many parents would jump to the conclusion that peanut butter was the only thing keeping the kid sane and start feeding it to him every day in every form they could think of. That would be a very bad thing if peanut butter was actually what was causing the problem. The doctor's job is to persuade the parents to be patient and evaluate the evidence more reasonably.
The "tower is a penis" analogy is indeed disturbing. And the author seems rather bitter. But all in all, it's not a bad read.
I kept waiting to get something deeper out of the article, but I didn't. A rehashing of descriptions we have seen a lot of in the last year or so: lazy, bored Emiratis; rootless expats; South Asian serfs; vulgarity. No real insights.
Thanks!

I use Radiance now but used Ambiance before. I agree that the fonts are too big by default. I have a high dpi screen so I have to set everything up the way I like it anyway.

I used xmonad before and it's awesome but I got a bit tired of constantly fiddling with settings so I try to stick with the "defaults" as much as possible.

I also really like the new defaullt font in Maverick and the monospace one incoming with Natty. I agree that they have a lot to do but I think I like where they're going.
Have a look at this. http://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake/quakes/recent_quakes.htm...
Christchurch, New Zealand. Main quake, 7.1 on the scale (and with hindsight, not all that bad), was almost six months before a very shallow 6.3 aftershock which was very bad and had lots of deaths. So far there have been something like 8000 aftershocks. People from the area often seem shell-shocked.
There's definite unfounded, likely highly-funded, hostility towards them. There is a single legitimate cause for concern that I've heard them occasionally mention, however: there haven't been any / many health studies on inhaling nicotine, and what it does to your lungs. Only smoking things which contain it. It's essentially an unknown, so there's definite reason for pause before they approve it... but yes, phenomenally excessive.
Des- this thing was spot on. I just got done reading "Made to Stick" and think their point about being concrete vs. generic directly relates to your ideas. Ex: "Its very easy" vs "It's easier than tying your shoes"

Thanks for this!
delta perceived greatness vs perceived suckyness matters.
Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss
Build Real Time Web Apps More Easily with NowJS
I think we over estimate the impact startups have on job creation. The recent home runs (google, facebook, zynga, groupon) have created astonishingly large value with relatively few employees - a few thousand on average. Startups are good at creating wealth, but not necessarily jobs (we still have record level unemployment in silicon valley). Our country needs to put millions of people to work; the 20k jobs created by startups are not going to solve that problem.

Theoretically, the unemployed workers can adapt to the "new economy" and re-establish themselves. Empirically, however, that's not happening.

Startups are more likely to aid the jobless via welfare (from tax revenue) than by actually employing people.
Doesn't make sense. Why anyone in his right mind would do that?
So someone who's laid off because their company fails is automatically put into the 'non-qualified' bucket?

Once again, I believe people should be judged on their qualifications - not their employment status. It's not a good indicator.
The specs aren’t technically unimpressive. I thought they would be, too, but Anandtech just started with their benchmarks and CPU performance is great [1], GPU performance leaves everyone in the dust [2]. This, together with best in class battery life makes me wonder why anyone would currently buy a competitor. (The cameras are horrible. I guess if you really love cameras – seriously love – then you might want to check out competitors.)

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/4215/apple-ipad-2-benchmarked-...

[2] http://www.anandtech.com/show/4216/apple-ipad-2-gpu-performa...
Thank you! Are there any specific sections I should focus on?
Ugh, not liking these shallow geewhiz articles of late.
I agree that we need to get to a more secure internet, but I'm not sure a walled garden is the way to accomplish this.

I feel like security holes are inherent in the nature of technology and its rapid development and evolution. The security threats that plagued the internet in the 90s are now obsolete. With new technology comes new threats. That's the way it will be and the only option we have is to stay vigilant and attempt to think of every edge case before black hats do.

To say that a walled garden is the solution is a dangerous statement. While this may provide a very safe platform such as iOS, it is also a stifled and languid platform due to the bottleneck of the approval process. We will be safe from security if we never make anything new. That's not a solution to the problem that's sacrificing future potential for economic activity.
Apple is going to love this: Probably the best customer unboxing video ever
"One of the promises of increased automation was supposed to be more leisure time for the individual."

Unions have pretty much put a stop to the automation of most industries.
Rapportive Adds Developer Profiles for Bitbucket, Github, and Stack Overflow
What would the equivalent perfect text-centric (articles/blog posts) web layout look like?
Covester is Bad For You.
I tend to find that minimalist OS's, such as plain Debian installed with no frills or OpenBSD tend to be better candidates for security sensitive machines.

Some of the utilities mentioned like Tiger haven't been updated in years.

No mention of chroot/jails/zones/etc, which can go a long way to nullifying intrusions when they happen, or integrity tools built into the system (using package managers to check for changed binaries, or checksum tools like like tripwire/AIDE/radmind)

While it does have some good points, it also strikes me as "cargo cult system administration", specifically "Following a security recipe": http://blog.lastinfirstout.net/2009/11/cargo-cult-system-adm...
So flag them.
Would you call PGP a walled garden?
I do find the state of journalism in covering nations to be pretty haphazard and ignorant. I think a lot of people feel that way.

But beyond that, dude, you comment about me a lot, like way more than seems sane and reasonable. And it's always similar - an out of context quote, and a snarky remark or some psychoanalysis like this you just did.

It seems trollish at this point - I can't stop you, but it'd be good if refrained from doing it in every unrelated thread on here. It lowers the discussion level.
This is kind of like saying, "I really believe that commercial airlines are the safest way to travel..."

Except nuclear power is not the safest form of energy. Not by a long shot.

What's the worst that could happen if an earthquake or a terrorist strike devastated a solar array or a wind farm?

Apart from cutting off the power supply, nothing much.

Compare that to a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. Or the nuclear proliferation risk caused by the theft of fissile material. Not to mention the hazards posed by nuclear waste.
Thanks Alicia! Can you recommend a specific starting point at www.processing.org that you feel will be the most helpful?
What wrong with it? It looks perfectly readable to me.
New startups don't just create jobs for the people they themselves hire. Google & Facebook in particular have created far more jobs than those on their payrolls.
What do you think the outcome will be of all this currency devaluation? Long term that is?
This book has a lot of concrete steps to take:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YH9MMI?ie=UTF8&tag=...

That said... it might take a while to get one off the ground that's really making much money. Maybe you should look for work with someone who's already doing that successfully to learn a bit?
I thought I read that once before too, but haven't been able to dig up the source. Do you recall where you heard this from?
There is definitely a balance between speed and quality. The author here is advocating methods that will enable a single founder to push out an MVP as quickly as possible (while still maintaining some degree of aesthetic appeal). The recipe is absolutely useful in the same way that purchasing a template is useful. As long as it doesn't get in the way of your functionality, you can ship and start iterating with real users.
Scaling a (PHP) web application on the cheap
Wasn't me that downvoted you, mate. But anyway, that's a difficult question to answer and the response could go either way - it all depends on when you officially define the bubble to have started/ended.
Unevolved Brand #140
Yeah, there isn't really any error handling. If hn returns an error it just dies, just try reloading the page
The U.K. Papers www.independent.co.uk and www.guardian.co.uk often have quite interesting stories on Dubai, but their stories aren't really from the standard political perspective.
"everyone uses "socialism" to mean whatever they think it should mean and then argues"

The general idea of socialism is the forced redistribution of wealth or property, which pretty much doesn't change in all of the different versions of socialism.

I consider massive taxes to pay for government programs a form of socialism (taxes that go above and beyond the basic funding of a nation/country. IE: fire, police, roads, schools). As these taxes get bigger and bigger, the wealth distribution becomes equal and it starts to really become more of a communist system.

It seems to me that the people that don't want it called 'socialism' want to hide the fact that it's exactly that.