skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's always good when VCs publicly reflect on missed opportunities.
As a reminder, here is the incredible (and fun) list of Bessemer anti-portfolio :
http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio.aspx
You should try readability.com
The answer to this question is completely obvious to people who spent formative years in Asia and are free of American/Western taboos (we have other taboos no doubt but not these).

Here is why there is no looting in Japan. Across the world -- in the US, UK, Canada, Brazil, South Africa and any country where they live side by side -- people of primarily Northeast Asian descent tend to commit crime at lower rates than people of primarily European descent, who in turn tend to commit crime at lower rates than people of primarily sub-Saharan African descent.

You can google the various crime stats if you aren't aware of this. Here are the California state statistics:

http://stats.doj.ca.gov/cjsc_stats/prof09/00/22.htm

Divide that by California population totals to get the rank ordering of violent crime rates by population.

You can also look at table 43 of the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, which is fine for establishing the black/Asian violent crime ratio, but which lumps Hispanics in with whites, inflating the apparent white violent crime rate.

http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_43.html

Similar stats can be obtained for other countries with a bit of googling. Now, the absolute magnitudes do change (1), which one could legitimately ascribe to the local culture. But the trend is very consistent.

There isn't a country across the world that I'm aware of in which people of primarily sub-Saharan African descent commit crime at a lower rate (or have higher educational levels, incomes, and so on) than people of Northeast Asian descent. Interested in counterexamples, but this appears to be a very consistent pattern.

Obviously there are other factors as well. But the probability of looting seems to be proportional to a group's propensity to disorganized violence (e.g. murder, rape, robbery) and inversely proportional to their ability to commit organized violence (e.g. military actions).

No doubt this post is extraordinarily blasphemous. But someone had to say what a good fraction of the rest of the world is thinking.

(1) Cultural variation seems to shift magnitudes but not rank ordering. That is, it does not appear to be a large enough factor to make Northeast Asian descent individuals in country X commit more crime than sub-Saharan African descent individuals in country Y. At least, I couldn't find any examples of this for any (X, Y) pair in the world, but perhaps you can.
An Aristotlean Approach to Devops and Infrastructure Integration
No one in their right mind thinks Twitter's moving to Brisbane except for the jokers in city hall. Their employees would sooner quit than have to commute to an office park wasteland everyday.
im currently reading Like a Flowing River (by Paulo Coelho)
To learn how you can help the Disaster in Japan and donate please click on this link : <script type="text/javascript" src="//www.hellobar.com/hellobar.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
new HelloBar(3823,9104);
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Price of everything, value of nothing.
I worked on a piece of code that literally drove the guy who wrote it round the bend. He had a mental breakdown, ran away, and eventually ended up in a different state ~3000 miles away.

It wasn't so bad.

Now debugging code written by Chemistry Students... that's some scary stuff right there.

Which is not to go all elitist and put Comp Sci degrees up on a pedestal, one of the better coders I've had the pleasure of working with was a trained vet. He was very methodical.

Actually, now that I think about it, working with something that if you make it angry it will bite your hand off, is probably good preparation for dealing with a compiler...
As a followup: At some point while I was trying to keep my annoyance in check at being forced to listen to CNN in the airport terminal during a layover on my trip back from PAX East in Boston I had a realization about traditional media. It's essentially just a giant example of the broken telephone game. The information from the people who actually know and understand what's going on is transferred in relay-like fashion through spokespeople, to reporters, to copy writers, to editors, to anchors. Sadly most of the people involved in this chain do not have any expertise in the subjects at hand and do not have robust mechanisms for ensuring the accuracy or utility of their reporting.

In the end you get the classic "purple monkey dishwasher" problem of too many questionably reliable nodes on an information route, and then amplified by the prejudices and predilections of everyone involved plus the needs of the news organization to drive traffic in order to maximize revenue.
Ask HN: Twitter/Quora/etc never give you an empty inbox
Just checking if more folks feel like this.

There is some pleasure on seeing your Gmail will 0 unread messages.

On Quora and Twitter, you can never see an empty inbox.

Even if you read everything, you're presented with a bunch of data. I understand its another concept, its a stream, etc.

But does anyone else would prefer a Gmail-like experience, when you can mark as read and never see that entries again (unless there is really new messages) ?
To really bork up the Java, you need a pattern fanatic. Once you stand working with Handler Adapter Handlers you know you should have taken the other colour pill.
Tim Bray: A Year at Google
A Nobel is "in recognition of cultural and scientific advances". While the work they are doing is brave, selfless and courageous I'm not sure a nobel is the right award for this.

Most countries have an award for valour both inside[1] and outside[2] of the military. A UN style award would be more appropriate I think.

In someways a Nobel doesn't match the ultimate sacrifice for little or no personal gain that these people may well be giving.

[1]-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Cross

[2]-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cross
I got some great advice early on in my career:

"Spend just 15 minutes per day reading about your industry and within five years you will be in the top 1%"

I may not be in the top 1% but reading about programming has helped me come up with solutions that senior developers were not aware about. It has made me more interested in programming and had lead to more and higher paying opportunities.

I never programmed as a teenager. I took my first computer class in grade 11 and always felt out of place since practically everyone in the class had been programming for a number of years already. I got mediocre marks in university and even considered dropping out of Comp Sci because studying it didn't interest me. I also quit my first job after a year and took time off because I didn't know if I wanted to do programming. That's when I found I missed it.

It is relatively easy to find stories of naturally gifted athletes who amount to nothing. They end up going nowhere because they just rely on their natural "talent" and after a while, people who put in effort start to surpass them. The same is true of programming. Reading 15 minutes per day I finish 1-3 books per month. The average programmer probably doesn't read 1-3 books per year.

I should clarify that I mean read books (I have a subscription to Safari Books Online). Reading HN or Techcrunch for 15 minutes per day will probably not improve your programming ability.

Of course, perhaps this is not relevant for you and you are just in the wrong job but you do state that you want to be a good programmer. It sounds like you are. Programming is more than just writing code. It also has a lot to do with communication and understanding others which it sounds like you are skilled at.
There was one networks class I took where the assignment was to implement a simple network protocol to do file transfers over a serial port. Computers in the lab were paired up and had their serial ports connected to one another. People were assigned to computers and given either the receiver or transmitter to implement.

I was about done implementing the first draft of my side and asked the other side how it was going so we could test some actual communication. The response I got was "it's about done, we just need to split it up into functions". I was initially shocked and then naively impressed that someone could actually reason about the problem without breaking it down.

The end result was of course that I just had to give up and implement both sides of the communication. This was eventually a much better learning experience. I ended up abstracting out the serial port and allowing the two sides to communicate through a unix pipe with random bit errors introduced in packets to test the recovery. I could then run much longer testing without depending on the lab or someone else. I think I eventually tested it enough that I was up against the fundamental problem that the cheap checksum we were using let errors pass way too easily.
I know this probably marks me a cl00l355 n00b (as if the pseudo-733t spelling didn't), but is there some reason that page wants to pull in a script from 127.0.0.1, port 5337?

Possibly amusing note: I checked Google for references to this port, and got a link to another HN thread, which turns out to be another item from scripting.com: How to blow up a server in one mouse click (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1763840), which also involved this port number.

So, now I'm really curious. Why is it trying to hit this port on MY machine??
> - CLIs are monodimensional, and suffer from the same problems that dataflow programming has: it's easy to split the flow of data into two pipes, but is really hard (semantically) to rejoin them.

That's not hard if the text streams are line-oriented

* append one to another, if order is not important

* append one to another and then sort again, if order is important,

* JOIN the streams using the `join' command (it's a standalone text utility, does pretty much what SQL JOIN does)

To compute sum (in set theory sense), use ` | sort | uniq', to take intersection, use ` | sort | uniq -d'. Or use the `comm' utility.

If using Bourne shell derivative, you may end up using temporary files. With the Rc shell, you may use the <{COMMAND} syntax, like:

cat <{foo | bar | baz} <{frob | knob | bob} <{some | more} | subsequent | processing

to catenate output of three pipes and do subsequent processing.
Exactly, the bottom line is were playing with nuclear reactions and hoping everything goes as planned. It's arrogance.
Using Dropbox to automatically download torrents
What is this G-WAN and how does it manage to serve files so much faster than other servers? I could not find technical docs on its site.
worth watching is Brian Chesky talk at Startup School as he goes a bit more into detail:
http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383

they also have a dedicated site for the cereals (and a song!!):
http://www.airbnb.com/obamaos
Yes, but he hesitated to say this was sufficient and said the reactors were still "a little more susceptible to an accident that would result in a loss of containment".
Dashboard • ScribTeX
This can work, but your grammar will be wildly ambiguous. A better way to achieve this is to compose grammars (instead of parsers) and construct the parsers only after the final composition is done.

There is a paper that deals with a very similar problem to this: composing Haskell Read instances. Instead of deriving Read instances for each datatype, they derive grammars, and only produce the parser at the last step. This allows the parser to be optimized. It is a very dense paper, not easy to read but definitely worth it:

http://www.fing.edu.uy/~mviera/papers/VSL08.pdf
You may be correct, but there is also the Nobel Peace Prize which is not for the purposes you state. However, I'm not wed to it being the Nobel organization, just needs to be international and visible.
It was never the right conclusion to believe this kind of energy can be indefinitely managed.
Lesson 6 asks for 'Here's a tricky one: get ONLY the NAMES of the 2nd and 3rd heaviest male unicorns'
Which made me query:
db.unicorns.find({gender:'m'}, {name:1, _id:0}).sort({weight:-1}).skip(1).limit(2)
but it wants:
db.unicorns.find({gender:'m'}, {name:1}).sort({weight:-1}).skip(1).limit(2)
I have written a light c-based api to access a windows file-share. Light samba so to say; in case anyone can use it: https://github.com/38leinaD/tango
Fukushima Reactor Status Widget
ON ERROR GOTO REDMOND
If you can't even talk about the looting because of political correctness, then political correctness is part of the problem and not the solution.
>Whatever the cause, though, people from the US almost universally think of lawbreaking as a common and often harmless activity

This is to be expected as laws never seem to come off the books, they just stop being enforced. So, in other words, you're probably always breaking the law in the US anyway because some laws even conflict with each other.
Where do you go on error

Hell, Arizona or any other village with that name. Real C# code can be like this:

if(John is evil){ goto Hell};

(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/scekt9xw%28v=vs.71%2...)
Finally, a Startup Visa That Works
US tries to attract entrepreneurs to reactivate the economy
Android #1 iphone #3 or open beats closed
> it's enormously powerful to be able to drop one segment of a pipe-chain and look at the output.

But having more complex objects instead of text doesn't stop us from having that. The objects just need to have some kind of to-string method that the shell uses.
I think the best way to guarantee job security is to solve hard problems for the company you work for, and make it visible (i.e., communicate about it). This will gain respect from your peers and give you a reputation of being useful and very worthy keeping around.

Writing some kind of obfuscated code is shooting yourself in the foot - after a while not even you can maintain it. Plus, your peers will notice and probably not like it. This notion will percolate up to management.

Another way to guarantee job security might be when you are the only person able (or willing) to maintain some old legacy system. This carries the risk that if that system is finally scrapped or replaced, your job is being scrapped too ;-)

edit: horrible grammar
That approach is a risky one:

a) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6947744.stm

b) You are directly trying to impose your value over someone else's value, with the assumption that you are correct. One has to be very careful sure you are not just projecting your frustration at the littering. What they are doing is completely correct for their worldview, which has a boundary round about where their clothing is.

If someone litters at all then they probably haven't much of an awareness outside of their own egocentric POV and it seems quite unlikely that a single intervention by yourself is going to change that, unless they are a kid of less than ~ ten years of age.

I like to smile and pick the litter up as a gift. If they notice they notice, if they don't they don't.
Worst for me was something I was asked to maintain a little while ago. Was essentially Microsoft Reporting Services implemented in 80,000 lines of VB.NET.

The first thing I did was chuck it into VS2010 and run some code metrics on it. The results follow,

10 or so Methods had 2000+ lines of code.
The maintainability index was 0 (number between 0 and 100 where 0 is unmaintainable).
The worst function had a cyclomatic complexity of 2500 (the worst I have ever seen on a function before was 750 odd).
It was full of nested inline dynamic SQL all of which refered to tables with 100+ columns, which had helpful names like sdf_324. There were about 5000 stored procedures of which most were 90% similar to other ones with a similar naming scheme. There were no foreign key constraints in the database. Every query including updates, inserts and deletes used NOLOCK (so no data integrity). It all lived in a single 80,000 line file, which crashed VS every time you tried to do a simple edit.

I essentially told my boss I would quit over it as there was no way I could support it without other aspects of work suffering. Thankfully it was put in the too hard basket and nobody else had to endure my pain.

I ended up peer reviewing the changes the guy made some time later and a single column update touched in the order of 500 lines of code.

EDIT - I forgot to mention, there was so much nested if code in methods you could hold down page down and it would look like the page was moving the other way, similar to how a wheel on tv looks like its spinning the other way.
Read the code ... The source attribute is set to "http://127.0.0.1:5337/scripting2/editor/controls?username=da....

I'm no expert, but could it be some kind of "edit this post"-functionality, that only works on the proper machine?
I once worked in a Chinese software company on the mainland and often maintained code written by Chinese developers.

I'm Irish and didn't appreciate their comments in Chinese, they didn't appreciate my comments in Irish.

Once that was understood we swapped quickly over to English for all comments / variables / declarations.
http://www.baycitizen.org/transportation/interactive/intimat...

I would rethink that decision.
which facts are true? How would you know? What is your source of info? PR by government, or the PR by the plant operator?

I completely support the nuclear energy and i consider Chernobyls is just a cost of doing business. Yet all this hysteria - everything is ok! everything is doomed! Com'n, we lost 30km area in Chernobyl, we'll lose a few kilometers diameter zone in this case - again it is the low price for the progress - we lost much more land for the roads for cars, we've been killing a lot more of animals and people for other reasons. Relax, we're making progress.
#define HEREWEGO {
#define ENOUGHNOW }
Mozilla Plans To Ship Firefox 4 Final On March 22
Thad Starner: Wearable Computing for Smarter Living
Google to make more changes to improve search results
I tend to waffle a bit (well, usually informative, but lots of info), so now at longish emails I go back to the top and put 'summary: foo'. Folks can get the summary and then drill down to detail if they want to. That's not going to help the GPs keyboard problem though.
Oh, absolutely. I'm not saying it's perfect, by any means - just that the JRuby team have pulled off an astounding job to get it as good as it is, given the limits of the JVM.

Also, native libraries are becoming less of a problem now that libffi has a bit of momentum.
Benefits of Web Development in Tier II Indian Cities
In the preceding blog post, I had discussed some of the issues, which Indian web development industry today faces. Countries like China, Philippines, Russia and Vietnam are emerging software outsourcing destinations. They pose serious challenge to Indian domination of world IT platform.
In the Java world REST was pretty cool for about 18 months. And then annotations came out, and instead of all the JAX-RPC bondage and discipline, you get JAX-WS, where to make something a webservice literally all you need to do is shove the @WebService annotation on it and you are good to go†.

All the WSDL and SOAP crap gets auto-generated for you. Thereby eliminating in a single stroke REST's advantage.

Now, it is true that there is some stuff†† you can do with SOAP that you can't do with JAX-WS, but really unless you like making life difficult for yourself then don't.

Especially for a big Java to Java solution there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to go with REST anymore. Even if everything you do maps exactly to the four SQL ops (select, update, insert, delete) it is still just as easy to use the annotation as it would be to use REST.

†C# has something similar I think.

††Example: JAX-WS is limited to what you can do with a method and parameters in Java. In your SOAP schema you can specify for instance that the array you get passed shall have between 1 and 3 members, two is okay but 4 is right out. Whereas in Java (and hence JAX-WS) if you have an Array parameter, you can't specify that it must have a certain number of elements in it.
Try to do a word count for 'it turns out' in Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. Anyone who's read that doorstop knows the prose is dreadful, and that phrase is especially conspicuous.
Optimizing egitd; Introduction
In FireFox, I enable the option View / Zoom / Zoom Text Only.
Facebook drops the comment button, allows users to edit replies
Is hiring 800 people really that big of a deal for a place like SF? The article made it sound like 2400 new jobs accounted for not only most of the tech jobs in SF, but most of the growth all together.
Actually I would need exact the opposite - a tool that would get rid of all "hot and trendy", simply because I have no problem whatsoever of finding them. For example right now I would really appreciate if I somehow could clean my twitter feed enirely of Japan news. I'm not at all interested what happens there, and if I am, then it is not difficult at all to find relevant news. As you said - Information overload: there’s too much content on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube etc, even among people you’re following - get rid of the "trends" and I'll start using utopic.
Enough people care about the software being open that this project will have a good market, if it produces a useful product. I tried Skype several years ago, but I never felt comfortable using it. With proprietary software like Skype, you just don't know what they are doing with your data. The GNU project does not have to be better than Skype, just usable. Ekiga and Twinkle work pretty well now, but they have problems that more competition should help. And, like other people here say, I suspect the GNU project is likely to produce a product that can be hooked into all sorts of other products. It is the UNIX way, after all.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because there are no news reports about looting doesn't mean it's not going on. The social difference may be in how news are reported, not in how people cope with disaster. I'm not saying that's what is going on, just saying that the statement "there is no looting in Japan" is taken as fact without any closer examination, which is a very unscientific approach.
It does hinder you, since string serializations will usually be an incomplete (or worse, inconsistent) view of an object. With Unix pipes, their string serialization is all that it is.
End of Internet democracy?
The qualitative assessment of the plant's design is outside the scope of what I'm commenting on. I'm referring to the journalistic bait-and-switch which hides a very relevant piece of information (that contradicts the implied assertion of the title) on page two of a banner-encrusted site.

In the context of current events, the title of the link suggests some kind of spectacular negligence.

At the point where the scientist says the design flaws were addressed, [his resignation due to design flaws] is no longer a story that adds anything relevant or noteworthy to the discussion. It's merely a historical fact disconnected from current events.

If the title of the article had followed the content and been focused on the expert sharing their knowledge and discussing possible problems with the design I would have appreciated it much more.

[edit: clarify what is no longer newsworthy]