skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Israel wasn't included. Anyhow here's a copy of the main graph:

Rank, Country, EF EPI Score, Level
1 Norway 69.09 Very High Proficiency
2 Netherlands 67.93 Very High Proficiency
3 Denmark 66.58 Very High Proficiency
4 Sweden 66.26 Very High Proficiency
5 Finland 61.25 Very High Proficiency
6 Austria 58.58 High Proficiency
7 Belgium 57.23 High Proficiency
8 Germany 56.64 High Proficiency
9 Malaysia 55.54 High Proficiency
10 Poland 54.62 Moderate Proficiency
11 Switzerland 54.60 Moderate Proficiency
12 Hong Kong 54.44 Moderate Proficiency
13 South Korea 54.19 Moderate Proficiency
14 Japan 54.17 Moderate Proficiency
15 Portugal 53.62 Moderate Proficiency
16 Argentina 53.49 Moderate Proficiency
17 France 53.16 Moderate Proficiency
18 Mexico 51.48 Moderate Proficiency
19 Czech Republic 51.31 Moderate Proficiency
20 Hungary 50.80 Moderate Proficiency
21 Slovakia 50.64 Moderate Proficiency
22 Costa Rica 49.15 Low Proficiency
23 Italy 49.05 Low Proficiency
24 Spain 49.01 Low Proficiency
25 Taiwan 48.93 Low Proficiency
26 Saudi Arabia 48.05 Low Proficiency
27 Guatemala 47.80 Low Proficiency
28 El Salvador 47.65 Low Proficiency
29 China 47.62 Low Proficiency
30 India 47.35 Low Proficiency
31 Brazil 47.27 Low Proficiency
32 Russia 45.79 Low Proficiency
33 Dominican Republic 44.91 Very Low Proficiency
34 Indonesia 44.78 Very Low Proficiency
35 Peru 44.71 Very Low Proficiency
36 Chile 44.63 Very Low Proficiency
37 Ecuador 44.54 Very Low Proficiency
38 Venezuela 44.43 Very Low Proficiency
39 Vietnam 44.32 Very Low Proficiency
40 Panama 43.62 Very Low Proficiency
41 Colombia 42.77 Very Low Proficiency
42 Thailand 39.41 Very Low Proficiency
43 Turkey 37.66 Very Low Proficiency
44 Kazakhstan 31.74 Very Low Proficiency
I'm not following you. I imagine that the Bing team would gladly increase their market share in exchange for the costs involved.
I'm talking about the 'fighting' part of the budget more than anything else. How much money and effort around the world is spent on destructive or defensive behavior rather than constructive or exploratory action?
When I needed to estimate a new project at my previous job I used to pretty much always say "3 months". I made sure clients knew I was talking about a MVP even if they were thinking about making something like Microsoft Excel in-house. Then we would just build on top of that, one block at a time, never more than 3 months for each block.
The same thing has to be done in engineering. Just because creativity is involved doesn't make programming an art.

Art can break rules and you can sell weird color splotches for millions, but the output of your /dev/random will always be worthless.
I want money to do 2 things:

1. Travel, anytime, anywhere.

2. Limitless ability to create new projects and businesses.

Fancy cars and houses? No thanks. I hate "stuff".
I think it may be worth mentioning the history of the technologies and companies behind them. Apple has always been more focused on the aesthetics of their products compared to competitors. Their OS and other software products have always been "prettier" than the offerings of MS and the linux community. In contrast, linux has a history of minimalist UI design, disregarding aesthetics for functionality. Developers that work on the new products like iPhone and Android tend to come from the old school and bring they're relative biases and habits with them to this new arena. I think as the android platforms mature, we will see a blurring of the aesthetic lines between the two products much as we have seen in the mac/windows/linux world with OS X, Windows 7, and Ubuntu.
I think we'd be naive to assume money is not a strong motivator in entrepreneurship. It may even be a primary motivator for some, though few would admit it. That said, it can't be the only motivator. Not because that's morally repugnant or anything (I don't make moral judgments here), but because it's not a realistic or sustainable source of motivation.

If all you want to do is make money, then you would be foolish to pursue entrepreneurship. Your expected return on starting a company is significantly less than your expected return on doing something like investment banking. Sure, you might strike it super-rich and become a billionaire through entrepreneurship. More likely than not, that ain't gonna happen. Conversely, you can almost guarantee yourself a fortune in the millions to tens of millions (and maybe even hundreds of millions) if you bust your ass in high finance and are great at it.

In summation: How many of us want to get rich? Probably most of us. How many are doing this solely to get rich? Only the silly ones.
* Not sure what you mean.

* Passenger supports using various gemsets very easily using the setup_load_paths.rb file in the config of your app (though multiple ruby versions still seem to be a problem).

* If you're using passenger, why do you have each app running on a different port? Using the Passenger Prefs Pane makes it trivially easy to have each app at its own appname.local URL (though, admittedly, installing an extra prefs pane, where Pow has it built in, gives bonus points to the latter).

* Same with my last point. Passenger automatically handles the booting up or apps when you access their URL in the browser, just like Pow does. Of course, I'm guessing you don't have Passenger installed this way if each app has to run on a different port.
What could replace it?
Teach your kids (or someone else's)
A good way to deal with recommendation systems that avoids these problems is via flows on graphs. Here’s one method of converting individual ratings to global rankings. Each alternative A, B, C, etc is a node of the graph. Now, when the user/voter gives 5 stars to A and 4 stars to B, this is interpreted simply as a preference of A over B. This preference contributes a single point to the total flow from B to A. At this point, we remove all cycles from this flow (there is a standard way to do that) and produce a gradient flow F. The potential function h of this flow, grad h = F, is the rankings.
Ah, so it's a file-size issue. Thanks to both of you for explaining.
Soooo.... if a statistician doesn't know C but knows R then that's a deal breaker? How about if a 3d game programmer knows lua, but can't do function pointers ? I'm way too late to this party, but I'm sorry it's horses for courses here.

Know the tools for your trade. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'd say that people can't estimate time because it's an acquired skill and most people don't try to acquire it.

When I managed a team, I had people put their initial estimates in the tracking tool, and when closing out the item they'd also fill in how long it actually took. Then, some of the report generation tools would let them see how accurate they were. There were no review metrics associated with being accurate, but I found that within a couple of months in a new area, individuals started getting much more accurate without just lamely padding out schedules (their teammates would have called them out, and even I wasn't pointy-haired enough to be fooled that easily). An unexpected bonus is that people also got a lot better at describing their work and investigating the risky bits before throwing something onto the schedule for the sprint.

But, we didn't do this for purely investigative or experimental work (i.e. "try out a new immutable text region design in the editor"). We'd just timebox work like that and evaluate progress to decide whether to keep going or not.
No problem! There was no normalization by time - that is, this was a snapshot of current data as if April 1, 2011. Unfortunately, there is now way to see for a particular venue, the historical timestamps of every checkin on Facebook. It is possible on the Foursquare API, but not Facebook
"Okay, Lindsay, are you forgetting that I was a professional twice over - an analyst and a therapist. The world's first analrapist."
I wish the design of this page wouldn't hide the elements (perhaps just make them white?) so I could Ctrl+F...
You could equally say "Just because math is involved doesn't make it engineering".

But I suppose it's something in between art and engineering.

With regard to "sell weird color splotches for millions" - Isn't that the same with code? You can sell a simple game or app to millions of people and become rich. The amount of money you earn doesn't have any connection to complexity.
I've just finished interviews at several Web companies in California, specifically San Francisco, so I have a good feel for what people are offering. I can confidently tell you that the going rate is between $80,000 and $100,000 for software engineers who can demonstrate that they will be valuable to the company, regardless of concrete years of experience.
Yep, that one. It was actually a keynote by Nicolás Jodal (co-CEO of Artech) that directed me here !!!

I wonder why it doesn't gain traction in the US, but I digress..

It's not a tool that would be liked by the HN community, as hackers like flexibility and under-the-hood access.
A serious attempt to provide a precise, correct answer to the ? "What do I really want done?"
Pick any USB Ethernet adapter supported by Linux, and it should be fairly easy to get it working on your rooted phone.

Here's some code showing how to mess with networking on Android:
http://code.google.com/p/android-wifi-tether/
Eset Nod32 Username And Password [ 9 April 2011 ]
Well, yes, but too often "soft" requirements get lost, like performance or the ability to be supported by anyone who wasn't the author. I'm not IN support, but I've been there and man I feel for those guys. Getting crap dumped on them that has no documentation, architectural designs that were pulled from someones backside in the heat of the moment of getting it done quickly, inconsistent standards being applied, wheel reinvention, etc.
Why is there no General Assembly/Hacker Dojo in Chicago? Is there a demand for it at all?

The culture in Chicago seems totally different, would there even be a demand for that sort of thing?
You can't print NFC chips on documents at zero extra cost.
Yep - planning on doing it one more time in May.

Not sure how I could get the number of venues in a particular city WITHOUT doing these crazy number of API requests. The API doesn't have venue counts for a particular geographic region. For example, the Foursquare API only lets you ask for a list of venues near a certain lat/long. It also limits its results to 50 per request. So there is no way to tell how many venues are in a region without splitting up the region and doing multiple requests then aggregating the results.
Jeebus, with all the thin-skinned douchenozzle pansies in this country, it's impossible to even have a fucking honest opinion that in any way differs in the slightest from the "conventional wisdom" of the hordes and masses.

He didn't "make fun" of Haiti, he expressed his opinion. It's honesty. Agree or disagree, like or dislike, but lay off calling people out over simply saying what's on their minds.

Honestly, I couldn't really give a shit about Haiti, either. It's tragic, what happened, but we've got enough of our own fucking problems for me to worry about those people.
I can't stand the rubbish advise to 'just double the estimate'. It just means you'll get an estimate 2^n times the size of the original guess from the guy n steps away from you.
Looks like that's just the first 33 pages of the whole book. That said, that would make a fine introduction to Steve's ideas, and then one can decide whether or not to buy the book, after reviewing that bit.

There are also a lot of videos on Youtube, where Steve talks about this stuff.
That's only the first 3 chapters.
Here is my take about Japan:

In Japan people learn English as a part of mandatory public education without targetting any practical use, and many companies mandate good exam score or certificate about English, even if they don't need English skills on the job.

This leaves Japanese in a strange parallel world of learning English, where the goal is scoring good and getting a nice job, not communicating with others.

Hence people without real incentive are forced to take globally standard English tests such as TOEFL or TOEIC, resulting in that low average score.
I like QR codes but taking pictures of anything is way to difficult on most phones. Power button, unlock, bar code app, loading, loading, loading, hold up to QR code, focus, focus, focus, detect, detect, detect, success! If there was a super quick way to scan them on phones, I'd be more optimistic about consumer adoption. IMO, the whole mobile phone camera workflow needs to be rethought.
Make a list of what needs to be done, if any item on the list seems difficult to start, break it down into smaller items until the way to proceed is obvious.
I'd be surprised if it isn't true, and isn't happening right now in several places. It seems like a really simple scam that would work well and not attract enough attention to fail due to the "doctor" getting a bad rep unless some of those the "treatment" failed for were not happy with the level of compensation.

Back in the days when cheques were common there was a great scam in the UK. A company promising to sell porn magazines and VHS tapes at (for the time) cheap but believable prices, but never sending out any product (never actually having any stock). They just worked on the basis that most people would not complain. When people did complain they appologised, gave some excuse about their importers failing to deliver or some such, and a full refund was sent by cheque. To reduce the outgoings, the cheques carried the (obviously porn related) name of the company meaning many people didn't want to pay them in as it would require looking the cashier in the eye if they noticed where the cheque had come from (there were no automated cheque processing machines back then). The scam only came to light when the "company" was investigated for other irregularities (IIRC some of the products they were claiming to sell were illegal, or at least close enough to the legal borderline to warrant investigation, which is what caught the eye of the authorities).
If a language in Tiobe drops from, say, 25 to 65 in a single month when the number of search engines used increases to 7, then Tiobe's being gamed. You'd think language implementers would have better things to do than create webpages with circuits of links.
How to Update tab icon badge in iPhone App using Titanium
List open ports and listening services
Google has developed speech-recognition technology that actually works.
Sometimes, learning about the nuances is helpful, and they seem to be in the 4-star (and even 3-star) reviews, especially when there are many 5-star reviews. That is, the reviewer says things like, "I would have given it 5 stars except ___." I zero in on those reviews to try to understand any edge cases in usability or suitability.

EDITED for embarrassing grammar mistakes
To Figure Out Google’s Priorities, Just Look At Team Larry
Pinpointing your location to Within 690 Meters
Unfortunately not. Android devices are not yet capable of acting reliably as USB hosts. This means you cannot connect peripheral devices to them.

The IOIO works by acting as a USB host itself.
Such a long comment deserves a reply :)

Personal finance issues are tucked away for some time, and I'm still eligible for my parents insurance [thank Obama].

Too bad B&N doesnt have a copy .. will have to wait for amazon :/

Can you point me to some NYC meetup groups?
$60,000

But, that is with the federal government. 3 Weeks vacation + holidays & sick leave is nice, but with furloughs I'm beginning to look elsewhere for employment.

I know spacex is hiring, a buddy of mine left for them.
I think your answer is right, which leads to the rather shocking conclusion that something that is without alternative can never be useless or braindead enough to be ignored. It's like a piece of dog shit in the snow.
Well, you may begin by posting the url[^1]. :)

[^1]: Ok ok, it's http://www.samevisions.com/
Newer online forums are worse at conversation
Of course more market share is good. But Microsoft is not purely interested in growing share with Bing; non-differentiation with Google is a good thing in and of itself. The less differentiated Microsoft is from Google, the greater perception of their platform having feature parity with Google. That way consumers are not forced to choose based on features, just ecosystem.

This is a the reason that Microsoft is a fast copier of market leaders, so that everything consumers could want, on paper, is housed within their roof (and Google's). It seems counterintuitive that less differentiation would be useful, but I think it's what Microsoft is going for.
Wait a second. In the right environment, good developers can estimate time fairly well on most things, even for tasks they haven't done before. I'm as prey to the "eternal optimism" factor as anybody else, but it's easy enough to work around: start by doubling your own estimate, and over time learn what multiple is right for you.
My mother-in-law tells a story of a doctor she knew who would tell parents-to-be he could always predict the sex of their baby (this was before scans were so common). He would tell them "boy" and would write it down on a piece of paper and put in a drawer, "so neither of us forgets". If it was a boy, they'd be very impressed. If it was a girl, they'd go back to him, he'd pull out the piece of paper to prove to them, no, he had been right. Of course on the paper he'd written "girl".
A big part of the problem is that management often isn't interested in honest estimates.

You can certainly find better practices in some organizations, but in many organizations, a certain team gets tasked with completing a certain assignment by an arbitrary deadline and no attempt is made to reconcile the triple constraints with reality.

In a context like that, developers may not be asked to make estimates, and if they do make estimates they don't believe that they'll be taken seriously. So they never develop the chance to learn how to estimate.

The accuracy of estimation also depends on the context.

If, for some reason, I had to fix a difficult-to-reproduce bug in a large system written in COBOL that runs on a mainframe, I'd have very little idea of how long it would take me to learn COBOL, understand the codebase, figure out the tools, and track the problem down. A COBOL jock would obviously do better.

On the other hand, I've worked on greenfield well-specified business CRUD apps based on a correctly aligned framework where I could estimate that something would take 21.25 hours and I'd really get it done in 19.75 or 22.50.

I've met developers who will absolutely refuse to estimate anything but I think more often developers don't believe their estimates will be listened to.

The good news for both developers and managers is that estimation is a learnable skill. If you get in the habit of making estimates and testing them, you'll get better amazingly fast. See the classic book

http://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Pract...
Same here. I call it Error Driven Development.
> They totally din't see Google as a threat, till it had a huge market cap. (Don't be evil, was a joke?)

Does having a huge market cap automatically make a company evil?
It is always a mistake to ask: "how long will this take you?"

I've spent my career as a lawyer dealing with this problem.

The solution is to choose a price that represents the value proposition of the output (whether it's code or contracts). As part of that price, you will bring a comprehensive process to the table – one that is very clear about what the client is expected to provide.

I have gathered a huge amount of timekeeping data from lawyers, and crunched it up, down, left, right and center over the years. Here is what I learned:

1. If a task can be defined, it has a predictable price.

2. Tasks should not be measured by how long they take start to finish, but rather by how much time is actually required to complete them.

3. A clearly defined task always takes just about the same amount of time. The start to finish time is variable because:

(a) the client is faster or slower at providing resources or information; and

(b) your other client work is causing bottlenecks in your own availability.

4. You can solve for (a) and (b) above. I'll leave it to your imagination how. That's my secret. ;)
The Hangover Part II
Why can't the same "hobbyist" effort that's applied to breaking the handshake and encryption on Playstations and Xboxes be applied to reverse-engineering Apple's peripheral chip?
probably the closest analog would be the spring security plugin, but I'm not well versed in devise enough to say for certain.

http://www.grails.org/plugin/spring-security-core
http://burtbeckwith.github.com/grails-spring-security-core/
sorta, this totally depends on the person.

Most of these job are for roughly 50 weeks a year, 250 days from 30 seconds of googling, of which all the "answers" oddly enough came from answers.com

That works out to 320 a day, and I know I am grossly oversimplyfying FICA taxes and other things, to the point where they aren't even being included.

So yes at 40 an hour for butt in a chair pay, some do better freelancing at times, and to some people the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
I want enough money to follow the advice that Warren Buffet gave: "I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing."

I don't think that requires a million dollar payday.
I think it's not the presence of middle managers; but how they are evaluated and incentivized. I don't envy their jobs; the upper managers have entire teams with clear tasks; the engineers on the other side have stuff to do; the middle managers are, well, caught in the middle. So they try to make themselves relevant by injecting themselves into various processes; by blocking things to make sure that everyone knows that they are present; by taking credit wherever possible.

So eventually it's the fault of the upper management, if they can't come up with the right incentive scheme to keep things moving smoothly.

I hate middle-managers too with a passion; but having seen them operate, I can't blame them for doing what they do. They're just playing the game by the rules. Blame the one who made up the rules.
How thick are the analysts at Gartner?
Was Tron using Ubuntu? lol

http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lj6wytUwrf1qd...
Keep your Mac clean with CLEANMYMAC.
Because estimates are not committments.

http://cwd.dhemery.com/2003/08/estimates_are_not_commitments...

"If you ask Fred, “When will you be done?” have you asked for an estimate or a commitment? What does Fred think you asked for? If Fred says, “Two weeks from today,” has he given an estimate or a commitment? What might happen if you want a commitment and Fred thinks you want an estimate? What might happen if you want an estimate and Fred thinks you want a commitment? How could you make it crystal clear whether you’re asking for an estimate or for a commitment? How could you make it crystal clear whether Fred is giving an estimate or a commitment?"
This is really cool!

I've spent the past few weeks working on this[1] with my brother (he built the case and wired/soldered everything; I handled the firmware) and I can think of some awesome applications for this Android board. I'm really excited about the idea of building an Android powered MIDI controller now :)

[1] http://www.djtechtools.com/forum/showthread.php?t=28014
I did not realize West Bengal was below the "natural" rate. Kerala (higher than natural rate) and West Bengal are the top two states on the list. While geographically and culturally distinct, they both have a habit of electing communist parties to power and are labor union friendly states.

Is the average mentality of 'equality' in those two locations above the norm of the national average? Is this a small part of what leads to better representation for women?