skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
gambling, and porn sound totally illegal in China. ie: you can do it, but not like, "legitimately" or obviously

There is a very well written story about a company that made a LOT of money doing gambling website in the "guise" of an MMORPG:
http://www.danwei.org/electronic_games/gambling_your_life_aw...

he company had successfully listed on the New York Stock
Exchange, and its third-quarter operating income was 405.2
million yuan, with a profit of 290.2 million. This
represented an astonishing 164% and 152% climb over the
same period the previous year. The company had a book value
of 6.8 billion RMB.

It's genius: use real-life sales people to approach gamers in net-cafes, sell them something that simultaneously grants psychological pleasure and will save them time. Then slowly leverage the basic human need for approval and acceptance, stoke their pride, and watch the money roll in. This works especially well in China because in a land of so many people, "individuality" and "personal worth in uniqueness" is worth a lot of gold.
What a coward.

Update: Go ahead and mod me down, but a spammer breaks out of jail (on a light 21 month sentence in minimum security) only to murder his wife and toddler aged child on his way out. That is an amazing display of cowardice.
- What will happen if BlackBerry's email service goes down periodically and loses your email?

Everyone will switch to their competition. But that's because email is BlackBerry's core business.

- What will happen if Microsoft demands 30% of all developer revenues for their products and limits the distribution of applications?

What, you mean like they do for XBox?

From the Wikipedia on "Xbox Development Kit": "Only developers that are licensed by Microsoft may compile code and release binaries (.XBEs)of their software with the XDK, any software released using the XDK by developers that aren't licensed is illegal."

I think the answer in the XBox case is "Customers buy a lot of software anyway."

These complaints about Apple are legit (their crazy SDK NDA is really frustrating), but they're still early-adopter nitpicking. The iPhone SDK is not the core of Apple's business: They made plenty of iPhone profits even when they didn't have one, and they had plenty of happy customers. Apple's currently-FUBARed email services aren't the reason that I bought a pair of Macs: I bought the Macs because they run Unix tools just fine, they've got modern browsers, they've got iTunes, the printers just work, there's a lot of available audio and video software that just works, they can run Photoshop, they can run Windows and Linux via VMWare or Parallels, they're kind of pretty to look at, they've got an amusing online fanbase, etc, etc.

All of that still works. None of it goes away just because some software that was released last week doesn't work yet. If you don't want to be burned like an early adopter don't be an early adopter.

One difference between Apple and Microsoft is that, when Microsoft released their new operating system, it reportedly performed poorly when running everyday apps on existing hardware with formerly-supported peripherals. The result is that... many people remained Microsoft customers but just went back to XP. They refused to be early adopters. Problem solved. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the other difference between them and Apple is that Microsoft's product development cycle is now eight years long, so late adopters will wait a very long time before upgrading...
Given that OP ripped a quote out of context, we will continue to use it as such.

If a reporter/interviewer asks you about your failures, and you simply reference your success, does that necessarily mean you do not fix your mistakes?

How do you suggest you 'fix' the mistake of dropping a few balls in a game on the spot? The only answer is, you go out and continue to have big games. This would be akin to an interviewer asking Michael Jordan 'why did you miss 10,000 shots in your game' and he says 'I made XYZ game-winning shots and was NBA Finals MVP.'

If you look at any of the interviews about teammates/opponents of MJ, they all say he was very, very cocky.

Cocky != Refusal to fix mistakes.

Or perhaps, in a better context, an interviewer asking you why some of your stock purchases did not work out favorably, and you stating that you've had a lot of successes despite your failures.

I'm by no means a Michigan fan, but I saw him play a few games last year (on TV) and he was clearly a very, very good football player. Looking at Manningham's stats on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Manningham he seemed to have a pretty good season last year, when I believe the interview took place.
Diagonal Scaling - Don't Forget to Scale Out AND Up
Architect Coder?

Had to complete the circle.
That is only user-created games, not all games. Companies still have the option of doing regular development and controlling their own marketing, distribution, revenues etc.

For your comparison to be valid, you'd have to consider the industries you're talking about. Microsoft operates within some pretty standard console industry practices - charging (relatively) small amounts for tools/licences etc. What they do is what Nintendo, Sony, etc all do and thus are neither bad nor good in this respect.

Now take a look at the smartphone market (major competitors being RIM and MS): APIs are pretty open, allow much more integration, users have much more freedom of choice, developers have freedom of distribution, speech etc.

Apple may be better than traditional cell phones, but they fail in comparison with their peers in this respect.

Just to give you an illustration, the last two projects I did had mobile components. I could not do an iPhone version of the first one for lack of background processes, and I can't do the second for lack of APIs that allow access to the phone's system settings. Meanwhile, a friend of mine is developing a horribly crippled medical device monitoring application, because the iphone allows bluetooth pairing for audio devices only.

None of these problems exist on the BB, Android and likely WinMo. So no, I am definitely not being hard on apple at all.
Congrats to the winners of the MobileBeat Tesla Award: Loopt, AdMob and more
I drove through Iowa recently, and couldn't get the farm subsidies out of my head. I had a good steak though.
Squarespace launches version 5... very cool overhaul
It is very reasonable to assume Google already includes such data in search since they bought Urchin / Google Analytics.
There are many ways to be imperfect, because there are many ways to be disordered (higher entropy). There is only one way to be perfectly ordered.

My point is that, in practice, counting the ways of perfection is counting the ways of imperfection. This focus on all the things lacking is discouraging and distracting from whatever you are actually trying to do.

IMHO, it's more effective to focus on what you value, what is worthwhile, and keep improving towards that; that is, to go towards what you value, instead of away from imperfection. It's more fun and you're more likely to come up with something that will be valuable to others - instead of "perfect" within some impoverished universe.

I say "impoverished", because the only way to have perfection is to define it, and as soon as you define it, you exclude all those possibilities that were beyond your imagination until you stumbled upon them, often via a "mistake". i.e. Any defined universe is necessarily impoverished, compared to the big one.
A selection of python libraries for scientific computing.

All-in-one installer for Windows.
Does nobody remember the late 90s? There was a service that did just that way back before the previous dotbomb.

But the name escapes me, perhaps because it was as exciting back then as it is now.
PageRank can be maniuplated too, but it doesnt mean that its a bad way to determine the search results. It means that you need to have extra layers of security to prevent and detect fraud. Another example would be automating clicks on a competitor's paid search results, to drive up their advertising costs. Some people have malicious intent, but just because it's possible doesn't mean the idea is flawed.

But yeah, I'm not in favor of extra clutter on Google's search results which is why I'm advocating for the automatic, behind the scenes adjustments.
Sometimes I wonder if a life filled with adventure and engagement might not be bigger and more interesting than one filled with security and freedom.
OP is fairly articulate and intelligent, but would be greatly appreciated if he would stop trolling with his titles.
Linux claims to support the ACPI standard. This motherboard claims to support the ACPI standard. Ergo, Linux support is implicitly claimed by transitivity, barring bugs.

If you bought a desk that was rated for holding 100 pounds of stuff, and it collapsed because you put 75 pounds of monitors on it (well, they were big CRTs...). You call the company, and they refuse to honor the warranty because they don't provide CRT support, despite their desk being certified for 100 pounds of weight.

Now, if you're saying that it's ridiculous to expect a cheap manufacturer to actually conform to the specs they say they do... well, you may have a point.
Of course they're not blameless. They're just another crappy vendor that, at best, puts a half effort into supporting Linux. Even cursory research probably would have revealed this before the guy purchased the hardware. The first clue that a little research might be necessary is that Foxconn doesn't even claim to support Linux.

The point I was trying to make is this is about the worst way to go about solving a problem like this. Assuming, and then treating people as if they're out to get you is going to get this guy and the Linux community exactly nowhere.

What do we know? Maybe Foxconn made a genuine attempt at providing some unofficial Linux support and just screwed up. Dealing with them as if they're part of some conspiracy to destroy Linux is not only downright foolish but really hurts the cause. If all a company is going to get is grief from a bunch of rabid bloggers, who can blame them for falling back on the "we don't support linux" excuse?

The simple solution is to let them know in a polite and respectful way that you're having a problem with the hardware. They can choose to fix it or not and you can choose to keep buying their products or not.
My heart truly goes out to his family. I have to admit that even on the other side of the world, I was inspired by him.

The only time I saw one of his lectures was on youtube, I happened across it in the middle of the night one time, and I just had to finish it - I stayed up until 5am just to see what he had to say.

It was one of those moments that really makes you think about what we can really achieve when we put our minds to it.
the same is true for stock u won't get taxed for buying stock and the tax is just one time (not recurring every year) at 25% (15% after 1 yr)

Really? Here in Australia, we don't get a tax break for buying stock (AFAIK). When you earn the money, you pay tax, and then you buy stock with what's left over. (though there's tax breaks for investing via superannuation)
What, like college? ;-)

The advantage of places with puzzles is that everyone else had to go through them too (you hope; if it's just you, something's wrong). That keeps the bar high and ensures you won't be working with idiots.

Most worthwhile things require some up-front investment without a guaranteed payoff. Finance means putting the money up now for a hopefully higher return later. Education requires that you study now for skills later. Startups require that you build something now and hope you can get people to pay for it later. (Well, not always, but the bootstrap approach of finding a customer first requires that the customer pay up first and then take on the risk that you can't deliver.)

The trick is on doing due-diligence on the job first and making sure it's something worth investing in.
"He had been serving a 21 month sentence [in] a federal minimum-security prison camp"

21 months in a minimum-security prison seems doable if you have a wife, child, and several million dollars waiting at home. Or are US prisons really that bad?
Are we about to witness a real OS X virus?
Streamfile Simplifies On-Demand File Sharing
Ballmer: Microsoft to get more narrow-minded
Or more generically "beyond polling." Polling is a great and simple solution for a range of problems (and why it's often one of the first tools programmers reach for), but as they point out PubSub often scales much better.
Silly as it is, that's at least a sign of progress. It means employers have now realized that you want the smartest programmers, rather than obedient ones.

Yeah but that seems to be what PG is saying here.
Burt Rutan: Entrepreneurs are the future of space flight
His "last lecture" helped to bootstrap me out of nearly a year of depression.

It is a sad day when a man who has helped, inspired, and driven so many to excellence passes from the world, for few men are capable of stepping up to shoulder the burden that Randy carried, and fewer still could do so with such cheerfulness, tenacity, and care.

He was a great man, and he will be missed by many.
> For some reason, this never gets as much publicity as the perceived lack of black quarterbacks.

The reason is that quarterback is the most glamorous and well-known position. This explanation doesn't explain why there is a lot of publicity about the underrepresentation of women in science -- "scientist" is definitely not a glamorous profession.
Pencil Project
The bar for a good cell phone is vary low. I really liked my SCH-A990 because it worked well as a phone and you could use it as a 3MP camera but while it was better than average its interface sucked.

To take a picture you open the phone, rotate the display, close it an it looks like a normal digital camera with a 2 inch LCD on the back and a nice large button on the top right to take photos. Now all you need to open the shutter your ready to take pictures.

But, while that button takes photo's with a short click, by holding it down you can go to movie mode and take movies. So then if you did a short click that same button wold start and stop taking movies or if you held it down again it would go back to pictures. Who on earth thought that up? Nobody I handed the camera to knew how to work it without messing it up several times. But, most of them still thought it was a Great cell phone.
That's a good point. I somehow didn't consider it before. I guess if they're in the 99.5th percentile of size, very very few of them will have any traits that cause lower height.

I agree that at 40 they will be faster. But for short bursts of speed, or for a run that requires frequent changes of direction (e.g. because you're being chased around) the higher IQ people will have a 'speed' advantage due to mental rather than physical agility.
> Yet in this study the Wonderlic is keyed to position, not performance in that position.

It's automatically keyed to performance in the position since it's based on NFL players, who are the people at the 99.99th or 99.999th percentile at that position.
(Almost on topic)

There is a JavaScript meetup in London on the 13th of August.

http://javascript.meetup.com/3/
Third Voice
IDEs are useful for helping you match tags, see what part of your page is affected by which tags, and checking your HTML. They're also just handy as editors, e.g. they allow you to open multiple files simultaneously (e.g. your html file in one tab and your stylesheet in another.)

Not that there's anything wrong with vi. I use it and an IDE.

You might want to give Arachnophilia a try. It's simple, configurable, multiplatform, and does more than HTML/CSS:
http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/

Amaya is prettier, and focused on web page design:
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

Neither one breaths fire like the big IDEs, but both do a great job on what they do. ;)
OLED breakthrough: 70 lumens/watt ()
RIP Randy Pausch, College Prof Who Got YouTube To Pay Attention
to add to the reasons why wikipedia will stay king - couldn't wikipedia just cite knol when it needs to?
Yeah, I agree. I was simply trying to think of the things that helped build the American internet market.
Great example of taking advantage of the commoditization of technology. I once worked at a start-up that spent tens of thousands of dollars building a lab to do this. Being creative with what has become standard tech to create a solution that costs orders of magnitude less than what was previously available is the way to build a company. Nice job!
Thanks for that. I think there's some kind of a distinction between a technology company, and technology company that is directly tied to a non-technology business, so that it also is a non-technology company.

Buildsoft (the acquired company) develop software for the building industry. At some point, this is the same business as developing physical tools for the building industry. Once there's a known task and a standardized way to solve it, we can develop our tool for doing that. There's less uncertainty.

I think the distinction is to do with uncertainty, generality and abstractness. A "technology" company is doing something new and unknown, that is applicable to many different industries - but hasn't settled down yet. Once the application becomes concrete, and specific to a particular industry, and the way of solving it is pretty well established, I guess it becomes just a regular business like any other.

Moore's "Crossing the Chasm" talks about customizing a product to a specific industry, as a way to get a measure of security - you won't get wiped out (until the next revolution in computers).

I was thinking that Warren might not have anything to do with this acquisition, but he's very attentive to capital redeployment, so I would guess he did personally approve this purchase.
I can't tell from the article, but is the actual game engine being run from the browser? If so I wonder what tech they are using.
btw - this looks incredibly addicting
You make a good point, but you're missing the main point: China's internet users aren't destitute and they're growing, along with a growing middle class. Lots of farmers are very poor; they're not your market.

If you've ever been to a high end mall in China, you'll know people like to spend money (I'm not sure where you got the stingy idea from).

There are lots and lots of very successful software and web startups in China. Most are not foreign owned because most foreigners have difficulty navigating the political/business climate here (I guess it's the same reason why most startups in the States aren't foreign owned either).

I hear a lot of high-level complaining about the Chinese <fill in the blank>, but if you are really motivated, you can overcome those barriers. I don't think that's specific to China.

The real problem, I think, is lack of understanding. All people hear about are great opportunities in China, but are frustrated when there's no prescribed formula for attaining such opportunities. This is analogous to a non technical person reading up about all the web startups and trying to take advantage, then complaining about this or that when he doesn't understand how to go about doing a web startup.

The solution is simple: dig deeper and immerse yourself in understanding the Chinese market.
It's working for me now, too.
Routers and Ethics
"what is unique to the Chinese culture..."

not really in need of a technological solution (???) but here's a few differences off the top of my head:

-most people grew up as single childs
-most people are atheists
-most people have never been outside of the country
-gambling is illegal in china
I would like to see a search feature pg, I have seen searchyc, however I would like to see search integrated.
Today for example, I used Google to search (I learned of searchyc while searching for "search" :) in this discussion - after trying Google) and it brought up what I was looking for (discussion of your History of T essay) in the results, however, Google did not provide a link to the discussion, apparently only a link to the main page was indexed. It was only after using searchyc that I found it . . . and a link to the essay as well, as I did not see it under essays on your site. I was looking for both because I saw them yesterday or the day before yet was in a hurry . . .
Pray for his family and children especially.
I don't know, maybe rather than wasting time on random puzzles, it would be a better investment of time to create some cool application as a demo? I don't think any startup would require dhh or pg to solve some puzzles before considering their job applications.

With college also, you get something in return for your investment (hopefully) - skills.

Of course if you just feel like chilling, why not choose some job puzzles.
I'm a perfectionist, and sometimes the only way I can make progress in my project is to do it the hacky way while documenting the promise to return later to fix it into a comment in the style of: "Lazy shortcut."

Sometimes doing it The Right Way would necessitate a big refactoring of the supporting code or learning a concept in more depth and I can't afford all that overhead (which might break flow also).

Also, sometimes a far-reaching refactoring might be carried out in stages over a number of hours or days and to go from where you are to The Right Thing you'll have to pass through a number of less-than-optimal stages. But I always find it easier and faster to use an incremental approach where I accept suboptimal solutions, most of which will be quickly overwritten anyway than trying to do The Right Thing all at once.
V.C. Advice to Entrepreneurs: Its Not All About the iPhone
Surprisingly, they don't block all the foreign gambling sites. Maybe poker just isn't that popular, but I have several American friends who play online poker once a while from China.

Porn is out of the question. You'll probably get thrown in jail if you're Chinese or deported if you're foreign.
I can't say I agree with his conclusion. Lineman are there mainly to be big and collide with other lineman, whereas receivers have a much more skill-intensive job. They have to try to run in pattern while still breaking free of defenseman, but doing so in such a way that the quarterback still knows where to throw the ball. They have to then catch the ball (requiring them to predict its flight path and adjust their path accordingly, an exercise in physics) then run with it and avoid tackle.

I would think 10 extra IQ points would benefit a receiver or a running back far more than a lineman.
Not in all cases. GMail deletes without prompting, but adds a notification about what happened, with an 'Undo' link.

You may be right about cases where it is technically impossible to undelete, but I think in most cases it's preferable to make undeleting easier than to show message boxes.
Facebook Connect Will Be Game-Changing...and Dangerous
What about assertions? They work well as comments, but they're actually tested, and you know immediately if they go out of date.

You can decide one way or the other whether to compile them as no-ops in releases, but it seems like a big improvement either way.
Don't me.dium and yoono do the same thing?
Saying goodbye to a man who inspired the world
And every topic he writes about.
Honestly. How bad could it have been? Especially since he was staying in the type of prison that you can simply "walk away from":

"had been a fugitive from the law since walking away from a federal minimum-security prison..."
Minda ICT: Simple interests; Great uses: Make Eject Shortcut on Desktop in 3 steps
I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you think the average NFL coach is not of above average intelligence? That job is far too competitive for that to be true.
The Smartest Advice I Ever Got: Personal Finance