skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing that isn't trivial is the nature of the constraints that produce the various designs of human language. Are they constrained by some sort of innate "Universal Grammar" coded for in DNA? Or by ease of learning, given general learning mechanisms (not specific to language)? Or by efficiency of use? Or by a balance of information theoretic efficiency (high bandwidth) and redundancy (high accuracy despite noise)? Or something else more significant? Maybe some form of flexibility (greater efficiency in low-noise and redundancy in high)? Or all of the above, in differing proportions for different aspects of language?

We need to measure a lot of things in a lot of different ways in a lot of different languages before the contributions of the various constraints reflected in "the design" become clear. It's not trivial that we will discover (nor has this study come close to proving) that "optimal efficiency" is the bottom line.
>can not operate securely

Nobody can, size just makes it worse. Welcome to the reality of security.
It's easy to keep salary info private, not so with vacation time.
Evernote Architecture - 9 Million Users and 150 Million Requests a Day
I guess I'm in the "lucky" category when it comes to paid time off. I work for a small company though, and I receive 5 holidays, 5 floating holidays, 5 sick days, and 5 weeks vacation. I could find a job that pays 10k more per year but offers not nearly as much vacation time - but I prefer the time off over the additional money.
We generally grade deoression as mild, moderate, or severe. Some evidence suggests mild-to-moderate depression doesn't respond to anti-depressants. Anti-depressants were originally tested in those with severe depression, which, like other mental illnesses, is much less common.
Show HN: Logo tip - I used unicode characters for our logo.
Hi, I'm learning to keep things simple.

I'm on startup no. 2 and have just put up a sign-up and twitter page. For the twitter page I needed a profile pic or logo of some sort so I've hacked together a little logo using unicode characters. Have a look: https://twitter.com/#!/TheSuperOwl

I think it looks quite cute, it's a temporary thing until we get a designer on board. The 2 founders are not designers (product person & developer) so we don't want this to hold us back with getting things going.

It's quite fun - I think we can play around with the unicode characters in the meantime. For example when our little Super Owl was first born his wings were down and now that it's been some time since he hatched his wings are lifted up.

I know this all probably sounds a bit trivial and silly in the grand scheme of things - but I thought I would share my wee unicode / logo hack with you. Maybe it's useful?
Australian Cyber Law Will Turn Citizens Into Criminals
See, I think patents are germane but also a great example of a topic we suck at talking about. My guess is that fewer than 20% of the most active commenters on HN know how to interpret a patent, and less than 5% of those commenters have had direct engagement with the patent system (in litigation or in acquisition). So what we're left with is a room full of ignorant† people competing over who can be the angriest about how messed up the patent system is.

† I mean this in the most neutral way possible, in the same sense as I am ignorant of linear algebra.
Blogging about how you're overcoming a difficult financial situation is likely to be interesting to a lot of people. The issue is that it's unlikely to be interesting to his particular clients, who may find it unprofessional or off-putting.

With very good execution, it may be possible to overcome those issues or even turn the whole thing into a positive with his clients. But it's a big risk.
I must echo the experience with Flash on the Xoom running 3.1. Performance is, finally, quite acceptable.
We personally prefer the user experience that we've crafted. Notifications in the app differentiate between new messages and mentions (in the room list), for one. We also feel that the display of messages in each room is superior, and prefer the room listing to the tabbed approach Propane uses.

These differences are largely subjective, though, and some people may prefer Propane's approach (and that's fine). I suggest if you're not convinced, use a promo code and try it out for a day or two. If the promo codes are all used, I'd be happy to email one to you.

We are also always happy to hear suggestions to improve the user experience:

http://getsatisfaction.com/bearded/products/bearded_briquett...
Apple of my eye? US fancies a huge metaphor repository
Not strictly Eastern Europe (was never part of Warsaw pact, had hostile relations to Soviet Union) but the former Yugoslavian countries today are in this seat:
Slovenia enjoys vacation time like during Yugoslavian times, which means 4-5 weeks at least plus holidays.
Croatia took a more capitalist route and altough workers still enjoy socialist benefits such as 1 hour per day payed for their lunch, and holidays off, the vacation time has been decreased while working time increased (10-12 hours per day are common).
Bosnia has large unemployment but the holidays+vacation are intact for the public offices, while for private employees get 1 or 2 weeks off per year.
Serbia is in a similar position.

Yugoslavia Socialism -> 4-5 weeks at least, plus all religioous holidays and all communist free days.
Capitalism -> 1-2 weeks maximum, religious on, communist off.
There is no point in your life that you can more easily take 3 months off to do whatever you want than when you are a "recent college grad".

My biggest life regret was not realizing this at the time. I jumped into the workforce and pursued my career at 95 mph.

I should have spent a year travelling.
Neural Networks - A Systematic Introduction
This is exactly why I thought PalmOS had the best app model of all the platforms. Was very surprised to see at the Palm developer event when most of the devs complained about the JS app model.
Howdy,

So, what is effective for you re inspiration/recharge of energy?

Best,
It's a function of the climate, if you excercise your right to four consecutive weeks, your employer has the right to pick the dates, as long as they are sometime between June and August, since that's when our summer is.

For this reason we have the "industrial vacation" in July when all heavy industry shuts down, since it's easier if everyone and the entire supply chain shut down at the same time.
3 points

1. Most existing Flash content is designed for the keyboard and mouse. Even if they were written using JS/CSS etc the same user interface issues would exist. In other words the problems are with the initial UI design. Flash really should not be blamed here! The current versions of the Flash developer tools support multi-touch.

2. I disagree about the deal. Flash offers the ability to have content appear the same across different platforms with the same form factor. E.g. the same on a 10" android tablet or a 10" windows tablet. Given the platform battle currently taking place spreading your risk by not developing purely for one platform (E.g. webOS) makes a lot of sense.

3. Unless developers have really deep pockets, the choice often boils down to - select a multi-platform development environment and accept some technical compromises but spread your financial risk OR make a calculated gamble and develop purely for one platform and hopefully get an optimised user experience.
Kind of a cool concept. Let's see if I'm the lucky winnarrrr!
Not talking about politics is almost the charter of this site. It's was conceived of as a Reddit for people that share the mindset of hacker startup founders and couldn't stomach the noise of Reddit. Read the guidelines "inside-out" for a description of the problem with Reddit at the time HN was started. Note the things that leap out of the guidelines as concrete examples and not abstractions. Politics. Cute animal pictures. Videos of disasters. Crime.

There is a place for people, including people who share the mindset of hacker startup founders, to share cat pictures and civil liberties discussions. It's called Reddit.

We don't need two Reddits.

We do need at least one HN.
> I will post all small and big thing I have done that day, will place some ratings and charts of my performance and other things like that. I will post where I sent my previous works, where I applied as a candidate for a job, what design and development works I have done, what projects I have been involved in.

This feels like a terrible idea to me. I've been consulting for a while and the last person that clients want is to hire someone who 1. can't make decisions without asking the Internet for help, and 2. puts all the tiny details about their work out there for the public to see.

Do not do this.

I think you should go buy Gerald Weinberg's "Secrets of Consulting" now - it's a quick read. Freelance/consulting work is about solving other people's problems, not putting your own problems out there for other people to solve.
HTML5 Email Address Regexp
Is there really a higher incidence of depression among the Askenazi? I hadn't heard that before. I can see how German or European Jews would have been affected, possibly for generations after WWII, but that set does not include all Ashkenazis, and definitely includes some Sephardics.
I was a homemaker for many years. I have found that having a job is actually a great thing for helping me keep my mind off my problems and filling my time so I don't just mope. Yes, in some cases you need to do something about the problem in order to be able to focus on something else. For me, at work, this is only a big issue if the problem is with a coworker. Otherwise, just doing my job is part of the solution. So I often am able to focus just fine in spite of being wrapped around the axle about my latest drama.

On the other hand, I have spent 10+ years successfully facing down death and getting well when doctors say it can't be done. So my daily, hourly, minutely hand-wringing about my financial problems seems minor in comparison.

Maybe doing volunteer work in a homeless shelter or some such would help you put your problems in perspective?
Milton Glaser on the fear of failure
Here in Sweden, employees typically have 5 weeks paid vacation. Because of our climate, virtually everyone take their time off during July.

This makes the whole inustial and coorporate sector grind to a halt. A lot of factories literally shut down for a few weeks.

Fortunately, it is rather well coordinated.
I think its common during recession period when companies are looking to save costs (better than firing people right) and also reduce inventory
Thanks, I hadn't thought of that. I have been getting the impression that some people can see comment points, I would like to see them back but I think it is safe to say it's no longer an experiment. :-/
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_ain%27t_gonna_need_it

But there's a fine balance to strike here. There's a massive spectrum of solutions to the problem of "Prevent the site from being swamped with spam and other inappropriate comments". Just because it isn't a problem now, because you have no users, doesn't mean it isn't going to be an immediate problem as soon as you start acquiring them. And just because there's an arbitrary upper limit of the complexity of those solutions doesn't mean that there's no point in addressing the problem at all right now.

"Keep V1 as your minimum viable product" is the advice. And the V1 solution could be as simple as "have an emergency global off-switch for the commenting system".
IPhone 5 - Everything You Need To Know
Very simply, this country was founded by people with the Protestant Work Ethic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic and it has become a part of our national identity.
This was one of the major draws for me for moving to Europe in my early 20s (from the US). After working one year in the US and having one week of vacation, it was bordering on surreal to have 6.

That said, most Americans wouldn't like the European pay scales. While a developer gets 3-6 times the vacation in Germany, they make half as much money.

For me it was a great trade; I still had a middle class income and spent my 20s bouncing around the world visiting more than 30 countries on 5 continents, with zero gaps in my employment.

Now that I'm an employer, I still see it as a great trade: employees are a lot cheaper here, and seem to be happier. But again, while most American software developers would love to have more vacation, I've heard them also repeat ludicrous things about how they can "barely survive on $60k/year".
For reference: I'm in a Midwestern university and I have off from May 15 thru the end of August. IME that's about average at semester schools.
Is it really? My company runs over the holidays and our problem is actually finding people who can work during that time. Surely lots of tech companies have to keep running over Christmas?
Why did Linkedin beat out Plaxo?
and this is why i'm amazed programmers have not yet formed a union.
But then again string A) 111111111111111 contains less information than string B) 48611 as string A can be written as a small program: 1*15.

Like in the article it could be far more likely to have a 1 follow a 1 (like markov chaining probability) than another number, making the string A more probable and therefor containing less information.

The overarching notion to me seems to be (Kolmogorov) complexity. The size of the smallest program that can reproduce the string/word/utterance denotes the complexity of that string/word/utterance.

We use less complex words more often, not because they are shorter, but because their optimal compression ratio (not the number of morphenes, but their order and complexity) is shorter than other words. The program to produce it in our brains is smaller and simpler.
There may certainly be issues with Flash on Android, but it's not useless on all tablets.

Flash works great on the Blackberry Playbook. When other developers ask me about the device, at some point I typically end up demoing Amazon streaming video. Most are quite surprised by how well it works.
This is exactly the sort of visionary engineering needed to break the field into the next stage. This isn't just a quantitative difference, it's a revolutionary qualitative difference!

Our online infrastructure is broken in ways we're dimly aware of, because it has always been that way. In the same way that people trying to do business demand network, electric, and roadway infrastructure that once didn't exist, we will someday demand software infrastructure with features that do not exist today.

Chief among these will be security features. If Google plays their cards correctly, they can create an ecosystem that stays ahead of the black-hat hackers. By correctly incentivizing white-hat hackers, they could expose and patch security holes fast enough to ruin the economics of the black-hats. This infrastructure will enable Google to make more money, resulting in a virtuous cycle.

If the infrastructure can be extended to the server-side, with web app frameworks that receive security updates with equal rapidity, then Google can establish a secure, smoothly running "toll road" -- an infrastructure subset relatively free from problems faced by the rest of the net. That could be worth billions.

(We'll know this strategy is winning if/when Microsoft starts doing it too. Once that happens, we'll be in a new era of computing.)
try http://www.readability.com/
The worst part of it IMO is that even if you could pay for insurance without your workplace plan huge numbers of Americans can't get it at all due to pre existing conditions. So this is a serious impediment to workers leaving stable jobs that they don't like to do things like found small startups or even just move to a new job that may not be as stable.
Was very surprised to see at the Palm developer event when most of the devs complained about the JS app model.

I'm not. HTML was fundamentally designed to display static documents. After years of hacks, we've managed to turn it into a somewhat usable application framework, but there's always going to be an impedance mismatch compared to APIs designed for apps from the beginning.
Recent grads are only making ~40k, some times less, some times considerably less (people have posted Ask HNs about this topic before). As someone who used to be in that camp, living off half your net at that salary range is not realistic; living on 75% is barely so, if you're eating bologna sandwiches every night.

Having a second job is a great idea, it's just too bad you can't get a good consulting job when you're a junior dev. Once you have a couple of years of experience you can start to get consulting work and from there you are pretty much set financially. The first couple of years are tough though. Vacations aren't realistic unless you have family that helps you out.
If the US had the culture of taking off August, it would be far easier to take off 3 weeks since everyone in your company would be doing it. Logistically however I don't really understand how taking August off works in Europe. Where does everyone go? Doesn't it get super crowded?
Can you port this to windows :P?

Seriously us windows folks are lacking in a decent campfire client.
I disagree that click-to-flash is an "ideal" way of handling this.

Personally, I wish I had click-to-flash on my desktop. Flash is so often used for intrusive ends, I'd rather it be sandboxed from the real web content. Of course, these days, HTML can be used for similar intrusive content, but it rarely is, so far.
"And not for nothing: I'll wager that your grandparents didn't work hard with the intention that their grandchildren would have to spend their lives working for a company that never gave them time off."

Very interesting. I had never thought of this... that the impetus for the former generations was, perhaps, to make it so that their children didn't have to work their asses off. But, instead, we took their dedication to work as some kind of example of how an 'honest day's work is done' and felt a moral obligation to do the same, and we pass this lesson on to our children.
Relative to cost-of-living, are wages the same, lower, or higher in countries with mandatory paid vacations? One wonders whether there's a delusive "free lunch" notion underpinning Euro vacation policy, whether governments really can force companies to pay everyone more for the same level of output, or whether Euro economies have discovered an effective way to engineer a more efficient labor force by attempting to outlaw burnout.

Because, at the end of the day, the company is buying completed-and-sold widgets for their salary dollar. All things being equal (including widget output), if the company pays you $50k a year and gives you 4 more "paid" vacation weeks, they gave you a raise. You can mandate 2, 4, or 8 weeks of vacation, but --- at least in middle class jobs --- you can't really mandate a salary floor.
I noticed that they have copied the close tab behavior from Chrome. That's a pleasant surprise I didn't see mentioned in the release notes.
Interesting concept but so far the syntax seems unappealing on first glance.
Exactly. That's what I meant by "solved problem". Alternatively, start supporting WebM: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/05/adobe_support_f...
Overview of Evernote's architecture
Don't say anything on here that you wouldn't say in person. Civility is paramount.
When my old company was going under and a lot of us were looking for new jobs this was a tactic we all used. Go for pay and vacation time increases on offers. Some of us took more pay, some took more vacation. One guy got 6 weeks vacation.

My new company is 3 weeks vacation and 5 days sick/personal for everyone. Instead I just took more money with the understanding that I could get approved for leave without pay as needed.
There's a bicycle shop in the area called "virtuous cycles" and this is the first time I've realized that they mean the antonym of "vicious cycle". I always thought they were just vaguely religious.
Ok, I'm interested. Would you mind sending us more detailed feedback? feedback@opalang.org
Yes, I should have mentioned my platform. It was Ubuntu Maverick or Lucid. I haven't checked it on any newer version.
So which footballer is going to be the first to get paid to change his name to "example.com", have an affair with a model, and obtain a superinjunction?
Terrible article, it's so bad it uses screen capture software to convert between formats.
She doesn't probably understand what its intended results may or may not be. Or for that fact what "broadband" is.
Surely the article ought to simply be one word: "yes". Apple made its decision in 2007. If and when flash really stops sucking (performance, UX, and security wise) and users demand it, perhaps Apple will reconsider. Since the likelihood of two of these three things is almost zero...
I guess this means for ignorant users this is good but for power-users we are having more and more control taken away from us.

You can always use Firefox or some other browser instead.

Plugins are an architectural mistake. They should go away and the Chrome team is doing the right things to make it happen.
Etherboot/gPXE
Where does the 'Connected' hard working Co-founder fall into that hierarchy? Seems to me one's connection are more valuable than money alone can purchase. Can't buy trust...
Positive feedback can work for you, as well as against you.
For what it's worth, I've worked in multiple start-ups that relied on or made extensive use of contractors (one for the same reason: it was difficult to hire designers and engineers) and have seen this very dynamic. I've also worked at a company that made heavy use of "perma-temps", have contracted myself (when I was a full time student) and have heard (anecdotally, from many contractors) what the different reasons for going into contracting are (tl;dr top ones do it because the hourly pay is higher or to bootstrap their own business, but the majority do it because they can't find anything else).

That's the primary cause for this comment: bringing in unknown quality contractors makes it difficult to retain and hire quality full time employees.

I've also worked at companies that have built a talent brand and a big company that has squandered its (looking at my resume, you can probably guess what they are).

I don't claim to be a quarterback, but the idea the article suggest is just egregious. I would not want to work at that kind of a company. I am not suggesting whether or not that approach will do what the corporation intends to do: generate profit for their shareholders. There are many cases where poor quality engineering teams have created outsize returns on investment: the market, the timing, the business models matter too. I am not making suggestions on any of the other points in the article.
Private, Invite only FanPage for your Customers
The Linux Week in Review (May 23 – 30, 2011)
In the past month or so, I've had friends with iPhones ask me several times to look something up because the website they were checking (restaurant sitesin a couple of case, and a local band site in another) used a Flash menu or splash screen. It's obviously idiotic for the website designer to do such a thing, but it's extremely common. I gloat a little every time an iPhone user has to ask me to do something on my Android phone.
Mandatory closing are one thing. Hell, I'd like to have the holidays off anyway.

But it's 50% of his total time off. Is that "the norm"?
I made $162 from an iphone app called Tank! last month, and it has been on the store for about 4-5 months. It is a simple clone of Atari Combat that was built with phonegap and Canvas + Javascript. I charge $2.99 per app sale, and that seems to be the sweet spot.
http://robkohr.com/iphone/tank/ (pricing is wrong on this page)