skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not exactly true on inflation. If inflation gets above 2.5% for example, they'll raise interest rates. They're explicitly targeting 2%. Bernanke has stated this repeatedly. You're underestimating the power of the Fed and its control of the money supply to curb inflation.
Some thoughts on Go programming language
WeFigured dominated Amped hackathon
Busy or not, what kind of credibility do you have coming out with this a month later? And then to use the tone used in the article?
Thanks for the heads up. Fixed! :)
I'd like some clarification regarding the common sentiment of computer scientists not knowing how to program. Does anyone actually know an incompetent programmer/engineer with a CS degree that actually knows his/her CS?

I always get the impression that people think the computer science field is completely orthogonal to software development, but I disagree. I suspect that the incompetent CS graduates this author mentions are in fact not good at CS as well as being poor programmers.
the autoplayed presentation is awesome
Giving criticism is a skill as well - or rather providing an assessment is an important skill. An assessment which doesn't point out what the person is doing right is less productive than one which does because it doesn't provide a access to the type comprehensive picture which skill mastery requires. Telling people what they should not change is as important as telling them what they should change.
While this is no doubt going to be unpopular here on HackerNews, I'm going to posit the following: This is almost as bad as have 8 of 9 people being Creationists.

...

One child policies that have resulted in a generation of males without females is pretty much exactly the type of policy I'd expect from a group of engineers.

Let us hope that they will do a better job with global politics and economics than they did with domestic policy.

Has there ever been a culture/major world power besotted with its own engineering prowess? Or is this just a way to describe western civilization in the 19th and 20th centuries? (In particular, Britain, United States, the USSR, and Germany.)
Reinforces my decision to home/in-school my boy. School was a prison for me and I'd not have that forced on him. Plus I learned far more outside of the classroom when given the chance.
I routinely have my flights into SFO delayed hours in advance due to weather and traffic considerations. The ATC system doesn't seem like it's set up handle such an arrangement without major changes being made to the way flights are programmed. Just a guess.
Awesome! I just finished the first chapter.
What's the advantage over a tweet or a facebook update of "I'm going to be at.." or "I want to go to..." followed by "anyone up for it?"?
> Ad Hominem circumstantial.

Hey, welcome to Hacker News. This is your second comment, your first was, "Meanwhile, red necks scream in anger, teir took uor jobs!!"

So, let me clue you in to the vibe here. First, we aim for a really high level of civility here. Second, standard throwing out of cliche is frowned upon - yeah, we get it. Nobody liked the bailouts and the BP oil spill was bad.

But most importantly - here, we try to engage in thoughtful discussion instead of just throwing out words like "ad hominem" when an argument isn't ad hominem. I wrote a fairly long comment that Chomsky's writings about what the world was like were wrong, with specific examples of comparable Communist/non-Communist countries. And I outlined that I had a personal background in the matter.

Anyways, my above comment said -

1. Chomsky advocated strongly for many communist regimes and against the USA plenty of times.

2. I believe that was a mistake, as evidenced by comparisons between Communism/non-Communism. Also, clearly, his predictions on South Vietnam and Cambodia were mistaken.

Anyways, welcome to Hacker News. Please try to up the discussion level a little bit, this isn't like the rest of the internet.
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洗顔石鹸口コミランキングで比較！！
A relevant article from 2009 contrasting prevalence of American lawyer politicians vs. Chinese engineer politicians vs. French civil servants and so on.

http://www.economist.com/node/13496638?story_id=13496638
Phoenix to Seattle is not the market. Even if I owned a private plane, I'd probably fly commercial for hub to hub flights like that. (and almost definitely for super long haul point to point like SFO-HKG; it's reasonable to own or charter a Caravan or King Air or Citation II or something if you fly a lot with a group of people, but a G650 or BBJ3 is an order of magnitude more. I've been a passenger on a moderate number of business/corporate/government vs. super-rich-person jets, and a top quality commercial business class or most first class products are actually a more comfortable experience, at a much lower cost).

A better market is for something like rural Texas to rural Montana; not hubs, and might require 3 flight segments each way (get to nearest hub, hub to hub, hub to destination); these can easily make a ~1000 mile flight into an all-day fiasco (plus, driving to the nearest commercial airport vs. a general aviation airport).

Flying 4-6 people on those flights might be $2500/day per person, plus $1000+ in last minute tickets, plus hotel.
Different national political cultures, apparently.

http://www.economist.com/node/13496638?story_id=13496638
Criticism with settled conclusions should be the way of a debate.
Bitcoin is the Wikileaks of Monetary Policy
Followup from the really smart Rob Tercek on my bitcoin primer.
I actually think now is a good time for a new social network. People are increasingly sick of Facebook.
Wouldn't it be much better if we seek a robotic natural language or modify existing natural language to make robotic ?
They consider the government of China, for the most part, simply the nature of china. It isn't a necessary evil, its just the way things are.

This is exactly what is meant by the Chinese "Civilization State."

http://today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/u-s-needs-to-deepen-its-unde...

I've had Chinese coworkers openly feel sorry for me because I have asian features and I don't know how to read/write Chinese characters, and I'm not even Chinese!
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Case-Shiller index chart showing home value fluctuation over the past 100+ years: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/2011...

It's pretty telling what you should do regarding buy or rent (beyond the NYT calculator).
Ben Laurie on Bitcoin
Forth Haikus
This is fairly shocking. First, for it to happen at all. And second, that it took this long to talk about it. Looks like everyone involved has some explaining to do in order to regain credibility...
Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell: a new online tutorial
The thing that strikes me about this is that while all this is going on, there's no Stevenote scheduled. It's interesting that no one seems to realize how odd that is.
I clicked this link. The first paragraph claims there is something special about Go. I read until the end of the article, and I was still left wondering what was special about Go and what the author thought about it.
Miguel De Icaza Announces New Company
But what words would Oracle use?

'We at Oracle know that past actions of ours and Sun's has broken the JCP. We now will openly ignore that and continue on our merrily little way.'..seems the same words they used except mine is more concise
Exoplanet near Gliese 581 star 'could host life'
Ask HN: Any advice in finding a reliable programmer?
A year ago, i started to build a social networking game on FaceBook through delegation; I would hire the artists and the programmer out of pocket. I had a good job then and i leaned myself from bad, wasteful habits, like eating out, going out, buying games, gadgets, etc. I would just pay my bills, food and focus everything on paying my people.

I bought a Mafia Wars blank canvas clone from a Russian programmer, Railorz.com, and i also bought modifications from him. The game is written in RoR with some PHP, AJAX, FBML and SSAS. Well, he started to get busy with other projects and walked away to make room. So i looked for another programmer running DXWebDesigns.com, but after working for 2 weeks he wanted me to accept some new and pretty draconian terms, namely that i had to get a new server from him, get a new domain from him and give him total control of my database. When i refused he did a bunch of damage to the server!

The Railorz.com guy responded to my email asking for help and accepted a job to fix the damage. I also found an Indian guy with little experience, but cheap, and i had him learn from the Russian anything he could while he could, as his time is limited.

The game was fixed, but it is barely functional, running in about 20% efficiency. I still have some pretty big bugs such as players no longer being able to level up, items page not available, etc.

I have my first 20 players yesterday right after i launched, but now that there is people waiting for it the pressure is higher to get it fixed fast.

I sent an email last night to both of my current programmers and i haven't gotten a response yet. I really need advice finding a reliable RoR programmer. I lost my job 6 months ago, but i do have some savings to pay them from, since my lifestyle is so lean in spending, but i can't continue guessing when he will have the time for me, because this game is what is going to be paying my bills and the savings are in the red.

I was thinking of getting another blank canvas built from good PHP and although it is more likely for me to find PHP programmers than RoR, the issue at the end of the day is to have someone that responds.

Thank you.

My FaceBook page: www.LUTOPiA.Co
I have thought about this type of service for a while. The problem with Facebook and Twitter is the signal to noise ratio is too low. Your status saying, "I am going to be here, who wants to join" will only be seen by a fraction of your friends & is not necessarily limited to your current geographic location. There is just too much noise.
Bear in mind that a strong part of this is the fact that these guys are trying to use economic planning. In between all these Americans complaining (fairly) about their country's legal power culture, this is an important distinction. Most Western governments aren't economic planners, so technocracy is less interesting/appealing.
There were "air shuttle" or "air bus" services, using small jets, on super high volume routes: SIN-KUL, DCA-JFK, Great Britain to Ireland. You'd buy a ticket, which was a right to fly on any flight, and then walk up to board and get on the next flight; they were frequent enough (every 30 minutes?) that it wasn't really an issue.

This only really works on very high volume routes, and the problem is your aircraft basically need to be dedicated to that route; a lot of the short flights otherwise (SFO-LAX for instance) are continuations of longer flights, which allow a carrier to for instance do a BKK-NRT-SFO-LAX flight and offer nonstop BKK-NRT (if they have 5th freedom), NRT-SFO, SFO-LAX, and direct BKK-LAX, BKK-SFO, BKK-LAX, NRT-LAX, using one aircraft (and probably 2 crews).

I think security screening is what killed the "air bus" market.
Nvidia CEO: Android Will Overtake iOS On Tablets In 30 Months
Even if that unknown amount of time averaged 7 minutes?
It's hardly ad hominem when the guy makes a four paragraph argument explaining why he thinks Chomsky is wrong. Feel free to argue the point, if you want.

Your second point is just mush.
It's this kind of reaction that makes our technological toys less secure. It's this kind of reaction that the Ominous Large Corporation wants us to have.

The standard belief is as follows: being proactive about privacy and security costs money, and if we don't have to spend money we won't. Most people, the ones we're crowdsourcing or selling to advertisers, don't understand and won't care who actually screwed up - we'll blame the hackers and that will limit negative perceptions.
LinkedIn Hikes IPO Price Range by 30%
Find my any flight path that is active enough to fill a commercial plane every 7 minutes and I'll concede that it's an amazing idea.
So Canonical, a distribution maker, is not to be trusted for their kernel suggestions, but Amazon is infallible?

Neither is infallible. But Amazon probably knows the intricacies of their platform better than Canonical. And they likely run some of their own stuff on these kernels for a while before releasing them to the public.

Old kernel builds don't work particularly well

Don't work as in what? This is the first time I hear about a kernel problem on EC2.

disdain

I don't see where I voiced disdain. I merely responded to the guy who claimed your EC2 kernel is linked to the distro you run. That's simply not true.
There's an emphasis on science, but it's not an Enlightenment style love of the scientific method that drives this phenomenon.

Why not come at it from a different angle - what good would it be to be a philosopher in China? How far would you get? Or what about lawyers, in a country that has a pretty unhealthy disregard for legal process?

No, the reason scientists and engineers form that majority is because it's how you get ahead in Chinese society. China doesn't want (or tolerate) artistic and liberal sensitivities - it wants economic development and industry.
The fact is that control systems break down sometimes. The Fed doesn't even use very good inflation indicators. (E.g. housing component of CPI). It seems pointless to limit the support of the distribution the way you suggest in order to make argue the absurdity of the parent post.
Yes. I'd much rather pay $N than spam my network.
The one child policy was not created by this cadre of leadership. The male/female imbalance also happens in India, which does not have such a policy.
This reminds me of PG's The Age of the Essay: specifically, where he mentions that writers for popular magazines ask hard questions, then recoil in terror. I'm left with a feeling that the summary here is really all I needed to know about the article, because the author stopped working after adding some description to better frame the question.

ETA: I'm not sure if edweek is popular in the way Seventeen/Cosmo/Redbook aim for, but it's still what the writing style reminds me of.

When I was younger, I really wanted an apprenticeship. When I was getting a CS degree, I felt like it should involve more code review. There's value in solving a problem yourself; but there's also value in comparing solutions and discussing the trade-offs they make. I would love to teach, but it seems to work best one-on-one, which is not really what the education system is set up to handle.
If a country is a bit backwards, with the right set of leadership, they can very quickly modernize, becoming extremely important economically and geopolitically in ~30 years when starting almost from scratch.

It's not only leadership. If there is a long track record of commerce and admiration of scholarship, a culture can enable rapid modernization. I think this is why Japan, Korea, and China have done very well for themselves.
I feel the same way about amazon, I love it and hate it. I think the information provided is great, but it’s just presented in a cluttered way. They could possibly group the info in tabs. A great example would be overstock.com, they give tons of info and its just a lot more easier on the eyes.
It's not often mentioned today, but in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries the Germanic states were a massive source of high-skilled emigrants. In the 18th and somewhat the 19th centuries as professors and colonists to Russia and the USA, after WWI a large number of German engineers were employed in the USSR (most of them were expelled in 1937), and many more emigrated to the USA. The next large wave took place after WWII.
Behind the scenes of a self-funded business: a week on RescueTime
Wait, seriously? And people trust this system?
Actually, I think it would work a lot better for business travelers, since it optimizes for minimum wait time at the expense of, well, expense.

If you take a commercial flight today, you are guaranteed to be at the airport for 1-2 hours, and chances are you'll pad that out a bit if you're headed to an important meeting. If you billed your time at $300/hr, wouldn't you pay a little extra to know your car-to-air time would be less than half an hour?

And, assuming you still show up at the airport a bit early just in case, wouldn't you rather spend that extra time sipping a Starbucks downstairs from your client's office rather than waiting at the gate?
No time and money for your startup? 11 strategies to get you started
totally - I was wondering how the author could write something so obviously wrong like that?
Nice presentation on your website. How are you checking name availability? Registrars have purchased domains queried for in the past that weren't immediately purchased by the querier. You may wish to query the TLD registries directly to prevent that sort of behavior.
Bitcoin should be rewritten to be some function of something "useful" like the SETI@Home project. Consider if you could have "solving sha256 problems" be simultaneously "computing the next largest prime" (arguably useful, at least, more so than what its currently doing) or "computing patterns in DNA".
Ask HN: What experts or tools can you recommend for usability testing?
I have been working a startup in the travel sector for the past few years. I am finally a bit freed up from the development grind, and traffic has reached a point where just even small increases in conversion percentages make it very worthwhile focusing on UX enhancements and usability testing.

The site is about 5,000 pages, and what I am looking for is in-depth expert analysis of a few critical points in the flow where I know there is vast potential for improvement.

I have looked at a few of the tools including:

http://feedbackarmy.com
http://www.loop11.com
http://www.trymyui.com
http://www.usertesting.com

Does anyone have experience with these tools or others? My feeling is that it may be better to hire a usability/UX expert to weigh in - a fresh set of experienced eyes to spot some obvious things.

I am open to any and all input.
The Ultimate CSS3 Development Resources Roundup
Yeah, its a poorly worded error message for anyone running the latest version of Opera
When you are as large as Google, it is the same: The interest you end up paying is whatever is supported by the market. Plus, no individual bank or lender is going to loan any company $3 billion dollars. That's just stupid.

The point of the article isn't the particulars of their debt financing, but the fact that they did, despite having so much cash.
What's not to trust? It seems that the clients determine what they trust, and so long as the majority of clients agree, all is well.

There are economic problems with bitcoin as a currency (its a fiat currency, effectively, except without the fiat - it has scarcity with no intrinsic value), but the algorithm component seems solid to me.
Who Wastes Life?
Best Industries for Starting a Business, 2011
This is certainly the correct approach to take individually.

Advantage to you of trying to disclose the flaw: zero in most cases.

Disadvantage to you of trying to disclose the security flaw: possibly years in jail, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent.

It's unfortunate that this is true, but it's true nonetheless. The country needs a Computer Good Samaritan law, where those who follow a prescribed process for flaw disclosure are granted complete immunity from prosecution, civil suits and general harassment.
TikTok: Idea to Kickstarter to Apple Store in less than a year
Actually, it'd be every 15 minutes to average a 7 minute wait.

And to find routes, simply look at Southwest's schedule between major airports. Or any commuter airline between New York and Chicago. If they're filling a 150 seat plane every 45 minutes, you could certainly fill a 20 seater in 15.
Agreed. Was I the only one that interpreted the title as meaning, Team17 will teach you one small change that can make YOUR game a hit?
> An alternative explanation is that Google has a very high option value for the cash, which more or less implies they see a lot of acquisition and investment opportunities in their not so distant future. A lot.

But don't they have $37 billion in cash already?

I think the critical point is that a lot of that cash is overseas, subject to taxes when brought back home.
Yea that's currently what we do, we don't go through any specific registrar right now.

I may need to adjust this in the future, so that's something good to keep in mind, thanks.
One stop service for all your smartphone need – Mobile9.
Communist governments have usually attracted intellectuals to higher levels of power -- the results so far haven't been uplifting.

I don't think that a comparison of the US system vs. China is going to produce a clear "winner", only a list of pros/cons whose weighting will be shaped by your perceptions and bias.

The explosive growth of China hides most of the warts of the system. When you have economic growth so fast that new, uninhabited cities get built, there's obviously some excess and policy issues at play.

The US is an imperial power, and the conduct of policy and statesmanship changes in that role. While the President is the front-man and sets the agenda, the work is done and policy is made by anonymous officials in the sprawling bureaucracy. And I betcha if you analyzed a Chinese and American bureaucrat, you would find that they look, act and think alike.
I'm not sold... If I want to see if my friend is going I'll IM or call or email them, this is almost an inconvenience.
Could do with more of a portfolio of previous work - there's not much to go on at the moment.
Heroku Being DDoSed
archived on livestream now...youtube later
In World War II, German military tactics nerds were able to find an initial advantage. Fortunately, the rulers (Nazis) were fuzzy-headed populists who believed in mysticism and half-baked distortions of economic and scientific theories, so it wasn't the engineers who ruled -- it was still the jocks and popular kids. By the end of the war, it was the allies who had significant technical advantages in military hardware, sensing equipment, and cryptography.

EDIT: There were also many instances of higher-ups impeding technical advances that could have been decisive, like stealth bombers.
We've all got different friends, but I'd offer a different perspective. Most Chinese I know dislike their government, but are apathetic towards it, or too busy trying to live their own lives.

And China is recently tending towards more sophisticated repression, rather than less of it in general. Perhaps the US and China will end up in the same place!
My Answer To: "Is Bitcoin A Good Idea?" Spoiler: No.
Never thought I had a need to. Now I do. :)
A Requiem for the House of Lords at the Sahara
You guys are missing the major cost savings while pouring over the numbers. It all comes from empty private jets as loarabia pointed out.

Private jets fly empty all the time. This would be additional revenue for the owner/operators of the private jets. Notice that most of the flights are one way. That is because the jet is flying empty to pick up the real passengers, who pay, essentially, for the jet to come get them and take them where they are going.

The real problem is what happens when wealthy people who fly private realize that poor schmucks are flying on their dime.
"Citation Needed" Is Not A Counter-Argument
How Web Designers Should Use Twitter (Properly)
BusinessWeek's Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2011
Using Kannel to access an SMS API
Works very fine for me here from Norway :)
Congrats.. :)
Calendars are a model, not a specific realization. Facebook does it one way, Google another, and so forth.

A lot of people have probably looked into social planning, but no one has done it very well so far. The execution is going to be all that matters with this, not the fluffy pitch about "social" and all that gunk.