skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The United States still has, overall, a much better set of governance, courts, regulation, etc. than China. But the USA is trending gradually downwards and China is trending quickly upwards.

Now it's interesting, countries can catch up a lot faster than they can lead. 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. But many of those rapid modernizations peter out once a lot of the proven methods are implemented.

Sometimes that means flat growth, like Japan. Sometimes collapse, like Nazi Germany. Sometimes gradual decline, like the USSR. Singapore has done a pretty outstanding job of keeping their upwards trends going and they're about 50 years into their building phase - I think that's the longest rapid sustained modernization in history?

So anyways, yes, I'll take the USA's system over China's today. And tomorrow. And probably 5 years from now. But maybe not 20 years from now if all else stays equal, and China can adapt after they've caught most of the low hanging fruit.
yeah, that is an amusing observation. of course, President Obama and various talking heads don't fret about the shortage of Americans in film school.

The serious question is whether we should launch a PR campaign to encourage young people to make decisions that may lead (at least according to RAND) to long training times with poor pay and career prospects relative to other paths typically available to the "best and brightest".
Electronic Life on the Edge
It adds that that the sentence is complete.

Consider:

He said, "The world".

vs

He said, "The world.".

vs

He said, "The world [...]".
You mean like how Hotmail ran Apache? It's true that not all MS properties run IIS, but there is no indication they'd lie about it.
drool @ show.css.sass.erb

nerdgazm

Oh man this is reason enough for me to move to rails 3.0 and beyond and quickly.

Problem is the performance of rails as seen in recent posts.
A good programmer could write large correct programs, but prefers small correct programs.
I think social scheduling is not properly solved yet - mostly for me, this is either via facebook events (which is, I'm doing this, please show up) or email conversations (which get messy with lots of people).
Like, I'd like to go out to the theatre with a good number of this group of friends - here are shows I'm interested in. This is when they're on (ideally event listing is provided via companies) Here's when I'm free. Here's what I'd pay. Collect that information from my friends and find a solution within constraints.

Also - could lead to a targeted-groupon like business model (in your circle of friends, 2 people have said they really want to come to our restaurant. Convince 10 people and get 20% off! Someone's friends that already like a product are probably the best word of mouth you can get). Or advertising could be much better targeted if you say what you're planning on doing instead of what you have done.

I had an idea like this once (and gave up cos I thought it was unlikely I'd pull it off - and I think I have a more reasonable idea to execute on) for a social-network travel agent. If you have hundreds of people giving you advance notification of their desires (I'd like to go skiing, for < £800, anywhere in the alps, with this group of people), travel agents could do collective purchases like booking entire chalets / chartering flights (a la Social Flights which also just hit HN headlines).
Yaml config file usage with Python
The Importance of The Narrative
You're right, but the trend in the US is towards more repression, while the trend in China is towards less. We are destroying our middle class, they are creating and growing theirs at an incredible rate.

The attitude that I get from a lot of Chinese is that they feel the present government is a necessary evil - i.e., in exchange for many political and religious freedoms, they get progress, and an immense improvement to the quality of life of hundreds of millions... where before there was only starvation and misery. And progress they have gotten, which is more than I can say for us in the last decade or so.
Advice for how to pitch VCs
Jobmine at University of Waterloo
In general, I agree with your sentiment. But I think the brush is a little too broad in this case.

The best time to borrow money is when you have a lot of money. Although time will be the final arbiter, this move is probably a wise one for Google given today's low interest rates.
Here’s some background, in case you’re not a software whiz. Software languages have specific features, or commands, that are typed in as shorthand for programmers.

Here's some advice, since you're not a software developer. Stop calling them "commands".
what differentiates whereberry from a calendar is that you can see all of your friends calendars, too. If you want your friends to see that you're going to the beerfest, it saves a conversation/invitation

the trick will be curating or culling the feed, we all have a lot of FB friends
A new type of web editor
Apple, RIM and HTC captured 75% of mobile phone operating profits in Q1
The very fact that I found this on HN while procrastinating my project for today means I probably shouldn't be allowed in the Cult.
Being able to take criticism, filter and apply it correctly is a definite skill.

If you are getting criticism from a coach, teacher, mentor or customers it's a good thing because if they aren't giving criticism then they've already given up on you.

Having been to a theatre/performing school for a bit as a kid. They would tell like a 10 year old that they sucked and how they could improve. The kid starts breaking down with visible tears, it's then explained that it's professional criticism. You end up building that skin, and you continue to keep progressing.

But there's a flip side to it. Criticism is often affected by a filter or lens that the other person sees through, by their past experiences, pattern recognition and world view. So you have to take that into consideration. You can be driven off path by taking everyones criticism. Here is a good quote from Jeff Bazos:

"Think Long Term - On feedback and being misunderstood: If we think we are right, then we continue.
If we are criticized for something we think we’re wrong on, we change it, we fix it. It’s really important to think about this things, but never to buckle to standard kind of pressure that forces really short term kind of thinking. It’s a competitive advantage to think long term."

- Jeff Bazos

There is not a single way or method to climb a mountain. But you'd be crazy if you didn't take the advise and criticism of others that have gone there in the past or have a deep understanding of the area.

But my personal view is that criticism should never be taken negatively.
Is this really surprising? Technocracy and the associated belief that you can sit down and design or direct societies seem to be prerequisites for what has passed as most "communist" governments to date, right - so why not expect them to embrace and promote engineers, through higher education and indeed through politics and the civil service?
OK, I figured it out. It was working but I needed to use the arrow keys and the mouse to move to find the right view. If you are too far away the land disappears.

Here is a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/SkYHs.jpg
Unconventional Steps To Entrepreneurship – with Dan Martell
You know, I think I get where you're coming from because I felt the same way until I (1) opened up a business, and (2) spent significant time outside the USA.

Honestly, the business/commerce in the USA is one of the best things about it. As for Chomsky - well, he's completely discredited to me after comparing his writings about Southeast Asia to spending significant amounts of time in SE Asia. Also the ex-Communist countries. He's a relic from a dead age, who played for the wrong team, and hasn't woken up from it. I've gone into depth on this before, but long story short - North Korea is much worse than South Korea, Taiwan drastically outperformed pre-Deng Xiaoping China, West Germany is still much more developed than East Germany... and it's really obvious that South Vietnam is much worse because it was conquered by North Vietnam.

Also, the Khmer Rouge genocide started the same year after American forces withdrew - the Khmer Rouge were emboldened by the American withdrawal. Little known fact - the last recognized battle of the Vietnam War was USA vs. Khmer Rouge, the only military engagement between the two parties before South Asia went from "bad" to "much much worse."

Anyway - I know this kind of not an easy to do overnight, but I'd really suggest comparing Chomsky's writings on SE Asia to what happened in SE Asia firsthand if you get the chance. Also, try to engage with a full-time entrepreneur while he's building the early stage of a company. Guaranteed perspective-changer.
Personally I'd rather know the exact time I'm going to be taking off, so I can turn up at the perfect time (when I fly, at least out of England where I know the airports well enough, I turn up, drop off baggage, drink a coffee while smoking a cigarette, go through security, and I sit down in my seat a couple of minutes before the plane moves away from the gate). As opposed to your system, where I turn up, get on the plane, then... wait for an unknown time until it fills up.
I usually see this view explained that due to the .Net stack's higher up front cost than free alternatives, and (debatably) higher long term cost, it's an uncommon choice for startups.

Basically, deploying a .Net site requires at minimum 1 personal license of Windows and 1 server license of Windows. Sometimes a non-free copy of Visual Studio, and usually a license for SQL Server (since many MS people use the whole stack for integration reasons). Without buying hardware, Windows hosting is also always more expensive.

Compared to a LAMP/Rails/Django style app which you could theoretically get off the ground for the hardware cost of a local PC and cheap VPS hosting.

Of course developer familiarity, your local hiring pool, initial launch scale, business partners, vendor integration, etc, etc, etc, all influence the tech choice and its impact on cost.
Interesting. Where do you put Germans in all this?
A lot of that stability approach can be traced back through much of the history of the Han, to the point that I'd argue the engineering background isn't the source of the stabilizing pressure, but rather a facet of the Han culture.
Hackers can cheaply rent Amazon.com servers
If evolution can do it, we will be able to do it, too. (Given enough time.) I’m not at all sure how markets figure into this. Human brains are not markets, this comparison strikes me as non-sensical.

I don’t see you claiming that there is anything in principle impossible about that.
Does anyone know where he works?

I've done a bit of Googling and can't find anything.
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.

Better than 90% of a council making decisions for the whole country being of the same persuasion is prone to severe group think. Scientists (or rather, engineers, if you RTFA) aren't immune to this any more than any of us are.

If you look at the best run businesses, they are often composed of people with variable backgrounds - people that approach problems from different perspectives. This has two major benefits: First, it allows you to gain from solutions that come from as many types of thought processes as possible and more importantly, it prevents you from blindly following dogma - if you can't convince somebody that doesn't follow your thought patterns of the viability or necessity of a particular idea, it probably shouldn't be perused.

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.
And the other issue is that (if I have this correct), the reason my phone connects automatically to various portal hijacking waps is because in the past I have connected to those waps, and almost certainly checked off the terms and agreements for them, and continued.

I don't believe the nexus one will connect by itself to any open wap, it will just tell you one is available.

It seems absurd for anyone to think I need to check off the terms and agreements every single time I connect to the open wap, everyone's suspicion of course is that no one ever reads through the terms and agreements, we just check the box to make some lawyer or IT dude happy and continue.
>> Rails 3.1 Release Candidate THIS WEEK

Oh man, that made my day. 3.0 was cool and all but mainly infrastructure changes. 3.1 has all the cool new features. Can't wait!
Oh, we forgot about our head of the class: China. Astonishingly, since 1980 China has not won a single scientific Nobel Prize. Keep in mind, this is a country of 1.3 billion people.

If China is ruled by engineers, then it is ruled by groups that understand the economic implications of the rocket equation and how this can be overcome using existing technology. Moving off-world is going to be the next huge watershed in human history and economic growth, much as the age of exploration and colonization of North America by Europeans was the last one.

Making the leap past Type I on the Kardashev scale won't necessarily involve Nobel Prize winning breakthroughs in science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

Instead, it will involve massive brute engineering and the political will to devote the resources to bootstrap it. The Chinese "Civilization State", ruled by engineers, is in a unique position to marshall those resources and be in the vanguard of what will be an economic and historic explosion of development.

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

I've seen this coming for almost a decade. If trends continue, China will not only be the next dominant power, but Chinese Civilization in the inner solar system will be to the last half of the 21st century what North America was to the 20th.
Job Hiring for Designers and Developers
Basically, my idea is this:

A company creates an online profile for themselves on my site, and can then add job positions they have available, either freelance work (i.e design a new site) or permanent (i.e Web Manager). People can then apply for the job and the company representative will be sent an email saying someone has applied, along with an email and such. When the Application Date has gone by, the company will get an email with all the applicants who have applied. They can choose which to correspond to, and ultimately hire.

Sound good? Discuss.

Tom Oakley
www.tomoakley.me.uk
High Tech Needs Humanities PhDs, Say Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs At Stanford
In the casual/social gaming world we call this asynchronous play. You won't find a single breakout hit in the space that requires synchronous play (like Worms). It's extremely rare to find groups of ones own friends online at the same time, who want to play a game with you, outside of the core gamer sect.
The Chineese exchange students, that is, the ones who are not nationalized in America, the off the boat people, at my school think rather differently. 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.
Most of the weekday traffic is business travelers, who have meetings scheduled and need to be guaranteed on the ground at a certain time. That would certainly work for a lot of leisure travel though.

Part of the reason why it's considered a sign of a civilized country if their trains run on time.
Behind Closed Doors Of A VC Pitch: Here's What Investors Are Really Thinking
It looks like all the comments here are from SEOmoz employees.
To those of us accustomed to good languages, it's like saying "the language allows me to call render_once() so that I don't re-render a template I've already rendered."

Right, and there's a case for that in languages that need a template library, as well. In some cases, you want to re-render a template for some other place in the output, and in other cases, you'd want to use a previously cached rendered template, and both of those cases are useful.

So, I agree that the distinction between the cases is the result of PHP being both a full programming language and a built-in templating language. I don't view this (in and of itself) as a bad thing, though I would quibble with the exact implementation, which is how it is for historical reasons.

When the problem is framed thus, most people would recognize that the solution to that problem is a better understanding on the part of the programmer of the flow of control inside his/her application.

Since you've already agreed that having the option for rerendering is a feature of including templating as a core feature, it seems like this statement is equivalent to declaring that templating should never be a core feature of a programming language. It's less about the flow of control and more about whether the result is cached. Even programmers who have a good understand of their programs' flow of control occasionally find memoization useful. :)
I can think of a few practical reasons why (I can think of non-practical ones too, but I assume that's not what you're after :)

1. .Net and Asp have not insignificant upfront costs when compared to a stack based on Ruby, PHP, or practically anything else.

2. You're basically tied to Windows application servers. There really isn't much of an option to move to another OS (whether because you've changed hosts, or you want something more stripped down or leaner, or you've found a valuable library that's only available on a BSD or something).

3. ASP (even with .Net) presents a pretty rigid framework for application development (though I'm sure there's ways around it). If what you're after is MS's take on MVC, that's probably fine, but if you're looking to push boundaries, you might want to think about a more piecemeal approach.
Show HN: iPhone/iPod App to Find Domains
As an aside, I'm slightly more concerned with the generation of Only Children as opposed to the generation of 114 men to 100 girls...just to toss another layer of complexity into the mix.
Entire Launch Shipment of Xperia Play Android Gaming Smartphones Has Been Stolen
I like the explanation, but there's no reason to skip over the complex exponents and Euler's formula like that. They're not really that hard to understand intuitively: think of all multiplication as a continuous process. Then f = e^x is simply the function that transforms the multiplicative identity (1) into ln(x).

Substitute "-1" into the left side of that equation, and see that no real value of x will suffice. This is related to the fact that the imaginary constant (i) wasn't discovered, it was simply declared as an unknown quantity that squares to -1.

The real magical part is that i still works in more complicated situations: multiplying any real number by e^(ix) as x increases gradually transforms it into an imaginary number, and then into its own negative, behaving like a counter-clockwise rotation when visualized in the complex plane.
I can't wait to see this all come to a head. Netflix's CEO isn't shy about calling the industry out on their bullshit, while the industry continues to lie about available bandwidth -- insisting that it is very limited, near maximum capacity, and very expensive (none of which is intrinsically true and only artificially so by their own machinations).

Netflix could end up doing a lot of good for the consumer beyond just providing entertainment at an affordable price, at the rate they're going.
Show HN: MadeForHackers.com - Kick ass landing pages, for kick ass hackers.
Hi everyone!
Im pleased to introduce MadeForHackers.com which is a tiny agency focused on designing beautiful handmade landing pages, user interfaces and logos for hardcore developers, like you guys.

This project is focused exclusively on helping hackers like you, stay focused on what you do best: Hacking.

I know there are a couple apps that helps you build landing pages but MadeForHackers offers handmade, unique and beautiful landing pages but also user interface design for web, mac, iphone, ipad, android, pc and logo designs at very competitive and accesible prices.

Each design is thought uniquely for each client.

Feel free to contact me anytime at nico@nico.im

Cheers,
Nico.
How We Create
Linkeable: http://www.madeforhackers.com
there is a difference between a scientist and someone with an engineering degree
I find these benchmarks slightly confusing. There are protocols/technologies mixed in with applications (or sites).

This is the opposite of ordinary end-users, who have problems distinguishing between protocols, technologies, applications, and sites.
This is a collection of blog posts that most of us have in our bookmarks someplace.
10 years of pf
This is my first mobile app so I'd love some feedback.
New Web Development Tool/IDE from Eclipse
Scoble video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA_lsvKfv4I
To combat global warming we are trying to move away from coal. I take the day-to-day disaster of coal as a given.

Nuclear is often put forward as a solution - I'm pointing out the huge risks that has.
Layer Styles builder.
The Bitcoin Lottery
Scoble video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA_lsvKfv4I
San Francisco Bay Bridge Becomes iPad Game
From the article:

Mostly what I see in my visits to middle and upper grades classrooms are examples of what of Michael Sedlack, et al. (1986), long-ago characterized as "the bargain"-- "you give me order and attendance, I'll give you passing grades and [minimal] homework." The only other public institution in our society that works this way, with this degree of focus and dedication, is the prison system.
I'm interested if someone is willing to expand on the "there is no editing stage" tenet. I like the idea of there are only three stages of doing (see the rubik's picture at #1 for an immediate understanding of this).
>As for Chomsky - well, he's completely discredited to me after comparing his writings about Southeast Asia to spending significant amounts of time in SE Asia. Also the ex-Communist countries. He's a relic from a dead age.

Ad Hominem circumstantial.

>Guaranteed perspective-changer.

If I was a BP CEO I would have a different perspective on the oil spill, and If I was a Goldman&Sachs CEO I would have a different perspective on the economic crash. Perspectives are not arguments.
I was going to post exactly the same quote :)
[pdf] The Telekommunist Manifesto
Well, a manifestation of the main reason I stay away from owning stocks of tech companies. They do not share profits with the stock holders and pretend to know better how to put cash to use, because their current business generates a lot of money.

Not only does Google not share any profit with the shareholders, it is now taking more debt. Google does not need the cash for its business. The only use this cash may be put to is to make acquisitions. Hubris of the highest order when company managements think they know much better than shareholders, how to best use the profits the company generates.

Of course, in technology business, it is very easy for management to claim that they can become irrelevant very fast if they do not do so and so acquisition - just look at Nokia or Microsoft. Which may be true. But it does not take away from the fact that, shareholders do not share much profit in tech companies.
If you mean my domain name, thats just what pays the bills and where you can contact me. Thanks for checking it out though.
Your header is broken (meta tag is missing its closing part) and your google analytics code is visible on page. Not really inspiring confidence ...
The app that I made by mistake 
Me and my friend made this app for facebook, thinking that it'll be viral. Although it's hardly 2 months after being launched, but we are feeling that it wasn't worth it. Do you have ideas on what else can be spinned off from this ?