skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I don't think that anyone would argue there is plenty of headroom, using international comparisons to make this case seems somewhat dubious for philosophical reasons. (Some people also strongly criticize the methodology of these international comparisons, but I don't know enough about this to say anything intelligent.)
> The Shuttle is monstrously complex, killed astronauts on routine low orbit missions.

Can you really call it "routine"? The first 135 plane/car trips were probably pretty dangerous, too.
The corollary is that just because you went through a gifted program and were a high-achiever doesn't mean you're necessarily smarter or better than anyone else. You just had more help along the way.
I expect effects on China's economy will be the biggest story of the 10's or 20's. So many things were lined up to make the system they had work, educated but under employed labor, a voracious appetite in the world for their cheaply manufactured goods, and a relatively docile population. Every single one of these 'advantages' seem to be deteriorating.

So the new learning we'll get this time around is if the Chinese version of Communism can keep the economy from driving off a cliff or not. If not, will it kill communism in China?, or the world's economy? or both? And how will the folks in power respond?

Very interesting times indeed.
You can in fact do recursion with regular grammars as you've just demonstrated, but if you mix right regular grammars with left regular grammars (as you would need to do in order to, for example, match parenthesis) your grammar is no longer regular (not equivalent to regular expressions). I suspect that is what wisty meant.

Honestly though, this entire conversation is fuzzed by the blurred distinction between "parsing with regular expressions, and writing a parser that uses regular expressions to tokenize" by the original author. I'm not really sure where just about every other person in this discussion is coming from as a result..
I don't understand why so many commenters on this thread consider verbal abuse a mark of sincerity. You can say everything you need to say without it. Mlynarik has pursued this style of interaction with people for decades, so it doesn't express any particular intensity of feeling; he just likes crapping on people. Maybe you don't mind reading it when it's not directed at you, but why should the recipient put up with it?
It depends on which country you are in and what platform you are using I suppose. If it's in the US then Braintree is a good and easy to setup payment system. I haven't personally used it but have heard about their ease of setup. Of course, you could use paypal if you are elsewhere but you might have to spend some effort setting it up.
This depends on the industry you're in. When I was in a sales floor, everyone had a nice watch. They were considered status symbols and proof of your skill as a salesman. When I went to my first tech conference I noticed most people had either no watch, or a digital one that didn't seem expensive. Also, now that I'm away from sales, I either sold or stored every watch I own. When I want to know the time, I just look at my cell phone. Atomic time is good enough for me.
Right, that's why I said "somewhat". People are really trying to put words in my mouth in this thread, sheesh.
>As much as you might like to think differently war is alway negatively productive.

I never suggested that war has a positive influence on an economy, so I'm not sure where you got that impression. I was suggesting that one political party or the other might want to use war as an excuse for deficit spending to further their political agendas.

That being said, war can be positively productive if you are outside of it, selling to one or more of the belligerents. That's mainly how WWII was so positive for the U.S. economy: we were selling to the allies for several years before we got directly involved. The Russians made plenty of money selling to both sides of the Iran/Iraq war, and I'm sure that those are just two of many, many examples throughout history.
Yes, I take responsibility for my own feelings. I know what it's like from the other side too: as a software developer I can't accomodate every user request. It's difficult to tell a customer that I think they are wrong, or that their problem is not important enough in some grand scheme of things. And it is very easy to insult someone without using any expletives.

I'm not saying that a developer should leave bug reports open to avoid any possible offense. But they must be aware that the act of ignoring a perfectly valid issue reported by a passionate user can be demeaning in itself.
Call me cynical, but I would bet they didn't want to deal with the possibility of a publicity fallout, regardless of whether they had any legal alternative or not. Of course, that could be called "seeing reason", for a very specific value of "reason" ;)
Maybe -- but getting the economy to grow to generate that revenue is a much harder problem than stalling it and then being allowed to borrow it.
Despite the amount of hot funding going around, most Chinese are capital constrained. Small business can't get credit because they don't have the "connections", their books are cooked (no revenue = no tax, but sadly no credit; and businesses that pay tax are uncompetitive), and banks would rather loan to the government or state-owned-entities.

Thus, anyone who has the seed money to start a business can do very well, so the "businessmen" (even small ones) make a lot more than the workers.
Non sequitur hint: If you are storing data like his powerhungy, consider storing the sum of the squares of the datum as well as the datum and number of samples in the aggregate (might be initially 1). This lets you compute the standard deviation for display, but it also has the nice property that after aggregating samples, you can still compute the standard deviation of that.
Show HN: Help Freewili; a place to run Twilio TwiML voice apps
Everything you did this week was meaningless
Kudzu and the Marriage Amendment
If this "glorified microscope" allows people to do their jobs tangibly better -- in this case, detect malaria -- then what exactly is the cost problem in your mind? We're not talking about gold-plated custom-designed malaria detection devices... we're talking about (commodity) smartphones with a small lens affixed and some software installed.
Is there any particular reason that Buzz and Plus need public profiles? I really like Plus, but I have a friend who has voiced a few significant concerns where it defaults to public on some occasions(such as when you change your picture). Especially given that Plus is so integrated with the rest of Google's services, I want to fully understand the privacy implications before committing to it.
Zynga Makes a Game of its Privacy Policy
Where is long not 64 bits?
Patrick, excellent write-up on the psychology of self-employment. I've found that by manipulating the environment (e.g. your Delta experience) you can really drive the situation. Neither giving in the clerk's comment nor engaging their wrath would have led to a favorable outcome but being neutral led to a complimentary flight. Cheers!
I second that as well. really annoying. but wonderful post. You can do amazing things with life if money is not on top of the list.
A True Threat to Privacy
there's something wrong with the algorithm, the yes guy looks like he's saying no
Namco BANDAI sues CD Projekt RED
Debt crises: Europe and America, increasingly alike
Selenium is one of the my hidden tricks to get good karma at my jobs. Everywhere I work I find a need for Selenium and everybody thinks it is awesome.
مسلسل ابواب الخوف الحلقة
مسلسل ابواب الخوف الحلقة
مسلسل ابواب الخوف الحلقة
I wrote a blog post a while back (http://webbindustries.com/archives/2010/10/index.html#e2010-...) about Big Design Up Front and why it doesn't work. This touches on what you're describing; accurate estimation is possible when you're in a 'Manufacturing' mode and creating one more of something you've created many times before, but it's not possible when you're in 'R&D' mode creating something new or investigate a previously unknown bug.

The theory behind BDUF is that you can come up with an accurate design, then come up with an accurate estimate for constructing the design, then go build it. It doesn't work because most software development is done in R&D mode, which you can't design or estimate accurately.
German police hacked, suspect tracking data stolen
What is it that made you fail with Cucumber and succeed with Selenium?
Ask HN: What one should do to gain most out of a startup conference?
I am going to attend my first ever startup event tomorrow. There must be lots of interesting folks, including startup founders, angels and VCs. What I should do to make the most out of it? Would love to hear you experience with such events. Thanks.
It only empowers the fringes if the rest of the general public does nothing. One would assume that people would start caring when the fanatic fringes start influencing public policy. If they still don't care, then they forfeit any right to complain.
Don't be shy, talk to everyone you can.
You have some false assumptions in your argument, mainly that it's just as easy to train and distribute humans across Africa (and elsewhere) to do malaria diagnosis as it is to develop and distribute copies of this software.

Moreover, as the software is improved, updating the software -- and raising the baseline of quality -- is a unique advantage over the "just use humans" solution.
Switzerland & Italian police arrest 15 suspected Anonymous members
How about we increase the size of congress to 1 member per voter? What kind of problems would have then?
Online Social Security Statement in limbo as agency adjusts for future
Were you in Firefox, by chance? There was a difference in the FF evaluates the JS, versus Webkit, when retrieving document.form, so I switched it to getelementbyid.
"Mr. Chai, 38, has been wearing a vintage Rolex, loosely dangling around his wrist, “not as a timepiece, but as a piece of jewelry,” he said"

This is exactly what Rolex is. There is a fantastic book on the history of Rolex, the name I forget, but the opening quote is from a Rolex designer and it is along the lines of "do not ask me about the watch industry, Rolex is not in the time keeping industry, Rolexes are fashion accessories."

I believe the reason why watches "are back" is because the mobile phone industry is far more contained than it was even five years ago. Five years ago, having a flash mobile phone was impressive - but now - everyone just has iPhones or Blackberries. A Rolex is timelessly classic, it is subtle yet if you happen to notice it, you know the guy has good taste - or money, and those two are regularly conflated in fashion.

Timex are the guys that are really capitalising on this trend, if you got into a slightly up market fashion retailer like J Crew, you are bombarded with classic Timex watches and then you can tailor them with multi coloured nato straps. http://www.jcrew.com/mens_category/accessories/necessaryluxu...
"Board" should be "Broad", if anyone who created this is reading.
Yea I like the more terse syntax as well. The idea of scss is to be closer to the CSS syntax for adoption purposes. In a perfect Sass world, I'd have the flexibility of the scss syntax without the curly braces and semicolons.
Invite me?
ps a good source for quality essays/articles is 3 quarks (but no/little discussion). http://www.3quarksdaily.com/
Real estate agents and Relocation
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Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers has worked for NASA or the NSA on missile defense systems or something like that.
Identicons are a great idea, I really love them.. They're a good solution to a gut-check "Something is wrong here.."

Sort of like a SSH-fingerprint.

The problem I've had with them is that they're generate not all that memorable. Was that triangles pointing left, then up, or up then left?

This is my attempt at addressing that problem for my own new project, but I'd love to see what you build! If you want to use these images, feel free. They're CC-BY, so they're open to the world now ;)
Treatment for depression
Not a physical place so you can’t hear, taste, smell, touch or see it – our physical senses are unable to interpret it. But, we have a 6th sense that has the ability to do it.
Well, assuming that you're referring to objective qualities (fat, bald) and tying that to attractiveness in an non-platonic sense, I think it's a simple deduction that that is sexual objectification. I would say that the second paragraph of that article agrees with me. I'm interested in understanding how you're reading this that doesn't lead to that conclusion. Though it seems that you think I'm a random person on the Internet harassing you, I've studied sexual ethics with feminists for quite some time and seriously am interested in coming to a common understanding or agreement about differences of opinion on this subject.

Arguments about authoritative definitions tend not to be interesting, but I think that the claim is that using physical characteristics as judgment points leads to "insufficient regard for a person's personality or sentience" and that that insufficient regard is not limited to one sex.

Hopefully this at least clarifies the point I was trying to make and addresses a little of the "you too" that you're feeling. Perhaps not, we'll see if this thread persists.
Yes, but observe the corollary: Don't be too polite; get out of dead-end conversations as soon as you can.

You don't need to be a dick about it, but be mindful of when a conversation has become more draining then beneficial

(This goes for life in general, not just conferences.)
I didn't go from one to the other; I should have made that more clear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_United_States#Rape_...
That came to mind as soon as I read the headline.

For those who haven't read it:

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I share most of your feelings about trademarking policy, and find the linguistic land grab aspect of it disturbing. However, my feeling (very slightly) sorry for Apple is because of their ill-fortune with the trademark system that we have now, as opposed to the idealized trademark system of my dreams that would have clear and unambiguous standards on what could or could not be trademarked.

It seems to me that they really thought they were following the necessary steps to build a distinct brand. I can understand why this would seem very important to them, because titles can be strangely personal things, notwithstanding the existence of the naming/branding businesses and so on. I used to work in the film business, and surprisingly enough, you can't (in general) get copyright or trademark protection for movie titles. This is a problem for any writer or producer without the backing of a studio, so in the trade you'll often see references to 'untitled Paul Producer project' - Paul Producer probably has a great title, but doesn't have the resources to stop someone else with more money from from pinching it and launching a marketing campaign year ahead of release. You'd be surprised how often this happens.

If you're interested, here's a good article on that issue, though not without a few minor errors: http://troygould.com/layouts/50/graphics/handel_la_lawyer.pd...
Bluelet: simple async I/O and green threads w/ Python coroutines
I've been coming to HN for months and months always dreaming of doing something on the side along with my megacorp job but I have not started on anything. If I get an Idea, I wonder about it for 2 to 3 days thinking about reasons why it won't work and forget about it. I think about at least opening my own small consulting company on the side but then think how would I get any clients. This has basically been going on for quite a lot of months. But I end up going home, sitting in bed and still contemplating things. For what its worth, I was happy before being bitten by the startup bug, I guess not knowing what things CAN be like is better than knowing what things CAN be like but not being able to do anything about it. Knowing that I need to change my attitude and finish things, reading this article made me fill and mail the registration for my LLC.
when congress' approval rates are in the single digits but reelection rates are 80%, its clear that something is broken.
Cool. Would you be so kind as to throw a book suggestion my way as to where I could learn such tricks?
Yes ... just get a card and go from the people who don't care what you're selling or are trying to sell you on their own stuff!
Patrick, thanks for sharing your story, and the fears and challenges that you have faced. For the first time ever I have been able to relate when someone speaks about running a small software business.

By the way, are you thinking about writing a book on running a small tech startup? I would not only pay for such a book, but I would gladly pre-order it and donate money if necessary. Would you please consider it?
Light travels as both a wave and as particles. Whether you observe light to behave as mostly particle-like or mostly wave-like depends on the circumstances. When you are dealing with very small intensities, you usually observe mostly particle-like behavior (but wave-like behavior still shows up in things like self-interference as demonstrated by the two-slit experiment).

If you think that it's unlikely for a photon from a distant star to reach us, then you are simply vastly underestimating the number of photons involved. Consider by analogy the process of smelling something: actual molecules need to fly off the object, travel through the air, and impact your nasal passages in order for you to smell it. That means that anything you smell is constantly dispersing its mass into the atmosphere, but an object can remain pungent for a long time without significant weight loss. Photons are vastly more numerous than olfactory molecules, and carry incredibly small amounts of energy.
It took me about a day (since I did not have time to watch the video tutorials) to set in mind the new terminology. But day after I have moved in all open tasks/issues, invite teams in and it feels as I have come to the promised land of GTDc (Getting Things Done Collaboratively).
It's called "code golf", and from what I can tell, perl is the undisputed king of golfing languages.

Someone ought to make a quiz page - "is this perl golf, or a cat walking on a keyboard".
After stopping by a store yesterday and remembering I meant to get some lightbulbs, it turns out I was right after all. Incandescent bulbs are <$1 each, but CFLs start around $5. (Walgreens) Also, your link to Loews shows two CFL bulbs for $4.98, not $0.98. If that was a troll, then well-played; otherwise, it's time to visit the optometrist.
Fascinating story and great insights. I think you undervalue your introspection.

It raises an interesting question though, if you were in a class that graded on a curve, did you do just enough to get an A or did you always get enough to insure it would be an A minimum?

Then the harder aspect of that, did your getting an A ever result in someone else getting a B grade? If it did would that make getting the A 'better'?

The question relates to the 'game' aspect of success. At Google, for example, when I was there it had a lot of money and not a lot of real[1] projects. So a number of people used gamification as a means of defining success. Specifically they would seek out 'win' such as having their project grow at the expense of others, or create the maximum amount of change in the shortest amount of time, or any number of ways to create a scoring system and then to 'win' based on that scoring system.

The insight you had, and I came to later, was that if you're button is 'win' and you take away the obvious 'company gets "better"' scoring system, people invent their own.I concluded that one of the jobs of 'management' in that scenario, is to help define a scoring system that allows folks who are 'wired to win' be successful and not be destructive to those around them.

[1] 'real' in the sense that few projects would make money for the company or cause it to lose money, they existed primarily as science projects to keep the engineers busy.
If I put a % anywhere in the string (except at the end where I think it is ignored) it doesn't give me my robot, but a broken link!
How does Bluelet handle the case when a coroutine calls a function that itself needs to yield?
A watch these days may strike some people as an impractical, frivolous and often costly way to express individual style. But that is just another way of saying that it’s fashion.

Whether or not the rest of the article is hogwash, that's a golden quote.
When I was younger I worked for a nonprofit that supported women in non-traditional fields. I guess I'm just too tired to fight anymore. I'm no Rosa Parks. When given the choice of spending my time hacking or discussing gender issues, I will pick hacking every time. I deeply respect the folks who have the energy to tackle the issue head on.

BTW, my clients do eventually find out that I am a woman when we do phone calls.
By that logic, locking someone in jail for kidnapping is a bit silly as well.

They both involve not allowing someone to leave confinment, but one is punishment and the other is a crime against personal freedoms.
There's even a simpler scenario then that.

I have a set of close friends that I share just about everything with. It's a somewhat large size. Some of them I am in fantasy sports leagues with, some of them are techie types, some of them are fans of the same sports teams I am. I don't necessarily want to flood the stream of people that I know aren't interested.

There's many cases where individual circles of friends have a intersections or just don't fully mesh. It'll be interesting to see how this proceeds. UI/UX is going to dictate how successful circles are.
This is exactly the sort of thing HP needs to do. If they want the TouchPad (and Veer and Pre3) to be successful as well as compete in the "cloud" offering space with Apple they need a service like this. The app imports your iTunes library data and you can then proceed to syncing all or parts of your music to your touchpad. As a webos fan I'm really excited about this and hope they roll out the wireless syncing very quickly.
surely a harder working software engineer will make more money than a lazy one.

I know two offices in NYC at an employer that I probably shouldn't name. In one, an engineer toils away for 90 hour weeks and earns about $40k per year. In the other, an engineer works fairly typical Manhattan hours (my understanding is that that would be a little south of 50), and makes $120k.

The mistake made by the engineer in the first office? They were asked a fairly consequential question by a HR department three years ago, and said "Yes." instead of "No." Literally. One word.

The specific question was "Are you OK with your employer of record remaining our Japanese branch office?" The right answer would have been to get their employer of record transferred to the American subsidiary, which pays Manhattan wages to Manhattan workers, rather than Nagoya wages with a 25% hardship premium. He gets a gold star for loyalty, though.

That is about as close to a pathological case as I could think of, but in general, "hard work gets rewarded" is not something we repeat because it is accurate.
We all draw conclusions about the feelings of groups of people without experiencing what the group actually feels. Making observations and conclusions based on those observations is necessary to reason. "Many women that I've talked to" should be the read version of all group observing statements. Then the conversation can continue about how someone else's observations may differ.
the original title was different :)

He fixed it, thanks!