skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The E.U. needs Turkey because Turkey has a young population (and therefore a young workforce) and someone is going to have to pay the taxes that will be needed to support all those European pensioners.

The US needs Turkey for it's strategic geography that allows the airbase at Incirik to be a forward base for any operations near China, Russia, or really anywhere else in Asia.

Russia needs to be friendly with Turkey because Turkey controls the only alternate pipeways to get gas and oil from Asia to Europe. Turkey also controls the Bosporus, which is one of the only ways for cargo ships to reach Russia. Also, read up on the canal that Turkey has just announced plans to build. (See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/27/istanbul-new-bos...) If they go through with it, this new shipping channel will allow them to bypass a number of limitations placed by international agreements on shipping through the Bosporus.

The middle east has historical ties with Turkey. Also, Turkey has been really smart about sensing the impending power shift in the region from Israel to the emerging Arab societies, and so they have allowed their relations with Israel to atrophy a bit (but not too much) while playing the part of the champion for persecuted populations in the middle east. See, for example, how they're allowing Syrian refugees to settle in Turkey for an indefinite period, and how Angelina Jolie thanked the Turkish gov't for their help (if you can't trust a celebrity, who can you trust?): http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=angelina-jolie-arri...

Iran needs Turkey because it's one of the last countries that they can still bank with, though they are skirting the line there: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=us-officals-warned-...

China needs Turkey because it's still the quickest way to get to Europe without going through Russia, and they are even looking to construct a railway based on that premise: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=turks-chinese-to-bu...

Turkey has a society that is rapidly modernizing, but unlike many of their European brethren (and the US), they still have a vibrant manufacturing sector. For example, most of the cars driven in Europe are manufactured in Turkey. So, yeah...Turkey is definitely one to watch (along with the rest of the CIVETS countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIVETS).
Tame.JS: Flow-control by the makers of OkCupid.com
Divide Between Venture ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-Nots’ Gets Bigger
This is my thought journal, where I look at various stuffs from their 'liter(e)al' perspective. I am just recording my thought sparks, I get whenever I see things. All this thoughts are my own and it doesn’t mean any offensive to anyone in any way. Everything here must be read with an open mind and a bit sense of wit. Enjoy this site with a 3D glass.

PS. Although I am a regular HN user with good karma, I would like to keep my blog as anonymous, so I am using a new account to post.

What do you feel about this journal ?
The issue with your bankruptcy clause isn't its reasonableness (although I personally don't think it's reasonable); the issue is that it's probably not enforceable. I'm not particularly interested in amateurishly delving into the nature of executory and non-executory contracts between freemium startups and their users, but just know that this is not a simple niche in US law.

I'm a very arrogant guy (really), but not so much that I feel like I can come up with a code of conduct for startups on my own. I've got no alternative to offer you. I don't think we need one and I'd bet the market is going to agree.
Re: closure compiler, not to mention dead code removal, type checking, conditional compilation via @define, function inlining, and a configurable flood of useful warning and error messages. I, too, dumped Crockford for Closure on a large web app and have been thrilled.
> It's a system of symbiosis; the man is making a fucking choice.

Ridiculous. A "choice" between working and eating, or not working and not eating, is no choice at all. Hey, how about you choose to give me all your money and live, or you choose to get shot with my gun and die? Wow, symbiosis!

Thanks for providing some creative explanations for why people might propose that 1+1=3 but you have entirely missed my point. My point was that some things are demonstrable, objectively false and when people state them - as did a great grandparent of this thread - and are then thoroughly demonstrated to be completely wrong, they should have the basic decency to admit it, and pledge to not waste the group's time with such nonsense in future.

There is of course one grim possibility, which is that the OP was actually category 2 - a child, knowingly stating misinformation to "get a rise" - in which case I would really like you to both leave HN; there are plenty of sites for your lulzy trolling, it's not appreciated here.
Amazing read. It's kind of disturbing that the quoted text is almost identical to the writing of one friend. Here's a blurb for confirmation:

Actually i mnot to sure eiter iguess the very basic is someone smart funny and feedm food. haha like someonei canlearns uff from idk but wat i no is that he isnot y typ

One thing I can't make sense of, with the ESL students (and maybe someone will be kind enough to inform me): I understand that they may not be great in English, but they should at least know that ican (I can) is wrong right, especially when it's underlined in red, right?
Microsoft accepting software suggestions/feedback form the public
Of those unique words, how many did Shakespear invent?

Making up new words is an easy way to boost vocabulary.
Until it gets infested with spam and nobody can do this sort of thing any more :/
This isn't using Google+ to improve your UI. It's just a tutorial on making so-called "Google-styled" buttons in CSS, which are really just knock-offs of the standard iOS button.
not to be too cynical, but any military, for lack of a better category, "fire-control" software with an 85% success rate probably got that rate through very conservative target selection and heavy-handed audit of results.

Full disclosure: I was a Navy Tactical Action Officer, the watchstander with weapons release authority, on an aircraft carrier. It's pretty deeply inculcated to not trust the machine. Is that blind job protectionism or professionally sound paranoia? I don't know.
In other news, military software predicts sun to rise tomorrow.
I wish I saw any basis for 1, 2, or 4. Unless by "eliminate squatting" you mean "eliminate TLD squatting", which would make 2 as irrelevant as 3.

In particular, "real-looking domains" have never been a required detail of phishing attacks, which only have to look plausible on the right side to do damage. A profusion of TLDs only serves to degrade what "real-looking" means to non-nerds.
I'm actually really glad he doesn't.

There's a lot of features that unix systems have that Windows does entirely differently, or not that all.

To accommodate that, he'd need to either write high-level interfaces on top of things and/or use the subset of features supported across all platforms.

We already have Apache ;)
I like NGinx because it's willing to say "Screw marketshare. I'm trying to make the best server for This use-case, and everyone else can bugger off."
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A tabloid's excesses don't tarnish thousands of other journalists
Fellow audio engineer here. Mp3 has this noticeable frequency dropoff at 16kHz, which makes it detectable regardless of the bitrate. Did you test mp4 (or whatever), which does not have that?

I seem to remember scientific studies that basically claimed that 192 kBit mp4 was indistinguishable from uncompressed sound.

That said, I still prefer uncompressed audio for mindful listening. For casual listening, I frankly don't care.
Definitely - I used to be a sysadmin a company which sells premium support/implentation/design/etc. on top of an open-source CMS.
"normalize" is a relative term. Does CPAN normalize Perl? Does STL normalize C++? The prevalence of a suite of libraries and tools is a good thing.
I filled pages of word lists while reading Cryptonomicon. It was amazing.
This has nothing to do with whitespace. It's just a CSS library for Google+ style buttons.
He's not really wrong about anything, but none of this is novel or insightful. We're all set on "JaveScript[sic] is an Abomination" and "CSS -- who thought that was a good idea?" rants.

That last quote just makes him sound crotchety. I guess he wants all these dang web developers to get off his lawn.
Many conspiracies don't make a lot of sense. :-)
It doesn't matter, they have the word 'trust' in their name, so they must be trustworthy.
Using decent in-ear headphones (I like the Etymotic HF2), listening to Justice, I can definitely without a doubt tell the difference between 128 kbit and +256 kbit. Or more specifically, 128 kbit and lower for specific music makes me feel nauseous.

I'm guessing this type of music simply doesn't compress as well as say... Red Hot Chili Peppers.

I'm not performing a rigorous A/B test, and I can believe that I would fail said A/B test given other conditions (other speakers, other music, etc). I would love for this to be true for all conditions and save all that storage space. Unfortunately, in my personal real-life conditions, better quality does make for a better listening experience.
That's because they're classified. Classified means trust.
Yeah, that was interesting. The default circles include 'Following'--I didn't realize you could invert the process and push stuff into other people's streams.
I think this is brilliant! I wonder how many textbooks are available. Something like this can really displace chegg.com, bookrenter et. al.
More corrupt the country is, more ticket violations by its diplomat
Ask HN: If users had to pay for Facebook, at what price would it break even?
no price tiering
Well, energy is conserved so in one form or other calories in = calories out. The question is do they go out in a different way when you eat different stuff, and if so, how?
Short answer, one looks like a newspaper.

The longer answer is that the newspapers are struggling financially, Google is not struggling, when snippets of content appear on the Google news page the newspapers believe they are 'improving' the Google brand without being compensated. They sued to have either Google pay them, or remove them from the News site.

What they fail to realize (and Google no doubt knows) is that if you aren't listed in Google you're not going to get nearly as much traffic (hence 'profit'). So Google apparently took a literal interpretation of the order and struck them from the books as it were, complete removal from the index.

So the newspapers have to make the following evaluation, 'what is it worth to us to be in Google's search results?' And is that value more or less than what we think they owe us for having our results on their news page?

Google clearly understands that its value for them to be in the search results and I believe they would say off the record that the value of being in the results is worth more than the ad revenue they get from the occasional story that makes it to the front page of Google news.

Sort of extortion, sort of natural consequences. Humorous though.
What force? As far as I know, ICANN only manages DNS on behalf of the US government, as stated in contract. They can simply not renew their contract, no force needed. In fact, the current contract expires in September.
It's not shocking that a for-profit college was more motivated by getting happy graduates through their program than by enforcing academic honesty. But, this speaks to the larger issue of for-profit education as a whole.

As a whole, this seems like an administrative issue, rather than an issue with a single professor. In an environment where departmental heads and academic deans expected, and encouraged professors to report plagiarism - then dealt with it in a fair, consistant manner, this would be a non-issue.

Another big part of what this story illustrates is that individual professors shouldn't be responsible for both detecting and punishing academic dishonesty.
I'm using the new gmail theme, and I don't have any of those complaints. I'm on a medium resolution screen (1400x1050 I think) and I currently have 18 mail entries visible.

It definitely took me a bit to get used to a typography-centric layout. I really do like it now, however.
Students Startup winning business
this is mainly a comparison to closed source - if it's not in the corporation plan - you won't ever see the change you want. And I also think that everyone should learn programming too ;) but that's another story!
Show HN: Unscatter.com redesign preview, suggested search previews.
I stopped reading after glancing at the caption underneath the article's image:

"Wherever Senturion is housed it probably looks a lot like this, but more ominous and with blinkier lights."

That this statement is less than rigorous doesn't speak well for the remainder of the article.
i am not defending TSA. Just pointing out the psychology of people who feel that their lives are in possible danger.
Well, I look like an idiot now. That's what I get for not going back to reread an article before making a claim about what it says, I suppose.
Have you seen this? https://github.com/macourtney/Dark-Exchange

edit: this is not my repo!
Show HN: Weekend project - ProjectIs
Regarding #1, it's a pain when the stats break, and I agree it needs to be more robust and accurate, but it has no effect on your rankings what so ever.
A single product champion is capable of only so much crazy
One interesting difference: Google just uses <div> for their buttons instead of <a> tags or even <button>. They also don't set cursor: pointer (the hand) for them.

Any UI people want to comment on the best practice for cursor styles? I always figured pointer should be used for all buttons or links that have an action attached.
Even if the results are not all accurate and that relying on gplus.to may not be the best solution, I get more results with it than with migratus, which is why I added a link to your app on migratus.
It surprises me that compared to the huge fuss over IPv6, custom TLDs feel like they've popped up from nowhere - but they will potentially cause very similar widespread problems with any kind of CMS or web form or shell script with email or URL validation, or webserver, proxy or rewrite engine, framework, etc. being unable to handle them.

Have I just missed the fuss and planning, is it a non issue, or has it not happened?
Revealed: A Few Secrets About Hyperpublic
I'm looking for a co-founder (UK)
I'm a 30 year old web developer from the UK (north west). For the past two months, I've been building "an ebay for time", similar to taskrabbit.com and zaarly.com where users post small jobs and tasks and others bid to complete them. The bulk of the coding is done - I still need to add payment integration and geolocation.

This is my first web startup, but I've run two successful companies in the past. One wrote shareware for the (original) Palm OS platform. The other consisted of three computer retail/repair stores here in the North West. Both companies were eventually sold (at profit) as I wanted to try other things.

I'm looking for someone with excellent UI and design skills to join as co-founder. Knowledge of html and css is essential. You would be responsible for all aspects of design including logo, branding and of course the web pages. I'm now working on this full time and I'm looking for someone who can commit at least 20 hours a week. I would strongly prefer to work with someone from the UK but I'm happy to hear from anyone who might be interested (email in profile).
Easy to scoff and funny too. However, note the input data used by the software..

A release from the company explained that Senturion analyzed the positions of leading EU officials, private financial institutions and Greek political factions in the week following a critical parliamentary vote at the end of June.

No balance sheet analysis, just verbiage. Combined with what?
9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.
Why online dating is so unsatisfying
> So "habitable exo-planet" is stretching things............... a lot.

Not to say anything about how hard would it be just to get there.
Couldn't say it any better, thanks!
It's tough. Linuxcare, where I worked in the dot.com days, wanted to be the support company for open source software, but they got derailed by ... other issues.

Most of the 'successful' open source companies are not just straight up service outfits. Redhat, for instance, has a model where you must buy a subscription, or you don't get support. In fact, you can't even use Redhat if you don't buy a subscription. They do this with some trademark trickery, which creates some of the artificial scarcity that open source software lacks.

Somewhere, somehow, something has to be 'scarce' to be able to sell it: http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity

People's time, is of course scarce, but services can be difficult to scale, as doing so requires people/management skills much more than actual technical expertise, or some kind of product. Also: to be profitable, a services company should spend as much time as possible billing for services, which may come into conflict with time spent on things like building a product that is then given away.
Incredible news indeed–congrats nginx team! Looking forward to their focus on new features.
This is a github repo I think we missed.

Have shared it with the team.

We are making some chenges to the bitcoin client to make our centralized exchange more secure, but a distributed exchange is a promising model too.

We ended up not pursuing that route as we didn't find a user friendly way of decentralizing the deposits and withdrawals.

Will get back to you later to discuss your repo and maybe we can work together in the near future. Good luck with your project!
It probably simulated a battle between these factions, if I'm understanding it correctly.
European Space Agency launches space equivalent of Google Summer of Code
The remainder of the article is equally tongue-in-cheek.
Jim Gilliam is jgilliam here on Hacker News

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jgilliam
What makes you think their code isn't multi-threaded as it is?
"It would be a totally self-inflicted cataclysm,” he said. “There’s no question the United States can meet its obligations. This idea that somehow that we cannot pay because we’re having a political fight over how to handle the spending and taxing” is “democracy functioning in the worst possible way,” he said."

Yup the who thing is a self inflicted cluster-f*k. From the politicians who spend to much, to voters who don't think about who they are voting for, to media who would love nothing more than armeggedon so they could get a few more rating points. One thing I know for sure, is that there will be a chapter on this period in the US and the world in economics textbooks.
Bad credit home loans
bad credit home loans
Sounds like colleges, especially with this type of software doing most of the work, should implement a 'Cheating Officer', perhaps one for each department. It could be a grad student and it would save the regular teaching staff from bad reviews and would keep students on their toes.
It’s the little things that hurt (The Programmer’s Guide to Getting Hired)
I did a similar test with AAC, which as I understand it (not a compression engineer) doesn't suffer from the same 16KHz problem.

64kbps vs 128kbps (p = .01)

128kbps vs 192kbps (p = .02)

192kbps vs 256kbps (p = .05)

256kbps vs 320kbps (p = .16)

This test taught me that (for my ears), AAC 256kbps is a good all-around codec for my music. You should do your own test (you might hear differently than me, apparently I hear differently than everyone in the Gizmodo and Maximum PC "studies"). But I would be surprised if it was simply a coincidence that Apple chose to standardize on 256kbps AAC, exactly the point where I have serious trouble distinguishing bitrates.
Thanks to the internet†, I can reveal a surprise: with the same methodology, the dictionary words in the seven real Harry Potter books concatenated is 19,245 and the total unique words is 21,441.

Total word count is 1,122,131 which is longer than HP:MoR by a factor of three. Plotting mean unique word count for the whole, halves and quarters of MoR gives a fit of uniques=168*length^0.3357, which makes sense given Zipf's law. That formula predicts about 18,050 words for a work of the same length as the original HP.

(Edit to add obvious test in the other direction.) The first 386,829 words of the original HP contain 12,255 unique words. The last 386,829 words contain 13,635 uniques. So, its comparable but perhaps slightly more varied (MoR had 12,685).

In light of those figures, is it possible Eliezer's vocabulary is less good than he thinks (Dunning-Kruger)? Especially as the Harry Potter book were written for children and presumably edited as such.

On the other hand, the fact that Eliezer seems to have used fewer words in his writing than you'd expect if his vocab was excellent doesn't mean that his known vocab is poor — he might just not use all the words he knows in writing.

Additionally, given the success of J K Rowling as an author, you might expect her vocabulary to be excellent, so it is conceivable that he's good and she's better.

† I have all the Harry Potter books on a shelf at home. Is torrenting the pdfs at work so I can word count them infringing copyright? I could have done it manually, it just would have taken longer.
I like the "flatter" UI design overall, but I agree on the whitespace. Especially in Gmail. I wouldn't mind a flatter phase going through The Internets, as I think it's less distracting, but I entirely agree. Less wasteful display of data, please.

I would be interested in any info people may have as to whether such a large amount of whitespace does or does not improve user's understanding/use of sites. I like dense displays, but I'm also willing to learn how to use more powerful tools, as I value the efficiency.
The key phrase here is "my own listening equipment". I have a much easier time discerning encoding quality on my Mackie reference monitors.
How Ray Dalio built the world’s richest and strangest hedge fund
TechTalksTO Underground (Toronto, August 13)
.NET's definitely got the weakness that there's less of an Open Source community around it. There certainly are some good things out there, but nothing like Java.

I spent a lot of time in the last week implementing an internal DSL in Java which in turn got me meditating on Scala.

I'm not sure that the increased fluency of Scala syntax is really a win for internal DSLs. My fear is that the fluent syntax depends a lot on fine details of the language; you could make some beautiful examples for the DSL's documentation, but take one step away from that and the user of the DSL has to deeply understand Scala's corner cases.

One thing that could be good about Scala, like ML derivatives is pattern matching.

Somebody with a lot of OO experience who's used to building things in an OO way might have a negative impression of pattern matching for polymorphism as opposed to conventional polymorphism. However, if you're building out an AST and you might want to process it in different ways, the pattern matching paradigm could be much better. For instance, if you've got something like a C# expression tree, you might want to 'interpret' it in the obvious way, or compile it to Java bytecodes, or compile it to a SQL query string, or do any of a number of different things. Pattern matching would provide a lovely way to do this.