skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The US is rich for the same reason Rome, England, and Spain were"

Not really, have you been in England, Rome or Spain?

Rome legionaries were used to make roads and bridges and mining 90%of their time. If I show you the extensions of the land they "washed" to get mineral you won't believe it(you can see it using google earth, e.g in the north of spain, look for grooves around mountains).

England made itself rich because of commerce, like Spain(they took the risk to travel the ocean and won the first mover advantage, and when the rest of the world notice, it was late for them). That was what made them rich, not the military.

The US is rich because... IT IS RICH. It is a huge place with huge resources for a small population.

The US became the more powerful country on earth because Japan and Europe totally destroyed itself by the military in the WWII. The US waited for them to auto destroy, and then entered the world and finished it with all their cities untouched, 90% of the world gold reserves and creditor to them all, being able to force the dollar as world currency and english the official language of aviation, and naval commerce. Every body lost their colonies and US got them all(they just wanted the commerce and influence without having to build roads like English or Portuguese did in Africa).

Yes, it was a coincidence(being far away), no, US was not the most prosperous nation on Earth 200 years ago. If you believe in that, please study some real history. US was not the technical leader that is today thanks to all the Europeans that went there thanks to Hitler(militarization and economic totalitarism), the Edisons, the von Brauns and von Newmans.

Thomas Jefferson and other of the US founding fathers thought a permanent military and central banking would ruin the country because military people do nothing while things work at it should they need to create new enemies so they can justify their existence.

I had family members that were in Soviet Russia when something like 95% engineers were used in the war industry, while people needed cars, washing and sewer machines. This was not wealth for Russia, that was a bully inside. Mass media brainwashed them all them about how cool they were being able to destroy anybody else.(This strange pride remains today)

Today 60% of the engineering in US goes to war efforts, 50% of all their money to the military, so they can kill better, while the rest of the world expends significantly less.

They will talk about GPS, but the question is if this money expended in real economy would be able to create as much as the military does?
I meant trillion.
Social proof is very important. Even subtle aspects can have significant impacts. I think social proof ties in with another area that I think may even be more important: the impression of longevity.

With both my own and others' projects, I've noticed that if you don't give an impression that you've been around a while or that your project/product is in active use or production, you'll find it significantly harder to gain traction. I think this is why the "trick" of using screenshots, videos, and so forth, tends to work well, since people get to see something that, supposedly, is in action, rather than a floaty promise.

If you're launching a podcast, an e-mail newsletter, or something where a sign of activity will boost signups, make sure you get a "few in the bag" and can do your public launch at episode 5, issue 7, or whatever. Likewise, with a business like that described in the post, make sure you can get some early reviews, some testimonials, and some blog posts in the bag so that you look like you're going places, even when you aren't.
It depends very much at the stage of the company when the investment is made, the later the stage and the lower the risk the smaller the multiplier needs to be for a VC to invest.

If a VC might be willing to invest at a much lower multiplier if they thinks there's a good chance at an ipo in the very near future.
Google buying RIM would make the other Phone companies very unsettled
>"It's always the same direction. Android gets sued. Sometimes it's the vendors. Sometimes it's Google."

It could be a vast secret illegal conspiracy against Google. It could also be that Android infringed on a lot of IP during the damn the torpedoes rush to be the first iPhone competitor. Analysis using Occam's razor and an understanding of human nature is left as an exercise for the reader.
Noche Window 7 Theme
Well why don't you educate other voters on this issue? Knock on doors and canvass, even just print up flyers and push them through letterboxes.
Google says so. Microsoft was also making a lot of money with its Windows OS back in 1990s, when it packaged a free IE in order to kill Netscape (which was not free). Microsoft was making money on the whole OS and packaged IE with all new distributions. Netscape as commercial company was killed, eventually. A lot of developers were sympathetic with Netscape back then: they pioneered graphical browsers, and were truly innovative.

Google today with Android is a lot like Microsoft back then. Yet for some reason, today offering free (deeply discounted, more precisely) stuff to kill competition is considered perfectly OK. I find this quite interesting.
What is really annoying about articles like these is that they don't actually tell you the Y-DNA haplotypes or SNPs in the phylogenic graph. Even if it isn't cluttering up the main article it would be great to have as footnote information for those of us who actually know our Y-DNA information.

Sure enough, by clicking through and getting to the real journal article, this is the footnote that accompanies the graph which is duplicated in the Discover article:

Figure 1 - Median-joining network (Bandelt et al. 1999)
representing Y-chromosomal variation within haplogroup C*
(xC3c). Chromosomes were typed with a minimum of 16 binary
markers (Qamar et al. 2002; Zerjal et al. 2002; our
unpublished observations), including RPS4Y and M48, to
deﬁne the lineage C*(xC3c) (Y-Chromosome-Consortium 2002),
also known as haplogroup 10, derived for RPS4Y and
ancestral for M48. Sixteen Y microsatellites were also
typed, but DYS19 was excluded from the network analysis
because it is duplicated in haplogroup C. The central star-
cluster proﬁle is 10-16-25-10-11-13-14-12-11-11-11-12-8-10-
10, for the loci DYS389I-DYS389b-DYS390-DYS391-DYS392-
DYS393-DYS388-DYS425-DYS426-DYS434-DYS435-DYS436-DYS437-
DYS438-DYS439. Circles represent lineages, area is
proportional to frequency, and color indicates population
of origin. Lines represent microsatellite mutational
differences.

If you are interested in DNA and haven't tested your own Y/mt-DNA, I highly recommend getting it tested (e.g. FamilyTreeDNA) and finding out a little bit more about yourself.
Trying to decide whether P=NP, it looks like.
The Republicans raising the issue was good and healthy for us. The clusterfuck that emerged in the months afterwards because of them refusing to pass any bill that didn't fall neatly into their little new imaginary rules was the problem.
NATO helicopter crash in Afghanistan; 31 Americans, 7 Afghans dead
Does anyone know any use cases? Does it really scale? I always though PHP wasn't the fastest scripting language around. Does the PHC even speed it up? How does it compare with Twisted?
Having attended an American high school but being Dutch, I know that this whole 100% thing is a very american, cultural thing. Here in The Netherlands we've decided as a society that you should aim high, but our grades are out of 10, and only top students actually get 10/10. The American system is built around the fact that if you do everything as required, you get an A+. Here, we reserve 10/10 for truely exceptional , over the top and amazing work. As such, exams are written to have harder questions...
That's entirely possible. Then again, I can't imagine a single non-trivial piece of software that doesn't end up stepping on IP toes left and right. If you take a look at some of the overly broad patents many companies have been granted over the years, you can't help but violate them, even when writing trivial algorithms.
That's why I say "fsck you" to these buttons and choose the Twitter one or put my data manually.
he also cashed out in the series A to make himself wealthy, which made selling early less attractive. With the Yahoo negotiations, there was a price he would have sold at, they just took too long to reach it.
NPM search tool with github information hosted on github
I understand the implications but what would it take for the USA to get AAA back from S&P?
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Sprite3D.js: a javascript library for 3D positionning
Plenty of non-startup companies trade at 20-100x P/E ratios.

Dropbox is clearly insanely profitable at only 65 employees. Especially because they are running de-duplicated storage on top of highly negotiated AWS pricing (they are likely the biggest AWS customer, and AWS certainly does custom pricing deals for big customers).

And startup P/E ratios should be higher than established companies because you are making a riskier bet for a higher potential payoff.

They could be doing $100 million in revenue (a 4% freemium conversion on their $99/yr plan at 25E6 users) and it wouldn't be crazy at all. Or any number of other configurations.
Also the Waldorf model - you get a "testimonial" at the end of the year, but there are no numeric (or alphabetic) grades on it, just verbal description on how well you performed, highlighting both strengths and weaknesses.
This sums it up:

"No one on our team is an Erlang expert"

Regarding mochijson we switched to jiffy [1] (NIF-based native C parser).

Also I would love to get a comparison between 2-years old (probably badly written) Erlang server and a new Python/eventlet server.

[1] https://github.com/davisp/jiffy
Would you please stop posting this? I don't think many people can read Greek (or whatever it is)... So what's the point?
Buffett: If there were a quadruple-A I would give US that.
Could you just solder LED and phototransistor to a proper place in you wifi cards and achieve same goal?
Quite a few fallen empires have made that error of judgement. I believe it hails from a time when the military could be used to make occupied peoples pay taxes. Nowadays, a military that is much bigger than what is needed for defense suffers from diminishing returns in terms of backing the currency with a safety net.

The military is not going to force the Fed to stop printing money.
Unlikely, there's a reasonable chance you could face jail time if you were caught doing such a thing and probably wouldn't be able to work in the financial industry ever again.

So your upside would essentially have to be a huge amount of money, but of course you're much more likely to get caught if you're moving around such a large sum.
Life on the Command Line
Yahoo Finance is still the most popular consumer financial data site in the world, Flickr is the most common photo site used by professional photographers.
What every 13 year child should know about internet
The big problem with SGAE and other similar organizations is that they don't explain what they do with the money and how they distribute it to their members, in fact now the managers od the SGAE are now being accused of theft and mismanagement of the money using it for their own businneses instead of for what is supposed to be. And the problem is that the government which should control then failed to do it. And in Spain even the blank CDs and DVDs have a tax that goes to them, so imagine how much money they control.
Study: Some ISPs Still Hijacking Search Results
Perfect. Obama and Boehner are doing an excellent job of what they are paid to do: transferring the wealth of the USA to Wall Street plutocrats. They've given the sleazeball so-called "rating" agencies the cover they need to demand higher interest rates.

No new taxes. No new jobs. I can't believe that folks who are in their 20s and 30s aren't throwing rocks at people my age (late 50s) for our generational greediness.

By the way, I had a six figure federal tax bill one year, when my cofounders and I sold a startup. Maybe I'm an aberration, but I was proud to be able to chip in that much to the government that paid for ARPA back in the day.
Funny how Google just shut down its dictionary.
Getting a 403 Forbidden
"an open source program exists that will read a plain language spec and spit out a good approximation of the same code you would have written"

And who will write the spec? And why will it be any easier to write the spec than the program? "Plain language" is a misnomer. Idealistic people try to write legal contracts in plain language, but it doesn't work.
It is translated in many languages !!!!
Startups aren't about "fun" and "excitement", startups are about building scalable businesses that solve problems.

You might not find sales or accounting fun but they're critical parts to running a startup. Don't join/start a startup because you think you'll like the startup culture because when the reality of hard-work and stress hit you you'll end up giving up.
4 US Companies Are Now Rated Higher Than The Government
Textfile titled 'to-read' in a dropbox folder. Working okay so far.
tl;dr - I am tall so I was confused when it looked like the physical buttons of an ATM did not match the on-screen labels.
Ask HN: How scared should a new grad be of the possible economic downturn?
I am a foreign student who graduated last fall with a ML/ NLP heavy MS from a top 5 CS school.

I have been trying to do build my own thing, but against my research advisor's advise I was working alone, and things did not turn out that well. Also I have not started looking for jobs, and am a bit lethargic to do so.

I have six more months left before I need to get a full-time job (visa regulations). Should I get shit-scared and start looking for one right away. Or can I wait a little longer. My friends tell me that there is a big hiring boom in general in SV, and even in the worst of economic times (2008-09), tech hiring did not ease substantially. I am not sure if that would be true, especially in the startup world.

So what is HN's advise?

Background: I have never worked in the industry, but have published a couple of research papers, and have created some real user facing, moderately popular stuff, while in the university.
Is there any way for us paywalled people to read this?
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PacMap - Using gamification to improve open maps data (loads slowly)
Some top level domains actually require you to give a valid address and you can't use a masking service. I know .ca domains work this way.
Yep, being locked in is the price I am willing to pay for a phone that works and integrates across the broad. Clean and simple. I'm not 20 anymore and I don't have time to play with my phone to tease out the perfect setup. It's a tool and it must work (interestingly not as a telephone but as a PDA).
Do you think finding mentor(s) is the quickest way to identify the stupid things? I recently started going to Chicago Python users group meetups, and just listening to people talk around me and noting down stuff to google later, has inspired me more than anything (& also the mailing list)... finding stupid things "alone" is more like doing your own proof-reading ... its pretty difficult to find your own non-obvious bugs.
This had some nice comments. But the author is not withstanding to somebody else's sarcasm and went and closed/deleted all of them - it seems. Irony of the the opportunist.
Ruby Programming Language (alternative Ruby home page)
Maintain important overseas installations such as Japan and Taiwan.

The US hasn't had a base in Taiwan for 30 years. Maybe you're thinking of Korea?
Sort by points
You have a deadline. Start now unless you want the error bars to wreck your plans.

Worst case, pimp yourself out as a generic Python programmer or something like that. Companies have been having a tough time finding competent employees. But ML & NLP is a very nice hammer to be swinging; you can probably find something interesting to work on if you start ASAP.
I agree that Google+ will probably get in on some sort of "Login with Google+" thing.

I guess someone could see this as this real name policy then "infecting" the Internet. It would really come down to why are these sites implementing this service. If they are doing it for ease of use, so the user doesn't have to create another account, and there are no alternatives that don't require you to use your real name then that could be bad.

But if these sites also want people to use their real names because they feel it would foster a greater sense of community then that is their prerogative.

There is no one service yet that rules over the Internet and so there will always be alternatives. If a service requires you to use your real name then you can just choose not to use it.

I'd grow more concerned if governments and ISPs attempted to implement a "driver's license" for the Internet. Personally I wouldn't mind this but a lot of people obviously would.
How would you reformulate it?

My curiosity was mostly along the lines of: how in the world is it possible that reddit is run by 4 people and Twitter has 300 employees, got 300 million in VC money and just got another 800 million? Isn't Twitter in the end "just another link sharing service"?
You are seriously on the wrong site.
For you (and maybe a lot of people, granted) the primary use case seems to be "Hey, let's search for that guy I know". For me it's not. I _still_ like to use these networks.

Well, those sites are obviously designed around that use case.

So your use case falls apart for casual encounters, unless you already exchange explicit details. "Hey, can you add me on Facebook? You find me as ..." works with pseudonyms just that well.

Personally, if I meet someone only once or twice and don't know their full name yet, I'm not going to add them as a friend on Facebook.

That said, you can use contact information, partial names, your friends' friends lists, and recognizing someone's face in their profile picture as ways of narrowing someone down. If I meet you in real life, you're not going to introduce yourself as darkajid, you're going to introduce yourself as Ben. If you're listed on a social network as Benjamin Foo and you're already a couple degrees away from me, I can search for "Ben" and the search algorithm will most likely pop up "Benjamin Foo" with a recognizable photo of you.

Outside of social networking sites, it's the predominant social norm to use a handle. Without pressuring or requiring people to use their real names, people by and large wouldn't use their real names and the sites wouldn't be usable.

Countering the last open point: If you want to (for example) find your old class mates from primary school by their real name, there are sites for that.

And they're slowly dying because no one wants to sign up for a single purpose site just to do that. They've been replaced by Facebook.
Haha, just 6.01, the world hasn't ended yet.
If you don't have an easy way of installing boost, it becomes complicated - just to compile one program.

That said, boost is a dependency that pays off in terms of programmer time if what you're doing is complicated enough (in other words, if you think you might reimplement some part of boost, you're better off using it as a dependency instead.)
The author is wrong about simplejson performing 10x better than the json included with python.

Here is my proof: http://j2labs.tumblr.com/post/7305664569/python-vs-javascrip...
You're not advocating against breast feeding, you just don't think the choice to breastfeed is a legitimate reason for the mother to be the one to stay at home? That's some double-talk there.
Game Developer Salary Survey 2011 Results
The trick, strategically, would be arranging to do this without having the transaction turn into yet another bidding war --- which they'd be at risk of losing once again to a coalition of their adversaries (as with the Nortel patent auction).

Perhaps they could arrange a coalition of their own, involving IBM, or one of the other phone manufacturers as the ones who would take over the actual phone business...
To talk about the worst case, were you around 2001-02? Did all tech companies stop recruiting then?
a to-read note in evernote, in a todo notebook. simple and sufficient for me.
I use http://goodreads.com. It's been around a long time and I like the community features for keeping up on what my friends are reading. I also use it to keep an eye on forum discussions about movies sinc I figured out it's a great place to get qualified film tips. Apparently people who enjoy reading books that I enjoyed, enjoy watching films that I (might) like too.
No, they did not say the Novell and Nortell patents were bogus. They said most of the 250,000 patents that a typical smart phone "infringes on" are bogus.

1. The number 250,000 is clearly a made up number, but the real number is in that ballpark (order of magnitude).

2. The Novell patents numbered ~800, a very small fraction of 250,000.

3. The Nortel patents numbered ~6000, still a small fraction of 250,000.

While some of the Novell and Nortel patents likely are bogus, as a whole they are very likely to be higher quality than the other 240,000 smart phone-threatening patents out there.
Lulzsec and Anonymous Hackers leak over 10GB of law enforcement agency details
Because you are being so open about it why do you feel you need to use a nick in real-life?

A lot conversations for this story seem to have focused on the concept of permanence with a nickname. If you use the same nickname across a multitude of services then you've created a "real" identity.

I'm trying to understand peoples reasoning for this. To me there seems to be two prevalent reasons:

1) You want your single identity to be under a name you choose, not have it be forced upon you like you real name was.

2) You want to maintain a multitude of identities each with a specific purpose.
A few companies exploded, but there were still a lot of job openings. Hiring standards got a bit more sane, if anything.

The world runs on computers. People who can make them sit up and beg are not going to stop being in demand any time soon.
They've banded with several other companies to buy these patents to ensure that their most successful competitor is defenseless against baseless patent litigation now and in the future. They're on the wrong side.

And before you start, the reason they're on the wrong side when they buy the patents, and Google isn't, is that they have a history of abusing the patent system, and abuse it currently, and Google does not.
The argument is much that you can't just socialize the health care, you have to tear it to shreds and then paper-mache it back into a more serviceable shape. This is a process that takes time, and would leave people scrambling all over the place. Trying to do it while reducing damage results in monstrosities like Obamacare, and the current situation.
3. The Healthcare System is interesting. The US simply pay a lot more than all other industrialized nations (and still everyone isn't covered).

These two graphs are quite telling:
http://www.rwjf.org/images/pr/thumbs/full/45110.jpg
http://media.economist.com/images/20090627/CBB677.gif

I think the problem is manifold, but here are some things that may be problematic (please let me know if you agree or disagree):

# Doctors risk getting sued for maltreatment, and thus they prescribe all possible medications, take too many samples and generally spend too much resources.

# On the same note, they also pay large insurances against lawsuits, increasing the costs further.

# Medicine prices are higher in the US, for reasons I don't fully understand.