skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess I prefer to think of a state as being like a piece of software. It starts out as kind of a kludge, doesn't do much, and what it does is like a blunt instrument (capital punishment, debtor's prisons and so on).

Like a piece of software, over hundreds of iterations and modifications, assuming the developers are good, a state can become pretty good - powerful enough to give its users what they want, but not monolithic and overburdened with features.

Features we need: environmental regulations, food safety, building codes, healthcare.

Of course, you can tell you've got feature-creep when your state starts building stealth bombers.

The trouble with these "micro-states" is they're starting from scratch. For the first hundred years or so, you'll be able to buy toys that can kill your kids, you'll have buildings that randomly explode, and a broken/nonexistent healthcare system.

Fortunately for the sane, we don't need to risk our families' lives and wellbeing in an unproven, buggy state. Mature, well-tested states are available!
Have a look at tldr.it[1]. It fetches data from Delicious to TL;DR.

[1] http://tldr.it
Funny how these guys can only afford these things from their profits in "nanny states."

Basically this guy is keeping it close to San Francisco so that he can earn him money here and suck it over to his amusement park.

If he really believed in "libertarianism" he would just do it without the money and see how he can prosper then. But alas, the super rich are not like everyone else.
Floating countries for rich people. Products: Gambling licenses. Dual citizenships. Offshore banking (tax havens.) What am I missing?

Edit: Of course, nobody would actually be living in these places other than system admins. All the available space would be stuffed with servers to run the above services.
I just see this as fixed price your just exposing your broken down system to the client rather than supplying a larger $x to complete the whole project. You do limit your exposure by using the smaller chunks though.

The issue is that if the "spec changes" you still need to work out what happens next, ie. scrapping some features etc.

Hourly rate keeps this process smoother, and smooth is the new fast.
Can we please stop sucking IBM's cock?

-Their chip only has a superficial connection to biological neurons. Any characterization of this chip in terms of "brains" is frankly bullshit. This is like measuring Google's computing clusters in terms of human brainpower.

-Everything their new chip can do has been done in software / FPGAs. While moving ANN's to ASICs can improve training speed (and is important), it does not help with the unsolved algorithmic challenges they present. Furthermore, the hardware structure severely constrains the ways in which these ANNs can be applied.

-Last time this IBM lab made a misleading announcement to the press, it was appropriately ripped to shreds by a very respected individual in the neuroscience community (http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/devices/bl...)

-Lastly, please refrain from drawing conclusions or extrapolating on science-related articles in the popular press. They are characterized by hyperbole and misinformation, and in many cases are flat-out wrong.
What would be a more efficient way to fund Medicaid and bombing Libya?
Tips from Thomas, which I have used to the benefit of clients and myself:

1) Any worthwhile developer sounds expensive when you break it out as an hourly rate, so don't. Charge a weekly rate tied to specific business goals which you think you can accomplish within one week, two weeks, three weeks, etc. If your client wants to dicker, dicker over scope, don't dicker over rate. Dickering over rate will hurt all your further business with that client. If e.g. $21,000 is too much for the budget, tell them what they can get for $14,000 and let them make the call on whether $7,000 is worth not getting $DIFFERENCE. Whether it is or isn't, it doesn't chisel anything out of your next engagement with them.

An amazing truth about the world: $X00 an hour is a lot of money, but $X00 * 160 for something which makes a meaningful difference to the bottom line of a real company is cheap at the price. Their pricing anchor will be other strategic initiatives rather than e.g. "You make more than I do!"

2) You bill on a time and materials basis. Basically, my best estimate is that one week of work gets you $FOO and $BAR. What you actually have at the end of the week is what you are due at the end of the week. If you change your mind on scope for $BAR in the middle of the engagement and it doesn't get done in the week, that's OK, subject to availability you can buy another week.

3) The basic offering is "A contiguous block of my time starting at a mutually convenient date in the near future." Things which add business value on top of that cost extra. Want to start working next week? Sure. Costs extra. Want to split the engagement into two parts? Doable. Costs extra. Want support? Wonderful. Costs extra. Want support with an SLA better than "Best effort to answer emails within a day"? Costs extra. Travel? Extra, and you reimburse costs as per your company's usual travel policy. (If I had heard that line a year earlier I would be five figures richer to the detriment of exactly no one. Doh.)
I really enjoyed one of this paper's citations, "Why do computers stop and what can be done about it" written by Jim Gray in 1985. A really nice and early look at how to build reliable systems from unreliable but independent parts. http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.html
In India, since the new Mobile Number Portability rules have been introduced, making it very simple to switch your carrier, more than 10 million people are switching their operators every month. The system must be made easy enough so that the operators realize the value of customer service. http://www.medianama.com/2011/08/223-mobile-number-portabili...
Putting Chinese and Japanese (I guess because their writing systems are kind of similar) is similar to, similar to saying the same for English and Basque (which, like Japanese is agglutinative) because they both use the Latin alphabet.

I don't know what exactly the OP means by "vanilla" in this context, these languages are anything but vanilla! One could argue that perhaps English grammar is vanilla because it has developed certain creole-like characteristics due to various pressures during its history: Compared to most other languages in the IE family, its grammar is quite simplified, it's lost most of its complexity.
This is definitely my favorite system when I can get clients to sign on to it. It manages expectations, defines scope, and ensures communicative development at the same time.

I also worked for a firm that sold sprints whose point velocity would automatically adjust to account for point value fluctuations.
so we can say that obama is an authoritarian thug too?

visit this and tell me what you see:

http://rojadirecta.com/

please don't overgeneralize, this was a court ruling (which I'm against) but don't use it as an excuse to make Argentina look like a dictatorship.

since you say she has a "long record of abusing private property rights, and now, free speech."

I would like to know some cases so people outside Argentina know (an for that matter me too)

PS: before you attack me with the easy label of being a peronist, let me tell you that I'm not.
But do I call the first elephant I get into my room elephant 0 or elephant 1?
Bubble? : Groupon looks to buy Wrigley Building
obligatory noticeable case: swahili (one of the widely studied non-indo european languages) comes with _18_ noun classes.
You can already buy a citizenship in a number of countries.

EDIT: Commonwealth of Dominica, Saint Kitts, Nevis and Austria are places that I know of.
Speaking of low taxes, I think US companies are overlooking Turkey and the advantages it offers to tech companies.

1) no corporate tax
2) no income tax for employees

All that is required is for the project to be approved as an R&D project. There is an incredible talent pool, solid infrastructre and a beautiful city waiting...I am just saying...:-)
Wen-Ai Yu - Google+ - Not sure whether +Dolly Parton is actually that Dolly…
The Perils of Partially Powered Languages
One thing to keep in mind is that it takes time to come up with a detailed quote like this, and you'll want to be paid for that time.

I usually throw out a ball-park guesstimate (without signing anything) to see if the client is comfortable with it, and then ask them to pay for a detailed quote like this, which they then own and can shop around with.

You can take somewhat of a loss on the scoping since if they've agreed to pay you for it, there's a really good chance you'll be awarded the contract (as long as it doesn't blow them away or they have unrealistic expectations, in which case thank god you scoped it out). This way at least you're still getting paid something.
I think HP is going to sell every unit in about a week and this will make them go hmmmm...:-)
Commenter on twitch.tv: http://www.di.fm/ Electro House station
As a side-effect HN has upgraded from HTTP 1.0 to HTTP 1.1.
Actually, wealthy people are even better off with the current system where they can hide their wealth in a number of competing low tax regimes in the outskirts of the world. It would actually be funny to see this thing coming true, and then turning to a prime terrorist target. Where would they build their defense missiles, in the basement?

In any case, despite the ridiculousness of the idea, this shows that the current sovereign-state compartmentalization of the earth is no longer the best way to run it and we need worldwide cooperation to both fight tax evasion and allow greater mobility of people and goods. Isolating the rich from the masses is only a good idea in the sense that it ends in an explosive way, like the french and bolshevik revolution.
I don't think he's making any policy suggestions so much as he's fighting the mindset a lot of people have: the anti-intellectual stance that scientists are a bunch of ivory tower elites that have no real impact on society. Certainly, there are places where we're unnecessarily spending money in science. But that doesn't justify some anti-science rhetoric you're seeing from some.
I would like to see some good science fiction that actually attempts to imagine what our real future might be like. For some reason it seems like writers (or maybe it's the fault of people funding TV/movies) can only imagine a future having to do with space and/or aliens. What about the future of internet, computers, and/or mobile devices?

I don't think it's a coincidence that Star Trek and so on emerged during the Space Race period. The public consciousness was very much focused on space travel. The fiction was well-timed then, but now?

I would gladly read a story or watch a show about the following:

- What happens when we have automated every last low-skilled job? Utopia? Chaos?

- What happens when every single action is recorded about your daily life? Crime-free paradise? Totalitarian nightmare?

- What impact would a computer super-intelligence have?

I'm just going off the top of my head here. I'm sure some writers can come up with better stuff than this.

TL;DR: Space was a hot subject during the Space Race. Now, though, it's time to see some science fiction address the future of other technologies that we are now approaching. If the tomorrow project does that, I'm all for it.

Update:
I followed the link to Cory Doctorow's story Epoch in arethuza's comment. This in turn brought me to the full book With a Little Help. Its introduction reads:

"It turns out the future doesn't really care about space travel. [...] Luckily, we have Cory Doctorow; he thinks about the Internet, a lot."

I'm sold.
HTC Aura WP7 Concept design.
Except deadlocks have nothing to do with sharing memory, and everything to do with sharing state. Shared state is necessary whether your address space is shared or not, and deadlocks will always be a risk in complex systems, whether the components involved are in the same or different processes.

Anyway, I'm mostly a server-side engineer, so I can't speak well to the disastrous mess of GUI libraries and such, but the libraries I use are, indeed, thread-safe, and I'm quite confident that they will remain so. Their state is maintained through handles, not global variables.
Recession-proof Startup?
Earn good money in Recession time
One guy with a machine gun could conquer this country in 10 minutes. And if it's truly sovereign then it would be completely legal.
From the original article "Der Hacker mit dem Comic-Mann-Aussehen redet sich in Rage..."

A little irrelevant to this post, but one thing I find very interesting is this: Generally gender imbalance in CS is explained as due to an environment that is hostile to women (even a Start Trek poster in the classroom). In writing, the pronoun "she" is usually used in examples, to avoid "sexist language"

Yet, the fact that "Hacker" has a masculine article doesn't bother the German female hackers. Articles for foreign adopted words are generally determined phonetically, AFAIK, but still. Do we refer to female hackers as "die Hackerin" :-) What is the article in other languages, French, Italian, etc (I would be very surprised if any had a feminine article)?
However, if robots are doing all the work then production becomes cheaper which means products become cheaper which again means that people can buy more with less money.

That's a big assumption there. More likely, companies will experience higher profit margins rather than pass along the entirety of the cost savings.
You're using "ego" with that "vanity" sense. I'm referring to ego as in "self". I agree that strong people have less "ego", less "self-importance". Try wiping out "your self" instead and see those strong people crumble.
Not sure what kind of theme you're using, but it broke the Greasemonkey script Hacker News OnePage for me. If you're using something like greasemonkey or stylish, you might have to go into the script and tell it to work on https, since the sites are whitelisted with only http. That should do it.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. I came here to say the same thing. These people will do all this song-and-dance of making a "libertarian utopia", but still keep their money in dollars; their house on Sea Cliff; their kids in US universities.

You really think you can do better, Mr. Rich Guy? Then put your money where your mouth is, and move your family there. Live there. Don't go to any of the so-called "socialist hells"; try to survive on your little parcel of paradise and see how long it lasts.
Well, not really. I have a bunch of reasons to not to buy iPad or Android tablet, but I had only one reason to buy this one: at $99 I don't really care if I have any use for this tablet or not.
Interview: SciRuby Team
If you can, read the original article (in German): http://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/besuch-beim-chaos-communi...
This is one Damien Katz sites as a big influence on the CouchDB design.
Of course the brain is affected by non-brain parts of the system. But my point is that, in order for glucose to "replenish" willpower, it should be the case that some task depleted glucose by some significant amount -- hence the need for replenishment.
And when the next hurricane strikes, guess who they're gonna call? The US Coast Guard! "Help, Nanny State! Please help us!!!"
why not create a virtual nation on the internet, the overhead would be very low.
As if the bots wont adjust their syntax when the software becomes more comprehensive. Silly Cornell, you're up against spammers, not actual robots.
I noticed a snippet fairly recently (last hour or so) using alpha values as an ID for switches and the things they're connected to (doors, etc).

So technically, it's RGBA values :)
Yes, and tests have shown that it's not just calories. A small non-food gift can have the same affects as glucose. I agree that glucose may be some sort of indicator to the body that it should engage in some tedious task, but it's not the cause.
Is there a reason to draw in-game font except for fun factor?
Scala's method vs function
I think the point here was more about how Arabic treats groups of non-human objects as feminin singular. I assume that in Polish you would use a plural form of "green" when talking about multiple books and you would only use the feminine form if "book" is a feminine word.
Interesting. To summarize their methodology:

- Take the top 20 hotels from trip advisor

- Filter out all non-five star reviews, plus any non-english, excessively short, or first-time reviews. Then sample (via a log normal distribution on review length) 20 reviews per hotel. This is their "real" dataset.

- Use Mechanical Turk to collect 400 reviews for these hotels. Turkers are instructed to pretend they work for the marketing dept of the hotel and are to write deceptively fake reviews. Again, quality filters on length, user approval rating, and deduplication are applied. Turkers are paid $1 per review. This creates their "fake" dataset.

I suppose one could still argue that there are selection bias issues here. The sample size is also moderate. Nevertheless, it's a novel approach and you have to start somewhere. Interesting work.
You can buy a US green card too. Just invest $1M somewhere, and you get a green card. So in effect the money stays with you, thus you're not even "buying" the card; just flashing the dough to get the card.
you can buy a US green card as well, via the EB-5 visa.
Of course I was downvoted, everyones' startup is going to be bought by Google and we'll all be rich! Woo hoo!

(and yes I realize I'll get it for this too)

I'm really fine with people living in the woods like the Unabomber and giving it a shot. Or even New Hampshire becoming a libertarian state, why not, go for it and see what happens.

But don't put a lot of money behind something and call it an "experiment" that we can actually apply in the real world.
Thanks, for me it makes sense to use the smallest unit available as the main unit, i.e. cents not dollars / pence not pounds.
Exactly. If you want your wealth to be truly secure, you'd have to store it on your island, otherwise it would be accessible to the same governments you're trying to keep it away from.

Wealth doesn't defend itself though, and a bunch of rich guys might think they're slick but even a rag-tag pontoon of somali pirates is going to have more battle experience: so you'd have to hire a small mercenary force to guard the place. How much will you pay them? What's stopping them from killing you and taking the place over for themselves?

I can't see how paying taxes is the biggest driving force for this idea. I think these people want the freedom and power of an aristotelian-scale democracy without dealing with the majority of idiots that affect our lives every day.
It definitely doesn't mean employees get to unilaterally declare when they're taking time off, if that's what you're wondering. I still have to go through the discussion with my manager about "No huge milestones coming up then, right? Your team and customers are okay with this?", but it removes the friction of "Well, you haven't actually earned five full days of PTO, so you'll have to take one unpaid or we have to do the paperwork to treat this as an advance..." that can make arranging vacations awkward.
I recall seeing stop-motion videos from either previous Ludum Dare competitions or something similar, compiled from a whole bunch of screenshots like you say.

I'd be more interested in seeing how the actual code evolves - maybe setting something to check it into a VCS every time you save would work.

Figuring out a decent visualisation would be hard though.
Ah, but which Firefox?

Rendered perfectly fine in Firefox 7 on Vista 64-bit.
You're expecting readers to know the difference? To know that this article was published without peer review?

That's like saying anything you read in the newspaper could be complete nonsense and you'd need to consult 50 different sources to determine what is and isn't true in today's news.

If that's the case then why the hell am I reading this garbage?

I think it's completely legitimate for the consumer to expect a certain amount of research and integrity go into these stories. I also think it's necessary to expose (like this) news sources that obviously haven't done due diligence.

I want to know which sources are garbage so I can blacklist them from my reading list before I dig a bunker because aliens riding unicorns pulled up to earth and are eating our trees.
All you'd really need in addition is a 'palette' image of the different colours and their meanings for other people to create maps using this format.
Do clients usually agree to this system? If they're unfamiliar with sw development, it might seem suspicious. I wouldn't be exactly comfortable with a plumber drafting up anything else than a standard work-and-parts contract.
> For exmaple, here are some "words" consisting of a single letter repeated three times:

> ÙŠÙŠÙŠ Ø¹Ø¹Ø¹ Ù‡Ù‡Ù‡ ÙƒÙƒÙƒ Ù„Ù„Ù„

Which for me looks like (asciified):

> USUSUS 010101 UtUtUt UfUfUf UnUnUn

I'm guessing I'm missing a font or something? (Firefox 6)
I think that is actually the most likely possibility for this. Why do you need land?
As these kinds of issues continue to bring into question the reputation of (mostly) anonymous review sites, the reliance on reviews from your social graph (I.E. folks you presumably know & trust) could continue to rise, particularly if the search engines remain unable to differentiate between the spammers and legit reviewers.

No wonder Google proactively sought out that kid who worked on the paper.
That's only part of the problem. The core problem is that google doesn't allow pseudonyms at all (even a single pseudonym across all circles) unless you happen to be famous enough, regardless of legal identity. It's a double standard.
tl;dr $67.00.
if your basic/permitted libraries don't include a way to render orthographic text, I suppose. I didn't see the beginning, but in comments in the previous threads, he's written the whole of the 3D FPS system to a fairly low level as well.
I'd consider applying CSS border-radius to all of the app icon images. Some of them have a beveled edge and the square edge, which looks a little less proffesional.
> Not quite: what you cite are just pronouns, but the conjugation and grammar doesn't vary. For instance, conjugating the verb manger (to eat) with feminine plural "elles" and masculine plural yields the same "mangent", whereas in Arabic you have different forms.

It's mostly true that the verb form stays the same in French regardless of the gender of the subject. However, they are exceptions. If a verb conjugates conpound tenses with être, then the past participle is considered an adjective and must agree with the subject, e.g.:

Ils sont allés = They went (one or more male)

Elles sont allées. = They went (all female)
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The huge switch statement is probably because that's the easiest thing to do with a simple 48 hour game. There is no point in wasting time writing clean maintainable systems with a lot of glue code when you're writing a simple game in 48 hours that you are the only developer of and will probably never look at again after the compo. Even in a larger commercial game it wouldn't be too hard to maintain that stuff (maybe clean it up by defining constants). I've written similar code for LD48 map loaders.

There is a good chance that the "engine" that's rendering the maze for him is something he wrote during the competition. Its not too hard to write a simple maze renderer using OpenGL or even an oldschool raycast software renderer like wolfenstein's pretty quickly. All final LD48 entries must submit source as well, so once Notch is done you could take a look at what he's doing. Probably not anything you can easily turn into a library or reuse :).
Maybe the underlying idea is that "a group of something is green", and a group is singular and is feminine (at least in Russian ^^)