skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I find some of the experiments at created icons with CSS interesting I wish people would concentrate on testing and pushing SVG for vector images in web pages. SVG is small, fast and well-designed format for rendering static images.

To my taste, a benchmark test like this completely misses the point (even if it includes benchmarks for SVG rendering—which this one doesn't).
The definitive online analysis of Esperanto is Learn Not To Speak Esperanto by Justin Rye,

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

which is based on facts about how the language actually works. I recall that soon after the change.org website originated, a group of Esperantists proposed that Esperanto be made a mandatory second language in school instruction. It became painfully apparent as that discussion unfolded that such a government mandate was supported mostly so that the expensive hobby of Esperanto involvement could become paying work for Esperanto hobbyists. If a language is genuinely useful for human communication, it is possible to find paying work teaching the language without any government mandate in the free-enterprise system (as I have both as a teacher of Chinese in the United States and as a teacher of English as a second language in Taiwan and in the United States). There is NO WAY that there is any coherent economic analysis behind an estimate that Esperanto saves any money for any purpose. There is not even good neutral research (as contrasted with flawed studies

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

published in Esperantist publications) on how rapidly second-language speakers acquire reasonable levels of Esperanto proficiency.

AFTER EDIT: As a metacomment on this discussion, I see the karma of this comment bouncing up and down wildly. That's okay. I've never objected to downvoting for disagreement, for reasons stated in a comment by pg back before I was a participant on Hacker News.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

But I suggest that if you disagree with my opinion that Esperanto (a language I have studied, among more than a dozen other languages) is not really very useful as a world international auxiliary language, then you may as well make use of the opportunity here to reply with thoughtful, verifiable reasons why Esperanto is really better than the other candidates for international communication, which happens every minute of every day in a variety of languages already. An important fact to note is that the number of NEW high-proficiency speakers of English (or Chinese) each year is greater than the TOTAL number of Esperanto speakers that there has ever been in any period of history, and that Esperanto is actually declining in use as a percentage of all world language use for all purposes.
You, sir, have never clearly not mastered the art of literary analysis.
It would be unenforcable in the same way its impossible to stop every crime, but the fact that it is illegal + the fact that they are getting so well paid anyways, it would greatly disincentivise such activities
Thanks for the bug report. I've tested on Firefox 8.0.1 on Windows 7, it works here. Maybe it behaves differently on different operating systems?
The problem with those links is that they don't cover what I need to know to be better at my job.

Roughly I need something (and my guess is that this is the same for everybody) which covers these areas:

* General news which actually matter. This includes stuff like SOPA (but only once and not on every tech site) as well as important elections and a few high profil criminal cases (but only the general overview I don't need to know the details) so that I can converse with others. This shouldn't be more than 20% and less than 10% most of the time.

News from friends and relatives -- a combination of Facebook and google plus sorta covers this, but it isn't very good since some people share so much that it gets irrelevant and others share almost nothing at all so I still miss important stuff. This should also be about 10%-15%
Professional development -- essentially something like what they were trying to turn Code Quarterly into -- high quality, upto-date, high quality, long (but not padded for length) articles delivered about every two weeks. This magazine (which would properly be sent as an email) would be adfree (for the same reason consumer reports don't have ads) and fairly expensive. This should take up the rest of the time.
Well, probation for me means lower salary too.
tl;dr: content-free buzz marketeering for the private beta for a "find something to do" service of some ilk.

The service name reminds me of some Yiddish word that I can't quite place for something or someone that's involving badness; it's reminiscent of various pejoratives. schlemiel, schlimazel, schmuck, Schemer?
I would like to just see a bi-lateral agreement between the eu and the us for work so you could give an american a job in europe more easily and also work in the us more easily. Having been hiring it's a pain to have to refuse candidates from the us because spain will makes it close to impossible to grant a working visa at the moment.

As an alternative they could also just do what australia does which is a skilled immigrant system where you score points for your background.
I just got a mental image of Eliezer Yudkowski and Linda Hamilton assaulting IBM headquarters at night with the help of a buff Austrian combat cyborg.
It's completely a generalizable solution. From upstart standups who tape their open night sets for YouTube to seasoned comics with tv shows and HBO specials like Louis CK and David Cross (who similarly self-produced his last special "Bigger and Blackerer" by asking his buddy to tape 2 of his sets, though he didn't self distribute), this model absolutely works.

Louie's just doing for comedy what have been doing for years, recording the concert and selling it at the end of the night or online for more than they'd have made otherwise through traditional distribution deals.
I agree. Austin is one of the most chill places in the world. As a matter of fact, the only thing people bitch about are all the self-centered Californians who moved to TX in order to escape high real estate prices.
I'm still going to pay the 5 bucks, because far be it from me to take advantage of an honest comedian's technological incompetence.
Unlike Capitalism, Globalization is Zero Sum. 100K green card cannot fix this fundamental problem.
So what could Schemer be exactly?

According to IGN, who partnered with Google to help
consumers find things related to games and entertainment,
Schemer is a platform that helps you discover things you
didn't even know you wanted to do.

From the about page:

Whether it’s exploring a new city, checking out a
friend’s movie recommendation, or just finding new
activities for your weekends, Schemer lets you discover
new things to do, share schemes with friends, and make
the most of your day.

Patent: http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=8...

Downloadable computer application software for mobile
phones, namely, software to facilitate group decision
making, event planning, and social networking

Providing a website featuring on-line non-downloadable
software to facilitate group decision making, event
planning, and social networking.

Edit: That website really wants to log me into my Google account. If you are logged out and try below URL it will send you into a redirect loop, adding parameters to the URL with each attempt: http://www.schemer.com/about?lo=2
Not that I'm aware of and someone else can chime in otherwise if they know of such a story but I wanted to respond regardless. Not that this answers your question in any way but its not just investors that are unwilling to sign an NDA. This can apply to others as well, particular behind the idea of mainly protecting the idea itself.

I get why someone feels the need, or rather want, to get someone to sign an NDA but realize that its not the idea that makes or break the startup but rather the vision and a million other factors combined. Even with Facebook, the seed alone isn't what makes Facebook what it is today even if we consider credibility to some of the original idea helping. That being said, often time, when people work on an idea, they rarely if ever, are the only ones that came up with that idea or tackling the same problem, currently or previously.

Beyond that fact, I find that signing an NDA is often useless for the above scenario because more than likely, even if someone takes an idea and runs with it, I find it hard to believe some people would go out, seek an attorney, and hope to win or settle favorably. It's a time consuming and money sinking process even if there are success cases.
Paleoclimate Record Points Toward Potential Rapid Climate Changes
Inspire high-school students about data-mining
ATS: a dependently-typed systems programming language?
So does anyone here use Dylan for production?
The key value store you always ignored
I always wonder why less people know about it. Hopefully this post will bring some light to this ACID key value store.
Do they not purchase clothing? Food? Housing? Leisure items? Vehicles? Electronic devices? Basic necessities? That are designed and produced by Americans, sold by Americans in American stores in America?

As for remittance, I believe that people are free to spend their disposable income however they wish.
Sorry, the platform is ugly and expensive. It will also never be the same as the original platforms. My Dad was a hacker before I was even born. He hacked on 50's - 70's Chevy's mostly. That was the kids freedom back in the day. Like an aircraft carrier to the U.S. it was their own moving piece of sovereign territory. Their cars had muscle, style and they were easily hackable. They had radios which would blare rock'n roll which their parents may not have approved of. They had back seats which were where many of the modern hackers (me for sure) were conceived. Today, we have the internet and cell phones. We can spin up a server for next to nothing. An Iphone is expensive enough. A !!!!ing Renault? No thanks.
Unless they aren't eating or sleeping while they're in the US, they're still spending some of their money on US businesses. And remittances are by far the most effective form of foreign aid...
Yes.

It confuses the hell out of me that I'm defending Windows here - I'm an OSS enthusiast and run Linux whenever I can.

Thing is: Operating systems are at this point just a more complex choice of preference and taste. Pick anything recent (I'm not going to stand for Win 95/98/ME/XP), use common sense and best practices for the platform and you're golden.

No, OS X is not by default a better system. It might attract you as a BSD with a UI that you consider damn fine. Other people are free to disagree and like their choice of platform better, be it Windows, Linux, *BSD or whatnot.

I repeat: There's _zero_ ground for calling OS X generally superior (nor inferior!) in a war of operating systems, neither technically nor in any other way.
Business Cards design in Melbourne
Design unique and professional business cards with 1design2.com.au. Look at the showcase for thousands of design templates. It has big team of designers in Melbourne, Sydney and Gold Coast, Australia.
For more information please visit:- http://1design2.com.au/products/business-cards
Well, that's poetic, but doesn't mean it works out that way in the real world.

For one, America was not actually founded solely on "tired and poor masses yearning to breathe free", but on a huge takeover and displacement plan for the native americans.

Then, "tired and poor" masses of african americans were used as slaves, and tons of "tired and poor" masses of white people were also used quite like slaves (sharecroppers and the like).

And even after that stopped, there was tons of racial tension (do you think Italians, Irish and Jews were welcomed to New York initially?).

Another consideration, if tens of millions of muslims, for example, come to the US and change it vote by vote, to follow islamic law, would you like it? Or does you "bring me your..." proposition presupposes that mass immigration will not happen if all is left open?
Without wishing to belabour the obvious, this could be huge. Excel is probably the most popular development environment in the world.
Damn this wretched phallic headline, I couldn't resist clicking.
But yeah, the weather sure is nice. I figure that's part of the problem, though: if you're homeless, you'll head somewhere that's warm all the time.

That and a place with good public transportation. Portland has a huge homeless problem because it has free public transportation within city limits. Many homeless people just ride the trains around all day.
So I asked him an even simpler question: Given a binary search tree, write code to find a particular value. If you can't find the value, then return me the next smallest value. For example, if the tree contains 1, 2, 3, and 5, and I ask for 4, then return 3.

Out of curiosity, what is the solution?

I would imagine something like keeping a variable of the highest found value under 4 and if you don't find 4 then you use this variable.
Honestly, it isn't ready yet. We're catching up as we bring things back up to date after some years of being left to rest.

We're also not there (yet) with libraries that people commonly expect in this day and age.

We were hoping this would be a lower profile release as we learn how to make a new release and get our systems automation in place (as well as improving platform support).
Have you ever used a Kindle? You can put any book on it that is either PDF, mobi and a few other formats.
"""Both these objections are dead wrong. The truth is that the US economy needs immigration to work. If you doubt it, just look at Japan."""

Citation needed. Japan was flourishing in past decades, even without immigration. And the US is not that much better off, debt and economy wise now.

"""In fact, immigration is the largest wealth transfer program from developing countries to the developed. It is already bad enough that poor countries are paying for the upbringing, training and education of these skilled migrants for which they get no compensation."""

The majority of immigrants from development countries don't have that much training and education. "Skilled migrants" are the exception.

Not ever Indian immigrant, for example, is a programmer searching work in the Valley --actually, not even close to 1%.
مفاجاة كبرى :ابن وزير الداخلية الجديد هو احد السلفين
So, maybe next week?

;-)
Design of the Ford Probe IV, 1983
They guy is wrong thinking that business logic does not exist. Then it all goes downhill from there. Extremely narrow view of the world he does not even try to uderstand.
Small suggestion: Post some code examples easily accessible from the main page! I've checked the documentation, the dylan book, the "get started".. I still have no idea what Dylan looks like. Basically, a quick "Dylan in 5mins" tour to give me a taste of the neat features.. so it gives me a reason to digg further in the doc.
This is my first comment on HN. Until now I have been satisfied just observing. However this post was so well done that I felt obligated to create an account to leave some form of positive feedback.

I found this post an intense, enlightening, and thoroughly enjoyable read.
In the US declaring bankruptcy isn't too bad, so there's a hard limit to how badly they can exploit the people they bring over. Currently people are exploited like this, getting in debt to be transported into the country illegally. However, in that case it's their illegal status depriving them of normal legal protections that makes the situation get so bad.

I do expect that most people coming in would require loans, but that most of them would still be better off with this program.
Express vs Sinatra Benchmarks
I was only able to watch about two minutes worth, but his summary sounds accurate to me.

The reason people aren't trying to start a dialog with you on your terms is that you don't seem rational. You seem unhinged. I saw your original open letter, and I thought the same. Based on these and your previous harangue against your team, I think you should consider seeking help.
There are some examples here (since we didn't actually write the real 'About' page yet): http://opendylan.org/about/index.html

I guess we'll be working on the website a lot in the next couple of days ...
Oh that's not how I meant it. I've paid my $5 for it and downloaded
it, and that link I posted will return a 403 without the right
authorization.

I posted it because I was worried that I couldn't download it with
wget before I bought it, I'm on a 3G connection through my phone and I
wanted to download it to my server so I could download it later from a
more capable connection.

I sent the below E-Mail to their support address (support@louisck.net)
and I'd encourage others who bought this to send something similar do
the same. I think it's important to tell artists that this sort of
distribution is appreciated:

Thanks for making this show available in non-DRM format. I haven't
watched it yet, but I bought it and downloaded it already.

My friends and I have been following your work for a while, I've
watched both your HBO TV shows and downloaded a bunch of your
standups. But since I don't live in the US and don't want to buy DRM
content I haven't paid you for any of this.

However I'm happy to be able to when you offer something in this
format. I can pay for it even if I don't live in the US, and I don't
have to buy something like a DVD or subscribe to something like iTunes
where I'll effectively be getting a worse service by locking the media
I buy into some corporation's proprietary distribution platform.

But if you keep offering things in this way in the future I'll be sure
to pay for them.

It's not that I'm cheap. I make a very good living, and I'm happy to
pay for things. I just think it's unethical to pay for media when part
of the proceeds go to conglomerates like the MPAA which are actively
working towards reducing freedom on the Internet.
I cannot read Hindi in my Android.
If those older workers and others are equally or more skilled than the younger ones implied by your question, smart companies will realize the discrepancy and hire them.

The invisible hand of self-interest only works if smarter contenders actually appear in the marketplace. If there is some invisible hand of stupidity (and groupthink) that affects all companies above a certain size, then we are hosed.

Why is it that all big organizations are almost universally dilbertesque? There must be some anti-nootropic effect that occurs above a certain threshold of organizational complexity.
As unfortunately is not low profile any more, could you guys make some main point on why one should adopt dylan? Maybe a comparison with Python/Ruby etc.?
Asinine idea of the day, there are some many wrong aspects it's even difficult where to start.

First, $100k is a big but not absurd amount of money for an American or European (it's roughly 1 year salary of a good engineer), but everywhere else in the world it's much harder to save that kind of money - it's closer, say, to the price of a decent house for a middle-class family.

The efffort to save that money will be very different per country of origin, which is very unfair. A Brazilian engineer has 3X better wages than an equivalent Chinese engineer, due to different currency valuation and salary standards.

People will start paying for this not with cash but with bank loans. These will be relatively high-risk loans so in practice, people will pay $100k to the US treasury, and maybe another $50-100k in interest to some private bank. And even if the loan is from an US bank, this doesn't necessarily mean "even more money injected in the American economy" - these days, money that goes to banks rarely benefits society in any significant way.

Having $100k in cash doesn't necessarily prove that you have the kind of skills that would ensure a well-paid job, and benefit the US economy. Maybe you are a mediocre professional, but you just inherited this money. Or your family helped realize their loved son's immigration dream, so you can only pay for the green card because dad sold his house. Or you just worked your ass off for 20 years in low-pay jobs, having a lot of discipline to save money. Or you made a loan (item above), maybe using family's property as collateral so you don't even have the merit for that loan. End result, a low-skilled worker being granted a green card and maybe becoming a liability to Social Security after failing to get an US job.
Interesting: Converting from Common Lisp to Dylan by Norvig.

norvig.com/ltd/doc/ltd.html -

Also slides from Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages (also by Norvig, in Dylan) http://norvig.com/design-patterns/ppframe.htm

Maxima Cas, that uses Lisp internally, could be translated to Dylan.
Ask HN: How do you lead teams? Let's exchange team management culture hacks
I want to learn how to lead effective teams and encourage a positive culture. Are there any pearls of wisdom or utilities to help with this?

How do you motivate a group to take ownership, be creative and produce their best work?

Unfortunately not everybody is awesome and I've not been lucky enough to choose the people I have to work with -- in fact I've taken the worst employees to see whether I can turn them around. When dealing with less motivated or incompetent developers, how do you treat the organisation problem created by scaling the micro-management that appears to be required to get them to produce useful work? Is there a laissez-faire way of doing this... Can I empower them to be more conscientious? If in the worst cases I have no choice but to try to get them fired how is this done in the least negative way?

HN, please give me your team management culture hacks! :)
I hear that argument a lot, but it's not consistent with how we actually use "stealing". I think it's just a feel-good argument to justify that "no harm was done" with downloading a file illegally.

For example, we say that "he stole the answers to the exam" --in this case, too, the answers are still there, nobody lost them.

Here's what dictionary.com gives for steal:

1. to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, especially secretly or by force: A pickpocket stole his watch.
2. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.
3. to take, get, or win insidiously, surreptitiously, subtly, or by chance: He stole my girlfriend.
I think there are 2 parts of the problem.

1-companies want to pay a pittance compared to what the person is actually worth. Face it, if you offer $90K, and your competitor offers $120K, the person has to be insane to take an offer that differs so much.

2-companies have really high requirements when they don't actually need them. If you are doing something simple, you don't need a Google level engineer...especially if you are not willing to pay a proper salary for one.
What do you consider "fun?" Does it have to be a startup or a ping pong tables in the office kind of place? Obviously HN is going to place a higher value on a startup, but there are lots of interesting jobs at larger companies too. Do you want to be part of a small or large team? How much autonomy do you want?

Figuring out exactly what you want is the first step in getting it :)
Interesting.

In the long run, I believe this is the wrong approach. Scenegraph-based UI can be easier to HW accelerate.
I guess, this would mean that a user can remove the ads from the ad-supported Kindle and save $40. This would mean that Amazon loses almost 30% in revenue each time they sell a Kindle Touch that is to be jailbroken.
... Who then drive up real estate prices here in Austin enough that "normal" people have a hard time buying in town.

To the OP: get out of your bubble, man. Austin is one of the friendliest places around.
As someone who's prospectively moving out to the Valley from Austin in a couple of months, I'd say its perhaps the most interesting part of this thread...
ditto on all 3.
It is interesting that you didn't bother to read the article but took time to post this comment. I don't understand what you are trying to prove..