skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is my preferred explanation as well. A caveman would not notice a WiFi signal even if it was blasting right through the cave; he would probably be looking for smoke signals or something.

Also, a huge intelligence gap makes communication uninteresting. e.g. we know a little bit about how ants communicate via pheromones, but we're not trying to send "messages" to them; what would it possibly be useful to say?
This alone does not make the tactic invalid. A glowing review at least means that the candidate was able to make friends which is still a plus in the context of hiring.

The real danger is that the person you called is unethical and feels the need to get even for things like the candidate having exposed their own incompetence - clearly not a minus in the context of hiring.
What worries me is that people will see this on the front page, and as many never read the comments here, will think that this is community supported advice.

Luckily the facebook comments on the article are going a similar way as those here, but I wonder is they carry as much weight as the community feeling in this thread?
"Why should I invest in you instead of hiring 1/2/3 people and outsource the whole project?"

Most of the questions seem sensible but the one above seems really out of place (and would put me off whichever 'investor' asked it). Has an approach like this ever worked?

Having said that, it's nice to be reminded that there's a world outside SV/London where people can actually get started (and funded).
Maybe their governments cut the funding.
I too am surprised. In my mind, it has long been inevitable that - at the very least - the wealthy population of the planet will retreat into a virtual world, ala "The Matrix".

It's not just the benefits of instant, unlimited sensory gratification (which are IMMENSE - real-world physical attraction and location no longer becomes an issue for finding partners, you can enjoy any activity at any time which in the past could cost you enormously in terms of money and/or risk: in a virtual world there's no spread of diseases if you're not in physical contact with people, no risk of death driving @ 140mph, etc. which also means a reduction in health costs, etc.).

It's simply far more efficient in many ways: why physically travel to work when you can have virtual meetings, offices, etc.? You could attend university anywhere in the world regardless of your location. Doctors could operate remotely where it's physically cheaper to live. Sitting at home all day (or in a Matrix farm) also means using less energy so you eat the bare minimum, don't need to own a car, don't need a big house with a garden, etc. On a larger scale, how useful will e.g. war become as the demand for physical resources falls? The efficiencies are mind-blowing; it is globalization of both personal and economic activities and human resource allocation without the physical constraints.

Ironically enough, in the same vein as your comment, I would expect people on HN are more likely to be fans of such an extreme form of telecommuting, telelearning, etc.

Not that I'm not suggesting all of this is good or healthy. Who knows what the psychological or physical effects of such a lifestyle will be.

Speculating further: At that point, why bother exploring the universe? Or more interesting: to what extent would wealth exist? It seems people would only need enough wealth to maintain their physical bodies and access to the planetary supercomputer. Accumulating more wealth could prove very difficult since classical economics falls apart in a virtual world where supply can become potentially unlimited over time. Would it be possible to accumulate sufficient "real" wealth to construct devices capable of finding and communicating with aliens, and/or visiting them? Would industries capable of building such devices even exist after everybody moves into the matrix after a few thousand years? All in all, once civilization reaches a particular level of technological development, it seems like there's a very small window where anybody will see benefit to OR have the resources to communicate with aliens.
Why don't just link to the original source instead? I don't see how Slashdot adds anything to the article.

http://www.webupd8.org/2011/12/cinnamon-gnome-shell-fork-wit...
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/11/fr... on the same subject. I did post it here at the time but it didn't pick up steam...
The success of WhoAPI and the like is really helping the situation improve. There are a lot of great developers and motivated people here, a huge potential.

Congrats to WhoAPI.
A string vibrates on me when in the online course about Machine Learning a voice said "you don't need to know what a derivate is ..."
Can you elaborate on the Jack Dorsey reference?
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Twas ever thus. Look at how many great inventions and discoveries throughout history were arrived at independently and then argued for the bragging rights, before it became such a priority to share your ideas. Calculus and television spring immediately to mind, but there are many others.
TL;DR: if possible, create a develop environment which is as close as the live environment

I think developing servers are only good for people writing libraries or frameworks to get started. I might understand that people want to choose a small and easy to set up webserver to get going when starting developing a website.

But, in my opinion, as soon as you're getting serious, there's nothing better than developing on a system which as close as possible to your live environment (hardware is hard to mimic, so are websites running in the cloud) including same webserver and software configurations.

Of course this means that you either:

a) have any influence on software installed or
b) know what is installed and how it is configured on the live system

I encountered several bugs which happen to be only on staging / live server, but which I did not encounter in my development environment. Why? Different OS. At this point, I'm trying to recreate my live-systems in virtual machines as close as possible. This is not perfect hardware-wise, and software still might behave differently, but it's damn close.

Another plus: I'm on a rolling release distribution and software packages are updating fast. This can be problematic when developing websites and applications. All my server-software is in the VM. I can choose when and what to update, problem solved. It also keeps my desktop clean, no stuff installed for developing purposes.

There's nothing worse than developing on a windows* machine and deploying on a unix-based os.

* nothing against windows developers. Point is: different OSs behave differently.
While that does allow you to use a locally scoped variable (even one that shadows an outer variable), it's still not explicit scoping.
At least we don't dump our shit in the streets any more though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stink

(Check out the cartoon of Faraday!)
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The golden age of SEO is over but the good news is we're now living in the golden age of social media distribution. The success of Zynga and Groupon demonstrates that this is an even more potent engine for growth.
I read Chinese and Japanese. None natively, and I can read Japanese faster than my own native language. I can attest without the shadow of a doubt that native Japanese and Chinese speakers read way faster than native English speakers (or native French, Spanish or Russian speakers). There may be outliers, of course. Whether this is a matter of literacy level or inherent to the language could be debated, I guess. But the difference is substantial enough for me to think it's more than literacy.

I do agree that the example given is not good, though.

I find Japanese extremely good for visual text scanning. You can look for a particular character and find it at ease. Semantically unimportant text (grammar) is usually hiragana (visually very different) and loan words are usually katakana (also visually very different). There is usually a space after the main subject (in the form of the punctuation mark 、 - not really a comma and doesn't work the same way either）.

I can scan through text in Japanese considerably faster now that I can in my own mother tongue. From my point of view that's pretty definitive. My Chinese is still lower intermediate but I can see how my Chinese and Taiwanese friends read and they aren't any slower than Japanese.
So a more advanced civilization would have a better spot in the Universe? I don't get your point.
That makes plenty of sense to me; when do you ever want to leak a for loop counter to an outer scope?
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The main obstacle for me seems to be that by entering the VR, you're actually getting your chances to reproduce down to exactly zero. By the way, a good book on this subject is "the machine stops" from the early 1900s...
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I think thats kind of the intention :)
> "Why don’t you sell your house/company/whatever if you believe that much in your product?"

How is believing in your product an excuse for not trying to minimise risk.

Especially if you know that most startups fail, there's no good reason not to hedge your bets when it comes to stuff that's at the base of the Maslow triangle.

edit: logic error :)
Exactly. As I've read elsewhere in some SF book, what separates us from aliens isn't so much space than time.
Last time I was on a plane I'm fairly sure they still said "When putting bottles of wine in the overhead compartment, please be careful because if they fall out onto people it can be dangerous."

They're giving you hints and tips.

(Also chlorine-based cleaning products are readily available from the cleaner's cupboard in the departure lounge.)
So we have Gnome3, Gnome2, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Unity, this + gazillions more I don't even remember about.

Anyone still believes Linux has any chance on a desktop market?
While not a seperate product, you could run the old program manager and file manager from Windows 3.x by running 'progman' and 'winfile'.
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@amirmc
Actually we were asked that question (outsourcing your project) couple of times. There are few more than tricky questions. You really have to think hard when someone asks you "What if someone copies your service, and offers it half the price?". Every question is a different test.

@ofca
I totally agree! If you don't know the "WHY" there's no point in starting anything! There are lots of other important questions as well.
I second the arduino + book suggestion. I had a tough time learning how to program, I had trouble motivating myself because all the things I wanted to do were complex, and "Hello World" programs aren't motivating, just letters on a screen...

After I got my first Lego Mindstorm robot (13 yrs-old), I got more interested, but it was a pretty limited robot. It wasn't until I started playing Second Life (15-16 yrs old) and learned their scripting language (and even made some money) that I got highly motivated, because I could see things happening and it was quite easy.

I would say an Arduino + book would have motivated me even further than SL. I know Wiring (Arduino's programming language, which is pretty similar to C) isn't as pretty as python, but when you are coding for the first time, you don't mind syntax, all you care is being able to finish the challenges you (or someone) set for yourself.

EDIT: I don't know any beginner arduino book, but Make magazine and some Make books available in O'Reilly seem to be good resources.
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My small business has always been global and now I am starting to look at expanding quite quickly. Now I am in a position where I may even be able to execute some ideas that might be of interest to investors.

The question of whether to go global at first is really a very hard question. I think it absolutely depends on the business. Many businesses would benefit by starting locally and working closely with customers at first before going global. Many other businesses would benefit by going global right away. Making the right decision here is sort of tricky.

Now, one thing to note is that this isn't an all or nothing question either. A smart business will globalize where it makes sense and localize where that makes sense. For example, if I am going to go and provide (or send someone to provide) training, I am not going to send someone half-way around the world for a short-term training contract. On the other hand, sponsored development on LedgerSMB is easily global. Payroll subscription services will naturally be a series of local offerings, while technical support for PostgreSQL can be more easily a global one.
Experts drafted in to improve 'painfully slow' adoption system
Couples are forced to go through an overly bureaucratic process that can reject them on grounds of race or simply because they are overweight or smokers, while children have to wait on average two years and seven months to be adopted.
Can you expand on why?

* Update: Specifically for you, rather than in the wider sense; how does Exchange make /your/ life easier?
Gnome2 is dead.

Sure, it's still installed all over the place (just like Windows 98 and XP might be), but it is by all means a dead project.

Unity (and this fork, as I understand it) are based on Gnome (3!) and just replace the shell. So your list becomes

- Gnome (Gnome-Shell, Unity, this fork)

- KDE

- (list of minorities)

For me - while being a Gnome guy and preferring the gnome-shell option from that list - the choice doesn't really matter. It's as moot as arguments during the times of Windows XP were, about whether you should enable the classic mode or use the Luna theme.
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IANALinguist, but it seems to me that the chinese and english versions of 'dragon' are equally complex. Sure, the chinese character takes less width, but it takes 16 strokes (being generous). 'dragon' takes 11 strokes if you're being really harsh. My gut feeling is that while the english word is wider, it's of similar complexity to the chinese word. Gut feelings don't make good science, though :)
Yes. We could argue that people would still buy tickets even if they weren't available online, since flying beats car / ship traveling even if you have to walk to a store to buy your ticket.
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I wouldn't consider the jump from 382 to 386 words per minute to be "way faster". That said, in a periphrastic language like English, those 382 words convey less meaning.
But I want to find developers who will help me deliver the business objectives. Rewriting list reversal code doesn't do that.
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You're assuming that extension compatibility is a priority for him. I didn't see any evidence of that in the story.
There's a plausible case that advertising is a negative-sum game (in the game theory sense). If no one advertised, they wouldn't be worse off since we would still buy the stuff, but if one player defects and advertises, they gain an advantage so the Nash equilibrium involves wasting lots of money on advertising to no net gain.
Speaking of which, anyone know what the state of Focus Follows Mouse is on all these various platforms? I could not live without it.
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And when do you ever want to leak local variables to an outer scope? Never.

Not to mention that loop counters are no different than other `var`iables in JS.
I was of the impression that your conclusion was the same as that of the author of the article? (And it's pretty much where I'd place my bets.)
Exactly - impacting the bottom line is an excellent way to get peoples attention.
Ask HN: How do you take breaks from work without really wasting that time?
> I doubt that this "GNOME 3 with a GNOME 2 interface" will get very far either

It's already the default in the current release of Linux Mint, they've just been hamstrung by the limitations of extensions in fully realizing their vision.
Most office workers spend very little time interacting with the desktop. They'll have some office suite open, or they'll have their niche piece of software, or they'll be using some manufacturing / accounts (I'm trying to describe things like Sage Line 50, Line 100, etc) open.

The barrier to Linux on the desktop in that situation is not the desktop being used, but the main bit of software being used.

Provide Line 100 in Linux, or EMIS (Egton Medical Information Systems or similar) on Linux with some decent support system and you'd get a lot of uptake.

Remember that small offices (under 20 people) often have no IT department, they have the guy who knows about computers and a support contract. Other people won't know how to CC or BCC, or how to sort a column of numbers in a spreadsheet. See also Google showing that the vast majority of people were using the + operator incorrectly.
They have a code base of 3.5M LOC and 10M users.
He's not forking the whole Gnome 3, just the shell so it looks more like Gnome 2. Keeping the backend untouched should keep the compatibility issues to a minimum and guarantee that libraries are up to date and no work is unnecessarily duplicated.
I'm wondering, if several engineers spent months porting their php code to hiphop, wouldn't they be better off just rewriting critical parts of their code base to c++?
Well, elasticsearch is written with this in mind as well - so whats the huge difference in those?
Try Yammer, it works great for small teams (I am biased, I am the UX/UI designer at Yammer)
We can start by speaking up when someone crosses the line (blurry as that line might be at times).
What do you think is so magical about Apache that qualifies it for production use?

Years of bugfixing and at least some attempt to be hardened against common attacks?
1) think the differences between those shells are much bigger than between Luna and classic in XP

2) that it's a different shell, not a fully different desktop environment isn't really that important, for a normal user it will already cause confusion (maybe even more as it requires additional explanation what's the difference between the two).

Don't get me wrong: the thing that you have a choice is one of the virtues of Linux, but at the same time what it causes is that:

a) Linux is doomed to fail on a mainstream desktop market

b) none of the available choices is and probably will never be as polished as commercial competitors (and fragmentation is one of the reasons of that)
That's a fascinating topic for me, for two reasons:

1) At the local Hebrew lessons I met a minister of the embassy of South Korea. He told me that Korean is a praised language all over the world (it was news to me - make of it what you want) for its simplicity and therefor speed for typists. He elaborated and said that both the layout (keyboard, I assume) would be very sensible and every 'character' is actually a combination of consonant-vowel-consonant and thereby simple (triplets, always) and carrying a lot of information. Since then I'd like to learn more about this idea and confirm or bust that claim.

2) Learning Hebrew is hard. A real quote from a coworker was "It's an easy language! We only have 22 letters, after all".
Reduce your alphabet (alephbet?) from 26 to 22. Note that of these letters, 5 are only special versions of other letters and replace those in the last position of the word. Which leaves 17 letters for most words/the meat of the language. And most words are rather short (okay, okay.. I'm not comparing to German here, that would be pointless. Even compared to english it seems to be the same or shorter to me).

Bottom line: I still have a bet going that I can generate Hebrew line noise (following the rules of going with the 17 letters and adding the required sofit/end letter if required. Gibberish ending in נ would be 'fixed' to end in ן) and will hit word after word. On my list of possible weekend projects I have an entry 'Hebrew or not' to crowd-source this.
Prediction: your prediction is wrong.
We pretty much all drive cars, how many of us are mechanics?
More importantly, the amount of under-the-hood knowledge to operate a car was diminishing, not increasing over time, and I expect the same thing to happen with computers. They will be all around us (already are), but for most people there will be no need to acknowledge their presence, let alone know how to program them.
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Actually it really depends on what math skills you talk about. Is it really the material you are taught and can apply to software that brings a lot ? The ability to solve problems ? The culture of correctness ?

The common ground between math and programming is the requirement of a very good capacity to manipulate abstract concepts in a defined frame of known validity. But it pretty much stops here. In mathematics, you define all your abstracts concepts and frame of validity, in programming, you are given a (very shaky and detailed) frame of validity on which you build up abstract concepts.

The ones that are good in approaching the discipline through the study of details to build up stuff that will work on top of it will make the developers. The ones that needs a strong and well defined frame for their work, for it brings a much more powerful ground and enable to reach very high levels of abstraction, will feel more comfortable on mathematics.

No wonder why those that can combines both of those approaches can yield stunning results.
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gastric ulcers - ouch! Is that all I can look forward to?
And shrinking... (members that is)

Facebook used to be pretty unknown here in the Netherlands, but is growing in popularity, with Hyves losing. They were acquired last year by a newspaper and media conglomerate Telegraaf.
If HipHop supports 99% of PHP 5.3, then it took them months to change 1% of their code. Changing any more than that would have obviously taken longer, especially to a whole other language.
Taking brakes in an reasonable amount isn't wasting time.

Scan some blogs or your Google reader. Just make sure you don't get stuck. I just sort through some "have to do anyway" boring stuff, sorting out blogs or other news for stuff worth reading later or sorting my email.