skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I citizen of a country buys that country's bonds then a portion of their interest is collected back as capital gains. Thus the country actually pays (interest rate * (1- capital gains rate) - inflation rate). So because the overwhelming majority of Japan's debt is owned by it's own citizens and it's in it's own currency they can easily drive their loan servicing costs below zero at fairly modest inflation rates. They can also achieve the same effect by slightly bumping the capital gains tax which is currently set at 15%.
Check out our new  Videos page
Neat! But it's in essence nothing more than an Apple TV?
without doing work, you die. if you're alone, quite literally, as you would starve to death.

modern man is disconnect from nature and questions work. modern man is also very surprised when nature strikes back. a simple camping trip can suddenly become a life and death situation.

we live in a world of massive division of labor. hence questions like yours. money is abstract. so go on try living our there for a while, produce your own food and drink. effing hard work i tell you. a full time job.
The world was a way different place 30 years ago. You couldn't reasonably have expected someone to have an extensive software portfolio or have experience at a tech startup. Now, both are commonplace among top hires.
Even all other things being equal, why is the fact that Synapse is a non-Mono app a reason to "switch"? If you're running an even remotely modern computer, the minor runtime overhead of Mono is a rounding error, and Gnome-Do wins handily on features and search effectiveness (I've used both and Synapse is much less accurate with searches).
I can't think of many pieces of commercial software available for Linux that aren't games.

I think games are really one of the few pieces of software that don't really make sense as "free" software.

Even on my Windows boot (apart from the OS itself) the only proprietary software I run are games + steam.
Considerably, I imagine.

Also include changing "solves a problem of your own" to "solve a problem that people will pay for"
There's no guarantee that new issues will crop up? Well, that's an argument against mercurial as well, is it not? Hell, it's an argument against anything, so I wonder how you can consider it an argument at all.

Actually, the word 'guarantee' is so strong, that in fact you don't have any guarantee that the mercurial project will fork, or implode, or even that the next financial crisis would turn the world into a post-apocalyptic one similar to Mad Max before any of that is relevant. You don't have a guarantee of anything.

That's why unlike you; I didn't talk about guarantees, but 'chances', and chances are: the most active and successful project (git) will solve its issues faster than anyone else. I have seen that time and time again.

And at the time I wrote the article, I didn't even need to speculate, because the issues Google pointed were actually SOLVED at that point in time. So, no, Google was not correct. In fact, not only wasn't Google correct in 2011 with the benefit of hindsight, they weren't correct in 2008 as I explained some of their arguments were invalid.

And I mentioned; support for Git was one of the most wanted features, and they eventually did it. Most likely the only real reason they did mercurial first, was not any that they stated, but the fact that it was written in Python, so it was easier to port to their server tools; they mentioned something like that as a reason for the delay for Git support in their issue tracker.

And Git doesn't require any third party install, so that's inaccurate.

And yes, I mentioned in my blog post that I was biased, however, I can be biased and arrive to the right conclusion. So far, after 160 comments, nobody has managed to show that mercurial branches are as powerful as git ones, which suggests that my conclusion was correct.

Feel free to try to prove otherwise in my blog post, comments are open, and prepare to be refuted, like everybody else has been.
CocoaRestClient? http://code.google.com/p/cocoa-rest-client/
> As for torrenting, etc., "it's only 'free' if your time has no value" comes to play.

Whenever I hear someone disregard torrents offhand, I get the distinct impression that they've either never actually tried it or that they're simply being dishonest, because piracy has never been easier.

Have you actually tried torrenting TV shows or movies (or any other type of digital content, for that matter)? Contrary to the FUD that seems to be popular opinion on HN, it's a cake walk. Most importantly, learning how to use torrents is a (rather small) one-time time investment, whereas watching TV means that you perenially waste 1/4th of your viewing time watching ads. And don't forget that you have to keep track of when shows are airing and either watch them then or remember to record them for later viewing.

So if saving time is one of your primary concerns, the numbers simply don't add up in favor of broadcast TV, no matter how you look at them.

In fact, piracy is so easy that I won't even bother with free solutions like Hulu - why should I waste my time traversing 10 different sites looking for a particular episode of a particular show I want to see when I can go to the same torrent site every time and have a virtual guarantee that the content I want will be instantly available, and in HD, at that?

If you have moral qualms with respect to piracy, I can agree to disagree, despite my personal lack of objections to the practice. But claiming that piracy is somehow time inefficient is nothing more or less than pure prevarication.
and nethack , xbill , UT99 , UT2004 , Quake 1 - 3 , Doom3 and..
The Next Scripting Toolkit in Tcl
Launching an app in the App Store is hard. And the App Store is an incredibly stressful environment because essentially you only get 2 weeks to settle into a rank that will be the basis of your success. If you fuck it up, you're pretty much done because discovery on the app store is broken.

I work for a social game company that has invested orders of magnitude more time and money into figuring out the best route to launch an app, and even they recognize that even after all their analysis and beta-testing, they too can fail. But they have the most disciplined process to give them the best shot at winning. I'll offer a few pieces of advice from seeing their launch process:

1) Beta test internally until the app is "good enough" for launch. Bugs are ok. Put in monetization features immediately and test.

2a) Come up with a target rank you want to achieve (both safe and stretch) and figure out how you need to get there. For example, if your goal is to get into the top 10 free games, you need to have around 1.5 million downloads a month. To get into the top 25, you need about 1 million. Understanding these targets helps hone your strategy.

2b) You can't afford to not do some initial projections in your industry. For a free-to-play game as an example, DAU and churn and Lifetime Value are important metrics. You need to setup some initial benchmarks for these metrics, so you can gauge if you're being "successful" in your launch.

3) Don't launch in the U.S initially. As you've found out, you only get one chance, and the U.S is a huge market to fuck up. One great thing about the App Store is that it has geo-targeting built into its distribution, so launch in a much smaller market that might validate your idea. We chose New Zealand, because its a large enough market to beta-test an idea, but "Whatever Happens in New Zealand Stays In New Zealand" as our marketing director put it.

4) If you fuck up a beta-tested market, don't worry, theres about 25 others that you can use before launching in the "mainstream" markets.

5) You will have to pour money into ads, but you only have to do it for 2 weeks because ranking in the App Store is determined by velocity of downloads. So as soon as you launch, target with any ad-system you can get your hands on from Admob, InMobi, Facebook, Google, TapJoy, whatever. This will cost you lots of money, but this is what it takes to succeed. There is simply too much competition in the App Store.
The Economist magazine.
Call me paranoid, but I'm always a bit leery about installing extensions that have access to "your data on mail.google.com". A malicious extension could easily scrape data and send it to a remote server.

Does Google do any sort of QA for extensions to prevent this?

In any case, it would be great to be able to review the code for this. Looks super useful for those of us with small screens.
As is often stated here, if you are not paying for it, you are the product.
AFAIK google doesn't check extensions, similar to how the android market is run.
Hi Chris, do you think you could extract and share your knowledge and stylesheets the way that FB Bootstrap does?
I was LOOKING for the rudeness and condescension and I didn't sense even the smallest bit of it. So yeah, it's your prejudice. You should really keep that shit off HN.
This probably isn't a very popular opinion, but I've always felt that if tech companies spent more time hiring "get shit done" people instead of rockstars, they'd end up a lot better off.
Wow that was a great read, I like the part where the receptionist tells him that he was a horrible boss and tells him to read the disastrous press running on the front page of the wall street journal. At a certain level, I feel for him, it must have been a roller-coaster, but I feel more for the developers that pulled an all nighter and he still felt that they needed to work the afternoon, because unemployment was high and they should consider themselves lucky. When a person only draws a salary they work to live, not live to work, the author should remember that in future ventures. If you want sleep deprivation dedication consider giving up some equity. He does not mention whether he did so. But by the way he portrays himself in the article I am left to assume that they where probably not receiving an equity stake.
Cara mengobati asam urat
cara mengobati asam urat dengan jus kulit manggis xamthone plus adalah sousi paling tepat untuk atasi asam urat, selain itu juga xamthone plus mampu menyembuhkan penyakit lain seperti darah tinggi, diabetes, ginjal, dan penyakit jantung. Segera tuntaskan asam urat anda dengan jus kulit manggis xamthone plus.
The Cocoa-specific app looks interesting, but I think the Java-based alternative you were referencing was Paros[1]?

[1]http://www.parosproxy.org/download.shtml
I find the advise useful for certain situations. For example, hesitation is contacting a prospective customer for fear of rejection.

But this has the potential to lead down the path of mediocrity if applied in a company. Just one more lost customer, just another half an hour of down time, just another customer support call missed. They pile on.

The key is to know your core values as a company and be paranoid about them. If your USP is amazing customer service, you should feel like the world ending if one support call is missed. However you may not worry about occasional downtime of half an hour. The situation would be opposite if you offer an infrastructure service and your outage affects your customers' business.

The paranoia in these cases is not rational but that element of irrationality is your edge.
This is an impossible question to answer without any examples of what you are talking about.
For both discussions about governmental policies regarding conditions of employment and discussions about college admission policies, it's important to look deeply into the details of what the policies actually do. If long-term, sustained economic growth that spreads prosperity around the general population is the goal, then it is certainly possible to have too much governmental intervention, governmental intervention that denies employers flexibility and keeps the masses from helping themselves through free enterprise.

Your comment mentioned "affirmative action" in the context of college admission, and hived off many subcomments of varying quality. College admission practices in the United States are partly constrained by federal regulations (applicable to all colleges, government-run or privately run, that receive federal grants or admit students who receive federal financial aid) and partly constrained by state law in some states or by agreements in NCAA athletic conferences. Not all colleges have the same admission policy. Few people are aware that Harvard, which endeavors to interview all applicants for undergraduate admission and receives application forms with the applicant's real name in all cases, nonetheless reports to the federal government that 12 percent of its undergraduates are "race/ethnicity unknown."

http://members.ucan-network.org/harvard

In United States federal law, all colleges are required to ask their applicants and enrolled students questions about federal defined "race" and "ethnicity" categories. But students are not required to answer those questions, and more than 1 million currently enrolled students in United States colleges and universities are reported as "race/ethnicity unknown."

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/12282...

I know a family of "black" people who have a daughter studying at Caltech, which is reputed to pay very little attention to "race" as an admission criterion. I knew that young woman as she was growing up (she and my oldest son were classmates in a mathematics summer program, through which I met her mother) and she certainly had a variety of college choices when she was applying for college. It may be that she particularly likes being at Caltech just because it is reputed to admit qualified applicants, period, without consideration of issues that don't pertain to the applicant's ability to succeed in a legendarily tough academic program. Throughout the United States, when organizations make clear what personal characteristics they are looking for, and what benefits there are to joining [insert name of college here, or insert name of employer here], then young people of all varieties of ethnic groups step up and develop the qualifications. One of the best ways to honor the young people who develop competitive qualifications for competitive opportunities is for colleges and employers to make clear that what they are looking for is qualified applicants, irrespective of the social categories the applicants may belong to.
Any well-rounded company needs a mix of "rockstars" who push the newest fads and try to work out complex solutions (even if the problem is not always complex) and "get shit done" people who makes sure the release is ready by Friday morning no matter what. I've found that these two types of developers compliment each other well -- if there's mutual respect.
Unfortunately, 9 times out of 10, people interview for constructs they would like. And when you get int he job - you never use.

It's a lottery....I usually work on the personality fit.

Unemployed now for 13 months and counting.... ;)

(not really)

I've gotten many a mediocre score in the practical tests, but gotten the job based on personality.
I did not dismiss any use-case. As I said; they are mostly the same. So, if you don't need complex use of branches, you would be fine with either git or mercurial, obviously.

But that's a chicken and egg situation; you don't know what you are missing until after you try out. Oh, I don't "need" more memory, I don't "need" an SSD, I don't need a 1TB drive. But once you have them, you suddenly realize you can't live without them. And that's usually what happens when people realize how they can utilize git branches effectively.

You are free to disagree, but at worst, they are exactly the same, and at best, git branches are superior (and so far nobody has managed to demonstrate otherwise in the 160 comments in my blog). So, why would you pick anything else than git?
My latest favorite: Pithos, a GTK-based desktop client for Pandora. No more Flash, no more having to keep the browser open, no more "I am still listening" nonsense, and all media buttons on the keyboard work: pause, skip, etc.

http://kevinmehall.net/p/pithos
Google, Facebook, and Twitter to coordinate a blackout in opposition to SOPA
What do you mean by not liking complexity?

If you can't deal with complexity (whether or not you actually like it) you simply won't be a good programmer. Complexity is often imposed on you from the outside, it can't always be designed out. Things should be made as simple as possible, but often "as simple as possible" is still pretty complex.

As far as faddishness goes, I think it's worst in the Web fields. I'm an embedded software designer and while I have to deal with pretty complex systems, the underlying technologies change very slowly. When you're building something that has a design cycle of 4-5 years and will be in the field for decades, that's a desirable attribute.

On the flipside, when your design cycle is measured in hours and your product may only be live for a few months, chasing the latest fad may be the only way to survive.

If you like hard problems and want to be a programmer, there's lots of work for you out there. You don't have to live and die by webapps.
I was glad to see your comment, this one and the previous. I basically agree with you. I can tell you that I have considered many of the inputs and outputs you listed, and perhaps others (do I have a formula with values assigned to each variable? of course not). Ultimately, I'm unconvinced there is a final model that can be applied to address all the issues. Therefore, in the interim while consideration is put into the details of such a possible (or impossible) model, action is necessary. My problem is with discrimination. If there are better alternatives to AA, I'd like to hear them. Unfortunately, nearly every one who argues against AA simply wants to eliminate it with nothing proposed as an alternative.
I like this article on memoization - http://www.agillo.net/getting-groovy-with-fibonacci/

The diagrams make it easy to understand. It is in groovy though.
your product name sucks.

let's see what the main idea (and issue) is. proximity. you need to educated people, remind them constantly what the core of your product is.

75 miles is a bit much, meeting people is more realistic within a 5 mile radius, isn't it?

call the product "5miles".

super simple, everyone will understand. if you ever branch into metric countries, add "5kilometers".
Do you know the process they went about in selling everything? I'm in a startup and we may be thinking of this too, perhaps approaching competitors. But still unsure about it.
"The treated larvae grew to become large headed and jawed ants resembling supersoldiers."

If you gave a normal cat growth hormones, it might resemble a tiger. That doesn't mean it is one. That was the basis of my summary. I don't want to ridicule the research, and agree that this could have beneficial applications.
Downvoted by the Gangstas on HN? Oh well... :-)
They have had a historically high internal savings rate that allowed this. One thing to keep an eye on is their terrible demographics. I believe Japanese citizens as well as the largest institutional buyers (Japan Post etc) have just recently become net sellers of JGBs as they move towards liquidation to fund retirements.

Japan currently funds more than half of their gov't via borrowing, with the demographic shift and the internal demand for JGB turning towards net negative, they will increasingly rely on external buyers of their debt. I believe China has been a buyer of late.

What has worked for Japan historically may not work so well going forward.
The problem with No Child Left Behind wasn't the testing. It's that it was an unfunded mandate. The Federal Government was requiring the states to do something, but at the same time not providing the resources to do it with. Given that, can we really be surprised that NCLB was a failure?

This criticism, by the way, isn't new. Opponents of NCLB were (correctly) bringing up the "unfunded mandate" charge when the bill was still in consideration.
"It's clear all the traditional media is filtering stuff out that the Government wouldn't like these days."

Yes, and that's why one solution is to consume media from countries which are intensely critical of the US. For example, I regularly watch Russia Today, online. Even though some of it is Russian propaganda, they usually have some information about, or a different perspective on, US-related events that I can't get in the US media.

http://rt.com

EDIT: I just went over there, and coincidentally, one of the top stories is quite relevant to this thread.

http://rt.com/usa/news/homeland-security-journalists-monitor... (Homeland Security monitors journalists)(2012-JAN-07)
If you're on OSX, take a look on http://ditchnet.org/httpclient/
Homer: They have HTTP in browsers now?
You can pursue an economic policy that creates high levels of inflation without necessarily triggering hyperinflation. The goal of course would be to gradually inflate away the value of the debt, not to pay it all back immediately.
There have been attempts to run Elisp in Common Lisp. Generally it would not be that difficult to have both Elisp and Common Lisp in one Lisp.

Whether it makes sense to go that route and have enough community support is another question.
> In many countries it's not considered shameful to live with your parents while you're single.

I can completely understand that you want to live with your parents when you are studing (or a young working adult). But 28years+ is becoming a bit ridiculous. Maybe it is because a lot of people are not getting married anymore. But the point is that many people (and some of my friends) can not afford a really expensive apartment. Tokyo is expensive to live in.

Anyways, the point I wanted to make is the Article's comment about the clothes young people wear - it is quite deceptive to use such a metric.

> * "Japanese health care is a joke" compared to what? Look at life expectancy numbers, doctors per capita, etc.

Life expectancy is higher in Japan partly because of diet (there are not that many overweight people - that is almost the norm in USA and Aus. Even trying to get overweight with the FAtkins diet followed in USA and Australia would be prohibitively expensive in Japan).

The USA's life expectancy is also lower due yo violent crime, excessive deaths due yo traffic accidents, AIDS and other lfestyle diseases).

Yet life expectancy is not the only measure of health care. There are other factors such as quality of life. The simple fact is that dental care in Japan is far behind the west (and I am not talking about the poorest of the poor without proper dental care, but fairly rich upperclass people).

> ATMs are open 24/7 in convenience stores.

That is true, I grant you that. 7-11 ATMs are open, but you will not find your banks ATM open after 19h00 (e.g. JP postbank).

PS: The goal of my post is not for Japan bashing but trying to give an unromanticized balanced view. There are many things wrong with the Japan, just as there are many things wrong with the west.
Assuming this company has fun work to do (you'd hope so), there's nothing stopping them just giving you their work.

It doesn't matter that it's open source if you're not going to use it and no-one else apart from them is (a very real possibility).

In essence, I'd happily agree with the article after changing this:

> "You come up with a cool idea of an open-source project"

with this:

> "You find a _popular_ open-source project"

Now you can be certain (not just optimistic) that the wider community will benefit from your work.

(edit: I'm thinking along the lines of jQuery, backbone.js, nodejs, django, memcached, sqlite, Nginx, Hadoop, Linux, ..., not some dev's/company's lonely github project)