skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've all heard something to the effect of "you need to be happy with what you have". For me, this rings true. I've forgone the notion that I need to be working towards doing my dream job, having my dream house, etc. and instead looked for what can give me happiness on a daily basis.

Some cultures (usually found in developing nations) celebrate happiness more than others because they live in the moment. Some countries have amazing geography and lots of options to be in nature in a matter of minutes after leaving your house. This is why I live in Brazil and why I left the US.
Seed Accelerators Knowledge Base - info on YC & other accelerators
Was a common idea back in the 1970's; might have even happened if not for Watergate, stagflation and then Reagan.
Your second point makes it seem like there are so many laws that you have to be aware of to avoid getting your domain seized by the US.

Well yes, but in principle that's exactly right. Really think about this: in principle you need to know the entire legal code of the US and all of the ways that someone in the US might use your site to try to break that legal code, before you know whether you're safe. If you start operating the next version of CraigsList and people in the US start using it to sell fish which were caught in violation of U.S. law, it doesn't matter whether you realized it was happening at the time, whether those fish are legal in your country, or any such thing; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could get a prosecutor to convince a judge to issue a takedown warrant for your domain.

What's that, you say? You just run a tasks-and-dates management web app? You'll ban users from the U.S. from logging in? That's not necessarily going to help. If your service gets used by some radical Muslims in some country that the U.S. happens to be bombing, they might take you down. Given the tempting targets, I guess you'd best be banning Iran from logging in, just in case the elite there find your app useful.

Bottom line is, in this case it's quite possible that the gambling enterprise that they were running was perfectly legal in their home country and happened to be illegal in one state in the U.S. -- and people in the U.S. were using it for its intended purpose illegally. So in the bigger picture, if you really think about it, the fact that you're not catching the US government's attention yet is no defense: in principle you need to know all of the things which are illegal in the U.S., and how users both inside and outside of the U.S. might use your site to do those things. Otherwise, you'd better move off of .com, to some domains run by a government which doesn't routinely steal them.
Very cute pics! We definitely want to feature more user's pets on the homepage. =)
Yup, I had the same reaction. Still, once I figured it out I was duly impressed. I hated clicking links and having it launch the never-used mail.app.
With the way people use browsers these days, load time has become even more important. As I tell my clients and bosses:

"It's never a choice between two seconds and five seconds. It's a choice between two seconds and whenever the hell they come back to this tab, possibly never."

Many people go about web performance the wrong way, though. It usually isn't about algorithms, or hard work of any kind. It's mostly about rigorous preparation (a build process to combine and minify your assets) and outright lying (async loading, etc.).
The first thing a power user will do is to go to the old-desktop and stay there, basically not interacting with metro at all. There is no point, it's about as useful as the winkey+tab is on Vista/W7.

I don't know if you're trying to troll or you're just incredibly short-sighted, but I'll bite.

Windows 8 is clearly designed as a hybrid OS, in the same vein that Ubuntu on Android is, even if Microsoft's marketing team don't outright say it. It's fills the use case of "I love my iPad, and I love my Mac, but I really hate that I have these two devices."

Within a year, you're going to see probably about 30% of the new machines being manufactured as tablets, with docking stations. Run the machine in tablet mode, and you get Metro, perfect for reading web pages and flinging Angry Birds around in bed. When it's time to go to work, you pop your tablet into the docking station, and up pops the Desktop for productivity apps. Metro is not going to disappear like Media Center did. It's integral to the whole thing.

The iPad is not a machine to do large amounts of work on, but you'd be surprised how many people are trying to. Have you been on a plane recently? A good half of the iPads I see are actually jammed into some horrible looking keyboard dock. Consumers seem to really want a machine that will do this. That's what Windows 8 is.
IPad 3 concept video: How Apple could really blow us away
Take off your shoes, get rid of all liquids (unless they're in a plastic bag, of course -- those are always safe), look up at the anxiety detection cameras, and enjoy flying in Complete Safety (R) (TM).
Well, it happened, so... 100%?

Since you're looking for a specific birthday which occurs (assuming random distribution of birthdays), 1/1461 of the time. I think you've got n(1/(1461^y)) where n is number of employees and y is the number of people who could have Feb 29. That should give you the percentage likelihood.

1k employees => .4% chance

10k employees => 4% chance

Unless, they're twins :)
With things like this I'd rather wait for the 2nd or 3rd run anyways. They are a small group who are doing this on a shoestring budget for a price point with a tiny profit margin and targeting a highly technical audience; I won't be shocked if there are some small hardware bugs that make it past QA in the first run.

Its worth the waiting a little bit to let them iron all that out.
I worked for a company where lots of managers and executives wanted to have their say.
Product managers, purchasing department, sales, finance and of course the top-executives.
They got the product ready more or less on time.
When it was introduced on the market, demand exploded and in a positive way.
They made hundreds of millions of dollars.
Based on that, the endless meetings, the revisions, the compromises had all been worth it, right ?
Not really.
The writing had been on the wall from day one.
The product looked ok on the outside.
However, they had been using cheap and low quality electronic components that stopped working after xxx hours.
And they had problems with the grounding, due to a low-cost design decision.
That made matters worse because it damaged other components.
They ended up replacing the components of the circuit boards and rewriting the software.
They did up to 3 retakes. It was crazy expensive.
And don't think for a second that was the end of it.
The customers were leasing the product and they had a purchase option after 3 years.
Guess what they ended up doing ?
Some no longer wanted the product and some negotiated the price down.

The entire company took a huge loss, a restructuring took place, the division was shut down, people were fired, some were moved to another division, the CEO was replaced and yeah, fast forward : it's not done yet ...

Lesson learned:
Cross-team communication is necessary and productive, but you've got to know who to listen to.
Side note: use of the singular @ return value instead of 'this' is discouraged
>The worlds most expensive security theater. Making you feel safer for your troubles.

And humiliating you so you're more likely to accept whatever the federal government doles out in the future. Psychological conditioning.
mailto: is getting less common due to spambots?

I thought spam filters were getting better. I never hide my email address and get next to 0 spam (gmail).
Accumulo, Nutch, and Gora
If you have problems with the theme colors of VS 2010 you can use the free "Visual Studio Color Theme Editor" extension:

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/20cd93a2-c435-...

I use it to get the colors which match the rest of my Windows environment. Still pity they don't read the Windows settings by default.
Today, February 29th, is a "leap day" which happens every 4 years in a "leap year"... Otherwise, the last day of February is the 28th, and today would normally be March 1st.

I'm assuming that when the day rolled over, it caused an issue with an internal system at Microsoft, that had something to do with certificate dates and/or timestamps.

It's not just Microsoft that it's happening to, today I could not automatically renew any domains at Namecheap that expire tomorrow because the registry could not produce the correct expire-at date.

Leap days cause odd issues.
The Leap-Day Birthday Problem: A Bayesian Twist
I'm curious to see what the data fiends on HN can come up with for this!

Here is an interesting twist on the canonical 'birthday problem'[1] in probability: http://twitter.theinfo.org/174910990750728193#id174912339269787648

A more precise form (since I now have >140 chars): ' What is the prior (for a group of size N) for having exactly two collision pairs of birthdays, with one on 2/29?'.

I spent just a few minutes on this when first thinking about it last summer, but depending on how much information you're willing to incorporate, you could create a fairly complex model for this simple twist.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
If a company violated SEC rules it would have to be trading through a US exchange

Not necessarily. If ABN AMRO markets Turkish bonds to US investors it will have placed itself under SEC jurisdiction just as much as Lehman Brothers marketing mini-bonds in Indonesia placed itself under Indonesian jurisdiction.

The US government has gone further with financial institutions. Take, for example, the Swiss banks helping Americans with tax evasion. Let's exclude those with US branches, e.g. UBS. Here you have American citizens travelling to Switzerland and opening accounts and the Swiss company is held responsible merely for doing business with an American.

I'm not making specific arguments on whether this is jurisdictional over-reach, but characterising the .com seizure in the OP an un-precedented move by Luddite judges isn't fair.
Chaar Din Ki Chandni Bollywood Hindi Movie Star Cast, Crew
Hi Matt, you make some interesting points. Here's what I think as a relative newcomer to both Ruby and Rails (but not to building large/busy websites).

MIGRATION/UPGRADES & STABILITY VS PLAYGROUND ZONE.
I appreciate what you're saying and yes upgrading could be easier - but the benefit of the way Rails does it now, is that uptake is significantly higher, because it is practically pushed on you. I think I prefer this because it helps keep Rails cutting edge (one of the reasons I choose Rails over other frameworks). Maybe I'll change my mind once I've got a few apps that need upgrading - then again maybe not, I've always preferred redoing things from scratch than upgrading/patching things anyway (with app-powered sites such as wordpress/vbulletin - I would redo the customisations from scratch for every major upgrade - but happy to patch minor updates).

PUBLIC/PRIVATE/PLUGIN APIS.
I don't really have an opinion on this.

RAILS/MERB MERGE WAS A MISTAKE.
I remember when I first started researching web frameworks, the Merb and Rails split worried me - as I thought it would end up in two factions (two frameworks basically aiming for the same thing) and would split the community. So the merge did two things (for me anyway) showed me the community is united (and not affected by egos), and made me feel better about coming to Ruby (instead of going with a framework in another language).

TECHNICAL DEBTS.
Again I don't really have an opinion on this being a relative newcomer - but I guess many people would disagree.

KEEP THE COST OF ENTRY LEVEL LOW.
This one I think I am qualified to comment on :D I didn't choose Rails because it was 'easy' to get into (although it is, because it is written in Ruby). I choose Rails because it was the best web framework. If people want wordpress-ease, they should use wordpress - a web framework is completely different to an off-the-shelf app which is designed for one main purpose, even if with some leeway for customisation. I left off-the-shelf packages for Rails because I hated being restricted by them, and I was prepared to learn to program to use Rails. To my surprise, learning Ruby and Rails was much easier than learning say PHP and CakePHP (which I tried briefly). Also, I believe anyone serious about learning Ruby and Rails, can easily, in about 3 to 4 months by following this guide: http://astonj.com/tech/best-way-to-learn-ruby-rails/

DOCUMENTATION
I have to disagree - I love the Rails Guides, I've been reading them from start to finish on my Kindle (currently half way through Digging Deeper). Of course maybe like almost anything they could be better, but I disagree that they're "far from great". Try working with a forum app where documentation is next to non-existent lol.

SUMMARY.
I came to Rails because I wanted a cutting edge web framework, one that was written in a clean, modern language - and that's what will keep me here. I'm aware and happy to continue learning and keeping myself up to date to stay current. What I don't want is a framework to lag behind others - that would very quickly make me think about jumping ship... and I reckon a large majority of others think the same too.
Great point! Thanks for the response, and it makes sense.
As someone who travels regularly and is not an American, I've had nothing but frustrations generated by the "TSA". Initially it caused me to unfairly assume all Americans are like TSA agents (i know this isn't true, but i guess its just my human bias). A few things that frustrate me:

- They are not friendly, have a real attitude problem and treat you as if you are guilty before proven innocent. You are the face of the country, the first impression every traveler gets. When i say "how are you doing?" as i approach, its what i say to everyone. Have the common decency to say "Yeah i'm ok" or "Not so great" rather than just looking at me like i'm an idiot.

- The TSA doesn't make it clear that they are just specific to the USA. When boarding planes in another country you hear about the "TSA" and you're like "who the hell is this International body that rules transport?". They are private agents of the US, no different to the guards that any other country has. This should be explicitly clear, because they act like gods.

- They seriously invade my privacy and treat me as if i have no rights just because im from somewhere else. Nothing says "Welcome to the USA" like having your body photograph, fingerprints taken (the finger printing seriously bothers me...i cant explain why because i dont know why, but it seriously bothers me is all i can say) and some border guard with an attitude problem treating you like you've turned up to take all the jobs. So much freedom, give me a break...

Moving all invasions of privacy aside, forgetting about how effective or ineffective the TSA is...i just hate the way they treat people. They have a reputation to up hold, they are everyone's first impression of the US and...given the USA's global reputation today, they could really do with some advice from Rackspace on how to deal with customers.

EDIT: Fixing my spelling of "planes" :-(
I may have 8 main applications pinned to the taskbar, everything else I do is through the start menu. Frankly, all I really need is the taskbar + start menu.
Apple Refuses To Sell Book That Links To Amazon Store
The Case For Eliminating Forced Office Hours
Coming Soon: New Facebook Pages
Broken, does not upload address book.
Are you sure? I would think that malls make a ton more money off of people popping in and out looking for specific items than people who hang out there all day, look for the best deals, sales (which are probably loss-leaders), etc.

I have no numbers to back this up, so if anyone does I would be very interested in seeing it.
The company which manages .com is headquartered in the US. This is also true for .org and .net and .us and .gov.

Under US law it is now possible for the US to seize any of these domain names -- and it will continue until the international organization in charge of this system (ICANN) says "oh, that's retarded, we're changing the system so that the US doesn't host .com and .org domains."

We had to fight against two acts proposed in the US which would have made it possible for the US to build a sort of DNS firewall to deny access to other domains from users working within the US -- our own rough draft of the Chinese firewall, if you like. (That was SOPA and PIPA.) But this other right was granted earlier than that, and is now being used to chilling effect.
2-3 years is probably too short. Somewhere around 10 years seems more reasonable. The same should be true for patents, although the biggest problem with patents is not the length of the patent, but what is considered a valid patent by the Patent Office in the first place, when most of them get invalidated in Court when tested.
I'm a bit confused by this thread. Can someone check this?

i) Doing trade with someone who is located in America means you have to obey those American laws? This seems reasonable, unless you've taken measure to exclude Americans ("Click here to agree that you're not in US" and using filters etc) and you're still getting done.

ii) It doesn't matter what domain name you use. But if you use a .com (and some others) the US can seize the domain names.

iii) Depending what country you are in the US may ask for an extradition because you broke an American law; even if what you did was legal in your country. Depending what country you're in (UK) that extradition request may be granted.
"First, programming languages aren't algorithms."

True, but irrelevant.

Any Turing-complete language will allow you to implement functions that don't terminate, and indeed in general implement functions for which it is impossible to determine whether they terminate or not.

Better?

"Non-terminating algorithms aren't broken in general, but this one is because there is a terminating alternative."

An algorithm is only "broken" if it doesn't work. That's not the case here. Among working algorithms, one may be a better than another because it is faster, takes up less memory, is more robust when faced with garbage inputs... many engineering tradeoffs. His implementation is probably safer, but it's going to use more space and be slower. Now, that's likely a good tradeoff for most situations, but not all.

However, his claim that the algorithm is "defective" because it doesn't work on random garbage is absurd. It's as if someone claimed that a car was "defective" because it grinds to a halt when you fill the tank with soft-serve ice cream, or that the most common algorithm for integer addition is "defective" because it doesn't work for vectors.

"Safer" I could live with.
What you can do with .tel domains seems to be extremely limited.

I am interested to know why you think .se is not trustworthy?
Personally, two things I would like to see added are a Metro-based file manager and a Metro-based command prompt, but I fully expect that will not happen.
Microsoft's shareholders would have had a fit if they marginialized the enterprise in this way. Let's face it, right now all of Microsoft's current future revenue is coming from there. The shareholders wouldn't allow them to go all-in against Apple in the consumer space right now.

I expect what you're looking for will be Windows 10, once enterprises have had time to get used to Metro.
OT here. Didn't know that this had been posted - here's my discussion post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3649114

Neglecting the 100- and 400-year problems with leap years, that seems to be a good frequentist estimate.

But if you look at it from a Bayesian perspective the question is how much you're interested in incorporating into the model. And there's quite a lot of

(Also, the problem as originally stated in 140 chars isn't really well-defined - though if you want to get cheeky with an answer of 100%, let's think about the probability for an unspecified NYC startup, rather than foursquare!)
I appreciate the EV calculation. That would probably raise the marginal value at which someone like Warren Buffett would buy a company, fix its problems, and make it productive again. I doubt he'd shut down Berkshire Hathaway, or that it would even slow down people intent on creating a startup; but it would have a marginal effect.

Still a bit different from the classic "going galt," though.
Coudn't you get wifi via usb?
How to Download and Install Windows 8 Consumer Preview
I was a beta user for Exec.

I used the website to order a task ahead of time - delivering a burrito to my boyfriend on Valentine's Day! The coolest part was being able to watch the delivery happen in real-time on my iPhone (super cool).

It was an adjustment for me to think of an everyday task that I could outsource. In general, I think that if people can make the mental switch, Exec will be a game changer.
Tomb of Jesus found under Condo in Jerusalem
How Gramfeed went from a 2 hour project to a beast visited by 2 million people
If you had sex in one of those Islamist countries, then yes of course. Look what Polanski did in 80s -- he ran away to Europe where laws are different not to face persecution. But he did have sex with underage on the American soil, hence it was in US interest to persecute. Had she gone to Europe and had underage sex with Polanski and came back to States and filed rape charges, that would be entire different story.

In Bodog case one could only wonder how much traffic they were getting from US. At some point, perhaps if they knew whats coming, they could ban US traffic or put notices all around their web that "there may be some laws in your country banning you from purchasing out products" etc.
I think all those situations are "out of the ordinary". This has only happened in the past couple of years. Not to mention that I don't think US should "own" the .com domain.
For what its worth, I ended up getting it working with the same fix Parallels recommended for the original problem with parallel tools -
http://kb.parallels.com/112317
As a compromise, the infinite copyright with a required payment to maintain it of $2ⁿ⁻¹ with n being the number of years since the creation of the work seems reasonable to me.

People would hold copyright as long as it made financial sense, and orphaned works would rapidly drop to Public Domain.
>Accept reality; most people don't like Windows Phone 7.

Most people don't even know about Windows Phones, and many of those that do are already wedded to iOS/Android phone contracts/ecosystem.

I would hope for you to back up such statements with some substance. By your logic, most people don't like OS X as well.
Really? I've never heard of anyone I know getting a sub-1-hour response time on TaskRabbit from request to starting a job, much less 10 minutes.
stick a dongle on it.
.org is operated by PIR (actually afilias in dublin according to wikipedia) not sure exactly how much leverage the US has over it currently.