skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
good read. never been to china so wont be commenting on it.

India has more young people, and they believe in changing their destiny in their own ways.

newer generation is coming out of old moulds of poverty, and socialism.

satyajit ray and international media were interested only promoting the image of poverty in India. 20 years back there were many monopolies and license raj, starting any business was very tough if dont have deep pockets and influence with bureacrats.

we dont want the government to help or support us, if they dont create trouble and provide a security, rest the people will take care
I like Android a lot for mobile phones, and could definitely see it running in other embedded environments, but wonder if it's a little bit underpowered for something like a netbook. With Linux, you get stuff like The Gimp, OpenOffice... real applications rather than 'Google Apps'. They probably don't run so fast on those small boxes, but at least they're running locally.
Someone ought to remind the 'Plan B' executors about the toads and snakes introduced in Australia ...
This blog post had the material and insight to make a really great essay or lesson. However, I just can't ever really accept something like this from someone who writes in "chatspeak".

The guy fashions himself as a hacker as well as a manager. Surely he types fast enough that spelling out "you" instead of "u" is essentially the same effort. Other grammatical errors in the piece really detract from its ability to deliver a powerful message.

Perhaps it's just me, but I would not want to be represented by a leader who could not properly communicate.
Substantially lower than if you put a mic inside one of the servers, preferably next to the concealed webcam ;)

Also, to directly answer your question: The latency demonstrated is in response to high amplitude noise. For talking you'd need it to be sensitive to the frequency as well.

Perhaps you could tell if things weren't going well (lots of yelling)?
Chaining is interesting as long as you don't make yourself feel bad for breaking the chain.

But the best implementation is a physical calendar. Partly because it's tangible and partly because we already have plenty of external motivators. This implementation is the archetype of a system the should not use a database.
Disputed definitions: In search of the terms that get scientists most worked up.
Zune Leap Year Bug Fixed | TechJaws
There are some differences between the 98 and 2000 look, but it might just be the default color palette. I would imagine it looks like 2000.
Do something that will improve your product every day.

Do something that will increase the value of your company every day.

Do something to increase awareness of your product every day.
There are more and better lessons to be learnt from 300.
If it's not too personal, would you mind telling us how the job made your health worse?
OAL is obviously a module name, though I can't figure out what it is. "Io Ctl" seems to be something with "IO control", although I can't figure out what IO has to do with it.

The rest reads "HAL (hardware abstraction layer) initialize RTC (real-time clock)".. and that's what it does.

This is from five minutes looking at the source. Very little college embedded programming. What more do you want?
The point is not, what should a hacker/entrepreneur do every day. There is no one X. It's called X because it can be anything, including something tiny.
The Coming Venture Capital Boom
So basicaly wikipedia reflects the society we live in and the many varied views and tactis we humans use. Intresting.
Writely - The Back Story (2006)
Canada is much more self-conscious than the US. Incidentally, that's probably one of the reasons why we excel at comedy.
Are you advocating a one-sided view of big decisions?
Wilson?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioctl
I don't think any article on the issue of "look and feel" is complete without coverage of the two most significant precedents (both for what they say and what they don't say about it), Apple Computer v. Microsoft and Lotus v. Borland.

Lotus said (broadly) that public interfaces like menus weren't copyrightable in and of themselves, but that the implementation of those menus may be copyrightable. Additionally, the non-copyrightable menus may contain individual elements that could be subject to copyright.

In this particular case, I think it's just something that 37signals' lawyers had them put in to give them future leverage in negotiation if someone does release something major that significantly uses their "look and feel" - in my experience the precedents aren't nearly clear enough to make a look and feel suit an open-and-closed cased.

As ever, you should consult a local IP lawyer if this really matters to you, and not listen to what a bunch of people on the internet have to say.
I find myself wanting to see the version history for that function. Is that how it was originally written? Was the bug introduced by a previous bug-fix? By a refactoring? Something else?
This is really bad news for me.

I'm working on starting up a magazine, so I guess I'll be able to learn from everything that went down at JPG magazine. Maybe refine my business model a bit.
yeah androi over asus linux, and google docs with pre installed gears would be comparble to office
From the Final 'Exit' of VC to Modular Innovations on the Horizon
I've been thinking for a while now that netbooks should come with their own App Store-style arrangement, because a specific environment for small, simple, low-resolution-optimised apps would be a big boon. So I guess Android fits that bill... I don't think it's anywhere near mature enough to use at the moment though, but it's a step in the right direction.

Now, how about those other embedded devices... Android on my fridge and in my car's dashboard perhaps...
Popular photo frames carry risk of infection
Sure, you can pick a job like that. But similarly, the voucher recipients could pick jobs that cripple the plumber financially.
JavaScript is not only "not too bad", it is actually great. I wonder if it is even cooler than Lisp, because those hashes that are objects and arrays and everything are so versatile. Sure it would be fairly easy to create a JS style object system in Lisp, but I think it isn't there from the start (only know Scheme, a bit).
Maybe not, but who wants to write Java?

Parenscript is another language that compiles to JavaScript, and although it's very simple, I think most web apps written in CL use it. So it might not be popular overall, but it is popular among its target market.

Now if only I could have a cxml-stp style DOM in Javascript...
It's not really years away. It's basically a re-branding of Vista with some tweaks thrown in. Microsoft has even stated they are really pushing to get it out the door since so many people have developed a strange aversion to the word "Vista".
Honestly, for me it comes down to two simple facts.

1) I would like an OS would a better UI.
2) I don't care if it bugs you/others that they need to relearn some tasks if the UI is changed.

Obviously I don't think that change for nothing but the sake of change is a good idea, but in the case of Vista I prefer it over XP.
I don't agree with you because we don't know if he has kids. Kid is a big factor. If he has no kid, I think he is over-thinking.
Ugh I'm in the same boat- come up with any ideas on finding a co-founder?
In case you're willing to go up to $325, I'm very happy with my Steelcase Uno:

http://www.steelcase.com/na/uno_products.aspx?f=12279

When I was chair shopping I found that good chairs started at around $300. Assuming your definition of good includes "adjustable". As far as I know under $200 means either non-adjustable or craptastic.
Let's be a little more DRYer:

days_in_year = IsLeapYear(year) ? 366 : 365;
while (days > days_in_year) {
days -= days_in_year;
year += 1;
}
You use the word elegant like it's an objective statement, which it is not.

I would disagree about it being elegant. It's a fine language, but it has no unifying concept. It's procedural, it has anonymous functions, it has simple OO built-in. This isn't really elegance because you can't go anywhere uncharted with this. The simplicity is there because there isn't much built-in. Code is not data. There is no module system. There is no generalized flow control. (I am not sure why language designers like manually implementing function calls / return, exceptions, loop/break/continue, etc. when continuations generalize all of this.)

Anyway, JavaScript is useful, but it is a limited subset of nearly every other language. This may be good, but where features are missing, everyone has their own incompatible "fix" for that. That may or may not be elegance; I'm not sure.
Hi brk. Your points on grammar and "chatspeak" are well taken. Our blog was actually started as an informal, un-moderated method of communicating with each other (and friends / readers). Inferring that the author can not "properly communicate" because it does not match your expectations seems harsh, but is certainly your prerogative.
Right, so the first choice is door 1, and the host reveals that door 3 is a goat.

The decision to switch or not is really a decision between door 1 and door 2. At this point isn't your first guess completely irrelevant?

I've heard this problem and the reasoning before, and for some reason I can't get myself to believe that switching is better.
I am so sick of this problem coming up over and over and over again.

1. Let's say you make a choice. You have a 1/3 chance of getting it right.
2. Then you re-cast your choice. You now have a 1/2 chance of getting it right.
3. You must switch doors to effect the re-casting.

I'm glad people aren't posting articles about how .999.. = 1.
You need to switch in order to re-cast your guess.
From that function's comments:

// This function is called by WinCE OS to initialize the time after boot.

So how about calling it:

init_time

or maybe

init_time_after_boot
The only real issue with netbooks is the lack of ram. Who decided that 512mb was fine for most configurations?

However the 1.6GHz Atom processor is fast enough to handle full screen flash video. Mine currently has 1Gb of ram and can run Eclipse plus the Android emulator at a pretty good speed. Compilation is noticeably slower than my MBP, but that's about it.
If You Are Really, Really Desperate For Cash, These Guys Will Give You $3k
I am somewhat of an MS fanboy, I guess, because the work they put into their operating system allows me to game. Which is a significant hobby of mine. Makes it hard for me to develop too much of a bias against them, that is, unless someone comes up with a viable alternative.
Its lambdas don't even close over lexical state, so I'm not sure why they even exist. Yet another concept the PHP designers don't get, I guess, but feel pressured to add. (See also: PHP's object system.)
Minimizing sugar and starch intake is far more effective than exercise in this regard.
Why do we have to build a speculative growth curve into the term "startup"?

Presumably because, if the average small business with no net profits went up to a VC and asked for $3m on a valuation of $100m, it would be laughed out of the room.

I'm inclined to agree with you, but AFAIK the word "startup" was invented by small companies which desperately wanted to convince investors that they were absolutely determined to become large companies. So I'm not surprised that it still carries that connotation... the real surprise is that the connotation is wearing off. We're getting to the point where your proposed definitions sound more and more reasonable. Because it no longer takes five years of advance planning, an enormous staff, office buildings, multiple factories, and all the other big-company trappings to scale up a small company, if that company is on the web.
CapitalOne sends out offers of 1.9% interest until the balance is paid off (with an initial 3% up to $50 fee) if the owner stops using their credit card for a while. That sounds to be about as good a deal as one can get right now. Of course, you should have a zero balance before you take them up on the offer and not use it for purchases or subscriptions in the mean time.
Once you have enough shareholders (500+) the SEC requires you to go public. The SEC famously made a recent exception for Facebook, which is dealing with this problem because they haven given stock to many employees.
An accessible, easy-to-learn lisp platform with a full complement of libraries

PLT Scheme? Clojure?

Even CL has some of the best libraries I've used, although coverage can be spotty at times.

This still hasn't killed all the other programming languages, which leads me to believe that libraries aren't actually what matters. I think, instead, that most people pick programming languages based on what's crammed down their throats. For a UNIX app, you "have to" use C. For everything else, you "have to" use Java, since that's what you learned at school (now it's .NET too).

Popularity is overrated anyway. Haskell and SBCL are not exactly popular, but they have great runtimes, important modern features, and plenty of libraries and tools. The only reason not to use them is because you'd rather use Java instead.
yes but you do get the ability to phone and be phoned. and most likely 24h internet access with the 3G wireless card

how about a version of OpenOffice with phone features, such as teleconference for presentations (yeah, crazy thought, but you get the idea)?
You are reading into my post, things I did not say.

In fact I didn't touch at all on the issue of wealth per person or total US wealth.
Presumably you could lift that out of Android and hack it into a regular Linux system. Granted, it's probably better integrated with Android, though.

The problem with running "other code" (Open Office, for example), is that all graphics have to go through the Android interface - the whole GUI is done with Java/Dalvik. That might make it difficult to integrate other programs.
How about a little more CORRECTer?

#define diy(y) (IsLeapYear(y) ? 366 : 355)

while (days > diy(year)) {
days -= diy(year);
year += 1;
}
Using floats without need adds noise to the code, e.g. the ".0"s in foo = 0.0; bar += 1.0, and makes the reader wonder why floats are being used. "What am I missing?"
Darth Vader’s “Management” Secrets
This is also explained well by Kevin Spacey in the movie 21.
I was not so sure about submitting this one, but they did a good job of making fun of those insufferable "top ten management secrets" kinds of lists that clog the "blogosphere" these days.
Monty Hall Problem Explained in Video
My favorite bit is the pitch-perfect bio at the end.
For the confused: the year changes each time, so you need to recheck IsLeapYear each time.

But I wouldn't do it with a define but rather:

while (days > (days_in_year = IsLeapYear(year) ? 366 : 365)) { days -= days_in_year; year += 1; }
"a vehicle for the exurbs of both our large cities and our less densely populated rural areas. It would be easy to assemble and wouldn't require expensive new lithium-ion battery technology or exotic composite materials. It would seat at least six, have a range of 400 miles on a fill-up, and get 35-40 miles per gallon with greatly reduced emissions. It would run on gas, diesel, biodiesel, or ethanol. It could probably be sold for around $25,000 to $30,000."

And it would come with a pony. And it should fly.
We watched this video in class this semester. I had already heard of the problem from reading Marilyn Vos Savant's articles in high school about it. http://math.ucsd.edu/~crypto/Monty/montybg.html
I don't think this:

"The researchers had already discovered that each session of intellectual work requires only three calories more than the rest period."

Is correct. It contradicts everything else I've read on the subject. It also doesn't make sense based on how fMRI works (which detects increased glucose metabolism).

I know it's easy for me to sit here and bash some research I didn't do, but it just doesn't sound right at all.
Urban Innovation
How about a flying pony?

No assembly required, no exotic technology (except for the flying thing), seats two or as much as four with the optional buggy attachment, and it runs on pre-processed ethanol.

I'd like a brown one. With racing stripes.
“I won’t support IE 6 in 2009″
That would make a seismograph that actually records the data on itself.
I find two things fascinating about this piece. First, it is a book review, but the book being reviewed is 135 years old. Second, it is effectively a defence of opacity and inequity in financial regulation. And it seems coherent, too, though verbose. But I hesitate to accept it without having read the book and without any experience in the realm of central banking.
Twhoops - Rails app built in 5 hours
The keyboard shortcut Alt-up moves you up the folder hierarchy on Vista. When I discovered that, I no longer cared that the up arrow button is gone in Vista. Very handy.
Amazon Should Acquire Netflix - Here's Why
Linking to the print version caught me slightly off guard, but otherwise an interesting article.

The author appears to be asking for a car manufacturer to build a one-size-fits-all car and make it cheap enough for everyone to be able to afford. I would be unsurprised to find that a car that meets his specification already exist, but is hidden by the wide range of options and alternatives offered by the various manufacturers (the curse of choice). So what the author is really asking for is for a manufacturer to pair-down their range and only offer one car, in black... While this might be possible for a start-up this is not possible for any of the large car companies. My example would be the Smart car, started with one design, and now has at least three or four different offerings to diversify their customer base.

Can anyone provide an example of an industry where choice has been significantly reduced over time?

Link to original article: http://tbm.thebigmoney.com/articles/judgments/2008/12/29/nex...
"I would also question how efficient China's government is given the high level of corruption"

That's an important point. I think India's greater press freedom and thus greater transparency is to its long-term advantage. Free and fair elections that can turn out the ruling party keep politicians somewhat more honest.

Here's a question for readers of HN who live in China or have recently traveled there: when you are out at night looking at new high-rise buildings, how occupied do they look? Do most windows show lights, or are most units in the buildings presumably unoccupied? I ask this to check a statement I read from a recent visitor to one city in China.
I caught this article about a week ago but didn't think HN would like it that much.

Since then, I've seen Bagehot mentioned or quoted in about half a dozen other articles.

We think each time there's a financial panic that it's the end of the world -- unless we look long-term. None of these problems are new, and in fact they are most likely a built-in "feature" of central banking.
That wasn't insightful, that was gibberish. It further's Congress' continual confusion between "cars people will buy", "cars good for the environment", and "cars automakers are actually making"... that's three distinct categories, and it is wrong to collapse them. (The most frequent collapse is that "cars people want to buy" are "good for the environment". This is wishful thinking. People will prefr good fuel economy, all else being equal, but they're not going to pay twice as much or give up those little niceties like "a heater". Hold the auto companies to this wishful thinking, as Congress wants, and you might as well just finish digging their grave and throw them in.)

Watch the switcho-changeo in action: "Detroit's goal has never been to sell the cars that consumers want to buy; it's been to sell the cars that will yield the highest profits. By contrast, startup car companies such as Tesla, Aptera, Fisker, Bright Automotive, and Commuter Cars have adopted the Silicon Valley mojo, using indie, engineered-in-a-garage values to develop cars that people should buy." That's content-free. Along with the category confusion, it also appears to praise the Silicon Valley companies for not chasing profits. Yeah, that's the path to success alright!

And why on Earth would the startups want to deal with the unions? Almost by definition of "union", they do not. That was just gibberish. They may have to deal with unions (ideally a nice new one, IMHO, UAW 2.0 to go with Car 2.0), and hopefully they learn from how UAW 1.0 badly hurt their host, but wanting to deal with a union is just stupid-talk. (Dealing with pay and stuff: probably OK. Defining every job down to the n-th degree so theres no flexibility, aka "work rules", and creating thousands and thousands of wasted worker-days per day: deadly.)

Unions aren't free. In fact, they are quite expensive if they have an effectiveness at all.

And as Erik says, I can spec the perfect vehicle too, that doesn't mean it can exist.
Solar outdoor and garden lighting
FP had a great article months ago about India and China. If I remember correctly, the money was on India out-growing China, mainly due to corruption in China.

I put my money on systems that iterate and have the ability to be wrong often. As a rough example, in the U.S., we just elected a new guy and we'll be heading in a new direction. For about half the country, we were wrong and now we've changed course. We never stick with the same guys and the same policy: we're always mixing it up.

I don't see that kind of radical change-up of leadership and policy in China, but I do see some of it in India. So my money's on India as having a brighter future.
The newsstand that spawned Microsoft is set to close
Forbes: VC's coming collapse
Why your web startup will fail
I judge climate models by how well they predict the future, and no other standard. (Because there is none of any scientific value.) They are nowhere near 80-95% right now. None of them predicted the past 10 years correctly, and if we continue to cool, an entirely rational prediction at the moment, none of them predicted that either. By their own standards, by their own confidence intervals, the models from several years ago are at 5%-ish and dropping. (That's what a confidence interval is.)

No amount of, yes, hype can change this fact. It is unscientific babble that has you convinced they are at 80-95%. The massive-warming models are by their own predictions on their last legs, not on the verge of being vindicated.
There was a case where a law dictionary effectively claimed copyright over the page numbers.

Since the law itself wasn't their property (and was actually public domain afaik), and there wasn't any other original content in the book, they didn't have a claim on any content in their book, so instead they claimed copyright on the page numbers themselves.

From what I can tell it was upheld too when they were sued. Page numbers are a form of layout in my eyes, certainly without artistic merit.

http://lists.essential.org/1995/info-policy-notes/msg00019.h...

I don't think this is nearly as clear cut as the article wants it to be.
I've had a lot of luck moving "non-geek" users to Linux. For those that cite these (once valid) points:

* Driver support

* Running windows applications (and here I'm including their equivalent, or under Wine/Crossover)

* Ease of use/installation

I'd be interested to hear what distro they tried and when they tried it. My last few installs of Debian/Ubuntu, even on non-x86 hardware has been a breeze and certainly much quicker than installing a fresh copy of XP.
What took 5 hours there? I assume it is mostly the design part and css tweaking, since the functionality is pretty damn simple (and a few lines out of a gem).

I'm not being snarky, I'm curious where the time went on that project.

Also, a small plug for Sinatra, that app is perfect for it (or any other microframework).
All I use in Windows is the Run command. All I use in Linux is the similar feature. If I can't run a program I need in one line, I add it to the path or create a shortcut in the existing path.

Why in the world would they take this out!? Can someone confirm/deny this?