skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook Vs. YouTube | Social Network Introduces Video Embeds and HD Options
FYI, you might want to check into acupuncture for that neck and back pain. It worked great for my shoulder pain. Good luck
A Double Handful of Programming Quotes
Arrays, What's the point? - Stack Overflow
Everyone should take note of this.

Even exceedingly tech-savvy users will avoid using things that require registration. By all means - encourage registration, but if you require it when it isn't strictly necessary, you'll run off most of your potential users.
Ruby The Smalltalk Way
Vote for the Sexiest Geeks of 2008 | The Underwire from Wired.com
"And I don't care that they will bring in more money than it costs to hire them. I'm still not OK with it."

You need to get your priorities straight. The goal is to help people, not to look good doing it.
In that case, it should replace ö with o, etc.
You seriously need to appreciate the distinction between CS and coding. Let me break it down: computer science is really difficult. It's not the CS jobs that go to India. It's the coding jobs.

Also, here's something you many not know. K-12 CS education in India is actually pretty good. My school started computer science in the fifth grade. Internalizing the Turing machine (even if it is not formally explained) at that age gives you a huge advantage should you decide to become a computer scientist later.

So how come India doesn't produce good computer scientists? Actually we do. If you look at the top CS conferences, the proportion of Indians is pretty high compared to the number of people we graduate. It's just that Indians choose to move to the U.S. to do research because there are no good government funded research programs in India.

Next up, innovation and design. I think PG pretty much answered that one. It doesn't matter if you have talented people, if you don't have a nurturing environment like Silicon Valley, it's just not gonna happen. There's not much incentive for an Indian firm to innovate because our business climate is just so bad. Success depends more on how well you can bribe government officials than on innovation.

That leaves coding jobs. If you teach everyone how to code, of course you're going to have a lot of coders who aren't particularly good designers or computer scientists. That's what we have. Many of my friends who are actually good tried to kick it in one of the outsourcing firms, couldn't take the boredom, and left to go to grad school or do something else. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.

To summarize: K-12 CS education is not hard, and it's important for producing good computer scientists. You just have to be prepared to accept that not every kid will be interested.
And add Qcodo/Qcube to the list of comparison frameworks, please. Thanks! and Congrats!
Random concern: I think spending too much time in a hammock is a bad thing because it hyperextends your knees.
Why Googlers Call Friend Connect “FriendSense”
Not really prepared to do that right now, but I'm curious about the logistics - work visas, tax concerns, etc.
Bits of destruction
To me, it seemed like he did mostly believe what he said in his rants. He is only backing away from the ZSFA persona, not the things he said during his ZSFA tenure. As someone who's done time as a troll, I can verify that the persona can get pretty constrictive, even if there is a core of truth in everything you type.
"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”

- Bill Gates

Every once in a while, I come across something new that surprises and impresses me about Bill Gates. If luck had fallen differently and Bill had become merely a millionaire, I think geeks would find him much, much cooler.
Nice and very useful.
One of my friends (my major client) is doing his Ph. D. in speech pathology and designed a program to combat children with learning disabilities. We commercialised the program some time ago and it's selling well, as well as becoming a major tool amongst the local and interstate education sectors.

Mind you, reading is totally different from teaching computer science.
Zed is such a douche.
there is also a berkeley CS class youtube video that goes into the differences between a linked list and an array:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp8oiO_CZZE

it is a good intro to the subject, however, Shewchuk does not thoroughly explain the difference beetween lookup/ access time and search time for arrays and linked lists. I like the explanation given by the commenter on stackoverflow
While that may seem like a silly question, if Java and Ruby both lost the data structure entirely, my code would still function. (The frameworks it runs on, not so much.)

It is sort of like a programmer not knowing what a NAND gate is. You could get all crotchety about that, because he couldn't do a single thing without a NAND gate on his current system... but he really doesn't need to know the specifics. Many types of programming (not all, obviously) have abstracted away memory management and have pitiful speed requirements compared to the capacity of hardware (and the bottlenecks don't happen anywhere near application code), and accordingly aside from syntactic inertia there is really not that much of a reason to care about arrays any more than there is to know about your NAND gates.

(Edit: It occurs to me that I could monkeypatch Array in Ruby and replace it with an associative array and my site would probably function fine... Maybe I'll try it just to prove a point.)
regarding immitation:

mirror system hypothesis

http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/arbib06mirrorSys...
Be careful, it wasn't the current Chinese regime that executed the rash of infrastructure improvement projects in Hong Kong in the 90's. In fact, the vast majority of the projects were initiated and executed by large British engineering and architectural firms to milk as much money out of building projects prior to the turn over to Chinese rule in 1999.
To use an analogy with cars - everyone should be taught how to drive one, but not everyone needs to know how to build or fix one.
A Techie Birth Announcement
I don't want to get into a debate here about what the best techniques for teaching reading are (not to mention how to get teachers in the classrom to actually use the techniques); my point is just that everyone in the system agrees that the schools have a duty to teach literacy to every kid who is biologically capable of it.

150 or even 100 years ago, I don't think this was the case; if a child didn't learn to read in primary school then it was considered the child's failure, not the school's, and the kid just dropped out and got some job that didn't require literacy.
Personally, I use lifelines. First I eliminate 50% of the wrong answers... If that doesn't work, I ask the audience. When all else fails, I call Bill Gates. :)
i recently had that plan with a friend too, unfortunately she had an accident. i have a little project to finish und would join in. planed to leave alone for thailand in the beginning of january. i'll send you an email

why the hell would yo need a workvisa?
Here are stats on math. In short: 1157 PhDs given out, and 761 have academic positions (the main place to get a job as a mathematician).

Actuaries, quant finance (it's not dead yet), crypto-related programming, logistics... there are lots of non-academic jobs (most of which pay better than all but the best academic appointments). It may be the case that giving up four years of earnings is not worth it from a purely pecuniary standpoint, but I seriously doubt that there is an overabundance of math PhDs given the jobs they can take.

The private sector is, of course, much less visible than academia.
Bringing Merb's provides/display into Rails 3
The real problems are coming when China wants to cash their bonds to fund their $500b infrastructure rebuilding projects and the US simply can't pay up.
dupe -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409639
Highly recommend Martin Gardner's books. One of my favorite childhood authors.
I know you did, and I acknowledged that, I was just trying to point out to you that you have the ability to change those emotional reactions; they aren't set in stone or based on logic.
He has a blog.

http://ferfal.blogspot.com/
One time I told an interviewer was my biggest weakness is my unwillingness to repair my relationship with my father. I did not get the job, but I got a good laugh. I guess making the interviewer uncomfortable is bad.
Definitely curious about this. What country are you moving from?
"Many investments have been marked down significantly. Investors would have been better off buying the S&P 500 index, which is down 0.4% annually in the same period."
I'm worried that (according to his stackoverflow profile) a 'Long-time Informix user and developer, experienced in C and Unix (many variants)' asks such a question.

I mean, seriously?
I think I agree and also disagree here.

Richard Dawkins talk about how genes suited to doing well "in average" environments tend to be the ones preserved. In other words, evolution produces people good at whatever the average tasks are in their environment, so "super heroes" are unlikely to emerge from evolution, but, say, "cubicle drones" are. Mediocrity, or being able to "fit in" in the "mean" environment, is a good survival-predictor for genes.

So, to VC. "Super hero" VC's will indeed go away. Meaning the "I'm investing in the latest dotcom craze and I am getting 25% or more annual returns" sort is indeed perhaps nearly extinct. But the VC types that looks at the market demand and diversifies his investments for more modest (average) returns, is going to survive. For example, a VC firm heavy in high tech could well collapse in a tech recession. But a diversified VC firm that invests in "essentials", like say, natural gas, that is still going to be needed even in a recession, is probably going to ride out the recession.

So, if I am in VC, which I am not, but if I were, I would look at building a diverse portfolio heavily weighted towards things like natural gas, utilities in general, that kind of thing, stuff that won't go away easily. I would, in other words, try to be an "average gene", not a "super hero gene" because per Dawkins, the average gene will be more likely to survive. Stay diversified, stay conservative, tack towards utilities and "essentials" if in a recession, and you might be "mediocre", but at least you'll survive as a VC firm.

In a word Superman may be dead, but the selfish gene of mediocrity is alive and well. :-)
Sounds nifty. I actually own a place on the beach in Thailand (technically, I'm a dual citizen of the U.S. and Thailand!); maybe I should stay there for two months and build new business ideas. Maybe I will see you!
I'm Thai and have been back there a few times the past few years.

One time, I stayed at a resort on Koh Chang (Elephant Island, a few hours east of Bangkok). It was pretty nice, and relatively cheap. And it had wifi. Make sure the room you stay in (or wherever your hammock is going to be) gets good signal. I couldn't get good stable signal in my room. I had to sit out in the porch if I wanted to go online. (Bring bug spray!)

You can stay/vacation in Thailand for relatively cheap. I would recommend you stay on a beach if you can. They have one of the best beaches in the world (not mainland beaches, but island beaches). And definitely take a few days to go sight seeing. Worth it =)

I'm interested in how this turns out for you. Good luck.

ps If you don't get paid locally for your "work", I don't think you need a work visa. And I use TripAdvisor.com for hotel reviews.
I think this is the key: "For me, trust and respect is driven by competence, but assumes a bi-directional loyalty."

Anyone who assumes a uni-directional loyalty in a business (or really any) relationship is asking for trouble. These days, I don't think many employees will assume a company is loyal to them, therefore their default behavior will not be loyalty toward their employer.

The whole startup/VC relationship, when done well, aligns interests such that bi-directional loyalty becomes more of a win-win. In the same vein, employees with equity are more likely to be in a "bi-directional loyalty" relationship with their employer.

I also like Brad's one-mulligan rule. It recognizes that one breach can be a mistake; two is a pattern
As mentioned in the Reddit comments on this, a stackoverflow question can be edited, and if it is, the most recent editor shows up in the bit you've looked at. And that is this person, who isn't the original questioner.
Ask HN: Is making clones bad?
Just a few hours ago, a friend sent me a message that he was planning to make spanish or french clone of a famous site. He said there was a market for this since this kinda site didn't exist in French or Spanish.

I suggested to him that he shouldn't make a clone of some idea UNLESS he's going to OFFER something BETTER (if it does something better I wouldn't call it a 'clone').

Am I right in saying so? Or is there anything I'm missing?
Charles River Ventures Trolling for Startups on Facebook
6% for 100k vs. 6% for 10-20k
That seriously scares me. Awesome!
Amazon had a very good Christmas
Sounds cool. I'm not seeing any info in your profile. Is it just me?
Even I'm confused!

The linux.com article http://www.linux.com/articles/6484 is dated January 04, 2001 (8:00:00 AM) - 7 years, 11 months ago

And in contrast the slashdot article http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F26%2F11262... is dated on Dec 26th 2008 (???)
inspiring for other cities in the world which are not traditionally considered as top tech centers
he IS offering something better. Does the original site exist in French/Spanish? No. So he is doing something the original site isn't.

Frankly I don't mind clones at all. Its all about execution...if someone can clone you and take any marketshare...then you might want to look for another job
A problem for hackers
Top 10 Microsoft Videos of 2008
How do spammers harvest email addresses ?
Err, localizing the site is already offering something better. I'd say go for it. Are you suggesting non-english people simply shouldn't have access to such a site because it already exists in english and the company chose not to build a localized version?

There's a huge market there ripe for the picking and many American companies aren't taking notice.
You can delete them off your iphone and you will still be able to re-install them off the itunes store for free.

itunes:
"You have already purchased this item. To download it again for free, select OK."
It occurs to me that I could monkeypatch Array in Ruby and replace it with an associative array and my site would probably function fine... Maybe I'll try it just to prove a point.

Why bother? Just spend half an hour learning PHP, which works exactly like this. It has a data structure named "array" that is actually an associative array, and which supports both array semantics and hash semantics (and, if you're not careful, will assume one when what you want is the other).

Is this a wise design decision? Yes and no. One less data structure to think about is perhaps easier for beginners. But, as we see here, it also encourages people to remain ignorant of how their data structures actually work. If you ask yourself "would I ever use PHP to teach a data structures class", the answer would seem to be "hell, no" -- which tells you something. And when you do have to think seriously about performance (which, though it often happens too soon, does have to happen eventually) it seems to me that you'd want an array primitive in your toolkit. (At that point, hardcore PHP developers would probably advocate just dropping into C and writing C extensions.)
MercadoLibre.com started out as a latin american 'ebay clone'. They seem to be doing okay (== monopoly in their region); in fact, ebay now own a stake in them.
Amazon says 2008 holiday season was 'best ever'
I would say taking personal finance would be a higher priority. I think we should require a proven understanding of compounding interest before giving out a credit card, car loan, or mortgage.

Understand pure CS seems to me less exciting for most students (especially for those that can't pass algebra) than getting into some engineering, where they can build real stuff. You have to mix theory and practice to maximize (and compound?) student interest.
Very true, and if this were a case of me disliking a fundamentally better language due to foreign syntax I would change that. However, after doing a lot of reading and experimenting with Ruby, I can't really find anything fundamentally better about it.
The biggest difference is that tdavis isn't a python zealot. Instead of talking about how awesome python is all the time, he's showing how awesome it is by coding with it.

He didn't force a rant to spark endless political-like debate. Someone politely asked his opinion, which is by definition filled with his own preferences & biases, and he politely gave it.
it's a good idea as practice. Otherwise, if you or your friend are planning to make it a major business, don't, because of legal repercussions when it will be popular
I'm already in Thailand since a month and am planning to do what you describe. Sill at the moment I am more into travelling around - Next month I'm going for Laos and Kambodschia. You definitly don't need a working visa if you work on your own startup code. Best to get a 2 or 3 month tourist visa which you can even renew two times by making a visa run to the border. If you come without a visa you'll get sort of a visa on arrival which used to last one month but seems to be now only 2 weeks! Best go to an cheap island resort with wifi or a nearby restaurant with wifi (where you can stay all day and use the net while ordering a coke every 2 hours).
$10-20 seems pretty high to my standards. I've seen rooms for $5. I would say you get an okay room for $8-14 but you might have higher standards. My current room is $25 and I have wifi by the hotel but I could easily go with less luxery and have wifi from somewhere over the street (often times you get an open wifi signal from next door).
If you have any questions, mail me.
Amazon expanded into Europe by buying up it's 'clones' in other languages, so this might work out well.

Facebook chose to translate and expand by itself instead of purchasing local clones.

I guess the difference is amazon was buying shipping and warehousing.
Celebrating lack of achievement
Ask HN: Hacking in Taiwan?
I'm in Taiwan for a few months and was wondering if anyone is over here doing any cool programming. I would love to meet up and shoot the breeze, or maybe work on something together.
There’s Lots of Tech Help, Yes, on the Internet
I can guarantee that the site he will clone is an actual clone of another site.

Everything you see today is a clone of something else and they simply change the theme, the message, this or that.

True innovation looks too dumb to be copied.
Bad? No. Cloning idea is actually good thing. We need multiple choices. Doing better is also not a necessary thing. I say doing different.
Interesting, Argentina suddenly popping up here a lot, see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408190

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407853
I have a screenscraping thing in place that targets an ASCII only environment (LambdaMOO mud). Manually replacing unicode stuff like this has been a pain in the butt. Luckily that was all just for fun and didn't need to be perfect.

Is there a good library out there (in any language) that does good unicode --> ASCII substitutions for major languages?
Sounds like a great idea, I couldn't find your email address in your profile could you post it here?
SAMSUNG U600 RED UNLOCKED
Samsung U600 is one of the best performance oriented handset of Samsung Company with different colors and multi function. It has also included powerful 3.15 MP of camera which will give you the best images ever taken having resolution.
Congratulations! Did you buy the domain name yet?
A simple, hands-on, introduction to Test Driven Development
That's a cool idea. A place you can go, hack, talk about your ideas, get help debugging, get suggestions, hear about new languages/frameworks/libraries, etc.

The issue I see is getting it to happen. A hackerspace won't be cheap or particularly easy to setup.

You have to rent (or happen to own) the space. You have to pay for power, heat/AC, and Internet every month. You have to buy seating.

It's a cool concept, and I really hope that some people actually go to the effort and expense of actually making it happen.
I consider the ease with which one can start a business in the US to be one of the pillars of its wealth creation engine.

The US, and the Valley in particular, have a culture which embraces the quick turnaround that can happen in the entrepreneurial world.

So it's good to see an unlikely contender like Argentina getting in on the game. I hope that it leads to serious wealth creation (and I hope that the Argentine government will keep things unregulated enough), since it should convince at least one or two other countries to open up more.

The wild entrepreneurial spirit might just be the US's best export.

EDIT: I'm a South African, with no American ties. I just can't help admiring this aspect of the US's business world.
When there's an issue, we'll register. But don't make us register beforehand.
Theory of Constraints Strategy SPIN Mafia Offers
"Bad artists copy. Great artists steal." -- Pablo Picasso.

I think as long as your friend is conscious what Picasso said in the quote above, it will be ok. Because the clone is just the starting point. There is market there but no product is available. So by cloning this product, he gets his foot out of the door and the rest of journey is up to him.
I once used latin1_to_ascii (The Unicode Hammer) in python: (works great)
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/251871/
Sorry to hear about the hassle.

Are you sure you didn't receive a series of e-mails warning about the upcoming renewal? That's what I always get from GoDaddy for each of my domains, prior to the auto-renewal.

For example, I received one at the end of November notifying me that one of my domains will auto-renew at the end of February 2009.

I just checked and have another from a few days ago notifying me of an auto-renewal for a different domain in March 2009.

IIRC, several of these are sent.
Echo that. Besides, unless the creator deliberately sets out to copy every last detail of the original, their knowledge of local customs will inevitably result in subtle design differences that will make the "clone" a much more cohesive and pleasant experience for people in the target market, even those who can speak English.
reminds me of the lifestyle described in 4 Hour work week