skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There are plenty of specific areas where other countries are better than the US, but no single country which is enough better on enough things to be a serious competitor.

Germany. Better education, better attitude, more open-minded, less harassment for being weird/nonstandard, median level of critical thinking ability, healthier food, better transport, more cultural things to do/see, better solutions to the growing underclass problem you described elsewhere.

There are tons of hacker-mindset people here (it's something in the water, I swear), and while there are lots of annoying hoops to jump through in the entrepreneurial arena, the general quality of life is vastly improved over the US in almost every meaningful day-to-day way. Economically the differences have already been done to death.

The US is coasting, and I believe it will implode financially within our lifetimes.
Cletus: it's an unwelcome intrusion

Harry: like television commercials?

Me: Yes, like TV commercials and youtube commercials and the multitude of unwelcome intrusions that do have some effect, that provide some value for the intruder but which are low grade on the developing advertising food chain.

Harry: ...the foundation of an I don't even know how many billion dollar industry.

Me: You mean like the multi-billion newspaper industry? I'm not saying that TV will go the way of newspapers but you remember TV happened before the net right? The vector today is towards ads that give people what they want, not ads that impose things on people (these won't go away but they aren't a high-value area).
The Wide Landscape of Java
The Top Personal Firewalls for 2012
Xbox 360 Repair: The Dreaded Red Ring Of Death and the Simple Fix
Princelings are a big problem; I'm glad Bloomberg followed the trail on Xi Jinping (China's apparent next president).

But really, the censors are way behind on this. All of the middle class knows this is how China works (political power = money) while the rural class doesn't care. So where do we go from here? Those in power hardly want to change a system that benefits themselves so greatly, and the system will continue to become more dynastic (certain families accumulating lots of power and wealth).

Bloomberg is going to be out for awhile I guess. But check out the Streisand effect going on, the visibility that the meta story is getting is much more than the original got!
I agree, there is certainly potential there. However, much in the same way playing street fighter is crap on a keyboard compared to a joystick/pad and any FPS is crap on a controller compared to a mouse + keyboard, a huge portion of game types just aren't suited to the 'slate of immovable glass' form factor.

Imo, mobile gaming is good at:
- The tiny subset of games where the controls are naturally dragging your finger over glass (Fruit Ninja, those airplane landing games, not much else)
- Turn-based games where the primary form of interaction is suited to a one-click mouse / finger. Turn-based because there is not enough feedback for accuracy in real-time games, and because it means you pick them up and put them down really easily (as long as state is remembered) which suits on the go play.

So stuff like Civilisation, turn-based 4x games, final fantasy style RPGs and XCOM style games are all good deep game genres that will hopefully make a competent jump to mobile.

I see that Frozen Synapse (XCOM style-ish) is coming to iOS, which is particularly awesome (more awesome if it was on tablet android, but that's just my selfishness talking)
An interesting and relatively recent example of this is that ex-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair didnt publicly announce his intention of converting to Catholicism until he left office.
Judge Richard Posner ridicules Apple's case against Google
Hm. I just used an arbitrary address consistent with the zip code. But I must admit that though it's worked in most of the cases I've tried, I have no idea what fraction of online merchants take such things in general.
Facebook testing 'Want' button?
Last year I wrote about Twitter as a platform for life:

http://krisgosser.com/journal/2011/10/twitter-as-lifes-platf...

This article has similar thoughts: if only Twitter allowed us to combine other things like our cars, bodies, appliances, and jobs so that communication was actually useful instead of simply social.
>unless, of course, your language has some kind of preposterously verbose associative array constructor syntax, like PHP does

array( => , => , ...) is "preposterously verbose?

You should see some other languages for the "preposterously" part.

Plus 5.4 has short array syntax.
Facebook feels manhandled? Now it knows how it's users feel when it: changes privacy settings, makes profiles public, sells information to advertisers, tracks browsing habits outside of Facebook, and comonderes e-mail addresses. Fuck you Facebook. Your little butt-hurt whining means nothing to most people as you made billions off the deal anyway.

Seriously, Facebook screwed many people over in its short life. I can't help but get a little satisfaction out of their IPO issues and lower stock price.

Maybe if they at least pretended they gave a shit about anyone other than themselves they'd get more empathy from guys like me.

Boo hoo.
Brian Hook wrote up some notes on the q3 networking model a while back: http://trac.bookofhook.com/bookofhook/trac.cgi/wiki/Quake3Ne...

There are a couple of additional items of interest in there.
"There's also plenty of buying intent to work with like this"

shrug

I'm not saying it's a sure thing (if it was it'd be done already). I'm just saying they've got a lot to work with.
That's an interesting viewpoint about consumption in the US I haven't considered. As an American who dislikes the wasteful consumption I see around me, my comment about your perspective is that many Americans don't purchase items to actually solve problems they really have. Much of it is wasteful on things like fashion, home furnishings, countless crap kitchen gadgets, etc. Things that people think will help them but don't.

That being said, your point about under consumption and unwillingness to improve life by buying better basics to solve problems is something new to me.
Show HN: Flutter HP Redesign + Play/Pause Spotify, WMP via Gesture on Windows7
I think there is a lot more subtlety to #1.

I'm Australian, and despite numerous cultural shifts, when you graduate the natural place to go is Europe. The thing young Aus/NZ people do is backpack around Europe.

When I was growing up, I knew a lot about the US from Mass Media, but it was pretty shallow. I saw the US as a mono-culture. When I finally visited the states that's what shocked me most - it's a diverse, complex place. In many ways more so than Europe.

I have my doubts about #4 too.
Here's a graph: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/137/religion-god-theology/...

Looking at it I noticed that I'm from one of the least religious countries in the world (Denmark).
> How many Americans can spot the difference between Hong Kong and Seoul, or know what "BKA" stands for?

That only means American culture is more exported than others in many forms like movies, TV shows, etc. People like to watch American shows, American that, American this, etc. If Honk Kong and Seoul were able to export their culture as effectively you'll know about them too. A lot of people know about Paris and Cannes in the US. Doesn't mean they are "well educated" or anything. Nor the other way around.
In all of the movie bios I've seen he was between 155-165lbs. In fight club, for example, his BMI was about 22.5
We just redesigned our Home Page & launched Windows (7) version of our app to join the mac version. Yes, we are aware that everyone wants to a new gesture. It is being tested right now and will be available soon. In the meantime, please send us your feedback on HP as well as Windows App. Thanks in advance from FlutterTeam.
Why use this over a cross-compiled version of Bash?
Ask HN: I'm a PHP developer, should I learn Rails or Django?
I'm a PHP Developer and have used a few different OOP frameworks (Codeigniter, Symfony, FUEL) and CodeIgniter has by far been my favourite (and still my go-to).

I am definitely seeing the benefits of learning Ruby (rails) or Pyrhon (Django) and my programmer buddies argue their framework/language of choice into the ground. Can someone who has used both give me some more objective advice?

I have played with rails a little, but nothing major, here's what I like:

- rubygems is awesome, this is how (code) package management should be
- seamless MVC, although I use MVC principles in PHP, it still feels clunky
- lots of learning resources from what I can see
- high level language = rapid development

What I don't like:
- very high level language, PHP seems to be somewhat the 'C' of web languages these days.
- I feel like there is a magic box between my code and the browser and often have no idea what makes certain things work and other not.
- very different syntax, I am used to C style languages (Obj C, C++, PHP)
- the webserver which comes with rails needs to be restarted to acknowledge changes - I like that I can hit cmd+s, refresh my browser and see changes in PHP.

All I really know about Django is that ALL of the people I know who use it absolutely love it and swear by it (much like Mac owners).

I'm a web developer for a small tech company, I build medium sized web apps and have a large amount of creative/technology freedom over my projects. I'm 19 and have been using PHP for the past 5 years or so, it has been the only (web) language I have used to build anything non-trivial (although my brief stint with Rails taught me much about MVC and how it should be implemented).

Thanks
Now THAT would be a disruptive product.

Especially if it were run by non-typical "Wall street suits" types.

Paging Elon Musk? (Nah, kidding, he has more important things to focus on)
Fingerprinting has negative connotations for many. It's typically associated with criminal behavior, as those are mostly the only people afforded such treatment. Not commenting on whether it's a valid practice which should continue, but it's easy to see why people, who as far as they're concerned have done nothing wrong, object to be treated in such a manner.

Also, there's the usual concerns about any state entity (particularly a foreign one, which the US is far as foreigners are concerned), amassing large amounts of biometric data. It's a black box which you can't see into, have no assurances how that data will be used, who can access it, etc.
What if there existed a Twitter-like technological entity, split into two parts, which together formed a virtual democratic republic.

1. The "community", comprised of those persons and corporations reading and writing messages ("tweets"), un/following each other, forming groups, etc. Both individuals and corporate entities could/would pay for the RESTful server infrastructure powering the basic messaging service.

2.The elected "governance body" which is in charge of:

* A massive geo-weighted DNS round-robin, so the service can operate under a single domain name.

* A system of caches, e.g. a bunch of varnish instances spread across datacenters around the world.

* A lightweight, tiered push-notification system which is orthogonal to the RESTful service, and allows clients to request that they be notified when, say, a timeline-resource has been updated; and also allows the server endpoints to originate notifications of updates.

* Authoring and updating the specifications for protocol support, message format, message signing, media type definitions and semantic profiles, and data replication between servers.

* The "laws" which govern the process of joining the community (e.g. agreeing to messages being under some creative commons license); having a server/s added to the round robin; kicking a server/s out of the round robin for some violation of the specs and laws (e.g. message tampering); banning a user-entity for spamming; and so on.

At regular intervals, the worldwide community would elect members of the governance body. Over time, the specs and laws of the service would evolve -- as a result of the elections, popular demand and technical problems and innovations.

In the beginning, the governance body, specs and laws would be established by the founding participants, to avoid a chicken-and-egg scenario.

---

Here's why I see this attracting interest of corporations and thus motivating them to pay for the servers and develop/deploy implementations of the technical specs:

All sorts of companies would love to analyze the firehose of public messages being pumped through Twitter (or this hypothetical service). They would also like to data-mine the timeline histories. Twitter is more and more making that a difficult and costly proposition. By participating in the infrastructure, companies and individuals would automatically have their own views of the firehose, and could choose whether to invest in the tech to keep the historical data beyond some minimum amount mandated by the specs.

In turn, such infrastructure participants could resell access to their views of the firehose and/or historical data to those who can't or don't want to run servers but are interested in exploring the data. Thus a market would be created, and there would be a healthy amount of competition among infrastructure participants regarding the prices of firehose/history access and the APIs they make available for tapping into those paid resources.
> I saw the US as a mono-culture.

I think the problem is that all the non-boring places to live in the US _are_ a monoculture, mostly due to the network. (Then again, most non-boring places on Earth are all converging to this point anyway.) The parts that diverge from the monoculture are places that would be horrible to live (e.g. the south, the rust belt, etc).
I mostly go through immigration in SEA, and its kind of crowded but I usually get through before my bags arrive (as an American citizen). Portland is good also, although they used to have the nickname of Deportland for all the Japanese tourists that got sent back for sloppy paper work.

The worst I've encountered so far is Gatwick in London for the terminal that handles Asian flights. 2+ hours in the queue waiting to get through immigration, torture! I'm sure the UK is worse than the US.
I think the article would be improved if he took a softer stance here. Certainly there are observable defined needs (like bingo cards) an entrepreneur can provide. But many tech companies are trying to invent new things people didn't yet know they needed. When you go there, you better need it yourself or be a damned good and empathetic designer.
What culture? American culture, compared to most of Europe and Asia is underdeveloped and shallow. Not to mention, 20% of US citizens are not even native English speakers. All the points you're listing could be more appropriately used to describe Japan.
Apart from watching foreign cinema, which pretty much shows men are men throughout the known world, I've personally met a large cross-section of men from different cultures, albeit mainly western, none of whom particularly differ when it comes to bravado or over-confidence, especially in adolescence.

And many of other countries that I haven't met haven't even gone through female emancipation, I have no doubt the vast number of countries like that are far worse.

I just don't agree with you. And again, I've had to say it before this week, I'm not American and have never even been there. I've only met a couple of Americans in passing and they were all female or mormons. Mormons get a little special category of their own, those two were very strange.
> there is no way for a professor to tweet out the homework

Surely a link to a URL is all you need to do most of that stuff?
Facebook needs to stop blaming everyone else for their failed IPO. NASDAQ didn't cause people to dump the stock days after the IPO. No, those were caused by stories of FB's overvaluation, GM pulling out and their inability to monetize mobile.
Have you read the article? Because some people's contact lists were updated at the same time, because they were synced with facebook.
The dark page with white text hurt my eyes so bad I couldn't stand to look at it let alone read it.
Every country has its good and bad, in terms of people, culture, society, taboos etc etc. I have lived in 3 countries including the US and I think that it all comes down to how you look at things that are around you. The best thing to do is to try and enjoy the best of it.
I think there a small contradiction in terms here, perhaps you've recognized it already.

A network service has a definition in in terms of the protocol used to talk to it. It could be an "open" protocol standard, in the sense that it's well documented and not patented. Even if it's not well documented, network protocols are not that difficult to analyze.

"Open source" is talking about source code to a program. Such a program might be an embodiment of a protocol endpoint.

The problem that Twitter has is that they have a trivial API and it's very easy for anyone to create a client for it. They're trying to lock this down cryptographically using client certs, but as long as there is some client on the users' devices that can talk to Twitter, the private key has to be available to all the users. Open source client endpoints have to publish their private key in the source. What they're trying to do is technically impossible.

So Twitter has chosen the worst of possible worlds here, they have a de-facto open API and must resort to the threat of lawsuits to prevent their users benefiting from the features provided by the open marketplace of client apps.

I would try to find a way not to end up like Twitter.
My thought about the Twitter business model has always been that they shouldn't charge for putting information into the stream, ala advertising.

They should charge for taking information out of the stream, like a polling company, or consumer research, or business intelligence.

Not for the stream, but for the firehose. And for specialized analysis of the firehose.

There would be massive value in knowing what everyone in the world is thinking about in real time.

Getting there should have been their goal.
I haven't lived in Germany (I've visited for maybe 3 weeks total), and in terms of quality of life, it wasn't that different from the US, at least for the things you see as a short-term tourist. Lots of stuff was more expensive (vs. SF baseline), and rural Germany around 2000 was pretty undeveloped, but Berlin would be more representative.

I'm also using SFBA, NY, Boston, Seattle as exemplars of the US. I'd rather live in London than New Mexico, but there are parts of the UK worse than New Mexico, too. (amazingly. I didn't know this until living in the UK.)

US universities are stronger than German universities, at least in commercialization, graduate studies, etc. K-12 could go either way; Baltimore public schools are worse than what I assume are the worst German schools, but Palo Alto, Stuy, etc. might be better (at least I don't know of anything comparable in Germany).
Append https to the BBC article to read it behind the GFW. The https hack sometimes works when the government is blocking content on individual cites vs. complete sites.
I thought you misspelled "crap"...
> The concept of God abounds in our Pledge of Allegiance, in our graduation ceremonies, in our political speeches--it is almost universally accepted and above question.

You probably know this already, but Yahweh's prominence on the coinage and in the Pledge of Allegiance is a relatively recent phenomenon. It wasn't until 1908 that 'In God We Trust' was mandated on the coinage, and 'under God' wasn't inserted into the Pledge until 1954, as part of a wider anti-communist reaction. The supposed areligiosity of the Founders is often overstated by modern-day atheists with an axe to grind. However, while you'd be hard pressed to find a more pompous and puritanical Christian than the likes of John Adams, even he was strongly supportive of the separation of church and state: "Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion."
‘Pests? Not In My House’ Video Project
This is quite an interesting thought.

How would this work? What would need to be done.

Pros, cons?
Design feedback: some indication that we should scroll down, I didn't notice at first and thought the download button was the main point.
I'm on a Mac and the download button on the new site doesn't appear to do anything.
The jist of this article: "Hey, look at me! I'm cool because I am not patriotic, nor do I respect several of the rockbeds of American culture. I'm multinational."

As real Americans would say, "Whoop-de-doo!"
"Crime mapping has long been a tool used to determine where the bad guys lurk."

I'm assuming they mean where poor people live.
That is correct. Also,the meme about Nokia phones being indestructible is not without basis, so that helps too
"...could’ve gotten a job at any tech company in the USA. I was offered ridiculous salaries with signing bonuses of luxury cars. Pretty tempting."

Thank you!

* closes tab
The Birth, Short Life, Then Death of the Twitter API Ecosystem
For Disabled Vets Returning Home on the 4th, iWalk.com Has Great News
If you have a browser plugin that blocks mixpanel it doesn't work. This will be fixed asap.
I certainly didn't mean it like that, it was meant as a melancholic line rather than an attacking one.
In some ways living abroad for a decade after school made me feel more like the US is the center of the world. I specifically looked for something as different and far away as possible, and I ended up meeting people who were learning English and familiar with the same music, television and movies I saw in college. Many of my European friends really could go weeks without seeing anything from home, but I couldn't.

That said, I was probably extremely unusual amongst my peers in thinking the US was just one of many countries when I left. Also, at that time I had thought that China would be dominating everything by 2020. Now, after having lived in China, I'm more bullish on the US than ever. Not only is it continuing to attract the smartest and most ambitious people in the world, but there's a huge demographic advantage, too. Whatever the babyboomer retirement does to the US, it will be far harder on Europe. Japan and China will be even older.

That doesn't make me doubt #4, though. Lifespans are going to increase.
It should've launched Mac App Store for you as we're available there now: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flutter/id522248613?mt=12

Let us know if it doesn't work for you!
There is a lot of confirmation bias in judging how non-religious folks are treated in America by using /r/atheism - the people that don't feel persecuted won't ever feel a need to join an online community to discuss it.
Thank you - great point. Please keep sending all your feedback!
> What if we divorced 'demand'(what creates value for each person) from money (payment for value created) and gave all actors an equal right to determine demand irrespective of their ability to pay?

Demand is already divorced from ability to pay - anyone can "demand" anything. The "problem" is that suppliers don't care about demand. They only care about being paid.

If a million people demand X but are unwilling to pay for it while 10 people demand Y and are willing to pay for it, why am I going to produce X instead of Y?
Interesting idea.

Anybody know what's involved in actually doing that?

Is it just a matter of filing some paperwork with the SEC and then convincing enough people to use it?