skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that's a very good analogy, most people forget that Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) was a ruthless dictator, perhaps not as bad as Mao Zedong, but his son, Jiang Jingguo opened Taiwan up to democratization. I think it's partly owed to the fact that ethnically-Chinese people are quite compliant to generations of dynasties, and until they standup, the Com Dynasty will rule.
Even more reason for the double screw idea. You can upgrade the WiFi radio when your network becomes incompatible in the future.
There isn't a national superpower anymore, and that may be a good thing. No one can predict the future, but I can't see any nation ever being as globally relevant as the U.S. was in 1945-95. That wasn't just the peak of U.S. power but also the peak of nation-state power. If I'm right, no national government will ever attain it again. Not the European Union (technically a multinational government), not China, and definitely not India. I think China will be doing very well economically in 2100 (and people will be surprised to learn about the extremely widespread 20th- and early-21st-century Chinese poverty) but I think the influence of national governments will have waned by then.

I'm actually pretty bullish about the long-term American future, because I think the global trend is not only positive but going to accelerate in the next 20 years. I think the Bush years were a nadir, and I think we're in a long U-shaped valley, but I think the 2020s will be slightly better than the 2010s, which will shape up to be better than the 2000s were. "Decline" for us is going to look like it did for the British: the average Briton is still a hell of a lot better off (happier, wealthier, and healthier) in 2012 than in 1900. People don't actually think about national dominance much when they don't have it, and by 2050, I think that concept itself will be pretty well outmoded.

To put it frankly, I don't care if the U.S. is geopolitically #1 or #14 in 2050, but I hope they've done something about cancer.
I agree. Best of luck and keep coding!
It actually gets upvoted.
So many of America's social problems can be traced back to a lack of a decent educational system...

Can you explain this claim?

I.e., both define what you mean by "social problems", and how a "decent" educational system would help.
He downloaded at least two million documents.

So there is at least 2 million scientific documents that publishers are profiting from withholding.

I'm not generally anti-copyright, but I believe the profits publishers make on scientific publishing are unconscionable - not only do they impede progress, but in many cases (eg, medical research) they cost lives.
Name one skill that everyone can do regardless of the number of neurons in their brain and the capacity to use them, and ignoring any other underlying conditions that may impact ones ability to learn or retain knowledge?

This can't even be said for the basics like language, maths and science, why would computer programming be any different?

The 7 billion plus human brains on this planet are not created equally to each other (nor do they remain equal over time)! So how come everyone apparently has the ability to learn programming?

This is all scientific fact, so I really can't agree with your viewpoint on things that we all somehow have equal capacity to learn, it sounds a little out of touch with reality to me.
It's likely I'll want to do some more complex stuff in bash, rather than pure sh. My preferred shell is zsh but of the more advanced shells, bash is the most prevalent.

I've pushed the change to use /usr/bin/env bash :-)
Something to do with homework and assignments management would be really cool.
I asked them about this and they said it'll still work to turn them on without the app (your assumption about flicking the switch is correct).
Keeping track of which students need more attention. Or a way to quickly tap the attitude level and amount of interaction of students in between classes. Then the teacher can evaluate that each term. I think that would be neat.
> The U.S. holds roughly 17% of the world’s International students, compared to 2nd-place Britain (~12%) and far more than education powerhouses, Korea, Switzerland, and Sweden (all below 5%).

Considering the U.S. has a population of 300 million vs. the UK's 63 million (and Sweden's 9 million), aren't these numbers actually damning? Or are they just saying "size matters"?
Thats funny. I'm in Paris, and I'm heading back to school at Stanford in 4 days. Thats exactly 9 timezones.
There are likely many MANY more :-)
I suppose I should cook up a sanitising method.
Fortunately, stackoverflow to the rescue! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/89609/in-a-bash-script-ho...
Not the person that you are responding to but I made this point in my response to him. America's education system only cares about the results. I.E. how well can he do on a standardized test, how good are his grades, etc.

This leads to people taking the easy way out and just memorizing everything without understanding or thinking critically about what they are doing. These people aren't thinking for themselves and instead are just taking everything told to them as fact and regurgitating it when they are asked. This obviously leads to a problem when they become adults and need to make decisions on who is to lead them. Instead of coming to their own conclusion they will listen to their parents, preacher, neighbor, etc. All of whom might have come to their conclusion of who is the best leader faultily.

In Addition: Just to give you guys an example of where this is being most blatantly done, literature classes. I remember in my lit classes that almost 90% of the class did not read the book. Instead they just took the spark notes and memorized key points taking nothing out of the text. As soon as the exam was over they forgot everything.
Off topic.

Why does it matter what others believe? Blaze your own path.
Swartz is smart and has interned for (law professor) Larry Lessig.

I doubt he's even going to try to make the case he didn't know it was illegal.

This is civil disobedience against unjust laws at its best.

To quote Wikipedia's summary of Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

Against the clergymen’s assertion that the demonstration was against the law, he argued that not only was civil disobedience justified in the face of unjust laws, but that "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Birmingham_Jail
This doesn't have much to do with hacking or entrepreneurship. I'm interested in the answer too, but lets not turn HN into reddit.
Disruptions: Let Silicon Valley Eat … Ramen Noodles?
Silicon Valley would like the world to think it doesn't care about money. But these start-ups aren't nonprofit organizations.
Rich people from all over the world send their kids to school here because rich people from all over the world send their kids to school here. At one time, it was "studying at Oxford". Now it's studying in America. If you have a top-50 U.S. university degree, when you go back you will be one or two levels below the CEO in your first job.

That has value to the U.S. and it obviously pumps a lot of money into American universities, but it has more to do with social signaling than quality of education. That's not to say that the top American universities aren't very good (they are) but that's not what it's really about.
Eventually it will be substantially cheaper, but don't expect it to be cheaper out of the gate.
Nothing good can come of this topic (on a forum like this anyway)
I am an gnostic atheist, I don't believe in any god and I feel that there is enough proof to show that gods do not exist.

Also, (a)gnostic and (a)theist are not a sliding scale, they are more akin to x,y coordinates on a graph:

http://freethinker.co.uk/2009/09/25/8419/
That's a great point and yet another reason why it's becoming increasingly difficult to accept the argument that activists who perform civil disobedience must accept the consequences.
We don't have universal healthcare for a variety of reasons, most of which highly educated agree with. Many people don't seem to understand that federalism is slower and the idea is to see what works. The problem is that healthcare reform is not being appropriately worked on at the state level - primarily due to huge interventions at the federal level that prevent experimentation.

Anyway, there are tons of high paying jobs outside of NY and SF - people choose to live there because the like the culture and the cities -- that's why the rent is high.
One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Martin Luther King, 16 April 1963, "Letter from Birmingham Jail"[1]

[1] http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h...
Damn, that's cool. Somewhat full circle too, in light of the many pdf printer drivers in use today.
Nonetheless, I don't think there is anything inherently so wrong about the US college/university system. People outside of the US wouldn't be spending buckets' loads of money to send their kids here. And lately, Canada seems to be absorbing a lot of influence as a tech powerhouse.

Specific education systems in the US are on-par with the best in the world. People outside the US are not sending their kids to inner-city New Orleans, Detroit, etc. - they are sending kids to Boston suburbs and private schools. The problem is not "all our schools are terrible", the problem is the massive variance in outcomes.
A summary of building Wordpoke my first iOS App
The difficult thing about that is that your first sentence said "I like to view life as one [...] problem". If detaching and letting go is so important to enjoying life, considering it a problem only makes that more difficult. You can't solve a problem and let go at the the time. Or, well, I know some people who can, but they've solved the problem long ago already.
ZenDesk and Google Apps Business Finally Work Together
You mistake "externalized" for ease.

Always like lunch w the young republicans in here.
Well, I was curious about the impact (if any) on entrepreneurship and/or hacking... Whether it inspires people or whether they find inspiration from elsewhere (Ubermensch anyone?)

That being said, this is definitely an almost-reddit question... And I apologize for that; I hesitated before posting it but figured I would anyway... I am a bastard.
Two handy picks for software development:

Verschlimmbesserung (German) - A supposed improvement that makes things worse.

Maya (Sanskrit) - The belief–often unfortunate–that the symbol of a thing is the same as the thing itself.
> Nonetheless, I don't think there is anything inherently so wrong about the US college/university system. People outside of the US wouldn't be spending buckets' loads of money to send their kids here.

Like MIT and Berkeley? Yep, those are said to be quite nice, but I don't know anyone who on their own free will would go to the US for a degree there. At leas here (Central Europe) it has the the image of being bad and expensive.
I think this is an interesting question and is not off topic. I personally don't believe in god until proven wrong. i think the concept of believing in god is Ridicules it's no different then believing in unicorns.
The conventional Jarvis-style artificial heart also tries to imitate the functioning of a human heart, with distinct pumps making up a heartbeat. They tend to suffer from mechanical fatigue over time, though, because they have no mechanism for self-repair. There has, however, been some interesting artificial heart research that uses continuous-flow pumps that could conceivably work much better than the current generation of artificial hearts: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/no-pulse-how-d...
This is clever, thanks for sharing.

When viewing the output (using the "computer science cheat sheet") I found some differences between browsers that I thought HN readers might find interesting. These aren't primarily issues with your tool, hence posting here.

- I primarily use Chrome (21) as my browser, and the cheat sheet renders very quickly. I noticed it doesn't seem to render some equations correctly (see bad operators here[1]).

- FF (15.0.1) seems to render more correctly, but it is glacially slow. The whole app (chrome and all) freezes for several seconds between clicks while the document is loaded in any tab.

- IE (9) renders the same page both correctly and quickly.

[1] http://imageshack.us/a/img88/3754/chromeformulas.png
This is an interesting move for DreamHost. They built Ceph, and have been using it internally for ages now.

I wonder if they're going to transform their reputation as a no-frills budget web host.
Totally off-topic:

Shouldn't it be "countries'" with an apostrophe? To denote possession?
As the poster / writer / builder. I will happily field any questions.
I upvoted this the first time I read this for your point on risk aversion.

The thing that I disagree with is that people move to the US to make more money. I had a job that paid very well in the US and there's a very good chance I would have made much more doing that than starting my own company.

The US is often years ahead in design, advertising, the latest tech trends, etc. American brands are more likely to try new things out/it's easier to reach larger scale adoption more easily. Through out my life I have always waited for American products/chains/innovations (no matter how novel -- Easy Mac, Yogurt Tubes, MTV, Old Navy) to make it up to Canada. In my opinion those are definitely reasons to move to the US.

So much of starting/running your own thing is dealing with mental blocks. When you are around more people who are breaking through those blocks, or have done so before you, it's quite advantageous.
How does this differ from the cgi-bins of yesteryear?

Also, regarding environment sandboxing: it's probably worth looking at the direction the CGI spec went in.
I believe you made a typo. I've fixed it for you.

>Personally I've decided that MY life is absolutely meaningless,...
Make something that YOU WANT.
I'm an atheist myself (born Catholic).

I tend to borrow bits from secular humanism and Camus' existentialism, which tell me that in the end, you need to find your own motivation, inspiration and hope.

Large groups of people are all capable of great works and great atrocities (along with a myriad of smaller ones), religions just happen to be one of the many divisions of people.
It's Sunday, which I have noticed is a day to relax the rules.

It's OK.
Unless you routinely serve up javascript from domains like 'dustym' on port 8888, then you apparently haven't done anything yet - it's still being included on www.theverge.com right now.
I love this. Its very bleak but it's true. In reading all these comments I really like how they are at very opposite ends of the spectrum and all true all at once.
A while ago I recreated the visualization of the Sieve of Eratosthenes from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes) in Javascript: http://codepen.io/FWeinb/full/tmwnf
The country's taking the opposite path. Kids start their school day with the Pledge of Allegiance to the Wealthy. Ignorance is strength.
Grow indoor hydroponic marijuana.
My friend actually recently released an Android game based on exactly this: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.uk.iceroad....
We have basic filtering now :-)
>American decline is real, and it's shitty, and it has everything to do with a lack of education and culture.

What does lack of culture even mean? We have plenty of culture, in fact we export it to the rest of the world. It may be different, but just because you don't like it, you can't say it's not culture.

>...but the lack of attention paid to education...

How can you possibly say that. We spend more money per student than all but a few countries. And we are constantly worried about our students falling behind. This stuff is regularly all over the news--nearly every politician ever elected talks about improving education.

So, yes we definitely "pay attention" to education.

Obviously the problem is not with the attention we pay, but with something else.
And i do agree with that. (and Notch's new game too by the way!)
No one punches these keys, ~!@#$%^&*()-+, w regularity who embraces ease, as a cartographical matter of fact. I think the root problem you're asking about is how to deal with confusion and overwhelm, rather than difficulty.
It depends where you draw the line.
CGI's were passed many variables and an environment by the web server.
In that respect, this is closer to a web server - the only thing it doesn't handle is the very lowest level network listening.
Here's my own personal perspective.

I am very thoroughly in Apple's camp. I have owned several iPhones, an iPad, and more Macs than I can count. This is what I use personally, and what I program for.

Although I don't use Android myself, I'm glad it exists. It keeps Apple on their toes. I don't think Apple will make much of a dent in the Android ecosystem, despite the fact that Steve Jobs apparently wanted to.

But now it's turning out that Google faces some of the same issues as Apple, doesn't it? The Android ecosystem is generally more open than iOS, but now we see that it has its limits.

Personally, I think Google is doing the right thing here. If this secondary phone OS really does contain a lot of Android frameworks, as they claim, then I think Google is right to be upset about this.

Interesting to see what the fan base's general reaction is going to be to this.
There are some reasons for US economic power (e.g. WWII) but the main reason is companies got larger and more successful than elsewhere because until China it was the largest domestic market.

Successful companies attract money, money attracts people.
My understanding, outside of corporate spin: Google is essentially preventing Acer and others that benefit from OHA to do any work with the likes of Amazon and Alibaba that use an Android fork. You work on any non-Google approved Android and you are frozen out of Android, even if they are different product. Do I understand this correctly?

If so, I do not like it.
Intel Project River Trail - Multi-Core JavaScript Demonstration
Restricting anti-Muslim video shows role of firms as free-speech arbiters
Interesting, What would be more interesting is some stats on reliability, seen as their reputation is one of mass, cheap, hosting.
Interesting to see a budget host enter this arena, but it makes sense.

Pricing culled from the press release:

- Usage billing: 7 cents per month

- Prepaid: plans go below 5 cents to store 50 TB or more

- Transfer out: 7 cents per GB
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you completely missed the point of my analogy, which was a reference to the exploitative, all-but-mandatory unpaid 'research assistant' jobs or 'internships' and the like. We're fortunate that this is unheard-of in our industry, but in some fields, it's the norm.

Though I would thank you for deleting the completely out-of-proportion reference to Hitler that was in your original comment ("Hitler liked cakes, therefore anyone who likes cakes is a Nazi"). It seems even Hacker News is not immune to Godwin's law.
Belkin's Wemo[1] line does pretty much what you're suggesting. I've got a few of their units, and I've been pretty happy with them.

[1] http://www.belkin.com/wemo/
This is definitely feature overload for a typical person.

I find it funny how on HN there arguments that non-replaceable batteries in MBPs are okay, and at the same time, that a small gadget must have user-replaceable radio.
Well since the UK is so close and economically/politically connected with other large developed countries you would expect their rate of international students to be greater than the US all things being equal.
Legal costs would be pretty steep if busted though.
Perfect being is a psychological reality. Faith does not entail religion. Sartre pronounced himself an atheist, but wrote extensively about the problem of bad faith. You put your faith in others every day. The problems begin when you put your faith in systems, rather than subjects (read: Worlds). Make faith-investing a conscious process. What about this Subject am I taking/acquiescing to on faith? vis what I am taking as manifest (read: System). Faith in Subject is good, and in System, not so much. All Subject is good, and all System is for sale. Everything else is pronunciation and posturing.
Yes I do.

His name is Bob and when he resets the computer we are all screwed.
Lie-in at the weekend makes you sleepier during the week
Britain started worrying about its educational decline in the 1890s recession...
Here is a statement of Andy Rubin on this:
https://plus.google.com/112599748506977857728/posts/hRcCi5xg...

Apparently, they even have pirated google apps. How Alibaba/Acer claim moral high ground on this is beyond me.
Also not the poster, but study after study finds that education and income inequality is correlated with everything from crime rates (unsurprisingly, poor people are more likely to commit, or at least get caught committing, crimes) to mental health (the less money you have, you are likely to be mentally ill and less likely to have access to good care). Then there's obesity (again, the rich are more likely to eat healthy food) and other similar physical health issues.

Some of that is a consequence of education (for instance, nutrition) or income (mental illness) but all of those are seriously worsened by inequality resulting from our education system. If you're interested, The Spirit Level (http://www.amazon.com/The-Spirit-Level-Equality-Societies/dp...) and Ill Fares the Land (http://www.amazon.com/Ill-Fares-Land-Tony-Judt/dp/0143118765...) both contain great discussions of this.
When you really start looking at US healthcare you find most of the problems are associated with bureaucracy and a tiny fraction of people dominating healthcare costs. Which is why it's impossible to fix healthcare at the state level or you have the vary sick flocking to states where healthcare has been 'fixed'.

PS: The US government pays more per person for healthcare than any country with universal healthcare. Instead, the free market's focus on passing the buck adds more overhead than any 'free market' efficiency gains. 'Medical Billing' is practically the definition of dead weight. Random inspection of 5% of clames will rapidly catch outright fraud, instead we get the worst of both worlds with plenty of fraud AND overhead costs.
Free education is out there for anyone who wants it and has the motivation to get it.

Hint: you're soaking in it.

The Internet gives us access to a significant portion of the accumulated knowledge of the human race, and access to knowledgeable mentors and colleagues around the world. You can get it free at your local library.

True, those educational resources are largely avalable thanks to those evil profit-oriented tech companies, but one can't have everything.
I was still using Sun/Solaris machines back in '99 when this was written, which were considerably more reliable from an every day use perspective. Most of the negative comments and opinion came from people who'd worked with industrial grade kit and moved to cheap PCs with Linux on.

To be honest, if you go back that far, Windows NT 4 on Compaq Professional Workstations was probably the most reliable thing out there believe it or not so I'm not sure where the hell these comments came from.