skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel that it's one of the factors, but not the main one.

To me the main factor for China's stagnation is that unlike countries in Europe, China had no equal (or near equal) for thousands of years (well the majority of it). There was simply no competition. To make a long story short, China simply rested on its laurels too long until the arrival of the modern era.
http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&...

Machine translation so you can see the comments... thoughts seem to range from "it's your parents fault" and "your parents are right, you can rest after your education" to "when you kill yourself take your teacher out with you."
Many of your concerns were addressed by the author in the comments section: http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2007/04/aliens-dont-exist....

He completely ignores that humans actually took many tens of millions of years to evolve from scratch not from existing life forms.

Kulisz responded:

The point is that it didn't have to. Nothing in the universe prevented a technological civilization from arising 8 billion years ago. And certainly not 65 million years ago back when the dinosaurs ruled.
Hardware is cheap. People are expensive. However these facts are lost on most upper management.

I have developed software for four decades. I was expected to develop the next generation software on what was essentially obsolete systems. I was never allowed to use development hardware that was much over current entry level capability. I did it but at what cost of lost opportunity and lost productivity? The management was stupid cubed if you ask me.
This falls into the "Doh! Why didn't I think of that!" category. It might not be earth shattering but it adds value for almost 0 manufacturing cost, and actually helps the environment a bit. I hope it catches on.
Is having one good algorithm better than giving the user the ability to tweak the algorithm?
Travelzoo’s Fly.com Launches Yet Another Travel Search Aggregator
Very cool; could make even better by decorating the bottom of the box. Maybe even with advertisements for themselves or third-parties.
Agreed. Also very useful for parties/outdoors. I mean, not having to do dishes is a big plus and gives the cardboard a second use before it gets thrown away.
http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

It's in the cloud of names.
Yeah, the blog author manages to bring the stupid. Perhaps he should go take a look at alexa, and note how every site not owned by Microsoft uses so-called cult operating systems?
British and French nuclear submarines crash
You may want to read Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond. You'll definitely enjoy it. The short answer is yes, the long answer starts with geography and how Europe's facilitated lots of small countries and China's one big empire. My favorite example is how Columbus asked three kings to sponsor his voyage to America. In China the first "no" would have been final.
Don't know where do you get that understanding from. Google's current market cap is 112B, its total revenue (2008) is 21B. It used to be that price/sale ratio is 10 for startups, which means they need 25M revenue to be valued at 250M. Even if P/S is massively compressed these days, they still only need about 50M to worth that valuation. 50M sale for twitter given the usage is definitely feasible.
One of the proudest moments of my high-school life was when I decided _not_ to study for a test... with a teacher I liked and respected. I still remember his disappointed look at my grade. But it was something necessary, something to drive home the point that grades are not important.
You're generalising from one data point.

Even within the UK, Scotland has a 4 year degree and England a 3 year. Generally in Scotland you can switch to your minor at the end of the first year without losing anything.

The only other part of Europe that I know about Germany is vastly more lenient with people staying students seemingly forever. One guy I talked to claimed that they couldn't afford to finish as the loss in student discounts would be too abrupt. Kind of like people on unemployment who would have to take a pay cut to start working.

And of course just because people can switch doesn't mean they do. Whether it's in someway normal to switch seems to play a larger role (generalizing from two data points...)
I'm not sure...in your parent post, you mentioned being "accurate to life" as an important measure. While subjective, verbal examinations (and all the possible unfairness they entail) can be significantly more true to life (in the real-world, post-school sense) than the multiple-choice/short-answer tests that are common today.

"Objective" tests are best for only the very few things that can be "objectively" measured. Often, they succeed only in rewarding mediocrity and parroting.
Digitally Signing Contracts == Easy
No. It's my opinion that people who twitter are either egomaniacs or who have something to sell. I have much higher respect for people who actually maintain strictly technical blogs these days.
I'm working on that part. I'm going to setup a Sinatra app that can respond to the GitHub service hook API and which I can then poll from my local box to check for pushes.
I meant on webmynd's website
Cuba releases their own OS, Nova Baire, based on Linux
Part of the problem here is that anonymity provides cover for misbehavior (spam, hacking, etc.) The aggregate cost for this is paid for every site that allows free access.

There already exists systems that authenticate known people - credit cards, for example. So it's at least doable. I wish credit card people opened their infrastructure for authentication as well as payment.

I do think this is largely the browser vendor's fault. Create physical tokens (cert on a usb stick, perhaps) and allow people to have real identity on the web (when you want it.)
Ask YC: Could web properties become ad-free and sustain using micropayments?
Most web startups and blogs depend on Advertising to make money. A web property with 1M visitors per month could probably fetch about 25k a month in advertising (not sure at all just assuming). That is 2.5 cents per visitor.

Could that cost be simply offset to the end user. I think most readers would not mind paying 2.5 cents to 25 cents to use a web service or to read their blog.

If I was to pay 25 cents/month for each of the 50 sites I visit regularly, that would not hurt much and they would probably have more money than by running ads.

Could web properties become ad-free and sustain using micropayments?
I've only learned a little category theory, but what little I've learned is there because one of my friends was talking about category theory and I felt inferior for not knowing it.

I'm starting to feel the same way about Haskell. This is a good thing. I'll take whatever motivation I can get, so long as it makes me learn.
It would have been more interesting if Sony's answer to IPhone was PSP2 with better PS3 integration... I don't see Idou as real competition to IPhone unless there are more details they are keeping secret aside from the camera.
Reports of Paris bikes (Vélib’s) Demise Greatly Exaggerated -- other side of the story
Doing well in the Physics Olympiad is not the same as doing well in physics.

In the Physics Olympiad, you solve simple problems based on well-understood formulae. In physics, you create new knowledge. It may be telling that China has won only three physics Nobel prizes, and all three of the winners got their PhDs in the US.

I admire your dedication to working hard on physics, but I think that creative, effortful practice is the key, not relentless drill.
To answer your first point, though I haven't read the book, I suspect it's about a baseball team and GP didn't want to reveal the ending.
Price curves generally run the other way. More demand means lower price.
When you are not profitable you pay people as little as possible and deal in cash. Give work to friends and friends of friends at below market rates. Do not give out equity or anything that requires paying lawyers to do things. Don't make promises you cannot cash.

Don't get trapped by socialized norms of what it means to be a founder or how one goes about starting a company. Simply launch the business and iterate towards profitability - identify issues and fix those one-by-one. If you need cash to fix some problems, that's a challenge in and of itself. Get a job. Unless you are getting a lot of cash taking investment can be a bad move - see the point above about lawyers.

In my experience dealing with other people is time-expensive and making commitments to others significantly reduces flexibility in how products can be positioned and sold. You will know how valuable your company is after you understand the problems and time needed to execute. And then you will understand that the notion of fairness is defined by what different parties bring to the table. If you can quantify this and know its value then you know your limits for negotiating. Treat people with respect but ensure you get results for what you give up and that you're trading resources for something that will get you growth and profitability.
Need rails developers? Hire Australians
"Test scores are like democracy, they're the least bad option. There's simply not a better way to measure progress, or one more accurate to life."

There are so many different types of tests that your statement is essentially meaningless.
In Finland, we have the exact opposite.
When tuition is universally free (actually you get paid to study, because government has allotted a student benefit for 55 months in third tier studies for everyone) from 1st grade to doctorate studies, some tend to wander - even for years - doing community work in student unions, or change majors, read another MSc, searching themselves...

Just too many choices and the only opportunity cost is lost time. But it seems to work, at least according to PISA studies.

(we do have entrance exams for universities, and getting private tuition is quite common when people try to get accepted into Med or Law studies - but not for most fields)
Is there a reason for them to display their funders?
Live Blogging the OpenID Design Summit
I think the n97 is a way better phone than the G1, but the G1 is pretty nice as well. It just doesn't have the 'wow' aesthetic factor or the gaudy specs that the n97 has. But that has more to do with the fact that Nokia really hit it out the park with that one.

Lately i've come to conclusion that enjoyment of the features on android are pretty much correlated to how many of the Google apps you use and how often you use them. I've used every other mobile OS out there and the things you can do with android you simply can't do on Symbian or the iPhone. You're essentially running Google's version of linux on your phone. I really like the notification system and the fact that its now at a point where any feature you want on your phone theres an app in the marketplace that can sort you out. Want your text message conversations to appear in chat bubbles similar to the iPhone? Theres an app for it. Want different colored lights to blink to let you know when you missed something? Theres an app for it. Want to slice out any part of any mp3 and make it your ringtone? Theres an app for it. This is only the tip of the iceberg here.

Right now my biggest complaint is the battery life. I'm not sure if its an issue regarding how android uses the phones resources, but the battery life could use a bit of improvement. Other than that, I really enjoy everything the phone has to offer. It helps me stay connected and organized in ways that no other phone i've ever used has.

Again, the n97 is really nice. Unless you live in Europe and can get it subsidized, I don't think I would go with it over the G1. The G1 has just given me a taste of how awesome android is, and the moment I can get it on a phone with a better camera and better features, I will most definitely pick that one up.
Actually, you get to mix in circles with people who can make you miserable. But that's a whole 'nother story ;)
Sure. Its definitely not ideal for the bike owners, but that doesn't mean it should be outlawed. There are many reasons this would be legit information to have and possess, and not all of them are nefarious in nature. Using your logic, should we also restrict websites that track campaign donations, just becuase the campaigners find it painful to their process?

The assembly of information is rarely a bad thing. Theft of said bikes is the 'bad thing'. Punish the people stealing, not the people creating maps.

Plus many organizations, including many governments, perform equally line-skirting things when collecting credit data, purchasing information, and private information. At least if it is public, you could see that your bike is known to be unlocked, so you could do something about it.

The pirate bay is seen/treated differently than all other user-content-generated sites, but it shouldnt be. Fair is fair.
From the title I thought he meant hard drive space.

On my netbook 16GB is plenty and 8GB would be just enough. That's including all my dev tools. The 1G of RAM is more than enough.
Defining a good release strategy for everybody is difficult I suppose. You can't make everybody happy, because the intersection of interests from Server/Desktop people is just different I think. Of course Debian's rather slow release strategy is not so great either, which if I understand correctly was one of the factors why Ubuntu could grow in the first place?

The GPL issues, e.g. firefox->iceweasel naming issue etc. are really nitpicking I concurr, but that happens when you have your own constitution :).

You can base a business on Ubuntu? I actually don't know, it would be very interesting to hear advice from somebody who really knows Ubuntu and Debian very well. I mean have extensive Debian experience but Ubuntu rather little. Could you give me some advice on that?

I mean I have been working with Debian since forever and I know my way around. What do you e.g. mean with "doesn't break most of the time"? I haven't encountered anything even when using experimental which gives me too much headache. At least when I switch from apt-get'ing to aptitude for some rather weird dependency issues.

Than on the other hand your argument is that I want to base my business on that. If I really want to do that, why would I pick so new software anyway? (I read bugtraq, fd etc. that is a bad idea as far as I understand.) That screams for a xen/vserver based solution where I run my host system in a stable (very stable) environment and control my unsecure systems via virtualization. Or is that a bad idea?

Anyway, thanks for your insights.
In order to do that they have to stream very early on, far before the Olympiads. I'm not sure what they use to stream but the proxy used in the west, math tests, are more an indicator of how well you can follow instructions.

Undoubtedly China is going to end up with a large number of very technically competent physicists I'm just wondering if they lost a few who could be Nobels along the way.
the cognitive jump between "free" and "not free" is surprisingly large.

could it happen? sure. it would be a challenge, though.
you might want to check your spelling of 'Tim Berners-Lee' on this page:
http://issuu.com/holdenpage/docs/web20
Something very like this was pitched on CBC's "Dragon's Den" in Canada (think 'American Inventor'). One of the investors on the program ("dragons") happens to own a pizza franchise company, and they were already in talks about the product.

Nobody on the program invested IIRC.
Interesting, could you tell me what you mean by break?
Is the issue ultimately solvable by e.g. aptitude and alike or you need to mess around by hand in the apropriate dpkg files?
In the Yahoo office in London our resident build manager "Bob the builder" (real name Andy) had a Pilchard the cat (http://www.nickjr.co.uk/shows/bob/pilchard.aspx) which meowed whenever anyone on either side of the Atlantic broke the build.
Twitter Business Model - You're Doing It Wrong
Will Twitters new direction raise fears of privacy encroachment?
It actually was originally written in Lisp, and AutoLisp is still used to interface with it. (This is how I started learning Lisp in the first place, to create 3d models of designs with a little Lisp help.)
saying that you know where there is a bicycle standing without a lock, clearly that should be legal.

Do U.S. lawmakers know that (facilitating crime should be legal)? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessory_(legal_term)

In some jurisdictions, criminal "facilitation" laws do not require that the primary crime be actually committed as a prerequisite for criminal liability. These include state statutes making it a crime to "provide" a person with "means or opportunity" to commit a crime, "believing it probable that he is rendering aid to a person who intends to commit a crime." [...]

The U.S. criminal code makes aiding and abetting a federal crime itself a crime [...]

The elements of aiding and abetting are, generally:

(1) guilty knowledge on the part of the accused ( the mens rea);
Don't really like the fact that I have to click on the arrows on the menu bar to get the options, would be more intuitive with display on hoovering.

Otherwise a neat page, great job on the design.
We've tried using Adsense and the payout is really bad. I can't post specific's but selling one calculator a day is a lot more revenue that any adsense we've seen.

I'm thinking that the word "calculator" may be too generic for adsense and so we are SOL in seeing that as a revenue stream...
Sounds like a great method to produce a mechanic but not a creator, i.e. an American Idol winner rather than a Bob Dylan.
Thank you wwalker3 for your keen response; however, I going to have to both agree and disagree - cliché through it is.

Doing well in the Physics Olympiad is a prerequisite to doing well in physics. Yes, I agree, creating knowledge requires a creative flare; however, I don't believe such heights can be achieved without first going through "the relentless drill". I'll use to example of literature to better illustrate my point. No doubt Hemingway's precision and restrain in writing was a creative leap; but that was founded on years of drilling; years of practicing alternative styles; years of relentless practice. Only then are creative insights possible.

First comes the drill; then comes the "creative, effortful practice".
Even when you have plates, sometimes it's nice not to have to wash them.
yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking.

That's like saying, "It's not as bad as it could be (Wal-Mart), but it's still pretty marginal."
My reply to wwalker3, hopefully, also, answers your concerns.
Thank you for your fantastically insightful post!
What Convergence? TV’s Hesitant March to the Net
key bit: working 6-8 hours a week

call back when you have to work a real job. whiny idiot.
The Wiimote is the answer for web browsing from the couch. Still need a wireless keyboard if you want to type.
I really liked your quote, I have just quoted you in my new blog post about the same topic. http://geeyk.com/what-is-wrong-with-chinese-and-indian-paren...

ps: I didn't link here to drive traffic to my blog post, The comment i have written on here is the same i have posted there. :)
Why are they calling this bike rental company a "scheme"?
These guys were showcased at the Wharton Entrepreneurial Conference last Friday. They have an incredible team and much better videos thn those listed on their website.
It makes sense that if you measure success by the same yardstick that drives education, the more highly educated will win. The Physics Olympiad is testing basically the same skills that a typical high-school physics education in China teaches. Naturally they'd do well at it.

The question is whether those skills are what makes a successful physicist. And I'd guess that they're only a small subset of the skills necessary for original research. Yeah, they're a necessary condition, but they're very far from a sufficient one - and perhaps some of the time spent on drill would be better off directed towards working on those other skills like creativity.
Sure, makes some sense. What interesting questions/problems are you looking at these days?
No matter the education or the business, I think what the Chinese should pick up again is conscience.
This really makes me wish that when I booted up my computer this morning, my sound card wasn't broken.
How does a math test, or a history test, or an SAT reward mediocrity or parroting?
If I were Twitter, Twitturly would be in my scope.
JSON protocols (part 1)
I have occasionally mentioned a book or two on my blog. As for how to get review copies: if people want to send something to you, then it takes a negligible amount of time to accept graciously and give your postal mail address. (Particularly if you use something like DirectAccess and have a macro for your postal address.)

If not, you have a problem: your time as a small businessman is worth $100 an hour, or more. (If you're not used to your time being worth that much you need to readjust your expectations even if you're not making that much yet, because it helps to concentrate your efforts on things that matter as opposed to things that do not.)

And if your time is worth $100 an hour, what the heck are you doing spending precious minutes of your time arranging to save money on an $8 or $25 or whatever book.

Every second of time spent longer than "Search for book on Amazon, Buy-With-One-Click" is time you are not improving your business. I'm darn good at writing letters to get things that I want, but there is no way for me to make one-off writing pay at $8 a page. (Now if it were writing on the blog or business website that actually scaled out of direct proportion to time invested, that would be a decent use of time.)
PHP reached a wide audience by appealing to shared hosting providers, but that path to popularity is no longer available. To answer your reasons:

- Yes, it's different. The Lisp community was interested enough in this problem to create Dylan, but that didn't work, and it wasn't really Lisp anymore.

- Try finding something more beginner-friendly than DrScheme. Actually don't. You'll be wasting your time.

- The Lisp community has always been interested in fighting fragmentation. SRFIs are being implemented in a wide range of Scheme implementations. I'm less familiar with the Common Lisp side, but I'm pretty sure a lot's been done there too.

- I think by writing code. I wrote C for 12 years, and that code has more comments because I would first write what needed to be done as a series of comments, then fill in code under each comment. Lisp is actually a lot easier once you get used to it.

- I use Kawa Scheme, which like Clojure and SISC runs on the JVM and has easy access to all Java libraries. But generally you choose a Lisp not to use libraries but to create a program that's in a class by itself.
I'm currently [one of] the best physics students in the UK and I'd pay anything to have had an uprising like that,

Sure, because you are (unrealistically) imagining yourself compelled to excel at your current aspiration. Consider instead the case where you were forced to put in 10000 hours becoming a master concertina player.

* 1) A productive society is one with experts. (2) Expertise is only accomplished with relentless practice. (C) The most productive society will be accomplished if citizens are made to constantly work at their discipline.*

Who do you admire and look up to? Did they have childhoods chained to the oar, compelled to excel with discipline through fear? Is that how they came to achieve amazing things?

I doubt it. I'm not a physicist at all, but I know at least that Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson did not.
how are these done? is the vector part that they're svg rather than gif, or are the actually created using scripts in the browser?

[edit: i keep checking out sites in the list using firebug. i'm not a ui person, but i am trying to learn. this looks complicated. is javascript inserting the images?]
Which is why PG and RTM worked so hard to develop the admission test for YC applicants . . .
Credibility.