skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Japan is the world's worst at teaching English as a second language

Actually, you're wrong. That dubious honor goes to South Korea, which spends one of the highest amounts of money per capita on English education, yet has the worst results in Asia.[0]

So the point about English actually isn't very important, given Samsung's dominance in the smartphone industry.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_South_Korea#Englis...
That would be Eastern Airlines Flight 855: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_855

All three engines on the L-1011 failed due to an incorrect maintenance procedure.
I suppose Japan is suffering from the island effect, at least in their mobile sector. Like Finland, they got a preview into the smartphone world (Japan with i-mode, Finland with WAP). Companies were built, investments were made, and they flopped, burning out a lot of entrepreneurs and killing investor confidence. And then the real smartphone boom happened, and we moved into it too cautiously.

I don't know enough of the French software business, but it would be reasonable to assume that they had something similar when Minitel was replaced by the web. How did the companies react and recover?
Apple: To map or not to map – That was no question…
I'd tend to just ignore anyone that uses the word 'bloat' without backing their statement up with any substance/insight or perhaps acknowledgement that they may be wrong on some counts and are unlikely to understand the entire problem-space of said project to the extent they can justify deeming any significant portion of it unnecessary.
Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel
> Hmmm... anybody have a guess as to what they have in mind?

I don't, actually. Anyone wanna clue me in?
That's a bad piece of advice if you have partners. It's the fastest way of getting screwed by an ill-intentioned one, or getting your IP stolen, or worse
(At least in a few countries I know the laws - not entirely sure about the US)
Not Flash The (Still) Angsty Zeitgeist Of HTML5 Technology Burnout
He probably didn't swim there.
With inflation that's cheaper than $80 for 10 years. :)
I've never read a textbook about lambda calculus. When I red this, it was fairly straightforward, and I didn't need a pre-existing knowledge of lambda calculus to get it. There are plenty of people who don't understand the point of what they read in math textbooks. Not everything is one-size-fits-all.
Letting Employees Work Remotely Pays Off
Nice to see such thorough documentation like in this project!
Yes, that's very true. For most people at least. The previous generation here in the EU, had this notion of a 'permanent job', which was an iron-clad, for life, contract. State guaranteed. You could be folding paper planes all day and sit counting your pencils. Again. And still nothing happened. This was quite common. I know a lot of people, especially in PT/ES who are in trouble with their parents; they want to take risks while their parents tell them to get this cushy job for life (which doesn't exist anymore). It's a real pain to convince people that this was a crazy notion (and poisonous!) in the first place.
It's probably fair to assume that the desktop won't be going away soon by the fact that they've improved it on Win8 (there are a lot of non-metro improvements in Win8 - surprised?). If the desktop were there right now purely temporarily then I doubt MS would have spent time improving it.

Maybe one day they'll nuke it, but they have a long way to go.
Right now we're taking carbon out of the ground and putting it in the atmosphere.

The ocean presently has a lot of extra carbon, which it absorbed from the atmosphere. So this is an indirect way of taking carbon out of the atmosphere and then putting it back...a closed loop. If we did this for all our hydrocarbon fuel we'd be carbon-neutral.
> majority of them are flip phones

There are 2 reasons for this:

1. Flip phones are more compact, which is valued by the Japanese.

2. Unlike English, the traditional keypad is perfect for inputting Japanese text. In fact, touchscreen smartphone Japanese keyboards essentially mimic this setup[0].

0: http://i.imgur.com/XFTMc.png
Built-in virtualenv? Finally!
The Japanese tech giants are exactly the companies that should to be doing well now, if they had healthy levels of innovation hormones. Sony, for example, still have a great name and most of the over 40s I know would definitely give it weight when buying a new TV or sound system.

There is a real opportunity now and for the next few years to incorporate great software into electronic products. iOS & Android are doing it with smart phones and tablets. But, it's a good time now to go back and rethink a lot of other electronics and see how software interfaces can make them better. What would an iMicrowave look like? Android Intercom? Refrigerator RT? Car Stereo. Washing Machine. etc. etc. What better way to differentiate your televisions in 2013 then giving them the best software?

Japanese companies were once at the forefront here - great products at great prices with an eye for new paradigms (eg walkman). They still have the brand names.
not true. Japan tech control digital photography and videography
Just for liability purposes it's worth dealing with incorporation early. If you have co-founders, you're a de facto general partnership until you opt for something better.
A couple of other considerations regard the box in which this theory plays nice.

-- Behavioural assumptions of market participants

-- Preference Neutality with respect Volatility levels

-- Non-existence of externatlities from market microstrucure

These are avenues to be exploited, and the exploitations work better the more EMH is disseminated without "hypothesis" being spelled out. These are orthogonal directions of attack, but more dangerous and more powerful than many understand.
I don't know about the economic soundness of the argument, but it is so cold hearted that I would immediately emigrate from any country where this was the driving force behind government policy.
I've owned the touchpad for about 6 months, and I really liked it, some of the UI features were quite refreshingly new and clean. I wish one day webOS can compete with android / ios / wp8. Competition is good news for the consumer.
How does this keep happening to people? No registrar I know has a default of "don't renew", and they send your reminders. Why not just buy the doman for 10 years, or set autorenew, or ... seriously. There is NO excuse for this.
I almost feel bad for Sony. I've bought Sony TV's all my life, but when it came time to buy a large flat panel TV, and I did all the comparisons, I bought a .... Samsung. No comparison - Sony just doesn't hold up anymore, and a lot of it is the internal firmware. I did buy a Sony BluRay player, and the UI is absolutely the worst piece of junk I've ever seen. Shoulda bought a Samsung!
You only really have 2 choices here[1] (provided this gas-to-liquid thing pans out):

1. Take carbon out of the ground, where it is not active in any carbon system. Put it in the air, and ultimately the ocean. This releases more carbon into the whole system, and causes problems we all know about. It eventually goes to the water as the parent mentioned, with the acidification problem (s)he brought up. Adding ever more carbon to the system only adds to the total carbon load.

2. Take carbon out of the water, reduce acidification, albeit by transferring it to the air. This doesn't actually put new carbon in the system tho, so it has benefit.

However, the carbon put in the air with #2 is the same as traditional jet fuels from sources in the ground, so those effects cancel out as a consideration in our choice range.

Sure in a perfect world, we would find a way to start actively reducing the amount of carbon in circulation, however, to get there we have to find ways to stop adding new carbon to the system. This helps with that.

[1] I know there are lots of options we could consider, but I highly doubt any option that effectively translates to "have the military be less effective" will fly politically, so I am assuming that short-term achievable options have to have no negative effect from the military POV at minimum.
Thanks for bringing up Nintento. The Wii truly was an innovative product, but I can't think of any other must-have product coming from Japan in the last 10-15 years.
I rather enjoyed the inscription by Zuck in the copy of Strunk and White. It reads: "The product is strong with this one. Now learn some grammer."

Yep, he gave this guy Strunk and White and spelt grammar incorrectly.
They don't need to issue a definitive statement on it, because that's not a possibility.

Why would Microsoft set a 250+ billion dollar ecosystem on fire (third party Windows desktop software) when it's responsible for locking in all of Microsoft's enterprise customers?

Metro is for consumers.
As someone who worked at Sony in the US and later founded a successful startup in japan, I feel I can speak with a bit of authority here… The main thing to realize is that this article is talking about Japanese 'tech giants' missing the boat, not HN-style software startups.

For many years Japan dominated and succeeded with well-built consumer hardware. The best and brightest minds became hardware engineers at Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu, etc… When the industry shifted to software and hardware blended together in a seamless fashion - an ecosystem bigger than the device itself - those minds were particularly ill-prepared for the fast paced, just-ship-it style development cycles that software demands. The product looked good on paper but the lifespan of the consumer relationship was inferior because it didn't include the user's newly found software lifecycle.

We all know how Microsoft missed the boat when the internet came along and disrupted their office/windows strategy. Now, imagine a whole country filled with Microsofts. Japan has floundered in denial for a while.

The good news for Japan is that the in the last few years I have seen a huge growth of people diving into it. There are a ton of coworking spaces and incubators popping up, and people seem to be focusing on software now. I actually think the big earthquake was a bit of an awakening for people here. More people want to work at a company doing something cool. The younger generation seems to understand that hardware is no longer king, even if they don't have the mentorship and guidance they would have in the US. It may take a bit of time but I think it is already under way. They have amazing work ethic and drive and I am hopeful that Japan turns the ship back towards innovation.
How to put all your data on the Web without storing it in the cloud
What about the heat given off by the ship?
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect....
Quote: "If the spacecraft are torchships, their thrust power is several terawatts. This means the exhaust is so intense that it could be detected from Alpha Centauri. By a passive sensor."
When people fail to respond to expiration notices, taking the domain offline on the expiration date seems like a good way to bring it to their attention.
The issue is that a lot of technically-minded foreigners go to Akihabara without realizing that for a lot of Japanese people, the place is just as much about otaku stuff (manga, anime, cosplay) as it is about electronics. And then they get disappointed when they realize that otaku stuff is what makes up most of Akiba.
Nodejs.org down, showing domain registrars site
IANAL: But from what I've heard and figured out, one should at least do an LLC to avoid personal liability, otherwise if some nut decides to sue you, you can even lose your personal assets.
EMH is actually a hypothesis (not a theory) that arises from non-arbitrage models. It's not meant to describe the real world, although it's thought-provoking to look at how "efficient" real markets are, so people like to characterize and "test" the EMH in its various forms. How markets fail to be "efficient" is often quite instructive for practical purposes.

For pedagogical purposes, I think it's a really good simplified and ideal illustrative model, until you learn the more axiomatic derivations of no-arbitrage (the arrow-debreau stuff). From your other posts, I gathered that you're not beyond undergrad studies in economics - you'll likely learn about the more complex models when you reach a more advanced and rigorous stage, if you pursue the theoretical path.

If I were you, I wouldn't be too concerned about others arguing about the EMH - without the proper foundations, you won't understand them beyond a superficial level.

Not to mention that it's popular for the less educated to bitch about the EMH, probably because it's an English acronym with commonly used words. I've almost never heard laymen talk about how unrealistic the nash equilibrium is (:
European countries are as full of things that don't work as third world ones. I lived in switzerland, for instance, and found it astonishing how things that "simply worked" back home (a developing country) were still badly implemented there. Paying rent and tracking mail packages are two examples I still remember didn't work well/could be heavily improved...

There are holes to fill everywhere.
Someone at Joyent snagged the name when it expired.
How an Indian company redBus used BigQuery to Master Big Data
From friends and family in the navy: whenever you see a fleet or battle group "stationed" somewhere, it means they are basically doing right turns in the middle of the ocean (a joke being that someone has to balance the effect of all those left turning NASCAR races). While they are doing operations etc, a lot of this time is considered extremely boring, more so than even long voyages going somewhere. Further, they usually aren't going full speed, so to some extent they are "just sitting there", particularly in the effect that they aren't using the full output of their power systems - leaving lots of power and (if needed people time) available for fuel "creation".
Don't rest all your hopes on ITER. Alternative approaches that could well be cheaper and come to fruition a lot sooner include NIF/LIFE, polywell, focus fusion, General Fusion, Tri-Alpha, Helion, levitated dipole, petawatt picosecond laser fusion, and Sandia's new approach to magnetized inertial fusion.

If none of them work, advanced fission designs like LFTR or IFR could be almost as good, with better safety and a hundred times less nuclear waste than conventional reactors.
I wonder why Twitter has never tried to do anything interesting with all the data they own. I can think of so many ways they can mine useful data from them (think of brand sentiment analysis). Or - how about exposing metrics like views, clicks etc. to businesses in a Pro account?
So I think you both agree with me that it's not necessarily the case that a hypothetical fusion power source or free energy source is best used to produce hydrocarbons for distribution and downstream use.

Regarding the comment of sophacles, power distribution is part of the economic factor. It may be that the central plant is much more reliable than a backyard plant, but the power grid - subject to thunderstorms, ice, tree falls, backhoes, curious squirrels, and so on - makes the overall power supply system less reliable than a backyard fusion plant.
Maybe not license, but a 60 "hour" standard broker training course (book and web videos to fast forward through) is worthwhile to learn the basics.
Other than the benefit of using strong crypto under the hood, I'm not sure what benefits this has over a system like openid. It has about the same level of interactional complexity, and at the additional cost of requiring browser support.

If we're going to have browser support anyway, I'd rather just use standard two-way SSL and put the work into developing better UI and private key distribution systems for it. It's even more secure and has a great user experience once you've set up the key in the browser and authorized it to the site.
I noticed that too, but thought it could be a joke. It's fun to mispell things on purpose sometimes.
"•A C implementation of the "decimal" module, with up to 80x speedup for decimal-heavy applications"

That in itself is should make a few python gamers happy. Also some serious motivations for older version users, not all but more and more. Also many other interesting develepments others have highlighted already.
The `whole greater than the tally` feature set and performance improvements of this release, really has inched Python 3 to the point where I will want to start using it. With no basis beyond my own and other's like sentiment this still seems like an important milestone. Feel like many will move from inertiaville, at least building a weekend house in momentum town.
There was a post about this yesterday, but I'll upvote it because it needs all the exposure it can get.
Yeah. The Japanese have always been fond of their flip phones, and in fact they were well ahead of us on smartphones. Long before the iPhone and such, they had very powerful flip phones there made by Sharp and such.
Haha, it's Gree, isn't it? I'm guessing things aren't going so well since kompu gacha was banned.
Looks like running your own dropbox from your desktop
>20 years of no growth buried them under a mountain of debt, crippling the domestic market which had been a big part of their rise (c.f. china).

I don't think a lagging economy explains why Sony and most Japaense tech giant missed the web/mobile boat. They missed that boat, because they missed that boat. The US economy is in its own "lost decade" but Apple, Google, and Microsoft are doing quite well.
The benefit is orders of magnitude better usability. I couldn't get users to grok OpenID, this just needs an email and password.

How will my mom log in to an SSL-certificate-requesting site from another computer?
How exactly did he lose $100,000,000?
I don't know about all this Euro bashing. I believe America is dominant in entrepreneurship mainly because of the language. Other factors are the huge home market and the few public sector jobs.

I've been starting businesses in two very different European countries, and lived in a third, just like I've been living in America. And I certainly don't believe America is equipped with better laws for entrepreneurs or with a more risk encouraging mentality.
I have to agree. The author hasn't dealt with all the unsolved problems with bounded rationality, which quite frequently involves the inability to compute the future (the case where even if perfect information is available). Then, somehow, he "models" the cost as computational complexity, of a particular sort. But that's why we have peer reviews.
Twitter does charge for it's APIs for large users of it. See DataSift and GNip.
You're cheating.

Telsa, like many startups, is pursuing a low-volume, price-insensitive market first. That helps pay for all sorts of startup and R&D costs, and lets them work out issues before they scale. Their long-term goal is, per Wikipedia, "eventually mass producing fully electric cars at a price affordable to the average consumer".

There are several fully electric vehicles in production that cost $35k.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_production_battery_elec...

They have a substantially lower cost of operation than gas-powered vehicles, so they are plausibly cheaper to operate over the lifetime of the car:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf#Operating_costs

And over the long term, expecting batteries to get better is a pretty good bet. Everybody from Apple to Toyota is eager for battery improvements.
NY has a significant rental market.
Good points and yeah, heck you're right Nintendo is over a century old. But I think more likely than a Nintendo/Apple partnership - is a Sony/Nintendo partnership. A deal that would leverage both companies' strengths to more effectively compete against Apple.

Apple is now Nintendo's biggest competitor, a deal with them is a last resort and would certainly be a white flag end of their hardware division.
There are some cash grants available, though perhaps more in some areas than others. I'm thinking of smallish grants targeting bootstrapping companies, stuff in the €25,000-€100,000 range. A friend starting a videogame-development company has gotten grants from both the Danish Film Institute, and the Nordic Game Program, for example, just paid out in cash.
No matter how often you call western European countries "socialo-communist", they have never been anywhere close to communist, and lately have been reducing all kinds of social benefits, going more towards the "totally free market" (with questionable outcomes...).

But I'm sure you'll find a "socio-communist" reason for e.g. the Spanish real estate bubble. Silly communists and their real estate speculation!
Gift shopping comes to Facebook, could make it a game changer for selling on FB
Slackware comes with slackpkg which is (in terms) similar to apt-get, but for non standard apps you need slackbuilds or compile code manually.

Btw using Slackware on one server in production and i must admit that small specific systems are perfect match for Slackware (VoIP, routers, ...). And ofc non-production systems (laptops, testing and development environments, etc).
Usability involves more than one target audience: it also has to be easy for developers to integrate.

BrowserID (Persona) took me minutes to implement. On a non-trivial project, it may take a couple hours. The beauty of this is the fact that it still works without built-in browser support. It's designed to be a forwards-compatible API that only becomes more usable with time.

Additionally, email is an excellent way to establish a user's identity, and the fact that it's designed around email makes it easy for a regular person to understand its authentication flow.

The problem with SSL is that it is an all-or-nothing technology. There's a chicken and egg problem: people won't make good UI for it until it's widely used, but people won't use it until it has a good UI. Persona provides an implementation of BrowserID that has a decent UI, and the user experience will only get better with time as more people use it. The chicken/egg problem is solved there, but two-way SSL right now is practically unusable for anyone who isn't very familiar with it (most people). Using an email address is very familiar, though.
Why didn't you ever tell us that osxmonad was online already! :)
OP is a bombastic ad for pubnub, blowing up in other people's faces isn't their worry.
Losing control of the platform would also mean many of their publishing deals would disappear, however. I believe that's quite a large source of revenue, the Nintendo royalty on every single Wii and DS game sold.
> a majority of them don't know English

There's been a push by Hiroshi Mikitani, co-founder and CEO of Rakuten, a Japanese Amazon equivalent, for "Englishnization" (No, there's no mistake in the spelling. Mikitani came up with it, which itself seems to be a sign of impending failure)[0] - having all business within the company, even between Japanese people, conducted in English.

I don't have any inside info, but it seems that things have not been going well. Most employees still speak in Japanese on a day-to-day basis (except for in meetings), and they're studying just enough to get the score on the TOEIC that they need for their position at Rakuten.

0: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/ek20120730a1.html
May I ask.. Is there anything similar to Rails or Django for Perl ?
I am just trying to provide alternatives. I have no idea what twitters revenues are. Perhaps a tiered system like mailchimp has? If you have under a certain amount of requests it would be free. Paid applications which heavily use the API could be charged more.

Also, as I mentioned in my comment above, I think a premium subscription would be in order. I would pay for a service that saves tweets, and provided basic analytics. I am just trying to get the conversation going about alternatives. If anyone else has possible revenue alternatives for Twitter, I'd be interested to hear them.
An LLC also helps if you're planning on releasing an iOS app under your startup's name, not your personal name.