skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's primarily because
1). these companies push their employees so hard and
2). a majority of them don't know English
3). software programming is seen as something for nerds too lame to do electrical engineering

1 is important because as we all know, if you are a good programmer, it's not because you are _good_ it's because you spend your spare time catching up on other facets and honing your skills. When there isn't time for that, what do you expect to happen?

2 is equally important simply because Japan is stuck in their own land of tech help. I think things are much better now because of Google Translate and such, but most Japanese programmers have basically been isolated from us.

3 is the biggest one. Despite Ruby got invented there, most programmers there do not know it. There are no Japanese Operating Systems. There is no Japanese business software market. Most Japanese companies have absolutely _terrible_ sites from last decade.
[as a source http://www.economist.com/node/18958643]

So, what's to be done about it? Well, luckily Japan has insanely high internet speeds, and everything is moving to virtualization everywhere else. So, at the end of the day, there is a big chance that everything could shift in Japan at a much, much higher rate than in America. However, this will take a number of consulting companies pushing pretty pro American attitudes towards business culture as well as programming, which simply isn't going to fly all that well there.

Personally, I think Japan needs a much higher number of startups, and they need to basically do a startup chile thing for web startups. They need them badly, they need a majority of the existing work force radically retrained, and the people coming into the work force need to be pushed in very different directions compared to the usual.

Japan has the might, they have the know how. The main problems are simply that they can't keep up with the rate of development and change that other companies can handle, and the only way that's going to change is if these companies start isolating portions of themselves like startups.

My personal idea, which I would be very happy to see go into use, would be to start holding out of work 'bounties'. Coolest Erlang program developed this month gets $2000! Best new language gets $5000! That pushes people to become better, share knowledge, and find other smart people to get ahead and get the money, which would hopefully lead to those groups of people doing startups together after finding a possible 'founder'.

Also: there is no FSF/EFF in Japan. And because of the max 1% of the budge the military gets they don't even have the intelligence companies or the drive for them as we do.

p.s. I can't read Japanese, so everything I know is hearsay.
Apple and Google view the tablet as an oversized phone, Microsoft views it as an undersized laptop or desktop. That's a philosophical difference right there.

The real test of Windows 8 will be on devices like the Surface Pro and other x86 tablets about to enter the market. Instead of being designed and used mostly as a consumption device like the iPad and Android tablets, you can run the full Visual Studio or Eclipse on them anywhere you go.

Microsoft hopes to leverage the sales of those and other touchscreen ultrabooks, laptops into apps and support for Windows RT.

If they made Metro run only on Windows RT tablets, it risks suffering the same fate as Windows Phone, a very nice platform with little uptake because of user and developer mindshare consumed by the iPad and Android tablets. From that perspective, Windows 8 make a lot of sense.
There are two significant factions in the Python community: the scientific group and the web-dev group. The scientific group is pretty much on board with Python 3. Perhaps due to unicode handling intricacies, that the web-dev group ain't exactly on board with Python 3 yet. But this needs to change and it takes leadership. Fortunately, bit and pieces such as webob are Python 3 compatible. And personally, I feel the Python web frameworks need a fresh redesign.
Also frustrating is when a local municipality lowers the speed limit on a section of highway that runs through it to produce a speed trap, as a way of generating revenue.
The new industrial revolution
>But, SciFi isn't about predicting the future so much as it is about setting up a premise with which to tell a story, so I can forgive these shortcomings.

So true. It pains me how often I see SciFi, particularly older works, judged on the in/accuracy of "predictions".
To make a <video> responsive, you only have to set its width to 100%... not a big deal.

But yeah, I love flowplayer, it has a nice js API. Too bad it's not IE6 compatible.
I'm actually much more interested in another trend, represented by MasterCAM's RobotMaster software, that allows CNC machinists/programmers to program robots in the way they do machine tools.

It's a very different approach, but it means that the end-user (machinist) has the ability to know/control his whole stack to a far greater degree than the black-box & magic approach that ReThink is taking with Baxter. For industries that pride themselves on optimizing details - I think the RobotMaster is quite interesting.

http://www.robotmaster.com/
Right now, you can install applications distributed by non-authorized third parties onto many Android systems, and you cannot do so on any iOS system without jailbreaking. There are many other important meanings of "open" which Android may or may not satisfy, but those aren't what's being discussed here.
whois nodejs.org

Registrant Name:Ryan Dahl
Registrant Organization:Joyent
Registrant Street1:345 California St Suite 2000
Registrant City:San Francisco
Registrant State/Province:CA
Registrant Postal Code:94104
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Email:ryan@joyent.com
And, dollar cost of the fuel is not the only cost of maintaining a "long supply tail." There's also the dollar cost of all the ships and sailors on that tail, and there's the logistical opportunity costs: we have to protect that tail with military resources that might otherwise have gone to more directly military purposes, and the head of the tail (the military activity at the front) is held back and slowed down by a "heavier" supply tail.

This doesn't eliminate the tail (we still have to deliver ammunition, lubricating oil, food etc. to the fleet) and it doesn't eliminate replenishment at sea (we still have to get that stuff from supply vehicles to ships), but it does lighten the supply load and create more military options.
It used to be possible to pay for other people's domains (they still own it, you are just gifting the payment).

Someone once renewed a hotmail domain after Microsoft forgot.

Registrars should allowing gifting, source doesn't matter.
If I recall right, Kirk maneuvered vertically in the Wrath of Khan. A quick google search points out Spock saying, "His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking."
Just after Visual Studio 2012 was released?
Excellent analysis of the situation - very interesting and could be with other consequences and applications, whenever the minority can be the one to both benefit on, propose, and vote on a change that the majority will have to bear and pay - all the while using a false pretense like safety.

The proposed solution to study the consequences could also be returned and simplified - to mesure the impact of the proposed changed on property value and to refuse by default any change that would raise it.

(the best way would be to accept changes that increase the global utility, but it might be hard to measure - giving a number to the increased property value would be hard, but giving a number due to lost time due to lower speeds or other inconveniences would be even harder)
We may not even need guided missiles in future warfare.

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

"The United States Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division demonstrated an 8 MJ rail gun firing 3.2 kg projectiles in October 2006 as a prototype of a 64 MJ weapon to be deployed aboard Navy warships. [ ... ] Such weapons are expected to be powerful enough to do a little more damage than a BGM-109 Tomahawk missile at a fraction of the projectile cost. [ ... ] Its expected performance is a muzzle velocity over 5,800 m/s, accurate enough to hit a 5 metre target over 200 nmi (370 km) away while firing at 10 shots per minute."

I'm sure that these hypothetical railgun projectiles have some method of in-flight correction, but we haven't forgotten how to do trigonometry since WWI. :)
Free Stanford Beginning Networking Class
I hope their effort bears fruit. Writing textbooks is long and tedious, more so than one would expect before actually sitting down and trying it. I had hoped to help it happen with a web app I launched this year:

http://www.bookvoid.com/

I however, haven't been able to attract any serious content creator.
Perhaps this IS old news, but I certainly didn't understand it if it was. So basically Windows is creating a two tier system where blessed developers can get access to key system functionality where others are left to the "legacy" desktop. Windows 7 will almost certainly be the final time that Windows get installed on one of my PCs.

With Steam coming out on Linux and shockingly even Apple having a more coherent idea about system security, I don't see a lot of reason to deal with Windows' legacy bullcrap anymore.
A little more info on ETOPS and the challenges created by multiple similar failures within a small population...

There are two parts to ETOPS (tongue in cheek "Engines Turn or Or People Swim")..The first is the certification to design standards, including flight testing. The second, and perhaps more crucial element, is the operations/procedures certifications. In the first stage, the entire system (engines, airframe, fuel system and everything else) is evaluated as a comprehensive whole. Essentially, you're looking to eliminate single points of failure.

The second part is arguably more important as it deals with the statistical failure rates. The assumption is that a modern jet (turbofan) engine is highly reliable. As the basis of such procedures, multiple, similar failures are worrisome. An airline must have approved ETOPS operations to fly routes requiring ETOPS (a certified airplane is necessary but not sufficient). Common operational procedures include not replacing both engines at the same time, servicing similar fuel system components together, etc. Basically, avoid the possibility of introducing a single point of failure into otherwise redundant systems.
Python 3 support in django is coming soon....!
By that analogy, only Microsoft blessed developers could make desktop apps and all others who wanted to distribute independently will be forced to use the command line.
Improving real-time collaboration on Prowork with NodeJs
But it's still registered to Ryan Dahl/Joyent, so it probably can still be renewed.
Well, yes, but it's nice to see how flowplayer resizes its interface with browser width on-the-fly.
Anecdotal, I know, but I found VideoJS to be a bit of a mess. From a code point of view, the player instance would not destroy correctly resulting in a memory leak for single-page web apps and IMHO the CSS was a pain to work with.
The CSS 2.1 spec was last updated in 2011 and does not include any mention of this new stacking context behavior (which was only proposed on the CSS mailing list in May 2012 and has not yet made it into any spec).
> I assumed that Windows 8 only contained the 'desktop' to give developers time to convert their apps to work on metro and that Microsoft would deprecate the desktop in Windows 9 or 10.

Where did you get this idea from?

The Desktop is here to stay, because it's the only way to run real applications that need a bit more than touch gestures.

Let me help you out...

Metro -> For Consumers (silly games, twitter, browsing internet, and buying shit)

Desktop -> For Producers (VS.NET, Office, dev and server stuff, real applications, etc)

Windows 8 basically is one OS for both Tablets and PCs. That's all there is to it.
HYPERINFLATION COMING
Not that I am defending predatory practices, but you have to put things in perspective. Firstly check out Wonga's advertising - they're an iPhone app. People who can afford luxury smartphones are not "desperate families". That is why it makes sense to lump them in with other dotcommy companies.

Secondly, if a week before payday I lend you fifty quid, and you pay me back and buy me a pint to say thanks when you get paid, that's a higher "APR" than Wonga charges, because APR is meaningless for any loan of less than a year.
Here is what is new:

http://docs.python.org/py3k/whatsnew/3.3.html
ERROR 500.5150 - Too busy being rockstar tech
As a PHP developer I've been waiting for the web-dev group to jump on board with Python 3 before I make the switch. I'm hoping it will be sooner rather than later.
For that there is the so Microsoft-named "Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization".

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/products-a...
> So basically Windows is creating a two tier system where blessed developers can get access to key system functionality where others are left to the "legacy" desktop

It's actually kind of the other way around, desktop apps can mess around with much more on the system than Metro apps can, except for some new APIs.

> shockingly even Apple having a more coherent idea about system security

How so? What has system security to do with this? If anything, malware authors will have trouble running their malware on Windows RT tablets and in Metro.
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What happens when the smart money realizes that shorting a massive amount of dumb money would leave them freight trained by the crowds?

Smart money can be dumb as well - because it pays to do so. I'm quite sure that the number of rational investors/capital are greatly outnumbered by the irrational investors/capital such that many correct trades become essentially insolvent before the market becomes rational again. See value shorters for the last two booms.
> The article itself even seems to hint at it, but not note it explicitly: in a graph labeled "life sentences", purporting to show how long it takes for "European" entrepreneurs to be free of debt, the bar for Denmark is so small that you can barely see it. Maybe they mean primarily French & German entrepreneurs?

It says the average time to discharge debt in the US is less than a year, so that the vast majority of Europe (by number of countries and by population) takes much longer. The existence of a pocket of 5 million people in Denmark (basically a large city) where it is less hardly diminishes the generalization.

> The main advantage to doing it here, imo, is that the healthcare story is solved, though maybe that'll be better in the U.S. after PPACA comes into effect in 2014.

This comment sounds more motivated by politics than the actual business of start-ups. Healthcare is a significant cost for businesses in the US, but the difficulty of providing insurance for employees is hardly even discussed here around HN as an important consideration for start-ups, compared to, say, finding capital, good managers, compensation schemes, entrepreneurial spirit, government regulation, and so on.
I submitted Slate separately after seeing this post ;)
Big Android BBQ Coming to DFW (Dallas) in October
Wordpress on a Retina Display
eNom does all kinds of shady shenanigans with domain renewals. There are stories of names going up on their auction block the moment the registration expires (meaning someone has to pay a greatly inflated amount of cash to reclaim the name)
I admit to little knowledge of economics, but to me it seems as complex a system as weather, without the underlying physical certainties.

My reading of Fama and Mandelbrot seems to indicate that markets are essentially random and unpredictable. Being largely uninformed on the matter, though, I would appreciate any explanation of Mandelbrot's theories and their relevance to the topic at hand, as they seem to have been largely ignored by economists -- I could not speculate as to why.

To me the tools of chaos theory seem apt to describe markets, insofar as they may be described. If they happen to yield no useful results, I would believe that such may not be obtained. I would appreciate correction on this matter.
You should really check out Cory Doctorow's "The coming war on general-purpose computing":
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-p...

and:
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html
Interesting. I own an OP-1, amazing synth. These guys at teenage Engineering are an impressive cutting edge company, I love their design and the way they bring a fresh approach to their products. The OP Lab is great example (beside the OP-1 itself), sort of a audio addon laboratory for sound nerds:
www.teenageengineering.com/products/oplab
You seem to still be confusing the command prompt and console applications with the MS-DOS operating system. The applications that can be executed inside the Windows command-line prompt are Windows applications, not DOS applications.
> The Python interpreter becomes aware of a pvenv.cfg file whose existence signals the base of a virtual environment’s directory tree

As someone who hated the .ini configuration for logging in python 2.5, this smells a bit.
>the way it is distributed

Oh really? http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html
Why on earth do you need IE6 support?

IE6 is not even in the top 12 browsers according to StatCounter.
It's more of an accumulation of things ending up making 3.3 way superior to 3.2 in the end. But,

* The feature I like most is definitely generator delegation, it significantly improves more extensive uses of generators and iterators, and makes generator-as-coroutines a much more interesting proposition (before delegation, calling an other "coroutine" would be rather painful, now you essentially just have to tack a `yield from` in front, as you'd tack an `await` in C# 5.0)

* The flexible string representation finally fixes narrow build's issues with astral planes, which is becoming rather important as astral planes include e.g. emoji, and it significantly reduces the possibility of bugs when working with astral planes (as there's no more behavioral difference between "narrow" and "wide" builds)

* We'll have to see how they're used, but namespace support could be used to significantly cleanup of... well, namespaces (and multiple separate libraries living in the same namespace, without having to resort to PYTHONPATH hacks or setuptools tomfoolery)

* A built-in, clean implementation of contexts/scopes (collections.ChainMap) I can already see plenty of use for. Same for signatures, there's high hijinks potential in that one.

* The rest really is about a better experience all around: reduced memory, "unicode literals" (for Python 2 compat), ElementTree fixups, ...
> My point is that they didn't take away the functionality of DOS

They took all of it away. (thankfully, it was a complete mess).

> Even the default Visual Studio project is a command line program (last time I checked).

'DOS' and 'command line' are not the same thing, at all, not even remotely.

Your literally comparing trading one UI for another to trading one UI for an OS. That makes no sense at all.
He is indeed an Apple apologist (I prefer the word "zealot" more), but he's not a terrible writer (in general). He sometimes (a couple times a year) writes insightful, technical, under-the-hood stuff in his blog, "roughly drafted". That's why I visit his blog every quarter or so and skim the long articles.
Yes. Also keep in mind that Visual Studio 2010 is the last one which will work on Windows XP and Windows Vista.
>"Why not counter cycle the lending activity instead of exacerbating the business cycle?"

That's easier said than done. Most of it is politics. But they do.

The Fed began tightening monetary policy back in 2004, when rates went from just below 2% to 5.5%. They did so to start to "cool" the economy, and it essentially popped the housing bubble.
What you say is correct. I'll chip in a bit on "registrar to registrar". In case of Namecheap,renewing a expired domain is just like renewing a regular domain. While other registrars charge re-activation fee, Namecheap has no additional fees. So, Ryan can just renew the domain instantly whenever this comes into his attention.
Former Micrsoftie (left in August) and founder of a startup that exclusively targets Win8 developers here. There's some FUD here that I need to clear up.

1. All Metro / Windows Store apps have to be distributed through the Windows Store for mass distribution - that much is true. There are good reasons for this - namely it saves you the trouble of having to write installers for three separate hardware architectures (ARM, X86, X64) and makes it comparatively low-friction to distribute your app compared to traditional desktop applications.

2. It's pretty easy to side-load applications on a one-to-one basis for developers who are running non-ARM devices; you can package an app automatically from Visual Studio with a self-install PowerShell script and installing an app is as easy as emailing someone a zip file with the app package + install script. This was how we tested apps among distributed teams internally at Microsoft and how all of the early third-party developers did it. I only did this on X64 devices so I'm not sure if there's support for X86 and I'm pretty sure ARM doesn't support this.

3. Enterprises have the ability to create their own bolt-on to the app store using Active Directory to ensure that all of their employees can get access to private, line-of-business Metro apps that they don't want exposed in the public app store.

4. Traditional desktop applications, non-Metro ones, can still be distributed the old fashioned way. My previous employer before Microsoft has no plans to put its desktop software in the Windows Store and frankly I don't think it will affect them much.

For the desktop, look at Metro as a way to have some content-focused apps and games that come to life directly on your desktop through live tiles. Don't look at them as replacements for heavy-weight, traditional desktop applications. That's not their point.

Windows isn't going to be a closed platform - if anything Metro makes Windows more accessible to a larger number of developers. Shipping a traditional desktop application is an epic pain in the ass compared to shipping a Metro-style app. Metro makes it a lot easier for most developers to sell native apps on Windows.
Looks nice but I was really hoping for <track> support - based on some recent testing, it appears that currently only mediaelement.js supports both the Flash fallback and support for subtitles / captions.
What about http://mediaelementjs.com/ ?
Yes, and no one other than WebKit folks seemed to feel it was particularly warranted. Which makes this deliberate spec violation all the more interesting to me. Nothing like sabotaging the standards process by deliberately trying to force the issue in the field when you fail to convince people as part of that process.
No, they changed it to no longer comply with that spec, actually. Please do read the spec, not assume it says what the "html5rocks" marketing folks want it to say.
The "Rogue MD5 signing" value of d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e is the MD5 of the empty string.