skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not only is the previous poster's comment not true, it was even covered in the article, in the section "The 70s velo-rution."

Even the comment "one reason: their country is flat" is addressed in the article, with "The famously flat Dutch terrain, combined with densely-populated areas, mean that most journeys are of short duration and not too difficult to complete." That is, urban density is also an important reason.

It's quite clear from the article that many factors affect biking in the Netherlands, and not just, or even primarily, its flatness.
The Health Tradeoffs of Entrepreneurship
Yeah, the word 'backtrack' doesn't appear anywhere in the linked article, and is clearly editorializing in the title.
And things are often at reasonable biking distances. Here in Palo Alto the city is flat and the weather is even more agreeable than the Netherlands, however, people mostly drive because they either live in a different town and commute to Palo Alto, or they live in town and commute somewhere else.
The problem with that approach (the immediate update) is that you're chasing a moving target. Fixing an app for a beta OS is actually kind of dumb from a cost-benefit analysis. Because what might be "fixed" in beta 1 might be broken again in beta 5 as the OS itself is necessarily changing. My strategy is to fix obvious issues early (for example UI components) and then revisit in later betas and making final fixes at gold master. I don't care if some beta users have issues because everyone has issues on a beta. Even some of Apple's own apps are still having issues (for example, the iBooks dictionary,) so it's pointless to chase bugs in a beta until the OS itself is closer to final stability.
Better late than never I guess, but what changed his mind really? "I actually did more research and was shocked, shocked by what I found!" or "I'm making a documentary and the tides of public opinion continue to shift, writing's on the wall, time to change my tune..."

Maybe (probably) I'm being overly cynical, but people like him have lent support and legitimacy to a machine that literally destroys people's lives for their involvement with a fairly innocuous plant. Oops!
Let's see, is it hyperbole?

An unabashedly totalitarian regime would spy on all its subjects, all the time, through every available channel. It would keep the details of its spying as secret as it can, while letting everyone know they're being watched. It looks like we have most of this, minus 'unabashedly': they claim they drop particular cases where they learn the people they're spying on are citizens within the borders who don't fit a long list of exceptions (crypto, etc.); and they're trying to hide the extent of spying. (On the other hand I don't consider secret courts to weigh much against the label 'totalitarian': the Soviets had that kind of thing, too.)

It could be unparalleled in either nature or extent. In nature, automated data mining is pretty new; in extent, the previous paradigm case, the Stasi, falls laughably short in some ways, while still far ahead in others (informers).

I think the quote isn't unreasonable, though it's loose.
That was the right decision and it took some real courage. I'm in TX, if you find yourself you want to come to Austin. Everything will be better from now on though, brother.
(side issue it is not clear if it will be ARM, it might be Intel)
Oh, they're worse. They hang gay people in Iran.
By providing a true API-compatible JVM implementation, they did the opposite of "foisting" -- they provided a way for you to run any JVM-compatible language you want. That, after all, is why we can run Clojure, Scala, and what-have-you as first-class languages on Android with access to all the same APIs as Java.

It is true, of course, that they chose Java as the default language for Android development. I imagine this is because dynamic languages were not always practical on early smartphone hardware, and because there was already a large ecosystem around Java from which they could draw.
I've been told that cycling in Paris is a lot safer than in London.
As I understand, bulletproof isolation between mutually untrusting users on a shared system was never the point of Docker.

And, if security is very important to you, why are you deploying to a machine shared with people you don't trust?
An even easier task now: http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2010/07/end-of-the-r...
Ask HN: How to find problems worth solving?
Hi HN!

I will be free for the next few weeks, and I want to build an MVP to a) gain some experience, b) have a cool project on my resume, and c) maybe make some money.

I know how to make a website, how to design, how to do marketing, how to do conversion optimization, etc. My only issue is... I don't know what to build. And I definitely don't want to build a useless product.

So my question is simple: any advice on how to find problems worth solving?
Thanks!
Very nice, thank you! It looks like neither supports headless Linux, though...
It's a life-style that only works on mostly flat surface.

But I agree it's not enough and there needs a voluntary effort from gov. or groups to promote it. Nothing wrong with that of course.
True, I've never seen a campaign change rewards so much and so often but people have been very creative with rewards tiers - usually to their benefit.

I'd be surprised if even half of the people that pledged early on are able to keep up with all of the changes and updates.
This article fundamentally misunderstands what profits mean in a financial statement. "Record profits" are recorded because companies are afraid to expand. They expect a macroeconomic contraction.

Remember: profits aren't included in the salary number, as that's a cost. So "record profits" aren't going to executives - that would be salary or options. And they usually aren't distributed as dividends. They go into the corporate bank account, namely the rainy day fund of the company. And the reason they are going into the rainy day fund of the company is that businesses in general expect many costs to come over the next few years, from the QE tapering to Obamacare.

Otherwise businesses would spend those "record profits" on hiring and expansion, or on salary increases to retain top talent, or on acquisitions. I think the fundamental misunderstanding here is that "record profits" have anything to do with executive salaries. Salaries are a cost.

Visual analogy: this is like reducing your marginal headcount and husbanding your corn with the expectation of a massive storm on the horizon. It does NOT mean you are feasting on your corn after kicking out marginal producers.
> But it strikes me as horribly short-sighted for a company to simultaneously report record profits and fire loyal employees.

This is an incredibly naive conclusion, one that I would argue could only be reached without any critical analysis whatsoever.

For one, record profits can be ephemeral. Many companies thrive and dive based on the business cycle. As we saw in 2008, the dynamics of a company can change relatively quickly, so record profits today don't guarantee record profits, or even a profit at all, tomorrow. Building a strong cash position and/or returning capital to investors in one form or another often prove crucial to a company's long-term ability to survive and grow.

More importantly, it's critical to recognize that a loyal employee isn't necessarily a good employee, or a necessary employee. At large companies, particularly outside of technology, you can often find plenty of "loyal" employees: workers who have been on the job for more than a decade who would love nothing more than to stay in that job for decades to come. Some percentage of these employees, however, are better at doing what it takes to secure their jobs than they are contributing to the ongoing success of the company. Others, while dedicated and hard-working, may simply lack the skills required to contribute as the company evolves. Companies are not static; as they grow and market conditions change, it may be necessary to hire in some areas, and fire in others.

The author of this post might as well have used the title, "In tough times, abandon tough decisions."
Heya! So, it's hard to know precisely re: 1.0, but I'm anticipating approximately towards the end of the year. Federation is the big thing we're still waiting on until we consider ourselves 1.0-worthy. Probably we could have tagged ourselves 1.0 a while ago and considered federation 2.0, but federation is at the root of a lot of our goals, so...

Anyway, once all our summer projects wrap up, I think we'll have reached 1.0-worthiness, however there's a lot of code being developed right now, and I can't promise how long it'll take for it to hit the "quality approval for merge" state.

We've had theming for a while, since 0.3.1! http://mediagoblin.org/news/mediagoblin-0.3.1-a-whole-new-lo...

Read the documentation for details on that, but you can already enable a light "airy" theme if you prefer.

PS: If you're a python developer and interested in federation, you may be interested in checking out our super-awesome-contributor Jessica Tallon's "PyPump" library, which integrates with the Pump API: https://github.com/xray7224/PyPump

I know she wants more users and feedback! Pump API integration is on the way, but in the meanwhile, there's a project that's already using it if you want to try out the API: http://pump.io/

Thanks for the excellent questions! Hope that rambly response was helpful :)
After I saw Gupta in Japan talking about protection against gamma radiation (http://blog.jgc.org/2011/03/cnn-sounding-authorative-while-t...) I stopped listening to him at all.
> I can only see the move explained as internal American politics.

and Putin's decision is explained as internal Russian politics. What a surprise!
I think an easier solution would be to just hide reviews that are submitted from a device that's running a beta version of the OS.

That way (legit) customers can still submit feedback, but it doesn't affect the app on the appstore.
The beta OS has many bugs that exist in the OS itself. Considering that OS goes through multiple betas before release and numerous bugs are fixed each time, it's short-sighted to try to fix your app to work perfectly on every beta release.
Just imagine if we had all fixed our apps for iOS 7 beta 1 - oh the fun!

Also, while adding a catchall preventing beta OSes from reviewing is good, I have seen other posts advocating mentioning the iOS 7 is no compatible in the description of the app. This is worst advice ever. Those who are not developers who are using the beta cannot be reasoned with and it is their own fault for having an unstable OS. Mentioning iOS 7 will further annoy them [that the app doesn't work on iOS 7] and confuse legitimate users about the availability of iOS 7.
Have you even tried it?

Unity on desktop is very, very good.

Unity on the phone (running on my nexus 4) is blazingly fast. I mean, stupidly fast. Android and iOS feel super laggy compared to it. Particularly Android.

Just seems like you are trolling.
For me that would result in the ugliest font ever.
Self-driving may be a bigger revolution in the end, but getting everyone off oil is also a huge revolution on its own. Yes, I know they're not the only ones to have an electric car ever, but without Tesla everyone would be dragging their feet with this.

Heck, they are still doing that. Just look at BMW i3. BMW is still treating electric cars as some sort of "concept cars" for the mass market, rather than "real cars" for the mass market.

We could also say touchscreen smartphones would've inevitably arrived, too, since we already had PDA's with crappy resistive touchscreens, and LG Prada even launched before the iPhone in 2007. But how much slower would they have improved to reach they level they are now, if it wasn't for Apple? And how much worse would they be now?
Giving money back seems like a terrible idea from a fundraising perspective (though personally I'd be irked if I had paid over $700 and they didn't refund me). Either way, it's not a great position to be in.

edit: please don't let me be misunderstood.
ahhh ok, I didn't notice that :) I stand corrected
> Personally I won't be very excited before I see an app that's open source. I don't understand why somebody wouldn't share the code for such a simple thing.

https://github.com/cheeaun/hackerweb
Food coloring also reacts very badly with a small subset of the population, but we aren't banning M&M's
It certainly sounds like the typical MTC propaghanda..."work hard on your mission and you'll be blessed with financial success and a hot wife".

My own anecdotal evidence is that I have had twice as much financial success, and an even more amazing marriage since I left the church. And some of the more faithful mission companions I've had are still waiting around for their blessings.

There are plenty of person accelerators out there. A mission is a good experience, but nowhere near as important as you think.
It's a legitimate complaint that syadmin'ing all these services is a lot of work, but I think that's actually an argument for working to make deployment of services such as MediaGoblin easier. Right now deploying web applications is hard... if we could get things at least to the point of deploying and maintaining systems are "as easy" (note the quotes) as "apt-get install" and "apt-get upgrade" then we'd be in a much better state. But there's a lot of work happening right now towards abstracting deployment; I think if we can turn some of that effort towards generalizing deployment recipies for everyone (not just people running big clusters of servers) we could make big improvement here. Projects like JuJu and OpenShift are probably the right directions, but admittedly I haven't had enough time to spend playing with them.
The 8 Characteristics for Successfully Recruiting on Campuses
"We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that."

Wow. Ownership of a mistake. Rare to see on a 24 hour news network. +1 for Sanjay

Considering CNN's role (as a 24 hour news network) in forcing politician's to defend anything and everything they've ever said, I really like seeing something like this coming from someone within the network. Especially about something as absurd as the illegality of medical marijuana.
Google should use Go for Android... Cleaner than Java, faster than Java (on Dalvik).

I can imagine how slow Python on ARM Android is.... and people complain about Java code being slow on Android... I would put money on JS/V8 being faster than Python on Android too.

The following comparison is JVM vs Python, so its really pretty far off the scenario we are discussing, but consider it shows almost up to two orders of magnitude difference..

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...
Quantifying the impact of Agile development
Gaining traction, JS and everything in its ecosystem. In a very, very big way. Forget Rails if you're starting out. Good chances are we're all going to be writing JS in the near future.
Five Sentences On Dynamic Email Signatures
Facebook Puts the Brakes on ‘The Hacker Way’
Just wanted to chime in: free plans are for venture businesses that benefit from network affinity (the classic example being dropbox).

I'd also like to note two things:

1) if you want to charge more, tell a better story

2) if you want to charge more, take features out of your product

Those two axioms are usually true and apply pretty generally to SaaS businesses.

At 2600hz we started with free plans and then realized the headache, now we mostly do paid support (there's a lot of free-ness because we're open-source anyways).

Generally though, I'd recommend against free trials. They just waste a lot of your time with tire kickers.
Nothing.

You get the downvote at 500.

Nothing happens after that to my knowledge.

P.S Can we please put up a FAQ? I've answered this question at least three times.
For your first expectation, (a), ignorant users are EXACTLY the type of users who are running the iOS beta and (b) more likely the rate the app 1 star considering that they had the ask a developer friend to download the beta for them or get a cracked beta. This is definitely the majority in the case of these 1 star reviews.

Although yes, I do not see these reviews causing a huge impact as of yet.
This is really great (except for the Orange!). But love the interface. Kudos.

My only gripe with all HN interfaces is that none of them can login and hence are read-only. You cant really comment on anything.
Rule of which law?

I don't understand how you determined that the appropriate jurisdiction to settle the facts of the Snowden case lies outside the US.

International law is founded on multilateral agreements, with each country deciding its relations to others.
Totally agree that personal financial management is far more important in schools than dates of the War or the Roses or analysis of Shakespearean poetry.

re your [1] : Compared to spending £100 a month on luxuries, almost any sort of saving is better. £100 a month on lottery tickets is probably better (from an investment point of view). If you haven't got the financial discipline to save £100 a month then set up a direct debit to take it soon after payday or whatever. Any high street bank will be happy to do this.

re your [2] : Can you please provide info on this? I can't easily find info on it. I found the following:

"You pay Income Tax on your earnings before any pension contribution, but the pension provider claims tax back from the government at the basic rate of 20 per cent. In practice, this means that for every £80 you pay into your pension, you end up with £100 in your pension pot" [1]

First in any investment strategy it is far better to pay off any debt first. Borrowing money while saving is absurd because the interest you incur on your debt is always higher than the interest you receive on savings. And borrowing while playing the stock market is even worse. Given the recent new of most people's debt, I suspect reducing debt should be _most_ _peoples_ concern. This includes things like checking if your mortgage agreement allows you to pay off more than the minimum to finish the mortgage early.

After that, you can invest up to £11,520 a year in a tax free ISA (albeit only £5,760 in cash for unknown reasons). Unlike pension income, withdrawals from ISAs are not taxed, there is no age limit, you can withdraw as much as you like, and its always your legal property. That last point is a big plus.

My dad paid into a company pension for 30 years. Then they went bust, and it turned out the directors had raided the pension pot. Some diretors got suspended jail sentences but that doesn't mean they had money to give Dad though. So he only qualifies for the State pension all the time wishing he never went in with all the 'your money is protected' assurances.

[1] (http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/incometax/relief-pension.htm)
The short version I've heard is: "The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled." -Plutarch

But upon some research, the context of the quote is even more interesting:

"The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting — no more — and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind."
NICE to Acquire Causata to Enable a Seamless Customer Experience
Definitely! We have a lead graphic designer and nearly 50 programmers. As you can imagine that graphic designer is overstretched. Do you know any graphic designers who are interested in helping make MediaGoblin nicer? Point them our way, we'd love to talk to them! http://mediagoblin.org/pages/join.html
It's a very hard thing to measure, mostly because double-blind studies are unethical, and well-controlled case-control studies are generally difficult. An 85% reduction in head injuries is often cited, but it's based on a study from the mid-'80s that, it turns out, had some pretty substantial methodological flaws, so it's generally agreed that that number overstates helmets' efficacy pretty considerably. More recent studies put the number somewhere around a 20% reduction in head injuries for adults in the US, accompanied by a slight increase in the rate of torsional injuries to the neck because of the larger circumference of a helmeted vs. unhelmeted head. In general, though, helmet use is not an especially good predictor of the outcome of a bike accident; it's much less well correlated with likelihood of death than, say, the cyclists's speed at the time of the accident.
He's a practicing neurosurgeon with published research, but, like half of HN, doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to radiological safety; therefore, his opinions on pharmacology are irrelevant to you?

That seems like a surprisingly dumb argument for you, John, but maybe I just misunderstood it.

At any rate, the importance of the piece isn't Gupta's authority on the subject. After all, vis a vis cannabis, Gupta is best known for his former opposition to legalization, which is a self-evidently dumb position for him to have taken.

The importance of the piece is that Gupta was Obama's first nominee for Surgeon General, and the best known medical reporter in the country; he's doing a very public about-face on the issue just as the US appears to be reaching a tipping point on legalization.

Also: it's just a good piece, or at least an atypically good one for CNN. That's why I posted it.
I like this explanation. Often you read articles about self proclaimed UX experts talking about their research and thinking about the product is what makes a product have a good UX.

Nope, its the iterative process. Good UX people, Good developers, and short iterative cycles. Not just market research. A good UX guy listens to the developer too.
Apple should change how they distribute beta OSes so that it is more difficult for non-developers who just want the 'latest' to get it.
I might be remembering incorrectly, but wasn't the launch option for App Engine their home-grown version of web.py?
Wasn't even implying they are crazy, after all USA also has thousands of nukes pointed all over the world too.

I am saying any two countries with such powerful weapons pointed at each other's citizens should always be talking.
If you think AWS is cheaper than ANY bare metal hardware you are out of your mind or simply just an amazon shill.
I like it. Is there a screening process for posting projects? What's to stop people from spamming lame Wordpress sites for $10 each like on Flippa?
"We are trying to grow our non-Windows business as soon as possible"-Acer
I agree and disagree, only in the sense that - everything impacts a user's experience. The entire team should have that on their mind to a varying degree.
Take a look at this pg essay: http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html