skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I basically don't see a way to have a well-run country and avoid democracy.

A well-run country requires mature and capable people. People cannot really be mature and capable without participating responsibly in the world around them, including being able to make mistakes. It seems to me like people have to be able to participate in government, or they eventually get degraded into a mad, stupid rabble. The mad, stupid rabble then topple whatever oligarchical government they have and their country collapses from an inegalitarian oligarchical shithole into an utterly insane and incompetent shithole.

Certainly I think that it would be better to have a form of government that can quickly and rationally translate voters' expressed policy preferences into consequences. Problem is, existing systems are bad enough at even letting voters express policy preferences, let alone imposing the consequences quickly and thoroughly enough that voters start learning how to vote!

And yeah, you could try to separate the "brain" and "heart" functions of voting, by having voters vote on ideological/moral preferences and then letting them be translated into policies by a technocratic government. That's what the traditional notion of a democratic republic (and social democracy, and really much of Western democracy) actually tries to do. Problem is, that too has demonstrably led to a somewhat-more-benign form of oligarchy when implemented, albeit one in which some of the oligarchs are reasonably benevolent and it ends up being the politically degraded voters who ruin the country by making bad value decisions (like the Tea Party!) for which they are never held responsible.

And that doesn't even start into the problems of malignant oligarchical elites in our current democratic republics, who have largely decided, "Voters are stupid, so I'm going to govern on the class interests of myself and my social peers!"
The popular to share programs were probably downloads or copied out of books.

I set my high school up with lots of stuff without really ever writing anything...
Surely what Mr. Gates needs to do here is start a scrappy little tech startup, hide it away from the world for a few months/years, while developing all the stuff he wished MS could do if it wasn't in debt to its current customer base, and then infiltrate MS under guise of a courtesy acquisition.
S/he was recommending Ken Burns's Central Park Five documentary that also reinvited scrutiny: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2380247/.
Scarcity is definitely both a social and a physical phenomenon. If we didn't have it we'd be forced to invent it.
It is all that and more; it is not just the extra mental effort, it is also the stress that messes with your ability to reason; that makes rationality diminish, and drives emotional instability and crisis creating behaviors.
It's a shame that iPads are being pushed so heavily in the educational space. Apple products are built upon denying users access to learn about the hardware and software. Educators should be fighting against walled gardens.
How Webmasters Can Fool Search Engine Visitors
I don't know. That sounds right in theory.. but in practice, would a country that prosecutes people on ethnical/cultural grounds even consider allowing companies to ignore their data requests?

History tells us no. History also tells us that tech companies often don't give a shit. Perhaps a highly visible company like Google or Twitter might, but a little visible company like IBM or Cisco? I wouldn't bet on it.
Ah, the good old days…
Manning is doing up to 50% off on any purchase this weekend, including physical books:

http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs172/1101335703814/archi...
>I find it regrettable that Snowden sought asylum. If he had stayed in the united states, faced trial by jury, and won his freedom, it would have set a precedent for other whistleblowers to follow

You mean like Manning?
Full time?
Man, you have balls 8-)
Not everyone studies this level of physics at all, and it certainly "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
Never been interested in an ergonomic even for a second, nor do I know anybody else who wants one.

I have a Das Keyboard S. Simple, high quality keyboard with everything in the right position.
> In a large organisation like Microsoft's the skill of the engineers and the ratings should follow a normal distribution.

My understanding is that stack ranking is effective when first implemented. Subsequent implementations are progressively less effective and eventually become toxic if done too frequently. This is because at the beginning, the distribution of skill in the company's population of engineers does mirror the distribution in the overall, global population of engineers. So the initial stack rank eliminates the bottom, say 10%, performing engineers. The problem is when this happens again the following year, which seems to be what Microsoft has been doing. Barring a horrible incoming recruiting class, the company's distribution has already been shifting to the right. So each yearly cut is cutting out increasingly better engineers.
It is just about September. Let's hope it's not an eternal one.
One of the most apt icons on the whole service, to my mind.
no. 'disqualifies you from job interviews' only applies in very few cases. obviously there will be some discrimination overall, but it's not a serious reason to avoid Germany.

I think the persistent poor performance of certain large immigrant groups certainly is an important issue. It is also true that part of this underperformance may have a genetic cause.
You should stop making posts about it on HN and start writing code :) I'm being serious. Go!

There is no mystery, no magic sauce, no secret recipe. When your product (or idea) inevitably sucks, it's okay to be depressed. And after you're done with that, try again. You might get lucky. Or you might not. You might be the next Zuckerberg. Or you might not. The only way to find out is to get off Hacker News, Facebook, Reddit, etc. and give it a shot.
I don't understand, where's the paradox?
Software Testing For Startups - Hypothesis Driven Testing
Simple enough, even my parents wouldn't mind
Small examples. Tried understanding something more complicates and got buried in lots of $ signs, scopes, directives, services. Sometimes stuff doesn't work as expected so digging through a huge swatches of angular.js code to understand how somethings works.
Right, so they do it at pretty much the precise time that everyone grabs the seats. They don't somehow get everyone on the plane, take off without everyone in their seats, and THEN kick out passengers.
This must be an American thing.

All the exams I have ever written (grade 1 to post grad) specified graphing calculators are prohibited. Every last one. Graphing calculators tend to be programmable and/or can save text files & local educational institutions didn't want to go there.
what has Bill Gates DONE in the TECH industry that deserves sitting in the big chair of the most influential tech company?

Steve Jobs had a comeback Jesus would be jealous of, but he also founded/built up TWO rockstar level companies Pixar and Next Computing in the ten years being kicked out of Apple. Bill Gates is just doing charity work... he's out of the game.
Study what? I'm not looking for shortcuts, I'm looking for ideas that help consolidate the concepts of 1) building things interesting to you, and 2) solving real problems
A quote once used to motivate a team that would build a product which would change the face of computing forever, now repurposed to get people to think on how to get other people to click on ads...

Oh I love you Silicon Valley :)
And if they were all ranked within one company-wide group, that might not be so bad. But in the organizations I've worked in that used stack ranking, that wasn't the case. You were ranked within much smaller groups.

So group A, which, company-wide, would have had all average to above employees now has to drop some person(s) down to below average, within the group. That "below average" person - who would have been average company-wide - now gets a "performance improvement plan" or worse - shown the door.

And group B, which, company-wide, would have had all average and below-average employees, will now rank some person(s) above average. That above-average person - who would've been only average company-wide - now gets a bonus.

Should it work like that? No. Does it work like that? More often that it should; I've seen it - in mid-size and large companies.
> My SO works as cabin crew for one of the large airlines you will have heard of, and they typically always overcommit.

I phrased what I said poorly. They always allow overcommit, but they try to work it out so that on average they efficiently make use of their seats without constantly having to give people giveaways and bad customer experiences.
That was a later edit; when I first read it (after the post you about the # of shares outstanding and the resulting calculated market cap), it said "stock" not "market cap".
If you don't want to install something new, there's a pre-installed app called Safari which has a full programming language rather fast runtime and extensive display capabilities.
From the reference frame of the garage, the ladder is moving with a relativistic velocity and therefore experiences length contraction. From the equally valid reference frame of the ladder, it is the garage that is moving with a relativistic velocity, making it even smaller (so the ladder wouldn't fit).
Ask HN: What is the best data storage service lately?
Due to the laptop's 128GB harddrive creeping down below 20GB now, I am in the market for a data storage service. Mobile availability is important. The only ones I can think of are Dropbox, Spideroak, and Skydrive.

Whats does everyone around here use? I get the feeling its a proper choice to move away from any storage related to Google/Microsoft these days.
It depends on circumstance. For a lot of people, having their flight canceled and having to switch to another is all but catastrophic. You basically have to restart and build a new travel plan, and much of what you set out to accomplish gets lost.

So... a lot like killing a process.
Bull market for acetylene gas and mountain wranglers.
I think one difference is that they will recommend New York Tech to their tech friends, rather than recommend a general system for meeting people with shared interests to all of their friends.
That's fine - but not all iPhone5's have the same bands either - still they're still called the "iPhone5" (with small ways of finding out exactly what model you have if you really care).

They should call the model one thing and just have small variances in model that are descriptive (e.g.: MOTOFONE F3 vs. F3c - the latter is CDMA).

Having random numbers with substantive differences in features that aren't "cumulative" just seems egregious and anti-consumer.
That was unenlightening.
I would take any option because safety trumps analysis paralysis. It may also possible to build up to working remotely for US-based startups, 37signals or github style. And if you happen to later find a place with low expenses and good healthcare, that would be even better.

- Canada (Vancouver especially)
- Denmark
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Netherlands
- Sweden

The US is out for USG failure and lack of universal healthcare.
> "Although we can think of reality as objective, there are some special cases that prove it's nothing of the kind."

This paradox does not say anything about the objectiveness of reality. Rather it just points out an interesting scenario in which individual perceptions of objective reality won't match up.
I have many German friends, so it pains me to say this; but yes, you are right: parts of Germany still have a problem with racism.

My sister-in-law (originally from Kenya) used to live in Germany for many years, and found the abuse she received there demoralizing and (ultimately) intolerable. She now lives here in the UK, and is much, much, much happier as a result, although I think the psychological scars from her time in Germany will remain with her for the rest of her life.
I mean, have someone else pay for it. The accuser or the government.
Interesting that they chose that particular image. I would love to ditch the crappy mono iphone speaker for a screen that emits sound in addition light.
Android accomplishes this using a slightly modified OOM killer, which it can control directly through /proc. In addition to "out of memory condition" which traditional OOM killer supports, it has the "low memory killer" (LMK). Processes on Android that are not supposed to be randomly terminated are protected by adjusting the OOM/LMK settings, which the Android system does when launching Davlik for that activity/service.

This may have changed in recent version of Android, as I haven't kept up with internals that much.
I have a strong foreign accent. It's British. I find it a huge advantage in America. :-)
It is certainly an interesting product, I'm hoping for integration into video apps on the desktop (VLC please god). The news earlier this week about apps being disabled is a bit disheartening, though their TOS clearly states you can't distribute them.

It is clear that "slinging" content to your television is a direction we'll be heading.
Most apps - open source - are built with reusable code… natural to connect them.
Thank you for reminding me that "tenet" is one of those words that has a weird MSFT-cult meaning, and an entirely separate meaning to those who are more sane of mind. :-)
Well, for one thing, he founded it. And to be honest, I'd rather have another billionaire doing philanthropic work than working on another Pixar.
That's an awfully early point in time. Lady Diana was definitely alive back then.
I could interprete it as a multiple-branch model with Git. But it's still rather confusing for me what use it would have for anybody outside of source code repos (meaning: I don't have the knowledge, not that there wouldn't be a usecase).

For some end users it's already confusing to have different states in the same linear history on different devices because of upload times and devices being offline. I think giving most users multi-branch capabilities would overpower them and they might just ignore all branches but one, manually merging parts of older branches into the newer ones.

So I guess you assume usecases for application writers? I'm also not deep enough into this topic that I could imagine any usecases. Would you mind giving some examples?
New rule: I'm not upvoting any kickstarter links from unknowns without a working product.
Syria’s largest city just dropped off the Internet
"ask" is my least favorite. "performant" is my most favorite.
Programmers vs. Engineers
The article states it plainly: the problem with the stack ranking system is that it's a zero-sum game.

(BTW, I tend to read it as "stank raking" for some weird reason.)
dragonwriter's right, I should have put that as an edit. But even from 'stock price', a reasonable person would infer market cap.
Well then, stop by https://github.com/Xeoncross and get to know me and my many helpful libraries and frameworks. Hundreds of developers follow my work. :)
> The long-term employees (who were a majority at all the facilities I worked in) developed a sort of mass psychosis that was part Stockholm syndrome, part misguided patriotism, and part Dunning-Kruger.

Whoa. "Interesting" combination. More details, please?
Ember is good though i finally decided to use backbone+ractive, best of both worlds.

AngularJS perf on mobile were not that great , Ember came a bit late ,but good luck.
> Study what? I'm not looking for shortcuts, I'm looking for ideas that help consolidate the concepts of 1) building things interesting to you, and 2) solving real problems

You're suffering from a misconception -- that a commercial success results from a deterministic sequence of choices and events. This isn't true -- there is a large element of chance involved in modern success stories.

If this were not true, people could apply the known laws of success, become successful, and retire, without ever having to think creatively. In fact, a computer could automatically apply the rules of success without brooking human interference.

Success depends on a combination of creativity, hard work, and chance. No amount of creativity and hard work can eliminate the role played by chance.

> I'm looking for ideas ...

With all respect, if you become successful, it will be because of ideas you discovered on your own.
As an addendum, seeing this a few days later, I'll add a note also about the other side of my claim, to be complete; the Swedish/European media I'm familiar with.

For any given year before the Syrian crisis, you could find kilometers of criticism of Israel. On the other hand, the first thing I saw over decades in Swedish about the Tunisian dictator was when he fled!

The criticism of Syria, easily one of the planet's worst police states even before the present atrocities, was a bit more than Tunisia -- but far from even one kilometer/year.

(Note that Syria was a large part of the Israeli conflict, so it should be discussed quite a lot.)

(Not hard data, but hardly arbitrarily. I could continue with mentioning that Pallywood and torture among Palestinian groups where just censored in Swedish. And so on, and on.)

But frankly, I think you knew this too.
The King of Thailand, Queen of England, Sultan of Brunei, and various other royals get left out of most lists, which focus on the richest private individuals.

And, from Forbes most recent listing of richest royals, the richest of them would only tie the 9th on their list of (private) billionaires).
"Although there are perhaps viable alternatives to flying for domestic travel within the continental United States, such as traveling by car or train, the court disagrees with (the government's) contention that international air travel is a mere convenience in light of the realities of our modern world," Brown wrote.

Yeah, no kidding. That somebody could sincerely espouse such a position is mind-boggling to me. It ranks up there with "Gay people can already get married too (to the opposite sex)."
Changing Data Center Equipment for more efficiency
As technology involves, we continuously need data center equipment to help make our data storage world more efficient.
Its not a matter of doing, I'm motivated enough to put time in. The problem is what to build.

In any set of ideas, some are more obvious in their usefulness. Some just seem cool. If you look at the biggest consumer apps in their earliest stages, they almost all were ideas that "seemed cool" and lacked obvious usefulness (it was hard to see what problem they solved).

The problem is that way more of those apps fail vs ones that have utility. Hope that clarifies what I'm confused on.
You forgot the last part:

> You seem as optimistic as you were in 1970

> * laughs * Well you know what they say about pessimists: They jump out of the window and they're no longer involved.
Over a decade ago now, I did get involved. Deeply involved. After 5 years I was completely sick and tired of the corrupt system and the utterly self-serving political elite. My options were to join or get as far away from it as possible.

Very few people go down this road and come back with their ideals and principles intact.
I think venomsnake's choice to use "program" instead of "app" was intentional. Most people have access to a computer at the library or even an aging Dell/Compaq that they bought when times were better. This hypothetical program sounds like something that could run inexpensively on AWS and save to Dropbox (like fargo.io).
A moderate amount of moderation is actually good to keep around. But I agree it can be a problem when it takes over everything.
Are there any companies whose core source of revenue is transporting people via boat? I'm not referring to cruises or other entertainment-based boats.
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Excellent resources. I've been learning Ember over the last few days and I didn't see any mention of these on the Ember.js site. I can see these being very useful tools for development.
IMHO, it is easier to follow the rules. If you have a genuine need for asylum, then the UK is obliged, under international law, to offer it.

What the UK is not obliged to do is put up with people who try to pull a fast one; and there are a lot of those around, moresthepity.

If you present yourself honestly to the UKBA officials, with a genuine need for asylum, with relevant documentation, telling the truth, and not trying to be dodgy in any way, they will (in all probability) grant you the right to remain in the UK for a limited time.

Work with them, not against them, and they will work with you. If you have a genuine case, they are there to help you.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people that they see are (very bad) liars, so a lot of asylum-seekers get rejected, on the basis that nothing that they say can be trusted. Of course, they have the right to appeal that judgement, but if you lie, you will get caught out, and the appeal will be rejected.
This is fantastic news - I'm just finishing up my second Ember app now and I have to say it's pretty amazing how it works. It's a large system with some complex parts, but once you get a handle on what's going on, you can make some truly elegant code. I've been doing javascript/jquery as part of web development for 5 years now, and shifting to ember from raw jquery is as transformative as shifting from cgi scripts to django
It's taken oldtime winners like Xerox and Kodak decades to wither away and die too.
As far as nutritional value goes, eggs are a great deal. Packed with protein your body can use and easy to prepare.
Holy crap, I played Desolate, that game was seriously amazing for a calculator. The graphics rivaled the original Game Boy (a decade later, but still). It was seriously smooth and well made.
> "Communication skills is an strong indicator of
> education and class." is probably what you meant to
> say...

No, actually, I said exactly what I meant to say: The accent you speak with is a social (class) marker. I refer you to Oscar Wilde's Pygmalion [1] for a humorous introduction to the concept. Those with "low class" accents are often presumed to be uneducated, whether they're brilliant or not.

> You last sentence suggests that the non-native
> English speakers were accepted only because they had
> good educations, though again I'd imagine that someone
> could have a strong accent - and still be highly
> educated.

Not quite... I'm suggesting that despite their strong accent (and their difficulty in making themselves understood), their other credentials, education included, gained them acceptance to YC, whereas the native speakers with "low class" accents weren't accepted in the first place. Hence the data makes it look like this is about strong foreign accents when in fact it's just about poor english communication skills. (The non-native speakers may be William bloody [2] Shakespeare in their native language.) Again, this is just my hypothesis about why pg's data looks like it does. Feel free to make up your own.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(play)
[2] For the humourless pedants: This is a joke. I know
that Shakespeare's middle name was't "bloody."
Many countries provide the lawyer costs of the successful party, and only force the loosing side to pay. In civil suits, this mean that the loosing party pays the winning sides lawyers.

Of course, lawyers can only demand "reasonable" pay through that system. That means above average pay, but not 1000x.
Yeah, careful with using that ramen as a currency unit. It sure is cheap, but it's the kind of food that will mess up your health long-term.