skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really don't think I exaggerated by much. I lived in Russia for eight months, and never encountered any Militsia engaging in crime fighting. Seriously, not once. Instead, I only saw them persecuting minorities, robbing people and getting drunk. My least favorite experience involved an encounter with blackout-drunk OMON special forces exiting the all night grocer with another bottle of vodka, toting submachine guns and wailing on us at 2AM on Tverskaya. The silver lining was when they decided, after some debate, against planting heroin on us to extract a bribe from my friend's rich parents. It was definitely a growth experience to be assaulted at gunpoint and threatened with permanent imprisonment. That was 6 years ago. I understand that economic conditions have improved with the price of oil but... have things changed so much?

That being said, I do realize that not EVERY Russian cop is corrupt. I actually met a few who seemed decent. But based on my experience I believe the corruption rate is well above 90%, and it is plainly true that very little crimefighting occurs.

As to the problems in Russia regarding taxes... if you think I'm exaggerating, you probably don't do much business in Russia. "Knowing the right people" doesn't mean you don't pay the FSB tax, it just means you get better bang for the buck. Even minor oligarchs have their packages seized and 150% tariffs imposed. Whats more, the overwhelming corruption is the reason you need to 'know people' to conduct business. Having to know someone special to carry out basic activities critical to freedom is the definition of corruption.

As to complexity: Yes, things are very complex when you have to purchase basic government services, in a country with the world's fastest declining population where half the young men are busily drinking themselves to death.

I'm not trying to knock Russia. I care deeply about the welfare of the Russian people. What I stated is simple reality. It shows the overwhelming strength of the Russian people that they manage in such an environment. And Las Vegas has nothing on Moscow. Anyway, it sounds like you're upper crust and don't much face the problems that typical Russians do. When you can't afford access to basic services, the whole outlook changes.
I think I misunderstood you then. I am also opposed to any sort of active interference in the situation, including this ridiculous idea of airdrops. Passive support, such as ensuring communication tools like Twitter are running at crucial moments, is OK.

What I objected to was (what sounded like) your position that helping pro-democracy agitators we like is OK, but those we do not like (your mention of Allah Akbar was telling), we should not support. I disagree rather strongly with that sort of side-picking. Your mention of nukes was also a red herring - what does that have to do with anything? We're either pro-democracy or not. In this case, however, I think we should just wait it out.

I also objected to your claim that OBL was once aided as a pro-democracy agitator; this is very far from the truth. He was aided to strategically undermine the USSR, nothing to do with democracy. However I agree that the USA should learn a lesson from its experience with him - hands off unless you're willing to go all the way, and the USA is not.
Plan 9 does have a userbase, albeit small it is >50
We have a GSoC entry http://gsoc.cat-v.org/ this year. Plan 9 is also used in some Lucent / Alcatel cell phone masts in RT mode. I know of three commercial companies with Plan 9 / Inferno based products.

Plan 9 was a for sale product when free Unices became the rage. When it became a free download, Plan 9 landed without a modern web browser in the days of the Web and we still don't have one. Until recently, with the addition of an AC97 driver, the only way to get sound was an 8 bit Soundblaster or difficult to find specific models of USB audio device. There's no video playback (unless you don't care if the sound syncs). So you end up needing two machines and only one of them expects to be just another node in the network and the other thinks it's the sentinel.
I think the kind of comments that settle at the bottom of these threads are a good demonstration of why so many women get turned off of computerland.
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The first factor that we need to remember is that when buyers approach a home owner, they approach us with great suspicion because if the property is good then why do we have to let it go and why is that the home owner selling the property. So in their mind they are skeptical about our motives for selling.
Mackay has an excellent (and very readable) book on-line which, despite its title, contains quite a lot of Bayesian statistics:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html

If that doesn't go deep enough into the statistical aspects I found the Gelman book hard going but very good:
http://www.amazon.com/Bayesian-Analysis-Second-Statistical-S...
The evidence, as I said, is actually against you. http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Gender-Difference-in-Lear...
Elements of Statistical Learning Theory covers most of that, I think, and some more.
Benford's Law and the Iranian Election
Not really. I assume the OP uses NoScript - it would take a second to enable JavaScript while leaving Google blocked.
Those things you describe are all yes/no questions, so it is not true that there are no yes/no questions in Thai. And what you've described are ways to give (for particular classes of question) answers that mean just the same as "yes" or "no" would for the corresponding questions in English.

It's interesting that English has a category (call it "standard binary questions, answerable with yes or no") that doesn't correspond exactly to anything in Thai. But from what you've said it seems entirely wrong to describe that situation by saying that Thai has no yes/no questions.
All European start-ups news at one place
I find it disheartening. I found that snippet interesting because she used the question to downplay gender. She also downplayed it earlier when her husband was brought up.

I guess I need to write better. :(

Got it, I don't like it when people push for minorities to be equal for equalities sake, but I reason if there are too few of some group then it becomes self fulfilling and the group stays small keeping out some who would otherwise do very well as Doctors, mathematicians, scientists, so it's reasonable to encourage them, but only on the right grounds. In this case not because she's a woman, but because she's intelligent and creative. :)
(obviously conjecture)
Y Combinator Companies Who Are they?
Know the team Y Combinator ..
IANA(M/S/EE), but is this applicable? I thought Benford's Law applied to fabricated numbers, e.g. in expense reports. But wouldn't it be too obvious to just invent vote counts like that?

If the vote counts are not fabricated, but results of a manipulated process (i.e. miscounting votes), wouldn't that mean that Benford's law still applies?
Google Wave -a Twitter killer?
While the world has focused on Google Wave as a mash-up of chat, e-mail, and document sharing, it’s really something else: Google Wave could be the Twitter that everyone really wants. Maybe it’s the Facebook, too.
I'm curious what you use ml for.
Secrets of Simplicity, explained thoroughly in 145 slides
What the paper you linked to actually proves:

girls' math scores are just as variable as boys' in some countries and some ethnic groups in the United States such as Asian Americans

I could even grant you that this result transfers to all ethnicities, but still legitimately ask: so what? If yesterday's evidence of differing math scores didn't imply differing ability to you, then equal math scores today shouldn't imply equal ability either. Make up your mind, will ya. Till then I'll consider you to be cherrypicking evidence to support a feel-good conclusion.
Fever: taking the temperature of your slice of the web - by Shaun Inman
Aaand you're down.
Lisp hasn't been "one language" for decades, and, by number, most lisp variants do not include the loop macro. It's just a popular dialect that does.
Does Open source makes you less motivated to accomplish?
I gave up after slide 38 - stop preaching and provide some information.
There's a professor at Ann Arbor who knows more about this than me :-) He's done work in this area and claims that Benford's Law's distribution for the second digit of vote counts can be significant. My little analysis appears to say "this data matches Benford's Law in the first and second digits"

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/

While searching for him I see that he's written a paper very similar to my little experiment about the Iranian election: http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/note17jun2009.pdf
This would be more of an issue if it was a consumer service/product. I'm going to give web developers the benefit of the doubt and say they'll probably find this if they're looking for it.
Show success before asking for help
I'm trying to launch a Hacker News like in french, if some of you are interested: http://culint.com/
This is interesting too: http://europeanstartups.ning.com/
It's a seven page PDF which reaches no conclusions.

Is it me, or couldn't he just say "Looked at this using Benford's Law. Can't say one way or the other."?
To elaborate slightly:

> Scientists calculated that the 50mph speed of
> the hummingbird at the fastest point in its
> descent is equivalent to it moving 383 times
> its body length each second.

This does not mean it's travelling faster than a jet - the title is deliberately designed to be misleading.

It's true that hummingbirds are amazing, but this is drivel.
I think hools would just get scared and run away the moment first real bullet would be shoot.

Also - helping "inferior" (in they opinion) races/nations? Not likely.
Wanted: an opera unite web proxy for iran
I'm guessing you don't have kids yourself. Once you have a girl and a boy the differences are startling and obvious.
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What is server offload and why do I need it?
This is what happens on the Dragon's Den. The Dragons are much more likely to invest in someone who can prove that they can make a small success on their own, and who has the balance sheet or sales statistics to prove it.

Even if someone has a stellar product or service, if they have only sold a meagre amount to friends and family in two years the Dragons start to get tetchy and either ditch them, or ask for a huge chunk of the company in return for their investment.

Of course, I'm sure the Dragon's Den isn't necessarily much like the real world, but it's interesting to note the things they look for.
I like all the comps except for the Web 2.0 and the final design. Fake handwriting is difficult to pull off well and the final design is an example of this.
Prototype Nokia phone recharges without wires
Now it's the third entry for 'less css'. The interweb moves fast.
Physicists create 'black hole for sound
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We signed up for Google Checkout the first day we could. The integration was actually very easy but the problem was, for every five real transactions, we received one chargeback. That was incredibly high considering that, in 4+ years, we've only had a handful for PayPal.
Hello world | Lighting Advisor
Here's her Moby Games page: http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,68...

It seems like she's recently transferred from Gearbox to Microsoft, since she references both Borderlands and Aliens: Colonial Marines.

I guess she's working on Halo: Reach
Chargebacks through PayPal are almost non-existent. I think that in four years we've probably had a handful literally. Chargebacks through Google Checkout were so bad that we dropped them.

We went with Authorize.net as the gateway and another company for our merchant account. A lot of chargebacks can be handled by setting up your risk controls up-front correctly. Should the postal code be required to match? Should the card verification code be required? Those types of things have more to do with it than anything IMO.
How we feel affects what we see
Simplicity is not something you learn in books.
Parrot VM v1.3.0 Released
I don't know, I think if I had such a technology, I would use it to become the next ID software and produce a really kick ass game. Then I would license my technology for millions and millions of dollars. I just don't see the relation to video streaming.
The Art of Simplexity
As I mentioned in another thread, I'm a U.S. citizen doing web dev in the Philippines. I would like to start checking out other places soon but for right now I'm still trying to get used to my first move to a new country.

There are a ton of people doing this and writing about it, so just do a search on the net. Make a list of places you would like to go and do the research on each place.

Considerations, especially for starting out, is visa, language, infrastructure, cost of living and other items.

For example, the Philippines has an easy visa where you only have to do visa runs once every 16 months. English is spoken nearly everywhere which isn't a small village off the beaten path. The infrastructure is not the best in some areas. I have to deal with a lot of brownouts and the internet has it's issues sometimes as well. Thailand is probably just a little more expensive than the Philippines but has better infrastructure. You don't want to be in the middle of a project and then have the power go out, but it happens.

I generally keep pretty busy as a contractor but I know developers here who will do a 3K site and then take the next couple of months off.

Ultimately, if you have an income and a bit of savings it's pretty easy. Just make sure you have enough savings to get you through a six month dry period and then enough extra to buy the next flight out of the country in case you need to leave in a hurry. Take a month or so break from work so that you have plenty of time to focus on getting settled in your new destination, especially if it's your first move. After that, perhaps you can get up to speed faster with future moves.
Time moves too slowly for hyperactive boys
The idea that good products sell themselves and "marketing after-the-fact can't fix a turd" is largely a myth. Look at Hendrick's gin. It tastes like Pinesol, but because they came out with this clever marketing campaign saying "only 1 in 1000 gin drinkers prefers the taste of Hendrick's" it's now one of the hottest selling new liquors on the market. And I have friends who've never even been to a gin tasting who swear backwards and forwards that it's better than Hayman's or Bulldog or whatever. Hendrick's sells itself on quality only in the sense that the marketing is the product.

Now if you're making something like a car then clearly taking a strategy like Hendrick's is going to catch up with you, like it did for GM. But the fact is that you can make just as money selling gin as you can selling cars, so why go through the pain of designing the car?
Is this yours / do you know how this works? The responses seem pretty good, although one of the three recommended for me is giving invalid data for google.com, and it's giving me the same three servers for several different connections in the USA, some very distant from others.

I have my reservations about blindly using DNS servers without verifying their ownership and control. Consider entering "www.wellsfargo.com" into a browser. If a bogus DNS server returned a hacker's server, it could redirect you to wellsfargo.wildcard-cert-based-attacker.com. The people here might figure out that something is awry, but I think we all know people that would not catch it. Of course this is possible in theory even without the DNS server operator being malicious, but it's considerably more difficult.
I think this falls flat as well. Many people have tap water at home that is a) hard and/or b) doesn't taste very good. You can tell the difference.
Well it does seem like an odd idea, though when one considers the motivating app, telephony, where the goal is code that runs forever, it's not so far-fetched. I could imagine using such features to back off minor changes to running code on the fly. Another domain would be air traffic control systems.
Resolve problems with Wordpress 2.8 on Godaddy.com
That's what Google Gears is.

There's also been various talks about replacing the Javascript engine in IE (ScreamingMonkey project), ActiveX video/audio players using Ogg codecs, Google's got a project to implement Canvas in IE and an unreleased one implemeting SVG using IE's VML support etc.

A surprising number of things can be achieved with Javascript shims.
The fact is the rest of them know there is a problem but won't do anything to stop it. Which means they are part of the problem.

Spot on, thank you. I'm Russian and somehow this formulation never once occurred to me. This says something about me. :-(
10 second version: Some Japanese people dislike foreigners. (Please see my comments above about people being Ruby objects, because that is relevant here, too.) I have good friends, a nice church, and a decent job at a company which is happy to overwork me insanely no matter my skin color.
The Limits of Control
Five Things that Mildly Annoy Me in Clojure
Useful PHP function Nr. 1: Substring to the end of last word
Thanks for writing that up in spite of the unspectacular negative finding.
Would have been nice if they got Moore's Law right. (nr of transistors, not clock speed)
Opera Unite - Clarifying the Vision
Thanks.

Though I imagine that those watchdogs might have more problems with the year 2038.
Less will always be the UNIX pager for me. Why couldn't they call this lecss (pronounced as "leks") so everyone gets the css reference?
Very true, and something I realized I didn't mention. But I think that shows Adobe is hedging it's bet on FLV and the ON2 codec.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=606026

collision attack is enough to break git.
LiveTask: Manage Your Team From Afar (usefultools app review)
True. On the other hand the longer you wait the more likely you are of having established a high cost of living for yourself and other limiting factors.

Example: I have a mortgage, a wife who is studying and a 6 week old baby.

Today I need to bring in at least 2500 GBP after tax per month for us to break even or set aside sufficient savings first to make up for the shortfall; when I started my first company I had no dependents, no commitments of any kind, shared a flat with my co-founders that we rented for about 1000 GBP/month, and beyond that we paid ourselves 600GBP/month each. There were four of us, so in effect we were each living on 850 GBP/month after tax while getting things off the ground.

In other words the threshold for me to start a company now is much higher than it was, and that is excluding the "luxuries" that drives the income I expect to have even higher. Then I could jump at anything exciting; now I won't consider something unless I think it has a reasonable shot at making me a solid salary and with a shot at making it big.

Doesn't mean I'm not still working on various ideas, but it takes more before I can afford to take the risk of going it full time and I need to choose more carefully.

If you have a good idea, right after (or before - I quit after a year, but since went back and got a degree) university is a good time to throw yourself into it. You're likely used to living on little money.

If you make it big, it doesn't matter, and if you don't you get plenty of chances to have a go at the grind of a larger company later while contemplating your next move.
Note to HN devs:

Dim tags inside dimmed comments
That's a very good point.

Also a somewhat embarrassing one. My standard practice is to go to Wikipedia to find out what is going on, then back to the page to find out more. And yet, when I came across a good, helpful page, where that was not necessary, I didn't even notice.

I guess this is yet another example of good design being design you don't notice. (Although, obviously, that "you" isn't referring to you.)
Simple 'on-server' mobile AJAX in Django
Just pointing out that the primary justification for Internet censorship in China is also 'to protect children from pornography'.
In other words, make it so that the conclusion can be tweeted.
I thought he was going to point out that there isn't a competition, because they can work together.

Instead he (an Adobe employee) says (paraphrasing only slightly) that there is a competition and Adobe Flash wins because the open web sucks.

Way to win friends and influence people.
That statement is content-free. Robust parsing can be achieved using regexes as a tool. I want some reasoning better than "ew, regexes!"
Couldnt DISAGREE more. The advice is extremely banal bordering on common sense but most importantly discounts the fact that a lot of startups are built not to solve any existing problem but perhaps to just better an existing solution.

The semantics are crucial here, because solving a problem almost implies that it is something a customer 'understands' to be a problem and not just satisfed with the status quo - that is true for almost everything - give me a better house, car, laptop, email, search etc. etc. anyday and if its really good enough I will switch.

The biggest startups were not found by scratching an 'itch' but through founders idiosyncratic views of the status quo and how they belived (without an MBA, without a customer survey and without figuring out if it was really an 'itch') on what was a better way, and for a long time without any external validation.

Selling books online - how does that even make sense, the internet was supposed to get rid of books but Amazon found a way. The iPod - if no one even knew something like this can be built, how can it possibly be a part of their 'itch'.
Twitter - I bet there was no itch here too.
Microsoft Research: Pex - Automated White box Testing for .NET
Iowa Teen Wins Text-Messaging Championship
- admitting they 'stumble[d] a little out of the gate'
My Computer Did What
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The above (wonderful) quote is preceded by:

'But when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money--booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence.

http://www.goethesociety.org/pages/quotescom.html
Once I tell people, however, I find myself waiting for those other people's questions about my progress. And if I don't get them, I do lose motivation although the reasons for them not asking me could be any (e.g. they didn't really understand or they're too busy with themselves).

So once I put it out there, I tend to constantly look for external validation even though I might not want to. It's not my own anymore.
Amazing Facts, Science Facts, Human Facts
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