skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sure there are plenty of intelligent, power-hungry people working for our government in either a martial or administrative capacity. Dick Cheney is an example of such a person.
Group Sues AT&T Over Ringtones Heard In Public
Has there been any form of prototype implementation?
this is beginning of the End of US$ - it is just the matter of time when BRIC nations would decide about world trade, economics and monitory policies ...
My experience challenges your experience to a duel to settle this for good!
My wild hypothesis is that as you go from 2D to 3D navigation, the cognitive load increases to a level which is much more than a normal human can handle. (Similar to 2D matching being polynomial time and 3D matching being NP-Complete). It will be interesting to see some vision research which shows that human navigation (vision) uses some kind of matching (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matching).
"But do you care equally about everyone you follow? "

Of course not. That's not how use Twitter

"If you sample randomly you bias for those who post often rather than those you care more about."

If a random sample routinely has someone posting items of little to no value to me, I follow. So it works out.

The people I really care about I connect with in other ways: phone, E-mail, blogs, conferences and local meetings, and so on.

Twitter is but one of many ways I get my daily data bath. That I miss this or that is not a big deal. Besides, the important stuff tends to get repeated so it usually finds me anyways.
What's the HN general consensus on polls?

They feel sort of Reddit-ish. :)
Did Techcrunch really kill Blognation? Time – and the courts – will tell
"However, what I find slightly unsettling is how, well, the vast majority of intelligent people (in addition to corporations) seem to support the idea even though it seems to signal the end of privacy."

In what way does this signal the end of privacy? Just because a company could access and use your data does not mean they will. Once a company starts doing that, it will be the end of that company.
"It’s not a short video so make sure you have 50 minutes to watch it "

Um, no thanks.

Can anyone offer a summary?
This Is America, Take Your Unicode Somewhere Else
Just bits and pieces as parts of a current EU project, nothing coherent. We are still working out the pieces in theory, particularly 'community currency' and the programming paradigm. While it is our desire to focus our energy on finding out how much 'cloud computing' can be had without compromising local autonomy, the speed depends on how much support we can get, as we can only do so much in our free time.
Amazon Wants Patent For Inserting Ads Into Books
You should make a poll about it
Unicode transliteration in Python
In some ways the poll is hard to answer, lets say you use gmail a lot, is the OS of the client or the server the one you're really using?
Does it not make a bit more sense to indicate why you're conducting the poll? I don't mind polls, but usually they're only interesting if the poster sets it up and comments on his/her own choice and the reason for the poll in the first place. Polls like this seem to serve no more of a purpose than "What's your favorite color?".

Could you indicate the reason for the poll? That will get the conversation going in the direction you want it to and will give everybody some context when replying.
All my contact management, todos, calendar, etc are on the web on a Linux platform, SO, you could technically say I'm on Linux all day, however, I access everything from Windows and code in Windows so...
<Hangs head in shame>
I voted twice. I develop on Linux (Ubuntu) running inside VMWare on my Mac.
I doubt flying cars would be allowed to have human control, if they get made, it'd all be done on automatic.
Kubuntu. I occasionally reboot to xp to play starcraft or LOMAC.
Gmail isn't exactly an OS in itself. If we were to answer the poll according to the OS that the web pages we visit use, we would see a poll dominated by FreeBSD and Linux. Somehow I don't think that is what the OP intended.
You start with 2.6. When you start working with python, you are not just going to use the libraries which comes with language. you need to use plenty of projects or modules developed by other users.

Start with 2.6 but consider 3.0 changes in mind like exception base, print statement. Start practice 3.0 convention using 2.6.

I think, atleast two to three years of development for people to port all their projects to python 3.0.

Sure, you will miss many things, but you are on the way.
The word LINK only takes 4 chars in every cellphone in the world. What's underneath the link (the url) is only available to html readers.

And the users DO NOT submit link titles, they submit urls (which are not part of the 140 limit, only 4 chars for 'link') and urls are recognized as such an replaced by the word LINK.

* users still not allowed to post html.
See also: "Foxhole Radio" (with instructions):

http://bizarrelabs.com/foxhole.htm
> If we assume that talent is evenly distributed throughout the planet...

This is a terrible assumption. 71% of the planet's surface is practically devoid of talent.
Your certainty that there are intelligent people working for the U.S. government stems from 1st hand experience, or does it stem from wishful thinking?

I thought Cheney was no longer in the government. And if he's so smart, why didn't he anticipate the Iraq quagmire? Maybe he desired one?
The experience and the conclusion do not match.

If seaching for "bjorn" doesnt match "björn" his little search engine just needed to know to turn "ö" into "o" and add that as a keyword as well for the record. Some users want "torbjoern" added as well, as that is how they transliterate "ö" when the keyboard lack it.

Unicode actually include lookup tables for locale dependent collation rules. English or American people expect "Östermalm" to show up among words beginning with O, but we Swedes do not.
to be honest I resisted posting this because its heavily laden with drama.

But I quite enjoyed the UK vs US subtext.
Hey, dolphins are smart!!! ;-)
What kind of support have you applied for? FP7? I am a little bit disappointed how little support is given for research by the EU.
They're not distributed equally, either.
I think the reason for the poll is just curiosity as to what the OS distribution is among HN users.
Patrick was largely wasting his time... as everyone (and their pet arcturian megadonkey) knows the real whole sum of human knowledge can be compressed down to MOSTLY HARMLESS.

The rest of the 2GB might as well be filled with cocktail recipes.
well ok perhaps I phrased it badly: I have a bit-part overview but now I would like to read about the "problem" in full with not too much maths. As far as I have seen you dont need an awful lot of maths to describe the problem

As to the latter set of questions: the answer to most is "vaguely" :) hence needing the reading material :)
thanks - exactly what I was after :D
sure thing. but you have an issue with two links. See, you have to have a mean of identifying links, and that is why there should be ability to either add custom title or fetch real page title.
Starcraft works almost perfectly in wine. Th only thing that doesn't work are the background on battle.net when you are in the lobby. Game play works 100%.
Getting physical: Einstein, Feynman and other famous swingers
sounds like atlas shrugged
Disproof:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_nob_pri_lau_percap-nob...

So, so tired of the BS. The reason you think immigration is so wonderful is because you have been brainwashed since childhood. Period.

But really, look at this:

Smart immigration policies will do more for American innovation and productivity than better math and science education, more spending on basic research and additional venture capital combined.

Boil this off...what is he saying:

"You should not improve the people...you should replace the people."
Unfortunately this strategy does not have the potency it once did. The two largest possible sources of talent for the US, India and China, have rapidly growing economies and plenty of opportunity. I don't know all that much about India but if you're smart and "hungry" in China there is a ton of opportunity. Why on earth would you go to the US? Same, to a lesser degree perhaps, for Brazil et al.

I suppose the attractiveness of migration to the USA remains high in ex-communist states, the middle east, Africa, etc, so it's certainly possible they could make up the numbers, but the days of automatically assuming Chinese and Indians dream of building their companies in the USA are over, IMO.
OS X is perfect for me, thanks to its Unix terminal. Linux is now useless, but I still use BSD for my servers.

I use Windows to play Quake Live.
Immigration law actually deters innovation of the top immigrants. These students come to US to study at top universities, undergrad or grad and afterward they cannot legally start a business on their own. They have to wait to get a green card, which is years away. By then, as people become older, they lose some of the hunger.

The next best thing for them is to team up with Americans.
His perspective appears to be from one who is young and self-involved, so I'll be kind: the 60% that he hates have personal goals other than promoting HP's agenda. These goals could be raising a family, taking care of an elder, etc; he will never know. Remember the sacrifices your parents made for you. Working for any company (Ycombinator startups included) will never return the love you give it.

Bottom line: develop your skills, have integrity, be a professional. But, remember that it's just a paycheck at the end of the day. A company will lay you off the moment you are no longer useful to it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; just don't have undue illusions about it.
My desktop OS is Windows, but all my servers run Linux and OpenBSD, and I ALWAYS have a handful of terminals open.
I am just curious about how HN readers are different from the general computer users when it comes to OS preference, this is interesting because HN community is a special group of people who are interested in technology startup, usually tech savvy and practical.

This poll is different from the favorite color poll because it's technology related, I guess it's not only me who is curious about this question, as people are actually upmodding the poll.
Even though people are saying to stay away from the stock market, I think now is one of the best times to invest (if not 3 months ago).
Our team develops on two MacBooks and a Linux box. We virtualize Windows via VirtualBox (which is just amazing). Our production server runs Ubuntu on EC2.
I invite you to invest your money in my start-up :)
He is making reference to the fact that 71% of the surface of the earth is ocean.
The point I was trying to make was not that they're equally distributed, but that the oceans are not devoid of "talent" ;-)
of course Gmail isn't an OS, that's not what I meant, but when we use Gmail we're really making more use of the server operating system than the clients, so my point is that it very hard to really say what operating system we're using.

It would be interesting to measure the usage of say posting this comment, how many machine instructions were used at the OSX end, and how many by the various routers (running their own operating systems), servers etc used in the full life cycle of what I am doing.
I buy into the conclusion that immigration is good for the United States in general and particularly good as a source for innovation. Having lived overseas, in one of the countries that is a big source for immigrants to the United States (Taiwan), I have to respectfully disagree with the idea that what is going on here is mostly selection of people from very high-IQ echelons of source countries, and those people then doing things that lower-IQ people INHERENTLY can't do.

Most human beings don't come close to maximizing the realization of their potential. And many of the countries that are the biggest sources of immigrants to the United States have very much of a "growth mindset"

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/feat...

in general in their cultures, and particularly in the subcultures that supply most of the immigrants to the United States, such that those immigrants, whatever their IQ scores, do more to realize their potential than people with "fixed mindset." Indeed, there is a whole book on this subject, James R. Flynn's Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ.

http://www.amazon.com/Asian-Americans-Achievement-Beyond-Iq/...

The IQ threshold for eminent achievement and even "genius" (as carefully defined by psychologists) is not particularly high, but is only about 120 on a currently normed IQ test. That, by definition of IQ standard scoring, is less than two standard deviations above the population mean.

Follow-up comments to this by request.
if you're smart and "hungry" in China there is a ton of opportunity. Why on earth would you go to the US?

The freedom to criticize the government openly and vote in contested elections for the national leadership? That works for a lot of the Chinese immigrants I know in the United States. (Net immigration flows from China to the United States are still strongly positive in the direction of smart people leaving China and settling in the United States.) India actually presents the more interesting example, as people in India enjoy press freedom and free elections, but still find reason to move to the United States.
Yup. I voted three times. My microscope & downstream processing tools use Windows Server 2003, XP Pro x64, XP Pro, Ubuntu, and OS X. MacGyver hacker, here.... and yes, I use them all every day.
Ironically, the 'secret' is one that everyone but the American government and the majority of the American population are aware of.

A NY Times article [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/googles-immigration...] published not too long ago outlined how much Google was spending on H-1B visas and their demand for the cap to be raised. If you read the comments or the backlash which followed, it made you very aware how the American public is still convinced immigrants are 'stealing their jobs'.
It doesn't work with a launcher i use to play on a private server, its retarded, but i don't mind.
You seem to be good with money, so I'd suggest putting the 100K away in the stock market in case you need it later. Having a bit of extra security will be great b/c you'll feel comfortable taking bigger risks than you otherwise might.
I wonder what will happen if people around the world can sell their citizenship.

Of course host governments have to do a background check etc and sign off on the bidders/buyers. Everybody wins, right? And I bet you can IPO 'eBay for citizenship' overnight.
Biology goes open source (2007)
Disproof to your above claim:

The US soccer team is mostly out of first-gen recent immigrants, or people that were given a passport just to play here.
I think a fair-er comparison is of Noble prize laureates by ethnicity or country where they were born. You probably will see a lot more even distribution.
Americans are not any smarter then, lets say Europeans. It is just they have more means.

You will probably see a great correlation to economic output and noble price laureates because:

1. Richer countries attract smart people. You are smart, you probably are smart enough to be given great jobs/research positions and the best places to live in this earth, which happen countries that are rich already.

2. To do nobel price research, you probably need a lot of financial/instutinational backing, which you are most likely to find in rich countries..
The project you mentioned in this thread sounds interesting. Maybe we can take this offline? You can email me at a dot marinos at surrey dot ac dot uk.
Paul Graham's article about the phenomenon:

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
many laptops and servers running openbsd over the past 10 years or so, with the occasional mac os-powered powerbook/macbook pro.
I did Physics at university. 'Swingers' wouldn't have been the first word that sprung to mind if you had looked around my lecture theatre.
if you're smart and "hungry" in China there is a ton of opportunity. Why on earth would you go to the US?

There are various reasons. I'm sure others will mention the obvious political and government things. I'll risk the ensuing flame war and suggest that the lifestyle in America is better. My roommate's girlfriend is from a small town in mainland China, and by small town she means 1 million people. Her parents live in a 2 room apartment in one of those gigantic concrete high-rise complexes. In order to escape that sort of lifestyle you actually do have to be the cream of the crop entrepreneurial engineer with the blessing of the government. Even then, when you succeed you're just living in the same type of city, but maybe in a nicer apartment.

In contrast my parents are from a small town in the USA and they have a big house and 3 cars and play golf every thursday morning and have 4 kids and a bunch of nice stuff and can afford to travel to hawaii, or arizona, or montana, or wherever. And they are just normal, average people who didn't even start their own multi million dollar business with the blessing of the government.

There are definitely people who prefer the bustle of the city and for whom work and achievement trumps all else, including creature comforts. But for people who are into the 2nd type of lifestyle I've described, there's only a few places in the world where it's relatively easy to achieve: the USA, Canada and Australia. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I know about China, I don't believe that sort of lifestyle is possible for anyone.
Windows/Linux side by side.. two large monitors and sharing keyboard and mouse with synergy.
I find the comments in this thread really show the potential in virtual machines.

Personally, I develop on a macbook and virtualize Windows XP and Linux (Arch Linux). I tend to just use which ever is the native environment for what I'm working with (eg: C on linux, ruby on mac).
I also attend UVA and am entering my fourth year... who are you? And do I know you?
According to this survey, cellphone sales are plummeting in Japan but sales of smartphones have grown 80% in the past year

Are they considering cellphones and smartphones as separate categories somehow? If not, I'm wondering if phone sales are just changing due to the economic situation, or a change in behavior...
I work with my Windows laptop and my Linux workstation side-by-side. I use my laptop for Outlook, company IM, Office documents, and web surfing. I use my workstation for everything else. That gives me a strict division between productivity sucks on the Windows laptop and productive work on the Linux box. When I want to focus, I can sit with the laptop outside my field of view, so I don't see new emails and IMs. If I need to consult html docs while I'm coding, I use Conkeror on my Linux box so I'm not tempted into random surfing. Using Conkeror and Awesome WM on my Linux box makes it very no-nonsense and very conducive to concentration.

Ummm, so, I already voted for Linux since that's where all the work gets done. Should I vote for Windows, too?
Poll Of Manufacturers: Cap & Trade will close 20% of manufacturers
Not necessarily, take a look at both examples:

- I saw an iphone clone at httq://tinyurl.com/blahblah here is the pic httq://twitpic.com/blahblah compare it to this httq://tinyurl.com/moreblah

- I saw an iphone clone at LINK here is the pic LINK compare it to this LINK

See? more room for cleaner, longer messages.

Cellphones get the LINK word, browsers get the clickable LINK
Think of it this way, since you're used to living like a college student, you can probably live on $20,000 a year easily. This is already taxed money so thats even more than it sounds.

So that means you currently have 5 years of complete freedom to discover what it is that you want to do.

Move to Silicon Valley, start a startup, or join one. Or go travel. Nothing really broadens your mind like travel. And you can easily do that on $20,000 a year if you have no other commitments.

It's not $100,000 that you have saved up. Its 5 years. Keep thinking of it that way and you'll realize what you want to do.
Once, while we were taking a break, I think we were actually watching the OJ chase on TV, there was a news program talking about him being in Europe with some little boy. I was sitting next to the guy while the news is making this crap up. He just looked at me and said this is what I have to deal with.
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/4325168-post15.html
And which category does the author fall into?
When you do a cost-benefit analysis, do you find that it's worth your time to tinker with all that and switch between systems?

That's why companies standardize on a toolchain. By the way, we standardized on Ubuntu at my company. And while the the home computer is my girlfriends Macbook I hardly ever really use it, so I voted once.
Most of the evil in this world comes from people believing in and fighting over imaginary borders.
NICTA (ICT research organisation in Australia) have something similar: http://www.tiniwiki.com/main/

I believe it's a demo application of some compression technology they've developed that can be updated with more recent content easily, but my first thought on hearing about it was "Didn't Patrick Collison already do this?"
To back your thing:

My current company was closing down. So I started looking for a new job, and I was really worried as an H-1B that I am, companies are really reluctant to hire in this environment, b/c of the huge amount of paper work, and cost required for them to eventually sponsor me.

Within two weeks I got 3 job offers, and getting one more next week (they are doing background checks), with a lot of money. I mean a lot more than I thought I could make. What it shows me, that there is a real demand for highly skilled engineers, even in a downturn, and a lot of "i am an American, I can't find a job lets send the h-1bs home", are probably voices from people that have no talent, or desire to work.

This is truly work Americans can't do, as I am not cheap at all, actually very expensive, money and paperwork wise.

The secret in the Silicon Valley is that 80% of the code is produced only by 20% of the engineers. If I have my own company, (or you had your own), I'd want to hire from that 20% pool, no matter what their race, ethnicity, or immigration status they are. Unfortunately, you have people on the 80% pool, that scream (or wishfully thinking) that if immigrants weren't here, there would be able to command higher salaries, and find job easily.

It is often much easier to blame others, instead of just looking in the mirror.
I'd love to hear what direction you end up taking your life in - I'm in roughly the same position, having established various web businesses and looking to study a variety of subjects in college, just 3 years earlier (going into college this fall) and with a bit less money.
I don't think that many of the people who appreciate Feynman, Einstein or Hawking think they are as smart. If they did, why would they idolize someone who is on the same level as them.

Having people to look up to in your field is inspiring. It forces you to work harder and aspire to be greater in your field.

What if you worked in a field that had no one? Who does an accountant look up to? What inspires them to get up every morning and go to work? Money? That just isn't enough for some people, which is why you have such 'cults' (such as the supposed Paul Graham cult!).
That Long, Long Road From Idea to Success
So people immigrate because they want to vote in US elections? What kind of change in American policy do they wish to effect? Wanting to vote seems like a very abstract motivation for making such an immense personal sacrifice. All of the Chinese immigrants I know moved for more obvious reasons (personal gain, marriage, etc.) And none of them seem particularly critical of the US government, or the Chinese government, for that matter. (But most of them work in academia, so take that with a grain of salt.)