skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Forget Bitcoin: There’s A Better Model For Mobile Money
1% would be plenty. It'd open up about $15 billion dollars, which would increase the funding pool by about two orders of magnitude in my estimation.
Interesting to see that this does not include a similar declaration for someone with expertise in the field that the investment opportunity is in. Still I guess it could be argued that even if the business is successful you could be hard done by if you don't understand the financial instruments involved as well as you should.
A lot of people dont realize that that you can begin trading stock OTC by just filling some paperwork with the SEC though lawyers fees for that paperwork are not cheap. You can do what is called direct public offering and directly sell your stock without using an exchange aka over the counter. Many people refer to these stocks as penny stocks and the OTC market as the pink sheets. What these new laws are trying to change is the way you register to sell OTC and the people you are allowed to sell to. The real problem is that just like no one trusts penny stocks and the otc market no one is going to trust crowdfunded stocks. They are going to be full of scams and pump and dump schems. Just look at the movie wolf of wall street for an example of the kind of scheming that goes on in the otc markets
You have a valid point but I wholeheartedly disagree.

There was a post on StackOverflow a while back where developers from different countries commented on the strengths/weaknesses of their home countries in the field of programming.

Many of the devs from India commented that the caste system had a huge influence on the types of people who become programmers. Essentially, many people from families in the higher classes go to school to learn programming because of the prospective earning potential and pressure from their families to succeed.

Many of the anecdotes mentioned projects that failed because the developers working offshore had a tendency to build the projects strictly to the specification. Despite the fact that the specification was incomplete or contained assumptions that were later discovered to be false. Ie they built what they were told to build, not what matched the 'real' requirements of the project.

The 'average' programmer there has little personal interest in the field and culturally they're more inclined to respect authority 'do as their told' not 'do what they think is right'.

A true measure of potential in a programmer can be seen in the willingness/ability to think and approach problems with a high degree of divergent thinking. To look beyond the rules/limitations of a system and discover novel solutions to their problems.

Accounting OTOH requires a very high degree of convergent thinking. Meaning, it's not only expected but absolutely vital for accountants to work within the bounds of the established laws/policies. There's a very fine line between creative accounting to increase the margins and cooking the books.

In cultures that put a lot of emphasis on respecting authority and doing what's expected, accounting may be a better fit culturally. Especially, compared to cultures that put less emphasis on authority and order.

That's not to say that there aren't talented/passionate programmers in those countries. There definitely are, they just may not be as prevalent as you or I may assume; for cultural reasons that we may not inherently understand.
http://imageshack.us/pages/resize/ -- Our Imagizer cluster does 6 Gbps at the moment thats 750MBytes/sec all day long, its fast and scalable ;)

https://imageshack.com/discover All of the images here are rendered with Imagizer; We store all originals in our HBASE/Hadoop cluser, while Imagizer does on-demand tranformations.

It works with non-imageshack links too:

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/500x500q90/http://actionfor...
Free markets will reward crowd funding sites that perform good due diligence.
My two suggestions are: learn everything you can about being a good manager and leader where you are now. Use the time you have as a "new (manager|lead)" in a company that knows you're a "new (manager|lead)" to be the eager newbie (just like you probably did when you were a newbie dev). Find the managers and leaders who you think are good and who have traits that you aspire to have and learn them while you can. Being a good technical manager and leader takes some of the skills of being a good dev, but a whole other set of skills that you generally don't need when being a dev. Finding a good mentor (even if they don't know they're mentoring you) is something you can more easily do at your current company.

When you do look for another job, be up front with the company you're talking to. You may want to interview for a Senior dev position, but tell the recruiter that you want to parlay your experience into being a manager or lead. At my last company, we hired a couple of folks like this, and they almost all turned out to be good managers and leaders.
I've worked with a weirdly large number of female-run and female-focused startups and clients over the years. I could write a long, blunt tirade about this.

Basically the cards are stacked against these businesses from the day they are funded.

Male tech folks make a lot of false assumptions about female focused businesses. For investors it can mean leaving a complicated business model under-funded. For developers it means blindly taking a “cofounder” title in exchange for an equity-heavy compensation deal without thinking through what it means to work on a business you aren’t passionate about, for years, at reduced pay.

In both cases, if there isn't an early slam-dunk hockey stick marker of success, guys don’t have the stamina to tolerate a female-focused business for very long. They bail. The company never gets its next round of funding. The engineering talent runs for the hills. Its not cool to work on a company for girls, especially a struggling company for girls. So male talent will just split as soon as the going gets rough.

Each time the company has a setback, the guys all start to bail. So the company needs to find new talent and appease many people at every little bump in the road. This is hugely costly and results in a lot of unnecessary crisis moments, doubts, and subsequent pivots.

The sad part is that a lot of female founders leave startups for good after one failure. I have a linkedin network filled with former female founder superstars who work in humdrum non-tech management roles. Women take the loss on a much more personal level than men do. So every time a female founder is stunted, and then abandoned by her male support network, she may be gone for good.

What’s the solution? I’m not sure, but I think it has a lot to do with adding more female investors and developers to the world. That and encouraging more former female founders to come back, mentor and try again
Transport data for Google Maps is something you have to (and can) lobby your municipal government for. (I'm assuming your transit authorities are under municipal jurisdiction, like the ones in Canada and the US.)

It took us the better part of the last decade, but virtually every transit operator in the Toronto, Ontario, Canada area is now on Google Maps. Not necessarily with real-time GPS, although the transit authorities in more well-to-do municipalities tend to have it.

But you have to work with your neighbours to make it a priority. Whenever they ask for comments (hopefully your municipality is modern enough to ask for this through online forms) then fill it out and ask for them to provide Google Maps data.

(On the other hand, local lawsuits also had a part in it -- a disabled (blind or deaf, I forget which) person sued a local transit authority saying that not having the stops announced was preventing him from using public transit and won. So every transit authority had to have drivers read out every stop until they could install computers with GPS and LCD displays and text-to-speech to read out all the stops. Once the buses and trains all had GPS and computers on-board, adding real-time tracking was just a matter of installing a GSM modem on each vehicle.)
On that second point...if the recruiter or hiring manager balks at the request to position yourself to be a manager or lead in the future, pack your bags and keep on looking.
> this software guy was constantly trying to write functions and loops, and was having trouble with the concept that all signals were propagated concurrently rather than sequentially!

Sounds like he hadn't written much software in a language with an actor-model. It's not nearly as hard a jump to VHDL if you've ever debugged an Erlang supervision tree, or a miscommunicating set of SOA web services.
Apparently it was never a real threat to dev bootcamp in particular. They got their paperwork done did.
Yeah? Go take a look at GoJS. Then sulk off to whatever fetid corner of the internet you came from.
I think I'd explain that particular bit by simply saying that there was no run-time looping construct, only a compile-time looping macro to generate runtime code. Most software people would get that, I think.
Justice Department Memo Approving Targeted Killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki
related (With cool banners from 1933): http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/murder-machines/
Education has some deep pockets behind it I can see why this is a smart move, even moreso that international students may be able to get their kickstart without having to deal with visa issues all over.
That is correct. We unkilled the comment.
One Hundred Million Creative Commons Flickr Images for Research
You didn't read the article, did you. It's about how regulations around crowdfunding are too burdensome, with ill effects.
Always there is a difference between "bugs discovered in beta" and "bugs discovered when you let your application loose on the wider public". I don't have time to deal with bugs in my calendars, so will wait.
Family needs a miracle to survive
The video says it all, my family needs something good to happen or else we are going to lose everything
How well do you know your music library?
The question is whether languages are really worth preserving. I'm not a native English speaker yet I don't really have much emotional attachment to my first language. In fact, my life would have been easier if I grew up speaking English.

And it's not that I think that English is somehow inherently a better language, it's more that there is a lot more people speaking it. It's kind of like if you are deciding what open source project to use. Having a big community around it is a major deciding factor, if not THE deciding factor.
What makes me wonder is, I would have thought that the prospects of nastaliq are increasing with electronic devices (as opposed to old-school printing presses).

What I also observe is, that arab speakers sometimes write with the latin alphabet using characters like "3" do represent some missing phonemes. Urdu surely is not alone, and having a proper nastaliq rendering on all devices might not solve the bigger issue here.

Could you elaborate a bit on nastaliq and how/whether it does represent Urdu's phonemes properly? Are people considering Devangari as an alternative?
Sure you can, especially with eg Groovy and Grails, but I wouldn't say it's Java's "sweet spot". Plus you tend to attract a lot of corporate enterprise Java devs who on average have a different mindset to quick-moving product devs.

I moved into a Perl shop straight after and the difference in productivity using off-the-shelf language features was staggering. Ironically I'm very interested in Clojure right now, I get the feeling it could deliver impressive productivity while leveraging underlying Java technologies.
The same government that regulates the sale of stock is the one that ensures the company gives you the stock, voting, and dividends you are owed. If you buy unregulated securities with Bitcoin, what stops the seller from "vanishing" your securities overnight?
"Now consider a company selling itself. With no rules, they are able to say anything they want about themselves. The stock market is seen by many (most?) as an investment, and therefore fairly safe (possibly even safe). How well dispersed is the knowledge that, while investing most of your money in the market is relatively safe, investing it in one dstock is horribly risky? How easy is it for a semi-reputable (much less disreputable) company to paint an overly rosey picture, appealing to somebody's hopes and dreams?"

I don't know where you extract that there are "no rules" in crownfunding stock. The stock market is crownfunding by nature. At first NY Stock market was a tree under which interested people traded part of their companies.

With more than one hundred kickstarter projects backed on my belt, I have been duped in... ZERO.

They are free to say whatever they want but it is very easy to catch a liar.

Part of my family comes from socialist East Europe economies. In those places even very smart people like nuclear scientists or very bright philosophers were protected "for their own good" against taking risks(or doing anything on their own by the way, good competent people were dangerous if they did good things because it made the very incompetent look bad).

The only problem is that "protectors" were very Mediocre people, people that spent their time banging pretty girls and drinking Vodka. Bureaucrats whose only merit were kissing asses of someone higher in the monopolistic hierarchy of power.

Let me be a grown up, an adult who takes his own decisions.
Let me save you the trouble.
As a lawyer, familiar with reading legislative text, it clearly requires them to do rulemaking about UAS, and grants them the authority to do so.
Maybe the site should have a "cash out for rep" feature?
Seriously, having competed in only 1 regional ICPC myself, I was blown away at the level of knowledge of some of the students. Some kids were coming in from high school with serious programming skills. Makes me sad when I go back to work now and never get to use any of these interesting algorithms.
Flights to Majorca
A note about Fraktur: Even though the wiki article states that the main reason for its downfall was the Nazis forbidding it themselves, as a native German speaker I quite strongly feel it to be associated with Nazi culture - which immediately renders it impossible to use in any context, since you want to be as far from that as you can. Allergic reaction to anything resembling Nazi symbolism is quite strong in German speaking culture, even in Switzerland where it never took hold. So it seems to me that postmodernist culture is most responsible for the sudden downfall of that scripture.
Former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio Tells Story of Fight Against NSA, SEC
Thanks for your comments.

I have done lots of research in the field and found the 3 top 'no no's' and why the disconnect can still exist:

EdTech developers (not all) make the mistake of talking and forgetting to listen once they finally get in touch with a teacher.

Teachers are tired of being told "we have the BEST tool for ...." Let them make that judgement.

Giving teachers your sales pitch instead of a 2 way collaboration process.

I hope that with TinkerEd we will continue to narrow the gap.
As you say it is a 2 way process and it is exciting to see some great advances from all parties.
I'm not all that clued up on non SI units, but your numbers seem to be off to me - according to Google:

5'10 = 177.8 cm

5'11 = 180.34 cm

6'0 = 182.88 cm

So, that would put the 181.7 number for Brazil a tiny bit closer to 6' than 5'11, never mind 5'10.
I think the problem is a lack of understanding who the customer is.

Many schools make centralized decisions: you either sell the school board or the IT department or both. The people stuck with the decision aren't the people you need to convince for a conversion.

By the time teaching is happening, you are one level removed. By the time learning is happening (or not), you are two levels removed.

If I were being adversarial and trying to design a system to achieve suboptimal results, this is the sales and feedback channel I would set up.

This may be one of the most surprising innovations we've made at AltSchool; it's completely non-technical but running your own school lets you iterate on the metric that matters: learning.
So I skimmed the article once, then read it again.

I see the writer is here. I just want to say I understand your sentiment, but your title and content are filled with some annoying misinformation and discrepancies.

First of all, Nastaliq is not "the Urdu script". If you even skimmed Wikipedia, you would notice that the script does come oringinally from Arabic (where it is used, but more to your point, sadly not as much in print media, at least from my experience in the GCC) and was later well loved by the Persians, and later different portions of the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, and beyond). To call it Urdu script, just because it is popular, and to insinuate that it Naksh is the default script of Arabic (it is not the preferred one, by the way) is a huge stretch.

Another point: Naksh was invented by a Persian, but who grew up his whole life in Arab Baghdad and was an Abbasid court vizier in modern-day Iraq. He did not spend time in Iran (then Fars, as it is known today in Arabic), until he was a tax collector there after growing up in Iraq, and only for a period. He might have been ethnically Persian, but to call Naksh script Persian because of the guys family background is far-fetched, especially if you know how loose the cultural boundaries between Abbasid Iran-Iraq were (they were part of the empire and people, goods, and ideas freely flowed between them). It is a derivative of Kufic script, and has strong ties to the religious intellectual history of Iraq (Basra and Kufa were the seat of a massive amount of religious scholarship and still prominent beliefs in Islam; scripts and art were an awesome by-product).

Sorry for the rant, but I know this is probably not your field. As I guy who spent a lot of time studying Arabic and Arab and/or Islamichistory, I get very annoyed at the misinformation peddled by people about Arabic history and culture. I do not mean to be so blunt, but I hear people rattle off misinformation like this often, and it irritates me.
at least the 2012 act requires them to allow flying UAS for commercial purposes (at the very least in the arctic, and likely elsewhere, depending on how you read it), and start a rulemaking about it
Regardless of the legal enforceability of these rules, I do think Amazon and the FAA need to be certain that a swarm of package-delivering drones don't cause, say, a passenger airplane crash or the failure of an airport's air traffic control system, before we see general deployment of these drones.

I suspect the true difficult technical challenge here will be upgrading the planes and airports to handle hundreds of little drones flying around, with the legal framework to follow.
> But I go back to my point, that we can't fully adjudge if nastaliq is meant to die off until we make at least a good faith effort to get it onto the devices.

Is that really true, though? The reason writing styles, fonts, heck even languages are for myriad reasons, but the intersection of technology and change (I don't just mean modern technology, but even the invention of the printing press itself, shipping and cross-continent contact, modernisation over the past few centuries) seems to me to be the dominant reason why they disappear. Perhaps this is just another example of that.

Of course, you can make the argument that because of technology now, there is no reason for a writing style to die off, and I wouldn't disagree! The question remains, though, is that whether it's worth it outside of the digitization of languages for archive purposes, if it's not used widely as-is. It's certainly interesting to think about, thanks for posting!
How much to integrate a one-page-scroll into an AngularJS single-page app?
How many hours would to take to integrate a one-page-scroll theme into an AngularJS SPA app?

How many hours would you take to integrate a theme like below into a MEAN.io single page app?

For a theme that works exactly like this:
http://sveccdesign.com/preview/applight/v2/versions/white/2/

And has a background video on the first slide/page as shown in this:
http://themeforest.net/item/wunderkind-one-page-parallax-theme/7601990?WT.ac=search_item&WT.oss_phrase=one%20page&WT.oss_rank=6&WT.z_author=VossenDesign

i.e The first page "index" is the landing page that shows this. And this along with the rest of the application is a single page application. The rest of the app is a different design altogether and this theme is only shown on the "/" route.

A much smaller version for such a mean.io app would be: http://www.breezejs.com/samples/zza

I was asked by a client to do it in one hour into an existing app that was not developed by me, and I could not do it in that time frame - obviously I took much more time and got stuck too dealing with the styling conflicts from the application styles and template styles. Well, that work was allocated to somebody else - and I left the client too.

But, in retrospection, I would like to understand if the the client really made a reasonable expectation.
As what point do I pick up a chocolate bar and watch its price tag change in front of my eyes because the system knows I have a weak spot for Snickers?

Here you're talking about price discrimination (separation of markets) rather than dynamic/surge/prime pricing within a single market. These are fundamentally different concepts.
Yea but you might have a higher quality of life. Income alone isn't everything.
First time doing Airbnb last year and then went onto the Hacker Homes in the bay area. Great time, great hosts.

There are definitely risks involved, but I think less so than on Craigslist. When went apartment hunting on Craigslist in Boston, the owner of the first house had to climb in through the window, total mess. I found out from his friend later that there was probably some residual effects of acid from his early days....

At least customer service seemed okay. Took down the listing, refund, plus a $500 credit. Bit slow, maybe, but it's a lot better than dealing with my phone company.
A reputation system would be trivial to circumvent, though, through a shell entity.
an easy way I'd imagine to limit bogus claims would be to make it so that a bogus claim has a negative effect, in the small. Normal law has this pretty well figured out: you win, you get reimbursed, you lose, pay up.
> Um, this is exactly true in science. But scientists are generally required to make clear and explicit the influences for their work.

I think a lot of artists miss the trade-off. If others feel invited to improve on your work then they'll be more likely to credit you, because in the alternative where derivatives are not allowed, anyone inspired by your work will be afraid to credit you for fear of it being seen as an admission of wrongdoing.