samfoo

Of the top twenty most developed countries in the world (ranked by HDI), over half (13) have some form of proportional representation. They aren't all Scandinavian countries, though predictably many are. Which of them would you not consider a stable government?

    Y    Norway 
    Y    Australia 
    Y    Switzerland 
    Y    Netherlands 
         United States
    Y    Germany 
    Y    New Zealand 
         Canada 
         Singapore 
    Y    Denmark 
    Y    Ireland 
    Y    Sweden 
    Y    Iceland 
         United Kingdom
    Y    Hong Kong 
         South Korea 
         Japan 
    Y    Liechtenstein
    Y    Israel 
         France

That's the one!

Awesome to see the Rising Star Expedition on HN! I was working in Johannesburg while the expedition was active and my partner managed, through a serious of very fortunate events to become a caver on the expedition. Here she is carrying up some of the first bones they extracted - https://i.imgur.com/IfT4PQz.jpg.

For those of you interested, the expedition was sponsored by National Geographic, and there was/is a fairly extensive blog (http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/blog/rising-star-expedi...) covering most of the details. When they first started pulling up the fossils, the excitement was palpable - http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/11/video-first-....

The expedition occurred nearly two years ago, and there were so many bones still left in the catchment that they left many behind.

Incidentally, though the article says it was scientists who discovered the fossils - they were actually discovered by amateur cavers. The Cradle of Humankind (so named because there are so many similar catchments in the surrounding area) has a massive system of caves and some of the most hardcore amateur cavers in the world.

Really amazing achievement, kudos to duke-nh!

For those of you who are looking to get into nethack, or play it all the time... (shameless plug) I've been working on a project for some years that helps ease some of the monotony of playing.

https://github.com/samfoo/noobhack

For example, it keeps track of where you see shops, so you can come back, maps out levels and what you've seen on them, and auto-price identifies things you pick up.

There's a rudimentary plugin system so you can write your own extensions (more coming soon).

Delta used to have an awesome frontend for Timatic (the system that all of the airlines use for determining their own liability in visa requirement issues) that I used exclusively. Sadly, it seems they've removed it from their new site.

I was able to find a similar offering[1] for free on Gulf Air's site, though.

A nice frontend to Timatic would be awesome, but I suspect that the licensing is too pricey...

[1] http://www.gulfair.com/English/info/prepare/Pages/VisaInform...

This has clearly been infringed on for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain; vis-a-vis, employment.

Amazon's monetary losses over this offense must be immeasurable. Jail time or crippling life-time debt could be the only satisfactory retribution.

/s

Yes, if only more people knew "their place".

By "Take control of..." you mean "act with the permissions of the app", I assume? I can't see how Angry Birds the app would ever have full control over my Facebook account unless there's a catastrophic vuln. in the Facebook API.

As an American living in Sydney: I've found it to be exactly the opposite. Sure there's a ton of coffee places, but mostly they're the same crappy $4.00 burnt roast. I suspect Melbourne is probably better, but I haven't had enough coffee there to confirm.

My speculation is that this is due to a general lack of hip/divy/young "artisan" cafes/restaurants in Australia (yes, yes, I know there are some, I'm talking purely about prevalence) compared with "hip" American cities. This is particularly true outside of the hip parts of town (Surrey Hills, mostly).

US coffee quality depends greatly on which city you're in, and the barista being a cool job is true in many places as well. The Pacific Northwest (Portland, Seattle -- despite the Starbucks black mark) has really amazing coffee shops, and they're everywhere. If you're ever in Portland, I highly suggest Barista -- http://baristapdx.com/ -- it will change your life.

Without exploring/understanding a problem space, how would you propose the formation of solutions occur?

Moreover, you're ignoring that to get corrective action against entrenched financial/economic incentives requires overwhelming proof of a problem and public sympathy.

I see your point, re-reading your original post. The phrase "young culture", to me, carries a heavy emphasis of literal age.

Ultimately -- and semantic quibbling aside -- I think you're right that American culture is (and by extension, typical Americans are) particularly energetic and optimistic.

I'm not sure I agree with unsophisticated, unless you mean "less formal".

> Americans have the optimism and energy of youth, but they're also comparatively unsophisticated.

Aside from the obvious ambiguities of what defines sophistication of a culture: It feels like you're begging the question to me. "Americans are unsophisticated because they're a young culture so they're unsophisticated..."

Moreover I think suggesting that an entire culture is full of optimism and youth because it's only 300 some-odd years old strikes me quite sweeping. The modern nation state is barely as old, and it's not as if Americans don't have some cultural heritage that goes back much further than that.

There does seem to be some evidence that this isn't just snake oil:

http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/dreaming/Lucidity%20Institut...

I remain skeptical, but it's certainly plausible. More than most ACM flim flam.

And because you won the genetic lottery, you get to exclude access to a country that spent billions and maybe trillions of dollars building its infrastructure?

Doing off-shore contracting work while traveling can only ever be a net positive for a country. Money is repatriated from overseas and pumped into the local economy and no jobs are expatriated.

The (claimed) risk isn't that Iran would use nuclear weapons against the US in any official capacity. The risk is that Iran will simply leak nuclear weapons to a proxy terrorist organization (i.e. Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.) If you accept the US government's claims that Iran has used state sponsored terrorism as a political and social tool, then it follows that a nuclear armed Iran is a large risk to the United States.

Which we are by way of building codes and regulations...

You're making the same mistake that many awful managers make; namely "If the problem seems like it should be easy, it must be easy".

You aren't familiar with Facebook's infrastructure and comparing working on small websites to working on something that scales to roughly 1/12 of the entire population of the planet is laughably naive.

Saying you use a "modul[ar]" approach is nothing but handwaving. You think that facebook doesn't use modules? Or doesn't have a service oriented architecture to some degree? They friggin' developed their own RPC transport!

(I should stress that this might be different for other Americans -- it's a big place with lots of regions)

When interacting with authority figures I am generally polite without deference.

I find that people generally use honorifics when they're being quite rude and would like to soften the impact (e.g. the perennial "Good day, sir"), or while insipidly attempting to endear oneself to another (e.g. perceiving someone as wealthy or powerful). I don't know if it's my own egalitarian nature, or cultural, but I find both more rude than the omission of "sir" or "madam".

What you mean "calling everyone guys"?

e.g. "Hey, guy! Don't step on the wet floor"?

I don't think, generally speaking, that honorifics are required, even with individuals working in an official capacity (I would never say "sir" to a cop or a ICE agent, for example). That might just be a west coast habit, though. Back east, things might be different.

I'm not making an argument ad populum and even if I were, I don't see how it holds any more weight than your argument from antiquity.

Language and grammar evolves and as far as linguistic changes go, the use of one preposition over another is pretty benign. Prepositional choice is already essentially arbitrary and varies from region to region.

English is a moving target. The current generation forming its own vernacular doesn't make in any more or less correct than when the previous generation did it. It's not as if English has its own académie française, and the flexibility of English is one of its most charming properties.

Leaving aside the condescending quip about toddlers, I don't see how over-regularization of prepositions is a bad thing. They're already confusing enough as it is and I personally would prefer a language with more consistent rules than not.

EDIT: A quick addendum: I didn't actually know this was a mistake and I appreciate having learned it anyway.

"Would of", "could of", "should of" are certainly errors when conjugating , but "on accident"? Either preposition "by" or "on" seems correct to me and the correct choice seems arbitrary -- though I find myself preferring "on".

From what I could find doing some (brief) research, this is a case in which the difference breaks down nearly perfectly along generational lines. Those ages thirty-five and under overwhelmingly prefer "on" and those younger prefer "by"[1]. Prepositional choice has always seemed a bit arbitrary to me, and the fact that there are dialectical differences reenforces that belief[2].

To suggest that this contributes to a "generation holding the less weel read attitude that grammar doesn't matter" strikes me as a bit misguided.

[1] http://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/01_4/barratt16.htm [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_di...

I don't know how to configure eclipse to build this, but I spent a few minutes and made an ant script. Save [it](https://gist.github.com/1dd9bd89748f489f67c9) as `build.xml` in root directory of the project and run `$ ant jar`. This will produce `minicraft.jar` which you can execute by running `$ java -jar minicraft.jar`.

(Details: The reason eclipse is complaining is because the images weren't included as resources in the classpath. This cause a null pointer exception when the game attempts to load it's sprites. I don't really use eclipse, so I'm not sure how to fix it)

I'm fairly certain that ICBM's use inertial guidance with predefined/computed coordinates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_guidance). There's no software involved, its all physical. Detonation is (probably) trigged by a combination of altimeter, accelerometer and other telemetry systems.

Just because you're not doing TDD doesn't mean you're not testing your code. I don't need to be forced to think about modular code, because I (try to) think that way voluntarily.

One of the most frustrating things (to me) about BDD/TDD is that I write a test knowing it will fail (a good thing), then I implement just enough to pass that test. Even though I know that I'll be rewriting that code again very soon to implement just enough more to pass some other test. It's needless context switching when I have a general idea of how I want the code structured before I start writing anyway.

With more experience, you should learn to avoid many of the pitfalls of not writing/designing modularly enough in the first place and at that point writing your tests first becomes a productivity crutch.

If you only barely make the cut, you'll only be paying barely more in taxes. Only your income above the cut is taxed at the higher rate. It's not like if you make $239,999 and you get one more dollar in income you lose money. Only that dollar is taxed at the higher rate.

I'll accept that victims of violent crime are also more likely to be the perpetrators. I just don't see how that matters: They're still part of the demographic of "men" and still contributing sociological disadvantage to the population (viz. "Men are stupid muscly brutes").

There are disadvantages (and advantages), sociologically speaking, for both genders. I'm not arguing that women are equally enabled at present (I don't think they are). As discrimination trends towards zero -- which I believe it is -- it's hard not to feel frustrated that cheer leading (pun not intended) is acceptable on one side but not the other.

(Note: I removed my questions in the edit because I didn't feel it was necessary for this to turn into a quid-pro-quo of discrimination reports)

I don't understand your point: How is a woman being more likely to be raped not equivalent to a man being more likely to be the victim of a violent crime? When men are victimized it's their own fault, but when women are it's men's fault?

You're cherry picking statistics: Do you think women are more likely to be homeless? Drug addicts? Do you think women are more likely to be the victims of a violent crime? More likely to be in prison?

I doubt the numbers will bear out in your favor on any of these points were we to check them.

So can we just agree that men and women have different strengths and weaknesses?

To clarify: I think it's important that women are represented in all professions (obviously software/tech is of specific concern) if only for the fact that diversity breeds innovation and discussion.

My guess would be that it's a flash app. Flash is (or at least used to be) horrible at internationalization issues like this.

I'm only speculating, but these are my thoughts:

1. Harder to expand quickly because of legal barriers.

2. Network effect/expansion is harder. Say you start hitting a network effect in Germany with some new social app... You can't necessarily leverage that in Portugal where the same simply isn't true in the US market.

3. When you serve a niche market you can't necessarily apply the economies of scale.