skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Economic misery and turmoil through war are not new to the 21st century, and the fact that we did not achieve unending prosperity through an Internet-based economy or eternal peace through the end of the cold war should come as a surprise to none but the most naive of observers of human nature.

This decade was no more "lost" than was the generation that followed the "war to end all wars." Both labels arise from those who placed unbounded hopes in human potential only to discover that the drivers in this world can often be as malevolent as they can be good.

Will the information age change any of this, as the authors imply? There is much good that indeed comes from having the interconnectedness of instant worldwide communication and of social networks and the like. But, if someone is going to argue that this will alter centuries of human experience that has been bedeviled by the bad as well as the good, he will have to come up with something far more convincing than the headline-level analysis and naive hope in new political structures that the authors seem to espouse as the basis for our future hope.
Nevermind that they still have not justified their existence by stopping at least one bomb from going through. Rules, directives will long number and dashes between them, expensive x-ray detectors, is just the theatre, they still have not done their job, at least once in all these years.

Some will say "well their very existence prevented any terrorist from even trying to get a bomb through" which is just as valid as "their very exitence prevented pink elephants from Mars from landing and stomping us all to death."

> The TSA doesn't want to look like a bunch of idiots if something like this happens again because they did nothing to prevent it. With this, they're doing something and people, on some level, like it or are at least comforted by it.

In general terrorism and security theatre is about managing perceptions. They are two sides of the same coin. Terrorists are not in the business of killing as many people as possible they are in the business of scaring as many people as possible. Likewise the reponse of the government -- TSA is not in the business of making traveling safe, they are in the business of _seeming_ to make traveling safe.

They provide the comfort of the witch doctor that tries to cure cancer by shaking a rattle. Sadly people seem to buy it so far. As long as everyone buys it, they will keep hanging around, feeling everyone up (with a back of their hand of course), puffing air up womens skirts, making mothers drink their milk and push disabled out of their wheelchairs. Nobody minds that much, so that will continue and intensify as time goes on.
Now make these dependent on each other: function A behaves differently depending on the number of times function B has been called and vice-versa...In C, this is easy!...It’s easy to mechanically convert a series of destructive updates into what’s essentially pure code.

These are both easy tasks in Haskell. Just use the state monad. You also get 100% certainty that the state isn't leaking into places where you didn't want it to leak to.

Lack of controlled mutable state is a failure of Erlang, not functional programming.

Also, counting function calls would actually be fairly straightforward in Erlang as well. You create a process which counts function calls to B. A then queries this process when it needs to find out how many function calls were made to B. Slightly harder to program, but it works even in the distributed setting.
These patent wars are getting more and more ridiculous. It is like a soap opera, who is going to sue who next?
The underscore bug sounds minor, but is not.

The problem with this bug is you can start with something that works just as you would expect, like "HTTP_PROXY is a CGI variable".

Now you go back and, edit the sentence: "HTTP_PROXY and REQUEST_METHOD are CGI variables". Suddenly, and in violation of Least Suprise, markdown spits out text that has a em tag between the two underscores.

So, in practice, you have to remember to always escape underscores, so you start with. "HTTP\_PROXY is a CGI variable" and never run into the problem.

Except now you have to keep this arbitrary rule in your head, and remember to do it all the time, and you end up with something that does not look like a plain text email; it's obviously marked up now. Which rather defeats the point of markdown.
"A spokesperson for YouTube said he could not comment on the complaint, primarily because the relevant YouTube employees and lawyers are off for the holidays."

(http://newteevee.com/2009/12/29/totlol-creator-learns-the-ha...)
It's not the verbosity or lack of it that makes it shareable, it's the fact that it's a standard.

Some of these inventions are a bit nicer than the original thing, but not so much that I'd give up being able to share the code with pretty much anyone and everyone.

I can do HTML pretty quickly with Emacs' psgml mode, and I'm sure there are other people who specialize in it who can do it even faster with other tools. I think that's the place to look for improvements, rather than generating it like machine code.
Agreed 100%, but you forgot one more category of deaths that Americans seem more than happy to live with: deaths from preventable or easily (and cheaply!) treatable medical conditions, as well as deaths from medical errors (one commonly-cited IOM report places the total annual number of preventable deaths due to medical error in the same ballpark as the number of people killed in traffic accidents).
Yeah, there's no wires going to them. They're ear protection.

Edit: Nor antenna. Probably not wireless headphones.
I think the claims are true, but the headline and content is a bit over dramatized.

Here are the studies, you can draw your own conclusions:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1573365

"The subjects were 1445 male smokers, initially aged 40-59 years" ... 20 years later "total mortality was 7% lower" for people who stopped smoking (7% is barely significant given the sample size)

And also
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00000487

Showing similar results.
What's the suckage to usage ratio?
Jeff wants Markdown to make a bunch of backward-incompatible changes that would change the interpretation of existing Markdown documents. It doesn't matter if Jeff is right that the new language would be better than Markdown; changing the spec in this way would still be an act of vandalism, because it scribbles all over the pages already written in Markdown.

I think Gruber is providing admirable leadership and direction by not making backwards-incompatible changes to the spec and smacking down people who want to do so.
I just read all of the "Purely Functional Retrogames" posts, and was sorely disappointed that there's no source. Did I miss something here? The posts were interesting on a high level, but basically gave me blue-balls.
I didn't mean to suggest that every person 'running things' was accurately described by each label. I meant "idiots, scumbags and criminals" as a domain.

I wouldn't even rule out that an exception or two might not fit into any of those labels. I just don't think they're statistically significant.
The reverse is true. Just modify the language. I don't see why people are insisting on this "purity" in approaches. It's obviously leading to difficulties.
Do they still teach kids about compasses these days? :)
Are you sure about not stopping one bomb? Their service is like the electric company (and IT), you don't notice it until it stops working.
> fetuses (feti?)

I believe the convention for -i/-es pluralization is based on the Latin root of the word. In this case the correct version is "fetuses". I don't mean to correct - I figured I'm not the only one with a dash of language nerd in them.
This decade has been really really good for IT, especially salary-wise. There were tons of successful startups.
Excellent article, but I was completely overthrown by the use of the word "ain't" (with an apostrophe, too). Quite atypical of The Economist.
Agreed, even though I am OK with the H1-B program. I doubt this judgment will stand on appeal, but perhaps they're gambling that the website operators won't have the money for that. disappointing behavior from a judge who doesn't seem to understand the internet.
A long time ago I saw research on boys born in Berlin from WW II that found that stress in mothers during pregnancy lead to an increased incidence of homosexuality. I wonder if there is a possible correlation.

For instance could it be that the stressed out mom flushes the fetus with female hormones to give a girl a better start in adverse circumstances, but those hormones increase the odds of abortion or homosexuality in boys?
As the author of SHPAML, I have no problem with all the negative comments about lightweight syntax abstractions, as I've seen all the same arguments written against HAML. Most of the critics of SHPAML have probably never actually used it, nor do I expect them to if they don't share the same pain points as I do. Nowhere do I make any claims that SHPAML is going to cure all problems. It does make producing HTML easier for me.
I expect the anti-global-warming crowd to start smoking in droves now.
I think people are rightly responding more to the stupidity of the new security measures than their ineffectiveness. Those are slightly different.

We can debate the usefulness of a security measure, but the real problem is that the TSA is acting as if this was some kind of unknown attack vector. What have we learned that we didn't know before? Did we not know that people could hide explosives in their underwear, or in their body, or, to take just one more example, in prosthetic limbs? Is this news to anyone? So why the new rules?

Since these are all long-known methods of attacking an airplane, it makes no sense for the TSA to wait until an actual attack to implement "preventative" measures. Either implement the measures long beforehand or decide they're not useful and never implement them. What they're doing is like waiting for your hard drive to crash before you make backups.
I don't think that's fair. I think "when you SELL code", there's an implicit (and usually explicit) commitment to improve/maintain it, but not when you give it away. When someone buys me a Christmas present, I don't go to them to repair it if it malfunctions.

Besides, the Markdown license explicitly says it's "as is" with no such support promises.

I don't think you can even call Markdown users Gruber's userbase. He created Markdown because it works for him. If you don't like how it works, change it and call it something else (MarkSide? MarkIn? MarkOut?)
I am a satisfied customer of and recommend Nolo Press. They publish books about "How to start a corporation" that answer questions like yours here, and also guide you through incorporating properly without paying excessive lawyer fees.

One way to understand restrictions requiring qualified or registered investors for public offerings is to look at examples of who has been busted for breaking such laws. An example I recall from a Nolo publication is the "movie deal". You pick up a copy of Variety (back in the day) and there's an ad: "Invest in a new motion picture. Major director. Outstanding cast. Guaranteed returns. Call 555-1212". Then, a few weeks later, the check has cleared, grandpa is out $50K but owns a useless stock "certificate", and the grifters have disappeared into the woodwork and broken the lease on the fancy office they rented for the "Unbelievable Films" 'company'.
Asch's Conformity Experiment (2007)
"c" was reality at a place I used to work. They had an old IBM mainframe and a huge tape archive going back to the 60s. There were several "silos" with tapes that were frequently needed arranged inside, where they could quickly be loaded into readers by robot arms. Less frequently needed tapes were organized outside the silos on shelves. The mainframe managed the tapes itself, but did need the help of a few humans whose entire job was to read printouts requesting tapes to be swapped in and out between the silos and the shelves and go fetch them for the mainframe.
Minimize Funnel Abandonment by Tracking Validation Errors with Google Analytics
Good HTML is hard to write. Look up HTML source of several major websites, and you will see how badly indented it is. 95% of them won't validate. Look at this page. It doesn't even have a doctype.
How about people who start smoking in their teens, and then stop in their early/mid twenties? The effects of quitting smoking then would probably far more beneficial than a smoker who's been smoking for 30 years and then quits.
The change required to fix that glitch is so not drastic that many (most?) Markdown implementations have silently applied it already.
I'm pretty sure that in the US, it not only has to be false, but the person making the statement must have either known it to be false, or shown negligence in not verifying the veracity of the statement.
I think after reading the rest of the site that the author (poster?) still hasn't learned one major lesson, which is that even if you can go it alone it is usually better not to.

Having others (critical ones!) around you to keep you on the straight and narrow is invaluable.

So, even if the 'we' is out of place now, I sincerely wish that by the end of 2010 it is back in there and for a good reason.

More hands and brains (up to some upper limit) are worth more than any amount of investors.

It is possible to do it all by yourself, a very few even get lucky and have taken it to a very high level that way but sooner or later you will need to work together with other people to go to the next level.
No, not all are cheap. The more interesting question is what a comparable skillset in an American would cost. For a random web developer, $80/hr seems high. It would be low for an experienced DBA.

Furthermore the fact that companies have incentives to abuse the system doesn't mean that companies do abuse the system. Your friend may be a fairly treated example. But his existence doesn't change the fact that many cases exist where the system is abused.
But it gave us the iPhone! Perhaps we could call it the "iCade" or something like that?
> Has anyone ever typed stuff, hit enter once, then typed more stuff, ever not intended a line break?

Yes. It makes diffs of version-controlled documentation far, far more readable (and efficient).

^Q in TextMate does it for you, so it's not even much extra effort. Type your paragraph, ^Q to wrap it to 78/80/whatever characters. I think someone else mentioned that emacs has a similar feature, and I'm sure vim does too.
This looks interesting but I wonder how long until amazon kills it "by accident" when they make their own widgets region-aware?

I also find replacing every 7th ad (14%) with your own a bit hefty of a fee - but I realize your target audience (mostly smaller scale bloggers I assume?) might be okay with that.
Vedic Mathematics: Division By The Paravartya Method
Both the fib and prime factor examples are shit. The tests are individual cases which is treating the input as a Cartesian product (a point on a line since these are single-variable functions). What you want are sets. The inputs for both are all natural numbers. However, this doesn't tell you much, there's still a lot of state to work with. So what you want are end conditions, but again that doesn't tell you much.

Tests are no substitute for reasoning and TDD is just another fad.
There’s a wonderful line in a Matt Groenig comic strip that goes something like this: “The jocks, bullies, and tattletales that tormented you all through your school years grow up to be the people who turn you down for jobs, explain why your broken products are no longer covered by their warranties, and announce that your country has just declared war.” Only he said it much much better.
It's largely subjective; the feedback of mechanical vs. membrane keyboards can certainly be measured objectively (i.e. pressure for key presses and snapback time), but it's just a matter of personal preference between the two (and I wouldn't consider the better feedback to be just a neat aesthetic benefit; it's the reason I bought it, not a bonus). My dad has always used an old clacky mechanical IBM keyboard but has no problem using membrane keyboards. I can use a membrane keyboard if I have to, but now it feels "mushy" after being spoiled by my Topre.

Membrane keyboards are cheaper to make (because most people don't care) but have less tactile feedback and are less reliable. Mechanical keyboards are more expensive to make, but are much more durable (keys will not wear out) and have quicker key snapback. Lack of n-key rollover could also be considered a defect of inexpensive keyboards, although it's not a common hindrance to casual typers.

More information: http://www.ergocanada.com/ergo/keyboards/mechanical_vs_membr...
It's leftover government paternalism from the scams and bubbles of previous eras.

Viewed charitably, it protects less-sophisticated citizens from losing money they can't afford to lose in areas where the risks and legal structures are too complicated for them to properly evaluate.

Viewed less charitably, it's just one of many traditional arrangements that discriminate against the non-wealthy, somewhat sustained (even if below the level of conscious intent) because they happen to protect the interests of those already wealthy.

Sound paranoid? Observe that there's no law or paperwork which blocks a poor person from gambling away all their money -- plus all the money credit cards will loan them! -- on rigged games of chance, including some run by the government itself (state lotteries).

But can that same person invest a few thousand to ten thousand in a private company? No, or not without costly paperwork which makes many ventures uninterested in taking such money. And that answer applies even if it's a small proportion of the investor's total savings, or in an area where they have first-hand expertise.
SHPAML replaces angle brackets and close tags with space-based indentation and pipes. The CSS sugar for #id and .classname is completely optional, and obviously if you know CSS, then the syntax should be familiar.

I agree that there are plenty of other useful ways to represent XML/HTML.

SHPAML does require or even support tabs. The "|" is not for line continuation; it is to separate markup from content.
> you don't notice it until it stops working.

My claim is that is hasn't even started working.

I was able to board and fly on a plane before TSA existed, I can board and fly on a plane now, albeit I am felt up by some random dude, I am standing one hour in line, I have to take my shoes off at the airport, I can't get up to go to the bathroom for 1 hour before landing, I can't even keep a blanket, a pillow or magazine on my lap any more. That's the only tangible and visible result of having the TSA that I experienced.

> Their service is like the electric company (and IT)

My lights are on, I know the electrical company is providing me electricity. My servers are accessible, so I know the IT is doing their job. So it is not quite the same. How many real bombs has TSA stopped going through its security screening?
* I love unit tests for the freedom it give me later*

I'm curious, what freedom is that? I'm not sure I've heard anyone else say that about unit-testing.
I'm a bit of an erlang noob, but my projects have started to reach the complexity where keep track of the flow of information gets convoluted. However, the advantages that it (FP/Erlang) offers as far as providing side-effect free scalable code is too great to ignore. I understand that in his case he needs very fast access to data that 'should' be globally accessed. In which case a global variable makes sense.
So far, it has been a bit annoying not having 'global' variables in Erlang. (not even in modules)

However, good languages like Erlang offer many alternatives. Mnesia has near real-time access speeds, which you could for example implement in your render thread/process. It also has things like per-process dictionaries/hash, and ets for dirty and even faster access to 'global' data.

I suspect that a lot of it has to do with the architecture of the code. I tend to prototype fast, so I run into these issues often. But I tend to keep mental notes as to how the code would be better broken off into modules, reduce the number of passed arguments, (and makes those to the fastest possible primitives.) and move any 'global' data to mnesia.
There is no doubt that there is propaganda on both sides. First, the govt taxes a pack of cigarettes at the rate of 85% over the actual cost of production, distribution and advertising with profit margin included. Since it is harmful for you, we will make you pay more for it - but we won't ban it because we want to give you the freedom of choice. On the other hand, the article goes on great length describing studies trying to find correlation between life expectancy and smoking, debunking the govt's claim along the way; However, it steers clear from talking about the high association found between lung cancer and smoking. Even if lung cancer deducts only a few months from your life, it still is a cancer and has effects OTHER than causing early death.
Why? It's a perfectly cromulent word.
My mistake. I was looking up the SRV record for _sip._tcp.grepular.com and assumed that the reason it failed was because it didn't support SRV. The failure was the underscores though, which you've now fixed.
It does for me as well. Safari 4.0.4 on OS X 10.6.2
I disagree with a lot of what you said. First, the system is already "market-based solution": getting a visa for an employee isn't a rocket science. There's competition for good H1b talent. And H1b by itself isn't that strong of a chain that holds them hostage. Changing employers while on H1b is not terribly hard.

Moreover, in my recruiting experience, you (as a company) have to compete pretty hard to get the best foreign CS grads - they know they're good and the fact that they need a visa after graduation doesn't make them less valuable.

The shady part of H1b business is a bunch of "body shops" that bring in sub-par talent here (with poor english or/and poor technical skills) and abuse them until those workers improve their marketability on US job market and leave.

In short, I see nothing wrong with the H1b system except for general slowness of the INS bureaucracy and poor enforcement of H1b abuse (just like with most immigrant-related laws, enforcement is a problem).

Full disclaimer: I myself was employed on H1b by a 1-st tier US tech firm and saw absolutely no discrimination in salary or any other matter.
> This decade has been really really good for IT, especially salary-wise.

Yet somehow I'm making a lot less than I did in 1999, before inflation. Part of that is my fault, but still!
This is blogging, not problem solving, Bloggers are capable of solving problems, but ad impressions, not solutions, pay the bills.
I like the auction idea in principle.

However the devil is in the unintended consequences of the details. If you transfer the auction cost around then you've effectively made an H-1B into a regular employee, part of whose salary gets paid to the government. This encourages underpaying H-1Bs relative to local competition, and as long as there is a significant market of low paid skilled people you're putting large downward pressures on American salaries.

The version I suggested gives incentives to bring in good people, but also provides market incentives to pay competitive salaries to anyone who is brought in.
If that's the case, the TSA needs to do a better job communicating to the world their value. Unfortunately for them, if they did find something, they probably keep it on the down-low to prevent people from panicking.
Sure, but the international Kindle only went live in October or so- how's that number relevant in any way, shape, or form?
You'll probably end up with the same issues with any publicly accessible recursive resolver. The only way to be sure you're getting "good" DNS responses is to use your own.