skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll believe that it will support "all dynamic programming languages" when they support Python.

Note that I used to believe in the project. I donated money to help them. Then I started to wonder what was going on there. Then for me the clincher was listening to Sam Ruby's presentation at OSCON a few years ago about his experience in trying to get Python running. From then on I've regarded Parrot as a fun project for those involved which I won't take seriously. Since then they've cleaned up development, they are making progress towards a far less ambitious Perl 6 than they set out to create, and I wish them well. But I personally doubt it will ever become widely used as a production platform, and I guarantee that it will never be widely viewed as the prime platform for running a wide variety of dynamic languages. If for no other reason than the fact that they don't have the people and resources to match what is being done on other platforms. (Have you paid attention to what Google has done for JavaScript execution?)

Just consider the facts. Python is a well defined target with multiple ports to different virtual machines. It is basically a perfect example of a realistically complex language in wide use. If you look at his background (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Ruby), Sam Ruby is pretty much the ideal person to work on a cross-language virtual machine. There has been literally no person that I've heard of in the Parrot project before or since who has as much relevant experience. And he failed.

The reasons why he failed are complex. But the biggest were all related to specific people problems (luckily mostly fixed since), and a design myopia that believes that Perl 6 subsumes all other dynamic languages, and therefore internal conventions that support Perl 6 efficiently will support everything else well (emphatically not true). Half those problems are gone. The people issues have improved, the design myopia has not.

Wake me up when they get serious about supporting Python. Until then any claims of "all dynamic languages" should come with huge disclaimers.
Git is significantly more complicated to learn, basically because having an additional level of repository and no default upstream repository makes for more moving parts. Git also has more flavors of branch (tracking or non) and repository (bare or not), and more ways to edit changes (cherrypicking, rebasing).

So basically, more moving parts means it takes more time to figure it out. For you or me, that's an inconvenience and then happiness about all the cool features and capabilities. For a corporation trying to keep their training budget low, that's a non-starter.
Roman galleys?
so I guess the new york times jumped the shark too?: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/business/22markets.html

Almost every news organization has had the same headline today
I agree, that's the main barrier. A subway line might cost a few billion, but reorganizing a major urban area to be walkable takes decades.

Part of it is that most American cities are very new in comparison to their European and Asian counterparts.

London, Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo, Kyoto, Seoul, etc. all have Ancient, Roman and/or Medieval cores which by default are designed for walk-ability. The modern cities are by and large extensions of those cores. The only American cities that have similar levels of walk-ability are ones that were founded and largely settled before the car like New York, Philadelphia, D.C. -- basically mid and north atlantic cities. Otherwise you simply can't walk by design.

Fixing that requires essentially rebuilding an entire city, which really isn't going to happen anytime soon. Imagine rebuilding something like say, L.A., at ~500 sq miles of broken sprawling urbanity, to be mass-transit ready.
Am I the only one that read that as "I am not a port number now"?
I think you need to re-read the article. Your 'general consensus' could be phrased better as 'general media consensus', in my opinion. The author's point was that you cannot clearly establish causation in the market, and that there could be numerous reasons for the drop and he presented several other potential causes, and that analysis of segments of the market did not really correspond to the Obama announcement as the main cause. I don't think he outright rejects that it may have had some impact.

In general, what I take away from the article is that the tone of the Business section of the website used to be just 'business', and that you could expect clear analysis. He no longer feels that is the case, and as such, the WSJ is becoming more just another 'general media' outlet, and not as special as it once was.
Learning to forget: Why web companies need to archive data
On your last question

> How would you have public transit create more value?

I'd answer by subsidising it more. That way more people can afford to use it. Of course that will increase debts further which is the contrary to your original question. Revenue and value are not synonymous.
High resolution tick data is usually NDA'ed; but anything slower than a few ticker per minute is free to publish, if you capture it yourself.

If data feeds are expensive, you can run trading software on your own machines and capture the ticks.
As a long time reader of the WSJ, it definitely has become a Fox-ish paper under Murdoch. What's tragic is that right now the investing public's need for objective, non-politicized, long-term financial information has never been higher, but now the primary journalist institution is no longer providing it.
Here's a practical solution I have proposed in my community (autonomous robots):

1. package code and data into tarball or VCS repo.;
2. place package on long-lived website;
3. compute SHA1 hash or similar from package (if git is used, this is the revision ID, conveniently);
4. publish the URI and hash in any paper that makes claims based on that code or data;

5. as a reviewer, prefer papers that follow this method, all else being equal;
6. as an editor, suggest that submissions use this method.

(Edit 2: In case it's not obvious, the purpose of the hash is to allow users to be pretty confident that the code they downloaded is indeed exactly the code used in the paper. By putting the hash in the paper, I make this promise. If I want to make an improved version available, I just put it up at the same site, but I must make the exact original available and identifiable as such. This simple method of ensuring identifiability is our contribution.)

My group does this with every paper. I have a paper describing this method coauthored with a student under review now at a good journal, and I'm looking forward to seeing the response. (Edit 1: see link in comment below)

I'd also appreciate feedback from HN.
Having spent quite some time in NoVA, I can attest that the inside the beltway traffic makes even my colleagues from the Bay Area heads spin.
I'm surprised this actually made it to HN.

I've read Barry's blog and have met him in person. He's one of the brightest, most realistic financial commentators out there.

We've seen an increase in media politicizing market movement. The example he cites was Obama coming out and making comments about financial regulation, and then the market takes a dump.

So you'll see on Marketwatch, Y! Finance, Motley Fool and others about how the president's comments caused the market to drop. This is rubbish.

Short term noise in the market happens. We were due for a pullback and this, combined with Greek CDS spreads and China's rates, prompted some weakness.

The same thing happened during the inauguration, how the market flew further south. And then the pundits came out and proclaimed how the new administration would be terrible for equities-- and then we rallied. A lot. And those pundits who thought there was some correlation between politics and markets disappeared.

Same thing here. The WSJ has increased it's politicization of it's content, when it has been known for the best financial news source out there. It may sell more papers, but they are significantly compromising the intellectual integrity of the staff and the brand.
> Buses are also generally unpleasant, usually populated by people with vast, on-display, personal problems like drug addiction, homelessness, mental health problems, etc. Mostly because people without these problems have cars and simply drive.

Some say car dependent suburbs are in large part a means for the middle class to self segregate from the underclass. In other words, avoid the people who can't afford to drive everywhere.

Arguably, the really good public transportation systems are all in fairly homogeneous societies with little to no social underclass. This might even hold within the US. Portland is one of the most homogeneous cities in America and has the densest middle class neighborhoods and decent transit.
Investor's Business Daily is a good alternative to the Journal.
Your comments are not calm, they are flamebait; and your opinions don't appear to have any connection to the actual article, in which the author describes specific reasons why he thought the Journal's coverage was poor (e.g. their failure to distinguish between financial and commodity markets, their failure to mention China's announcement.)
> But it actually has some truth in programming.

I've learned a few programming languages over the years and I generally accept the Blub Paradox (right now I'm contemplating the prospect that Python is Blub), but I still think this line of reasoning gets it backwards - particularly given that programming languages are invented.

Of course serendipity comes into play, but to suggest that it might have been impossible to imagine effective closures until a programming language accidentally supported them (poorly) just seems absurd.
I'm not sure why you were downvoted (comment currently at 0). If you look at countries where gas is the most expensive you see smaller, more fuel efficient cars, and more use of public transport.

Granted, this is also because many of the cities in those countries are old and weren't designed for vehicles, leading to congestion problems. These areas usually have high densities of people as well.
Tornado and mongodb... primarily beause I'm using them to develop my side project. Also have interests in Cassandra and seeing what happens with it in the future.
> reorganizing a major urban area to be walkable takes decades

It seems to take about 15 to 20 years. The dense walkable urban areas in Northern Virginia and Maryland grew up around the metro system in that time frame.

Large areas don't actually need to be reorganized, just refurbished. Many cities including philadelphia, baltimore, and DC to some extent have loads of developed space that's just low rent and crime ridden. Just put back in the streetcars that were ripped out in the 60s, fix-up the buildings, and price out the gangsters from living there. That's basically the story of NYC's rehabilitation in the 90s, except they didn't need streetcars.
But the market wasn't down because of Obama's bill.
Get a proper spam filter. Your mail address probably is out there already.
It's like debating which is better reiserfs or ext2. for 99% of people, they don't care. Both work.
Sure, which is why I qualified those results by saying they're not definitive. I have read The Economist, come to my own conclusions (that the publication is strongly Keynesian) and thought it would be interesting to see if that bias showed up in a simple search for Keynes' name. Turns out it did.
Michael O'Hare (Berkeley Prof) has an article about why public transit really wants to be subsidized:

http://www.samefacts.com/2007/05/energy-and-environment/more...

The short version is that the marginal cost for an additional rider is basically zero.
All the news that's fit to bill. New York Times is changing their game
In response to your updated question, I think the best way would be to change the experience of people who ride.

- Install TVs with captions and an FM channel so I can listen to the news on my 30 minute commute.

- Take out chairs from a few of the cars and make them standing room only so that during rush out you aren't crammed in like sardines.

- Make the first and last cars dark so that in early morning and your way back from work you can sleep if you'd like.

- Add WiFi so I can work my entire trip in, just came to mind.

These are things I'd love to see on the metro cause right now I feel like I lose 30 minutes a day just sitting there and reading.
Sadly, no. I was hoping to use this tool to track some down.
Did you read the whole thing? The biggest losers were commodities, not banks. Many banks also just reported quarterly losses and signs of continued economic trouble. The "general consensus" is what it is because of sloppy reporting like the WSJ provided.

Go look at the financial sector over the last month--it had a big spike and is now back to where it started. Then look at how closely it tracks the S&P 500. Banks are actually doing a little better, but it's tracking quite closely. There's a lot more to why markets move than proposed new regulation on banks.

http://www.google.com/finance?catid=58211593
Why is there no "all on one page" button? :( HuffPo fail.
You're making a subjective judgment and stating it as a fact.

Most cities wouldn't be able to function if you hard to park a car for every workday commuter. Especially Boston, I used to live there, you telling me there's room between the South End and Beacon Hill for all the people that work there? Maybe if you paved the commons and turned it into a 5-level garage. Sounds lovely. And that's not even getting into what it costs to pay welfare and housing for all the people who would no longer be able to hold a job without a way to get there (not as big a deal in Boston since the subway barely goes to Dot and Roxbury as it is - they're on the bus anyways).
Bing, Google, And T2: The Race For Semantic Search
Does anyone know the approximate percentage spent on actual operations vs. management and build-out of the system?

I lived in Boston for a summer in 2006, and I got to witness the transition from decades-old transit tokens to paper cards.

It was a giant cluster: Horrid machine usability, non-reusable transit cards, and untrained station personnel. It made me wonder what sort of premium the MBTA paid for that "upgrade" and how much rider confidence was lost.
I disagree because:

1. Your summary of what the article "boils down to" includes this: "The general consensus is that the reason the market is down is BECAUSE of Obama's bill". There is no such thing in the article.

2. The article suggests reasons to think that the reason why the market is down is not "BECAUSE of Obama's bill". You neither mention these reason nor offer any objections to them. (The reasons are: (a) the market is noisy enough that typically day-to-day movements are mostly noise; (b) there is another good explanation for the market drop, namely China's recent doings.)

3. Your summary of the article includes this: "the WSJ is are a bunch of no-good right-wing authoritarian fascists, and I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears and pretend that they don't exist". The actual article's complaints about the WSJ's politics don't include anything about authoritarianism or fascism, and the author says not that he's going to pretend they don't exist but that he's not going to take them so seriously any more.

4. You offer no evidence of the alleged consensus, no indication of whose consensus it is, and no reason to think that the alleged consensus is correct.
I'm not sure NYT had quite the same reputation for reliable market reporting. While it may have been better than papers for whom this is "business as usual," NYT didn't have as far to fall as WSJ did.
Its only been 2.5 years since he bought it. And it was awhile after that it started changing.
That's my biggest criticism of the economist, that the content is not attributed to any author.

I love the content but it's kind of a bizarre approach to journalism to keep the authorship anonymous.

I can't imagine what their rationale is or why their obviously sharp staff stands for it.
Note: I have to post a link to HN, not the interesting link I want to vote up.

The discussion about a link on HN is often interesting. Why not link to it?
I'm also red-green colourblind, but it sounds like you've got it much worse than I do. I've never found that intensity conventions are all that helpful. When I was younger, I was consistently under the impression that purple was just "dark blue".

In defense of the Canadian flag, leaves turn red in the fall. Not that that helps in intuitively knowing what colour it is though.
James Clark Maxwell came up with an ingenious (if perhaps impractical) workaround to colourblindness. If you cannot distinguish between red and green (common case), then use glasses with one green tinted lens and one red tinted lens. By obscuring alternate eyes, you will be able to differentiate the colours.

edit: note that it is a little impractical to wear silly glasses
I use posterous because I like it. Tumblr is slower and isn't as power full when it comes to import/export. Javascript support or pre_made modules would be a plus for posterous as long as they keep is simple as its now.
I think this sums it up pretty well ;-)

http://image.tutorvista.com/content/heat/water-cycle.jpeg
"As for your other points, the issue of simulation accuracy is already taken very seriously in the areas where I've seen it used.... my field (high energy physics)"

Bad example, inasmuch as it is too good. Particle physics has petabytes of data (exabytes yet?) to test against and is very connected to the real world. With that check you can't stray very far.

"Ideally, you should collect your own data, make your own simulations, and do your own analysis. Then we should see if we got the same answer."

I would say a precondition of that step is first that I can reproduce your work. If I can't even reproduce your computation it's not even worth trying to reproduce the eventual results, as your eventual results are too questionable to begin with, as far as I am concerned. If I can't reproduce the computation you might as well have just pulled them from your bum.
Ah. You're right. I misread it. However, I stand by my points on visual scripting in general. Even if there is a way to automate certain tasks via GUI elements, you are placing a great deal of trust on the system to operate as expected.

I do quite a bit of research in machine learning, and I can say that these systems are never perfect. Building an abstraction on top of an image processing technique is interesting, but I really wonder how a system like that can be debugged if something goes wrong.
"My group does this with every paper."

Any links?
Physicists Shrink Heat Engines by Seven Orders of Magnitude
Nothing I've seen suggests that fares are a barrier to use of the bus or subway. With the MBTA, subway rides are $2, bus rides are $1.50, and a week-long pass for unlimited use of both is $15. Even New York's $89/month for unlimited use of subway and local bus is many times more cost-effective than cab fare or car insurance.

Subsidizing further to reduce fares doesn't seem like a net gain to me.
Microsoft patches IE vulnerability, but perhaps 3 months later than it should
I think he also had a pretty good concept overall. So it not just the name.
Samsung U600 Silver Unlocked
Samsung SGH D900i silver is an inexpensive price cell phone. The receiver give you the 3.15 MP of camera to sudden your all constructive moment with high resolution quality 2048×1536 pixels, video recorder and many more.
Ritholtz has an excellent blog, I don't know how he finds the time to write so much. Highly recommended.
Do you guys still think the name is very relevant? Every day I use more google search to go places rather than typing the url directly.
A better way to do this is tax increment financing. The taxes on nearby properties will go up regardless because the value of the properties will increase. They shouldn't be charged a higher rate, but a portion of the increase in tax revenue should be put back into supporting transit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_increment_financing
How to find your first 3 paying clients
The MBTA is bankrupt; it has over 5 Billion dollars in debt. The transit fare for the subway is the same as NYC but in Boston we don't get 24 hour service, nor the scope of service.
Privacy is over. Here comes sociality.
Public transport can create value by running all night. That way, more young people move to the city and bring money with them and create wealth while they are there.
JMD, Markdown and a Brief Overview of Parsing and Compilers
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned.
-- Bruce Ediger

With that said, we all know an intuitive interface when we see one. It's just too difficult to separate an enormously complex and highly context-sensitive technical process that we've learned from some kind of ideal optimum. Saying a design is "intuitive" is analogous to saying one Turing complete language is "better" than another.
Assuming that's double paned class and that the rest is well insulated it'd be fine. Not everything in the world is constructed as shoddily as most houses in North America. We've got double paned windows and when it's -10°C out I can put my hand on them and they're only cool to the touch, not cold.
I will never forget the brain lock I encountered the first time I had to deal with a relatively small program that made extensive use of closures. In hindsight the program was well-designed and clearly written. Yet I simply could not understand it for over at least half an hour. And even once I did figure it out, it took days before I could truly digest what made that design work.

A couple of years later on the Perl 5 core mailing list I responded to a claim that a good Perl programmer could support any well-written Perl program with a key line from that program. From the volume of the squawks I got, a collection of good Perl programmers generally were not prepared to understand that code, despite years of experience in a language that fully supported closures.

I will not claim that it is impossible to imagine effective closures. I know there are people who are far more intelligent than me, who think very differently than I do. If history played out again a few times, perhaps it would play out differently.

But I say without false modesty that I'm a significantly above average programmer, and I am convinced that I personally could not have come up with effective closures on my own. And I've known quite a few good programmers who I am sure could not have done it. And I've never personally known anyone who has left me convinced that they could have done it. And finally the history of how closures were invented does not support the idea that someone imagined what could be done with them and then invented them for that reason.
The articles likely have multiple authors that contribute to making them high quality and very concise. Nothing I read comes close to The Economist, so whatever they are doing, I works well. Also, being much more expensive than other magazines, they can afford to hang on to talent when others are shedding it.
I much prefer the current interface.
I cancelled my subscription a year ago because of this. It's really a shame too, as it was one of the best papers out there. The frontpage always had one really interesting article and the rest(barring the op-ed) was really solid reporting.
I got to play the Natal Ricochet game this summer and I must say that it worked flawlessly. The only thing that didn't feel natural was the response time, which they said they were trying to improve.