skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say "Class" can be used to refer to the types of economic problems or challenges facing people, regardless of salary. In this case, if the question is "what's the best way to pay for my daughter going to an Ivy" and not "how on earth can we afford this", they're not middle-class. If mortgage is the topic and "how are we going to ever pay this off" isn't the question, you're not lower-class.

I'll certainly agree that the lines are far from clear-cut, but I think it's best defined in a problem-oriented manner. The middle class gets these tax breaks because they can't otherwise afford to send their kids to good schools or own houses, while the upper-class can. They're facing different problems, and so the solutions are tailored differently for them. This causes confusion when you have income-to-SoL disparities in the country ($60k goes further in Kansas than in NYC), so people at different income levels can be facing the same problems.
I think CB radio is a more apt comparison - at least for the US, when it was a big fad.

All twitter needs is a song like 'Convoy': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_T0MONtP0w
No, I really doubt Google would do that. For one thing, it's not done. For another, Google would lose that fight, badly; they are severely outgunned on this front.
Despite the rather irreverent title to this submission, it is a pretty amazing story. It highlights the crazy implications of having n entire world's worth of knowledge at our fingertips at all times.

There are a few things I'm really unclear about though, namely why isn't it mentioned that he contacted anyone over the phone or internet to let them know where he was, or that he was alive, or to get medical advice for that matter. Also it mentions he was trapped for 65 hours. No possible way that an iphone battery could last that long, is there?
Surprises from numerical linear algebra
I dare anyone to look at these and not declare them art.

Participating in the scene is one of the most fun activities I've ever done.
no one launches a phone (or anything) correctly off the cuff. Apple were simply clever enough to launch their first phone, the Motorola iTunes enabled phone, with a different brand.

Give Google a year and they'll be fine.
PyBlosxom: blogging with a hacker-friendly workflow
I used to do graphics in the demoscene, and contributed to a couple of demos. Here's the ones I remember best:

Tesla - http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=33

Contour - http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=31

Live Evil - http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=297

13/10/99 - http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3291 (This one is actually a video demo, something I made alone without a coder.)

Nowadays I've turned to programming and make visual effects software. Most likely I never would have ended up on this career if it wasn't for the demoscene, so I feel lucky to have been there!
As an example of a large change in 2009, Facebook went from 150 million active users to 350 million active users ( http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline ). I consider that a fairly large change in the consumer web.
Twitter ought to let you do long form posts, but have a separate, mandatory field where you only have 140 character to entice people to read the rest.
To be fair, 64-bit Linux builds of Firefox are currently an unsupported configuration.
>how the colonial system created this problem in the first place

This reminds me of how in the UK parliament the political parties bicker about who's fault something is. Most of the ex-colonies have been autonomous more than long enough to establish their own stable governance if the combined will of the people were for it.
Please review the alpha of our startup:  LifeThunder.com
Link: http://twitter.com/billgates

I assume (based on his first few tweets) that he'll be using it to promote his foundation primarily. I selfishly wish that he would use it less for self promotion and more for just odd ideas/thoughts, I think it would be really interesting to get into his mind occasionally.
LifeThunder is a central point of management for your personal information; when your address / credit card expiration / preferred contact email / etc change, we update all of your service providers (e.g. NetFlix, newspapers, Amazon, utilities, PayPal, etc) at once so that you don't have to notify them individually.

The service is in alpha; the interface is still rough, and we are looking for suggestion on what the most important parts are to improve. NOTE: At the moment we only support PayPal, Yahoo, and LiveJournal.
Yeah, that would definitely take the bloom off the rose for me as well.

I'm already wishing I had some of the things Android has and Apple doesn't (interpreters FTW) but I would jump if they tried to steer me towards 'favored partners' for search.
He's a little late to the party, but since he's tweeting for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, I'll cut him some slack.
In what way does US occupation threaten women?
Glad you're taking the high road and not doing any further sniping at me (lol).

In case you are genuinely unsure why someone might not trust godaddy:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=915150&hi...
Wait, nothing you just said makes renaming "reverse" "flip" more logical.
Not everybody can be a Gandhi, but here is a suggestion. You can light a room with a candle but not a City, you can help by helping in your 'little corner' and I don't mean charity. India has come a long way. I remember when every other year there was a 'Faminine' in India no more. Just by working hard and improving yourself and your family you are helping pull India out of poverty. Don't pay a bribe to no-one. Don't support the system this way. I have a couple of Indian acquaintances that I know made a lot of money out of bribes. Good luck to them. Give your children a good education and good moral support. Help others in indirect ways (ie, give a chance of a job to a kid from a poor family - if he deserves it). I believe education lifts people. If you can find a way to support education do it. Support the small trader rather than the big store.
Unfortunately the given tree seems rather lame. In principle it might be a good idea, though.
Ah, but what's interesting though is that his @reply counts just as much as yours or mine. To even notice Bill's reply, they'd have to sift through all the @replies that they get every day.
> How is discouraging people to save and pay their debts good for anyone or society as a whole?

In a time of economic slowness, it benefits the society as a whole more if you increase your marginal spending (spend more cents of every dollar), because that keeps money flowing through the system. Of course, that means we'd want to create incentives to pay debts off and save when the economy's going well (which also has the benefit of controlling growth).

In America, we've become more and more dependent on consumer spending as the engine of our economy, so we keep incentivizing it beyond reason, even in boom times. That's what's causing the personal debt levels we're seeing.
It really needs some design. I'd suggest going somewhere like http://themeforest.net/ and picking out a cheap template at the very least.

I also never sign up for a site without seeing what I'm signing up for, so I'm afraid I haven't checked out anything further than what I could see while logged out.
Well, yes. But as FF+Chrome+Safari have more than a third of the marketshare, you can start writing parts of a website that work better with HTML5. For example, an application that uses the application cache to be usable offline, and tell IE users they could have an offline experience by changing browser. This means that everything still works, but people with HTML5 browsers will have a better experience.
This sentence is even worse:

"Instead, reverse responds to its surroundings and figure out what they expect. $string = reverse $string is a scalar assignment, and expects a scalar. print reverse $string, as integral explains, puts reverse in list context, so it reverses the list of one thing ($string), i.e. doing nothing."

At least "flip" is just a very dumb name.
Amazon Fires Missile At Book Industry, Launches 70% Kindle Royalty Option
In the US, "middle class" has always been a measure of income only. I'm sorry if that was confusing.

And David Beckham is very much not a member of the middle class, indeed. He's as upper crust as they come by US measures
If a tax-pass-through entity wants to retain net profits for business growth, its several owners still have to pay income tax on those profits in the year they are earned, regardless of whether they are distributed to the owners. This is an inherent limitation with this sort of entity, as it does not easily lend itself to a profitable venture that keeps sucking up cash to fuel growth. Unfortunately for the individual owners in such an entity, the net income is imputed to them as earned and the only way they can normally avoid "phantom income" problems in such situations is to convert to a C corp.

Of course, this applies only with respect to actual profits. If your startup is generating revenues, and such revenues are spent on growth in ways that generate deductible business expenses as you go, the only part that is potentially taxable is the net amount earned after expenses. The revenues in such a case can be used to grow a business without creating any particular tax problems for the owners.
Yeah you are right, it may be pure coincidence or just bad luck in the form of the blue whale of death.
It's funny how some predictions that sound outlandish have come fairly close to the mark in less sexy ways. Kurzweil's defense of "computers commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry" as applying to iPod Nanos embedded in pockets is a bit of a stretch, but in practicality not far at all.

Though I think anyone with a sense for usability could have told you in 1999 that speech recognition, despite its eventual technological maturity, wouldn't be anywhere near the primary mode of text entry a decade later. Ultimately, I'd chalk that up to Kurzweil understanding technology somewhat better than he understands humans.
Well, if that large supply side is driving costs down, it's causing deflation, which can screw debtors hard (and most americans are debtors). Further, as costs fall, profits fall, and people see wage cuts or down-sizings to compensate.
None of the interior pages loads - just getting a blank white page.

That being said, what kind of security protocols do you employ to ensure that users' account details, usernames, emails, and passwords, etc. are safe from compromise? (e.g. some kind of PCI-type compliance?)
"[1] reading internet, [2]ranting and [3]solving problems of my choosing"

[1] For reading the internet, you could do a startup where companies that intrusively search the internet and facebook for disqualifying statements for new recruits and insurance clients could outsource that work to you instead.

[2] Doing [1] may discourage you from ranting online, which won't help you to be paid for ranting but could lower that need's priority.

[3] If you choose to do [1] then you will have solved at least one problem of your choosing.
> "Appealing" by today's standards.

Amusing slip, but the sad thing is some people would agree with this statement.
See cable as an example.

Only channels I know that do not have any ads are the movie channels (HBO etc).

So I doubt NYTimes will pass up potential revenue from displaying ads to subscribers. Just that these ads will be more targeted and focused depending on the audience.
So what you're saying is that yes, the reason poor countries are poor is corruption? But for some reason that sticks in your craw?

A politician can win the support of the people, including the armed enforcers, by other means than threat of death. If it were possible to have a political group that, I don't know, laid out a plan for the countries future and won support that way. Then, winning support of thugs with guns, by allowing them to plunder, in order to subdue your population by force wouldn't be necessary. Then you could start to rebuild the pride and position of your country and its people and those people could work together to help build a nation.

Pipe dreams I suppose.
I don't think this is a bad observation. My slant on it is, if you are maintaining backwards compatibility to a point in time where these things just didn't matter, because only one person used the machine, there were no multiple user accounts, and the machine was not on a network... it's unsurprising that such an environment would be rife with security holes. Not saying it'a acceptable, just that it's not surprising.

Edit: and it appears there's an effective way to mitigate this, disable the 16-bit support in group policy.
Zynga Raises $1.5 Million For Haiti In Five Days
A similar project: http://www.blogofile.com/
I had the same issue on x64 fedora 11, but found a workaround (although a bit annoying one). Delete the .mozilla directory and start firefox, install firebug, then it works. I tried messing with files left behind from the previous firebug individually, but couldn't find a specific culprit...

Annoying bug, this is just a temporary workaround.
It certaintly was! Thanks a lot!
No, they mean different things depending on syntax. (char *) is never a function invocation.
Stanford’s Robot Car Tries for Peak Performance
You do have a point. But if you're writing web stuff for the intranet or if you otherwise have enough control over your users to control their browser choice then it's a much better use of your resources to code for the future (FF, Safari, Chrome, Opera) than for the past. Big stupid corporations who still insist on writing all internal stuff to work with IE6 are, sadly, still around. But declining.
Evolving the Key/Value Programming Model to a Higher Level
In that sense Unix retains compatibility with the '70s.

Operating systems are rife with security flaws. Uniformly.
I was a musician for a while for a number of relatively unknown groups.

I mostly tool around now with a bunch of semi-retired sceners. We occasionally put out a small demo. Nothing as good as these, but we do it all for fun.

http://fulcrum.antisoc.net/

I still put out the occasional tune.
Sir, I have a frivolous data point for you. It's from a blog post I wrote shortly after the change from 'reverse' to 'flip' for strings (<http://use.perl.org/~masak/journal/38800 >):

"Strangely enough, nothing happened when clicking the 'flip!' link... a moment's reflection gave the cause of this: a few days ago, [Larry Wall] has syntactically separated reversal of List (.reverse) from the reversal of Str (.flip); my code was like three weeks old and was still using .reverse for strings, which in the newest Rakudo got interpreted as one-elem lists, and list-reversed with no visible effect whatsoever. I fixed that, and found the fact that the link in the Lobster app was already called 'flip' an indication of the appropriateness of the name change. Perl 6 just keeps getting nicer and nicer."

The relevant piece of background is that I was porting the example application (Lobster) from the Rack framework, where the link was already called 'flip'. So, suddenly both the link and the method were called 'flip'.
Clojure programmers often work with logical lists called sequences. Arrays, maps, lists, sets, Java collections and many other types provide access to their elements as sequences.
No kidding. I dropped WSJ.com last year and don't miss it.

The Internet delivers a WORLD of news sites meaning the traditional publishers have less of a voice than they did when paper was the sole medium.

Their proposed pay wall may ensnare existing readers, but who in his right mind is going to subscribe having never had a relationship with this provider before? "Oh, you want money for that story, the same story I can see a 1,000 versions of in Google News? Buh-bye."

I'd love to see the evidence that supports this decision. This reeks of someone trying to save his job.
Same here, none of the other pages load.
They (Microsoft) didn't want to pay licensing fees to Linotype.
It is sad to see Venezuela in the bottom 10 of the list. How can the Venezuelan people not see the list and think that there is something wrong with their current direction. They are in the company of very poor countries. It is worst since they are doing it by choice. Other countries are there because they were already very poor to begin with.
I'd say for the most part nearly all of the technology Kurzweil predicts ends up being available, it is just the implementation of this technology that muddles the prediction.

In Kurzweil's talks he often expounds on the high predictability of technological progress (price and power of computing, etc). He does not so much cover how humans will use this tech.

Im sure that iPod Nano's (or equivalent) could easily have been embedded or sewn into clothing or hats for years now. Speech-to-text is available now and I use it in Google Voice all the time. It's a matter of choice in this case, not the technology.
Awesome, thanks :)
This again? I thought the TimesSelect experience proved that this model doesn't work.

I wonder if they'd be net better off adopting a pay-what-you-want model.
There are two things which builds a person - genes and environment. In some places of the globe both of them are spoiled. Russia is the good example.
I honestly don't think the metered approach will work for them. Most people will hit that point, and instead of paying will search for, and find, they have other alternatives. In the end, NY Times will just lose most of those regulars as the alternative becomes the primary source.
Fortunately honesty seems more prevalent in the Baltic countries.
'Survival of the cutest' proves Darwin right
GPS trumps LORAN: Govt. to kill outdated navigation system
You should look around. At least get one gfx guy and one musician and you can probably start turning out stuff. Setup a site and just start releasing.

If you want to participate in the parties, you most likely have to find one you can personally attend in order to enter. Depending on where you are this can be either easy or hard.

But it's worth the trip, demo scene parties are tons of fun. Even small ones with a dozen people. I probably went to a dozen or so small scene parties and one big one during my peak in the 90's. And this was in the U.S. which tends to have far fewer parties than Europe.

Checkout http://www.scene.org/sitser.php for irc servers, you can usually find lots of sceners hanging around in #trax.
One of the big three (I think it was GM, not sure) was planning this exact thing back in the late 90s. They'd pack an entire drive-by-wire electric car in to a giant skateboard, and then they'd simply be able to sell different interior/exteriors that would be mounted on top. Then they could focus all their development in to three or four actual drive platforms.

It was a great idea, and had they stuck with it I'm sure we'd be close to using it by now. I expect that batteries ended up being the torpedo though.
It's "C'est la vie."
It's an entire year to look like they're doing something
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple starts more collaborations with Microsoft. Remember how IBM was Apple's big enemy and then they got into bed with each other?
Kurzweil's defense of "computers commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry" as applying to iPod Nanos embedded in pockets is a bit of a stretch, but in practicality not far at all.
I'll accept this when the iPod is embedded with some degree of permanency and doesn't have to be taken out when I do laundry.
Why Conan O'Brien Should Jump to the Internet
"They put anything from microsoft on it."

Dude, books and covers! Please judge products on merit not by who made the damn thing. You can rest assured apple will never let the "average user" experience suffer just to do a deal with another company.
But they already have 'favored partners' for search (Goog and Yhoo) you can't add another search provider even if you want to.
Facebook. The B isn't capitalized.
Thanks, your last para clears up the need for a classification, here we'd probably say middle-income as middle-class is not necessarily related to earnings.

I guess as class and income in the UK are not coterminous this leads to confusion. For example I earn well below the poverty line in the UK but would be described as middle class due to my education and parentage.

Beckham, for example, would probably come in as working class - son of a kitchen fitter and hairdresser (according to Wikipedia) low academic achievement, low IQ, no titled lineage.
That would reinvent existing functionality, badly. You can already post a long form essay to your blog and then post a teaser + link on Twitter.
Make Your Websites Load Faster With Rackspace CDN
Apple iPhone OS 4.0 Features Apple Calling Tablet the iTablet Not The iSlate
Summary: After selling MySQL for $1billion, Monty would like to have access to the code again to build another business off it.
Google's MapReduce patent: what does it mean for Hadoop?
Make the text on the heart popup "I loved that quote" (or "liked" is probably better if you want people to vote more).

The page was a simple WP page with no special symbols, UTF-8 encoding.
They already steer you towards google.
NY Times charges: A quick look at the numbers/opportunities
Ask HN: What Kinds of Comments Should Be Upvoted?
We continue to see metadiscussion about comments and voting rules here on HN. Let's emphasize the positive by discussing what kinds of comments deserve upvotes as positive contributions to the community. Here are some suggestions:

1) Comments that link out to research sources to verify disputed facts, or that cite sources that aren't posted on the Web.

2) Comments that ask for sources to back up statements made in previous comments, which ask for comments in category 1.

3) Comments that respond to name-calling or ad hominem comments of the kind identified in pg's article "How to Disagree" by refuting the central point politely and thoughtfully, and not being drawn into the same tone as more argumentative and less informative comments (in other words, comments that raise the tone of a thread).

What other kinds of comments do you think should generally be upvoted? What kinds of comments are unexpected, pleasant surprises in how they contribute to the community?
Facebook | Inbox
The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures
Oh, competition could still help. Interestingly, you can have some forms of competition, even with a public health care system.
I'm a bit of a design nazi as it is, but in this case I think there's a more legit need.

You're asking me to trust you with very sensitive information. I'm going to be very hesitant to do so with a site that looks like it was hacked together overnight.

As mentioned below as well having information about the security of your solution is vital.
Bing and Deicide.
there are many modes of use of HN that are very useful and that will inherently lead to a very low average karma

Such as?

Also, I'm claiming that as a community grows, it's vital for people to post less often - preferably only on topics regarding which they have something truly insightful to share. Your counter-claim would need to be stronger: you need to show that the "modes of use" you speak of are vital to the community, that there is harm in disincentivising them.
Thanks for the explanation. I guess I'm in the habit of thinking of a string as a list of characters. :)
I agree with the poster who recently likened Twitter to Mullets. We'll look back thoroughly embarrassed.

Keep dreaming, axod. Twitter is here to stay. You'll look back on your twitterlessness and be thoroughly embarassed. :-)
Why is it not done to call out opponents when they make huge claims that are patently not true? Haven't Mac used this in their "I'm a Mac" advertising campaign (albeit hiding behind "PC" rather than saying "Windows PC").

Google would lose because they make big claims about security and their opponents know about lots of security flaws??