skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, for the love of...

OK, Bild, you don't like that Apple's new policy is screwing with your promo app, I get it. But can we cut the "freedom of the press" bull crap. Not that I should expect rationality and perspective from a tabloid rag, but is it even worth the energy to get into that argument - does anyone who matters buy that line?
It does until 4chan decides that a funny prank is to mass flag every video on youtube....
That's a great read, and it inspired me to write this blog. you should also check out Free Software Foundation's comments!

http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?ent...

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/2010-02-ustr-comment.html
Google is a big, juicy target, with lots of money and prestige, and the others are not.
I parsed the headline as pertaining to startup banks, like Vernon Hill's Metro Bank in London.
This should be a non-brainer – ie. catering to the non-English users of the Web.

I wish I could say we were smart enough to have taken that in to account when we started, but, like most, we were oblivious to the fact, and only ended up awakening to the opportunity by virtue of our community leading the way, with their use and volunteer localizations of our offering.

At this point, about 50% of our users are non-English (our offering is available in 30 languages - again, all localized by volunteers).

We are monetizing in 40 countries, using PayPal to sell low cost subscription based web services and virtual goods. In order of sales - US, UK, Canada, Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, France, and Brazil.

So, my best advice to all those running a start-up - think global. You will be able to monetize once you get there.
Yep, we totally get that. We're changing out that intro page to something much better.
PopCap offering Peggle Nights for free
If it's overturned in the EU court of law, fine - that's the process. Really, I find it quite surprising that there is so much opposition the ruling; the video is horrible, it is disgusting, it is wrong. Bravo for Italy (and China for that matter) for identifying and trying to do something about a serious issue.
Absolute trash!! In one breath he goes from locking, synchronization to fine grained/coarse grained locking. Incomprehensible at best.
Well, advocate for an exemption, then. Advocating to abolish the tax entirely come across as advocating for only the super wealthy's needs -- let's face it, family farms and small businesses with values over 2 million are a tiny minority of these inheritances, nationwide.
And that's fine, because that's not the purpose. The purpose is to argue that the relationship isn't linear (as might be intuitively expected), but curved (I don't know what the shape is called).

It's impossible to accurately model the economy of a society, but theories like this can help politicians better judge the impact of their policies.
Google Do No Evil, Hit Again
Oh sorry I meant to...

"Social justice is the application of the concept of justice on a social scale."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice
Way to go, godaddy!
>your conscious executor is simply way way way too stupid to handle this depth of problem by reasoning it out, you have to offload 95% of the processing off to your subconscious before you can actually program

There's a lot of truth to that. Whenever I encounter a problem I can't easily figure out, I take a brisk walk and give my subconscious a chance to tackle it. If that's not enough, I then have to pull out my (so far) foolproof heavy-hitter: a good night's sleep.
Agreed -- I've read the art of the metaobject protocol. But when most people think of functional programming they think of lisp, and this was about perception and not technical accuracy.
the word "state" appears just once in that article. which surprised me.
Then why attack its employees and not the corporation itself?
I'm not working on production code, but I've been using Haskell via Happstack. I can't vouch for its suitability for the enterprise, however.
While this doesn't sound like a good ruling and will presumably be overturned later, I can't say I'm full of sympathy.

There has been an increasing trend in law to rely on blanket "safe harbour" conditions when it comes to on-line activities. Those conditions act as a get out of jail free card for big organisations, and I'm not sure that is healthy. If you set up a service that can host content provided by others, and that service is successful in large part because it enables people to break some law (copyright, privacy, whatever), why should you get a free pass? What you are doing is not then the same as a post office or phone provider, because you are directly profiting and your business model is based in part on illegal activities.

An extension of this idea is that several powerful corporations, Google among them, have been pushing back the boundaries of the law concerning privacy, personal data protection, intellectual property rights, defamation and so on, as hard as they can. I am quite sure that that is not a healthy trend. Services like Google Groups and Google News are based on leeching the work of others. Google Maps and Google Street View have serious privacy concerns, to the extent that both have been partially blocked in several nations either by law or just by large numbers of people turning out to physically block the camera car from entering their village. Google Video/YouTube established themselves based substantially on blatant copyright infringement. And then you get things like the Buzz fiasco a few days ago.

All of this is done from behind a virtual shield where it is almost impossible for anyone who is damaged by such actions to contact Google about it short of filing a court action. The latter is prohibitively expensive in some jurisdictions, notably including the US, in cases where the damage is not a substantial direct financial cost that a court can award back, which basically means the little guy can't stand up to the mighty corporation even in cases where the corporation's behaviour is clearly unethical and/or illegal.

While I would certainly prefer to have robust laws implemented to protect personal privacy and the like, and to see Google forced to comply with those like anyone else, until that happens I half-welcome just about any non-violent effort to check the Powers That Be and make them reconsider whether some of the things they are trying to achieve are a step too far. Legal shenanigans are a game Google likes, and turnabout is fair play.
Heh. How many times should I have used it?
Thats really scary, trust is always a concern when your in a managed hosting solution. How do we know that people from their company aren't taking advantage, even if the Godaddy isn't trying to.
Im sorry, but I thought erlang was the defacto telecom infrastructure language.
I understand your view point. I've done a number of projects where all of us were coders/hacks and the product didn't go anywhere. It was awesome, but, no one knew about it. This is Cindy's vision so we can't very well kick her off :-)

Currently, there are only three of us on this full time. The others are part-time and great contributors to the project. We had Pivotal Labs on board early until we could find someone like Julia to join us full time. And, for some big chunks, we'll likely get them to help out again. They are a great shop.
Pitting a political scientist vs a pro-palestinian writer tells us nothing much at all. Except that they both know what topic to go to to sell copy.

What state have we reached where replacing science with the truth finding abilities of partisan politics seems in some way sensible.
You get it.

We also decided to launch this as an experiment as well to get input and feedback like we are getting here. Rather than try to make it perfect at launch, we'll get the minimum viable product out there and see what the world wants from it. We've already made some changes and are continuing to do so based on feedback from the masses.

Thanks!
Tools to Help You Focus and Increase Productivity
I would agree with you (more than I do anyway) if everyone started out from the same base. But isn't it also unfair that true entrepreneurs who take a lot of risk are taxed equally to people who have inherited wealth or just went from one elite school to the next ending up at a consulting firm talking hot air for the rest of their lives?

I do think that there is a causal relationship between effort and wealth, but that relationship is very patchy.
The idea is that a tight control on free media would ease the control of public opinion by the media he controls.
Beside the war with the judiciary, he controls directly the three main generalist TV channels and, indirectly, the three channels of public TV.
The less "video" are on air, the best for his control.
Beware, it's a political idea and, in Italy, it's matter of serious discussion. I'm just explaining for a "non Italian" audience independently from the fact that I endorse or not the idea.
My opinion is that this government is generically hostile to the free information and to the fact that there is something out of control, there is no need for "special" theories... the plain, old, obscurantism is more than enough.
btw: in this country is forbidden to have WiFi hotspots without having control on who have access to the Internet. Whoever have an open WiFi AP is considered an ISP so he must have many months nogs and so on... Scary, I know...
20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. That means 1200 people reviewing 24/7, making sure that the reviewer speaks the language(s) to watch for profanity.
Dentist in Miami
Dentists in Miami Florida - You might find out that you are right in your thoughts by talking to others about a particular Miami dentist.
That makes the question that the author is trying to brush aside all the more interesting.
Latex could silence noisy neighbours
A classic Steve Dallas lawsuit.

http://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/1986/06/22/
I am not the seller, but I am privy to some of the companies who have asked for additional material, and I like you was surprised to find that more than a few were major corporations, including a few from overseas.
TOMS Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie discusses social entrepreneurship
You can also use Erlang with Nitrogen, and of course you can configure Apache to run any arbitrary executable.
Like Julia said, we're working on it. And for basic stuff, supporting IE is cake. Some of the features weren't cake and rather than release them non-functioning we made the call to get it working right. Soon!
DC's Tech Scene
I read somewhere [citation needed] that the reason that you don't see a real correlation is that the rich effectively tend to pay somewhere around a 40% tax rate. As tax rates go up, it starts to pay to look for tax shelters, and get non-taxable benefits from their company, and so on, and by the time all is said and done, they won't pay more with the higher rate.

If true, raising the tax rate won't get any more money for the government, although it might be good PR for the rich and good income for their accountants.
Capital gains isn't there to compensate for risk, nor should it. Let the borrower compensate the investor for their risk.

I think capital gains primarily serves as a crude mechanism to compensate for inflation.

Consider a hypothetical case:

Year
2050 $100 would but a 10 day supply of air
I invest $100 in a jovian mining operation
2060 $100 would buy a 5 day supply of air
I sell my interest in the jovian mining operation
for $300 making a handy $200!
If taxed as income (33%) I would owe $66 in taxes
But think about air, I had the equivalent of 10 days
of air, now I can buy 15 days of air, so I really
only earned 5 days of air worth $100 which if taxed
as income would cost me $33.
So we invent a 2nd tax scheme for capital gains and
set the rate at 15%, my $200 profit gets taxed $30
and we are pretty close to "fair"

Except that only works for certain time periods over which inflation is about 100%. For shorter periods the investor wins. For longer ones the investor loses. And when I say "investor wins" I mean everyone else pays more to cover the government tax bill and vice versa for losing. There is no free lunch.

If only we had invented some sort of "thinking machine" that could perform basic arithmetic operations, and if only investors kept track of when they purchased their investment, and if only we had, say an office that tracked inflation… we could dispense with the crude estimator and just tax people on their profit above inflation.
Good article but I think it falls into the same trap that all 'smart people' (read: experts) do. I write multi-threaded embedded code in C for a living. It's hard - But it's not that hard... But that's because I do it for a living ALL THE TIME. If someone has a passing need for this kind of thing I don't think the arguments in the article hold water.

For people who don't do "This thing I'm an expert at and claim is not so hard" as often as the expert in question it really is that hard. Things get easier, and people better, with practice. Now, if this is something you plan on using a lot in your job / particular programming field then you shouldn't be afraid of multi-threaded programming but if this is going to be a small passing item that you work with rarely if ever you should probably use existing libraries / abstractions for this type of thing.
And the second best Warner Bros composer, just after Rossini.
Provocative tagline. It's worth noting that most open source users do so not to avoid paying, but for more idealistic and teleological reasons.
What do you even mean by that? I mean, even try to visualize the alternative; that every video, picture, audio clip and piece of text submitted to any website is first vetted by a human being. Any content that that individual cannot get behind will not be published.

Sure, I would like to have material like that magically disappear too, along with the kind of people who would do such a thing. But if we move the level of discourse into the real world rather than la-la land, we have to accept that we can neither use magic, nor vet every piece of content prior to publishing it.

You are free to post obnoxious shit on the internet without it being vetted first, just like you are free to say obnoxious shit without permission from anyone. The consequences come afterwards — and the fault is yours, not the providers of the medium you chose as the vessel for your content.

Freedom of speech ain't pretty. But the alternative is much much worse. This is the only way it can be done.
Asimov's essay is explicitly referenced at the end of Yudkowsky's, so I'm really not surprised someone else posted it.
Future HN headline: The Role Functional Programming Played in Wrecking the Economy.
I completely protest. This is very disturbing, and a stretch of the law too far. It's obvious that the USA Federal Government, and state and county governments, abuse taxpayer funds and have some ridiculous programs. However, instead of trimming back and fighting something that is tough to fight, once again the government finds it's all too easy to find yet another tax. The trouble is, in the bad economy, this was one escape valve that self-employed have been using successful to stay afloat. First we were already taxed on our income for being self-employed, and then taxed again on income, but now we're potentially going to have our employment cut back as etailer after etailer drops CPA affiliate marketing.

Time and again, when the government gets involved with the web, they prove their incompetence.

It's kind of like the time when the government tried to consider online sales tax. But the politicians didn't realize that this isn't like local business sales tax. I mean, the Internet has no geography. With local retail businesses you drive a car to, you can raise sales tax and people will pay it because it's a hassle to drive to a place where it might be a lower tax (in some cases). But with the Internet, the dopes in Washington don't realize that if we create an online sales tax, then people will just purchase goods overseas where there is not sales tax. And then businesses that may have had a nexus in the USA will simply move overseas as well. Brilliant move, Federal Government. So I'm glad at least we achieved a moratorium, but it's imperfect because the states disagreed and force me to collect local sales tax for serving customers in my state, and it's imperfect because the moratorium was only temporary and requires renewal.
That's pretty sick.

This is actually much simpler than it seems. It's just a microcontroller hooked up to the switch (just two wires). The version shown in the video costed much more than it needed to only because we didn't know what we were doing at the time. The whole package can be done wirelessly for ~$35. The benefit of this method is the expandability factor. It can be hooked up to almost anything.

The text message backbone is just a postfix mail server running incron which starts a bash script to parse the message.
A visual cue that indicates when a follow-up comment on a post is from the post's author.

For example, when someone on Hacker News links to a post by Mark Pilgrim, I'd like to be able to scan the comments to see if Mark has contributed to the comment thread.
Thats REALLY scary, I wonder how many passwords they store? just the previous? your whole password history?
Can you really go to college for 99$?
Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial by Joel Spolsky
Exactly - it's fairly obvious why Google has made the conscious decision not to do this, it costs a lot of money and their business model suffers. Ok - so they run the risk of breaking national laws and take the consequences when it happens. I'm not sure this is the most ethical or moral business model but it's what they have decided to do.
That article doesn't really explain what social justice is, nor does your quoted sentence. What does "justice on a social scale" mean?

Does it mean that groups (on the "social scale") are granted the same rights as individuals? I.e., make corporate [1] personhood a fundamental concept rather than a convenient interface?

The only really concrete idea I get from the wikipedia article is that an unjust government is illegitimate (without explaining what "unjust" means), and that somehow equality of outcome is desirable.

[1] By corporate, I mean any large explicitly defined group of people, not strictly limited liability corporations.
A Floating Office in Every Dock
Yahoo and Twitter strike content-sharing deal
Four Elements Chandeliers By De Majo « Lighting Universe
Sadly, I can't say I'm really surprised, this is GoDaddy after all.

This is a company that has been shown to be consistently anti-customer time after time.

Their founder's latest blog post, on the GoDaddy homepage, is titled '5 things I wish I learned in Business School. Plus ... a smoking HOT blonde.' That pretty much sums up their cynical view of their customers as sheep to me.
Obviously the dopes thinking they'll just buy from 'overseas' haven't heard of 'import duty'.

Brilliant move.
I thought the first part was great. Loved "You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view".

Then it tanked. I couldn't help but feel that straw man arguments were used for the examples of those who claim science is a faith. Sigh. Ok, how about a few things that make some scientists and especially the media seem like they belong to a religious or evangelical movement rather than one of discovering the truth:
* believing in something no matter what the evidence
and coming up with bizarre explanations for things because the evidence contradicts the theory.
* saying the science is "settled". Seems like a dogmatic view if I ever saw one.
* reluctant to share data to someone who disagree
* appeals to experts ("Like most scientists agree") to replace the actual need to show that data fits into a coherent theory

Global Warming scientists seems to fit into this camp more often than others.

But really, you look at different disciplines. In archaeology, some guy was just claiming he might have found the first spot that civilization started, and it was from 12000 years ago (if I remember right). How does he know? Why make claims for that? Why not just stick to "oldest known", rather than sensationalize it?

Why also does every show have to talk about either evolution or global warming? I watched a great Bobby McFarrin special on music, and all these scientists involved kept talking about evolution, and "since we know evolution is true then X" and the hilarious part was that all the scientists came to contradictory conclusions. :-) Why not just leave the whole "evolution is true" part out, and just follow the data where it leads?
This kind of freaks me out. If you told me somebody had cleaned out either my brokerage account or my GoDaddy account, I'd pray it was the brokerage account. There are much easier options for recovery from that.

It's not that I don't trust GoDaddy. They've been good to me. It is just that I don't trust every person who might happen to see their data base in the next decade.

Crikey, now I have to treat every password I've ever used there as compromised. Bleeeeeeech.

[Edit: It occurs to me that I probably lose consistency points for this since I've previously argued that plain text passwords are "not that big of a deal." Thomas, I owe you a drink.]
This article covers mostly how _performant_ (as in fast/resource savvy) parallel programming is hard. Though robust parallel programming can be tricky too, and the way you "[Avoid] race conditions" will have an impact on performance. So the trade-off evocated in the article between speed, maintenance, memory could also take into account robustness.
Straighterline seems interesting to me. I like that people can take these intro courses at their own pace then transfer over. It seems like it could help those who are in the military and wish to take courses but are unsure about their scheduling and have little free cash. It could significantly lower costs for a 4 year degree or a 2 year. I think the rise of the 2 year degree will have an enormous impact on our economy as we need more skilled workers, but not necessarily with Bachelor's degrees.
The article is not coming up. Can anyone advise how I might go about finding a mirror?
That sounds shockingly low to me too, but I keep hearing in my interviews with YC-backed entrepreneurs that they got some of their most productive insights from these meetings.

I used to think they were making it up because pg is such a hero in this community and they wanted to make YC look good. But after wasting time disbelieving the process, I now accept that it works, and I spend more time in my interviews trying to understand out WHY it works.
Argh that really sucks. We should make a website that keeps track of these 'clear text' password people.
Actually, venture capital *is* adapting
Using high-level, no-brainer parallel constructs is kosher (like a pre-built, concurrent data structures lib built by odd people like Doug Lea), similar to the advice about cryptography. Playing with the atoms yourself is dangerous. You can understand the concepts well, be contentious in your coding and build something the right person can drive a truck through.

How do you verify correctness? How do you test? A bug might only present one in ten billion loops, perhaps when you push the cores really hard. Or fail on the new processors with the slightly different barrier/cache/coherency semantics. Or fail in ways that send you down a million heisenbug gullies. Without any proper tools or diagnostics (yet).
To be clear, leaving aside his 'passport' status, he had a French father and a Polish mother. And it's interesting that he made no attempt to ever return to Poland after he'd arrived in Paris as a very young man. I think the French and Polish can make more or less equivalent claims on him.
Smarkets, a London-based betting exchange startup, goes public