skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. I heard about the money saving by using cash, too. But it seems to work differently for me. With cash I have no audit trail (which can be a good thing). But paying with electronic money, I get to see all the money I spent everytime I check my bank's statement. Cash just vanishes.
Anti-IRS Rant of Software Engineer who Today Flew Plane into IRS Building
what kind of work do you do?
It is crucial if you spend much time staring at a screen. Bugged font rendering is distracting and hinders readability.
Or just foreign currency.
"I'm sure there are a few good courses."

"Trust, but verify."

WRT pointers, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointers is wonderful additional reading, but a very poor first introduction to the concept. Maybe better than the pointers and arrays chapter in K&R, which didn't work for me, but only that.

Yep, this guy is worse than useless (the accusations of cheating). The high school coach who taught my high school computer programming course (punched card FORTRAN "IV" on an IBM 1130) was a lot better ... then again he gave us a not in the book blackboard lecture on the two's compliment system, which I found to be tremendously useful going forward (just knowing that there was something behind the opaque veil of integers and floating point numbers was in and of itself useful).

See if you can find a non-loser CS professor (or maybe one who needs some FORTRAN worked on ^_^ ... anything real and concrete ought to beat this) and go from there. Good luck!
I wish... really really wish, they would make an email client that renders html nicely.
Social flatland
Pointless and bizarre, and therefore cool.
YouTube - yahoobing's Channel
Considering that a majority of HTC phones (the champion of Android) are WinMo, and you can also find (recent) WinMo phones from Samsung, LG, Acer and Motorola ... your assertion is out of sync with reality.

Historically yes, WinMo phones suck ... one of my uncles (who's a truck driver ... i.e. a normal person ... has one) and I hated it from the first second I touched it, but he's happy with it. And I once owned an HP iPaq, which was a lot more useful than an iPhone.

I wouldn't underestimate the power of Microsoft, or the number of .NET developers who would want to go mobile if WinMo 7 is a success. They only need focus, and sometimes they can pull it off.
This is the best thing I've seen all day: http://5z8.info/stalin-will-rise-again_e9m8_ip-stealer
why does almost no word processor implement this algorithm?

In TeX the line breaking depends on the whole paragraph. I imagine it could be visually quite distracting if the line-wrapping jumped around in a WYSIWYG word processor as you added text to a paragraph.

Edit: ah. I see this is noted in the posted article’s To-do section:

Figure out how to deal with dynamic paragraphs (i.e. paragraphs being edited) as their ratios will change during editing and thus visibly move around.
TED: Shai Agassi's bold plan for electric cars
Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications and How to Avoid Them
Google acquires ReMail; shutters iPhone app
I'm sure I'll get a backlash here for supporting this guy, but the system he publicly advocates would be a much better functioning patent system than the current one.

Currently, the average lawsuit between a large and small company over an IP dispute is around $1.6M. The result is that only large companies can play the patent game, and will simply infringe on smaller companies.

If IV can level the playing field by aggregating these patents and taking on that lawsuit risk, that should theoretically reduce the likelihood (or at least the cost) of an IP lawsuit, making the system more efficient.
I just hope that the devaluation of the dollar doesn't coincide with the election of the first latino president. It would be funny as hell, but utterly unfair.
Same here, one of the reasons I quit my phd program. I saw how much of the publication volume is bs--it's really hard and rare to produce a meaningful research paper, and that rarity will only increase.

If you go to a top cs conference, chances are 80% of the papers are throw-away...literally no one will read other than the reviewers, and I'm talking about top-conferences let alone the countless lesser known ones. And to be honest, a lot of emerging countries seem to be mass producing a lot of low quality papers in CS, and it's flooding the field. One reason might be how cheap it is to fund a cs research project as opposed to an experimental physics or bio lab.
That's not "capitalists", that's the financial media.

Most of the people I know who are involved in finance consider the financial media to be pretty stupid.

Finally, the financial media tell you to do all kinds of orthogonal and contradictory things, only some of which was to put all your money in the market. In fact, most advise and would have advised the opposite.

So, I don't see the point of what you are saying.
Claws are out for teen fashion blogger
Shai has been a media darling for quite some time now. This TED video is from last year. Are there any actual results to show yet?
PDF if the site goes down: http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://celes.niran.org/~ni...

The site's been holding up surprisingly well. Not bad, T35 Hosting.

EDIT: It looks like it's gone now. Here's the home.htm that was on the site as well: http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://celes.niran.org/~ni...
IT career : once a decade has passed
Did Garry Kasparov Stumble Into a New Business Process Model?
a little snippet in the article about potentially building residential verticals/blocks with this kind of technology built in. now that would be ... tasty.
Can anyone tell me why a user's identity is so important? Sure, with perhaps a whole lot of algorithmic work, they might be able to serve me slightly better ads but is that all it's good for? It seems like a whole lot of furor over nothing.
An invention market for software is complete BS. All the effort involved in producing a software patent can be summarized as a small amount for the idea, and most for wordsmithing. The real value comes from the implementation, which is only loosely connected to the patent; just as the relationship of any software to its initial specification.
Tip: pick out the top 4-5 points from your report and share them in the blog post as a teaser.

Otherwise having to read a multi-page scribd document just to get a clue requires way more time and attention than most people who can give you coverage have.
You're making the same mistake that Eliezer describes in his essay.

Many things in science are not proved true - in fact, it's fundamentally impossible to prove a scientific theory is true. You can only disprove - falsify - it. The best we can do with a scientific theory is say it agrees with all observations.
Law Review Circulation Continues to Plummet
The financial media and all "capitalists" who've been exposed to the downside of the risks they took. All that talk of individual responsibility and keep the government out of financial markets evaporated real fast, if I recall correctly.

Of course, now it's back again. It's as if 2008-2009 never even happened.

EDIT: My bad, you didn't get my initial reference. In 2005, a bunch of the "capitalists" were saying we should privatize social security and put it in the market. I was saying that would have been dumb. Regardless of how "capitalist" it may have been.
you can get Xcode and iPhone SDK for free too and directly from Apple.
I almost want to start sending these links to people at work- just to see what they do. If they actually click on them, then that's bad.

If I could track clickthroughs like you can with Bit.ly (you could always just sketchify a Bit.ly link) then you could do some security testing to see who will click on anything.
Freakonomics: When are High Wine Prices Justified?
Examples? Well in my case nothing is stored in Gconf: vim, irssi, apache, postfix, firefox, skype, sound settings, wifi etc

So what's the point of this "standard API" then? Just to make life harder for KDE/XFCE folks to run GTK apps that were written by unfortunate souls who use gconf and suddenly packaged with gconf-daemon as a dependency?
Right, and labeling them is not much different from calling them dumb.

I think something's wrong with us "passionates." Why aren't we seeing any value in these everyday "content" people?
This actually sounds like a good idea. It gives graphically undemanding, data-driven apps a relatively streamlined dev environment, while game development can draw on the existing mindshare of XNA developers.
The Trillion Dollar Gap: Underfunded State Retirement Systems
What about a menu (ribbon) item called "apply very nice typography to your document" which recalculates/reformats the paragraphs? Would this be a solution?
http://5z8.info/smut_s0s8_back-to-africa is my link both salacious AND racist?
If a district employee came home with the student, while I was there, with my permission, and helped him or observed his work, I'd be OK with that. Again, with my permission and knowledge.

If the same employee was peeking through the window ...
Yea but there wasn't much tech there, only "it is a new OS" which can be interpreted differently if you're talking to techies or consumers, for example.

Only thing they've shown (afaik) is a new UI. What is underneath?
In my experience, bright kids who underperform (grade wise) do so because they are spectacularly lazy, not because they are refusing to memorize.
Summary?
An unlawful search is illegal. Whether the cop go to jail depends on if they're convicted of a criminal law.

As far as I'm aware this never happens, or at least I've never heard of it. But then, IANAL.

Not that I disbelieve you, but I'm curious. Can you cite some real-life cases where officers that poked their noses where they ought not have later been prosecuted and actually been punished? My guess is that they'll be protected by qualified immunity. (but then, that immunity probably isn't available in the case at hand)

Anecdote: I have a friend who was handing out pamphlets in front of the post office on Tax Day. He was arrested and later sued for 1st Amendment violations. He won his case against the town, but the prosecution against the officers failed because they thought they were doing the right thing (with no acknowledgment of the fact that their job makes it critical for them to have this knowledge).
Forgive me for my incomplete understand of the CME's profits. Does the CME clear trades for JPM or any other large bank?

If so you profit indirectly from those institutions. Regardless, too many people who profit directly or indirectly from Wall Street and it's surrounding economies are apologists for the TBTFs actions.

Back to my questions. You agree with Taibbi on front running/flash. 2 more to go.
"There are only three numbers in Computer Science. Zero, One and N."

Anyone know who said this? Google only gives a few results... that's what his thesis reminds me of.
It helps that it's 33K of static HTML. Looks like it was converted from Word, some interesting metadata:

<o:Author>Joe Stack</o:Author>
<o:LastAuthor>Joe</o:LastAuthor>
<o:Revision>27</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>1848</o:TotalTime>
<o:Created>2010-02-16T19:24:00Z</o:Created>
<o:LastSaved>2010-02-18T06:42:00Z</o:LastSaved>
If wine is just grape juice that gets you drunk, this makes sense. But wine is also a signally mechanism. There should be a convenient way to say "I have more money than I can possibly spend," and spending $5000 at a time on wine is one way to do that.
Noby Noby Boy website (no flash)
I plan to address this in a future article, but here are two examples of many, many things that can go wrong: 1. throw up a customized phishing page mimicking a Google or FB login page where you've already filled in their username, fill in stars in the password box along with a message saying "Welcome back, shalmanese. Incorrect password." or something like that. The percentage of people falling for this will be dramatically higher than a naive phishing attempt (and there are studies on this.) 2. Surveillance will become greatly easier: the government can subpoena just about anyone to get information about you.
Nice. I got an exe!

http://5z8.info/guns_m4r4_worm.exe
Joseph Andrew Stack's Web Site / Manifesto (IRS building Suicide Pilot)
Fusion-Powered Express to the Planets
My appreciation for Malcolm Gladwell's work took a major tumble at the publication of that article. We had enough sycophantic executive worship from Wired in the 90s to keep me immune to that sort of carefully packaged PR for a lifetime.
What we have here is someone who Did Not Do The Research. The housing bubble first began picking up steam in 1997.

Here's a pretty chart: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_pMscxxELHEg/SfcAHzHg0UI/AAAAAAAAFI...

This time coincides with a remarkable expansion of government-sponsored lending via FNMA and FHLMC, eventually reaching over 2 trillion dollars of liabilities. During that whole time, the executives of those corporations quacked about how safe their loans were and their institutions were, and bemoaned the expansion of sub-prime lending. Well, guess which two mortgage banks have taxpayers on the hook for over $100 billion. Hint: they're not GS and J.P. Morgan.
I think the iPhone app just got released. Started right clicking around on the site to see how it worked. I was surprised to find it wasn't flash.

Also, I love the domain name!
Vintage (Storage and Communication) Technologies That We No Longer Use
Watch out for the telescreens, comrades!
For this to be really useful, I would need a way to get strong encryption support (without admin access like installing TrueCrypt).
Ah, but with URL shorteners, people are already clicking on anything! Which I'm guessing is the point to this whole exercise.

That said, the reason we've come to tolerate shorteners is that there's an implicit network of trust in the way they're used on Twitter. We trust that someone we follow isn't going to put a goatse behind that bit.ly because we know enough about them to believe they wouldn't (or at least we don't think they'd risk a massive loss of followers for it).

So by the same reasoning, if you send a ShadyURL to a co-worker, if they know you, they probably trust you won't be sending them anything malicious. Though I suppose the smart thing for a recipient to do would be to double-check with you that you sent the right link.
Unfortunately I have the opposite problem. I'm running Win7 x64 with 8GB of memory and the only way I can get it to use it is to have at least 2 VM's running. Usually I have more than 4 GB free.

Granted, most of my apps are 32 bit, but I would think that Windows could utilize all the available memory. I paid good money for that memory, and don't want it to go to waste!
Exactly my point. The submission's title states that.
It's also worth noting that people can move between 0, 1 and N passionate things during their lifetimes.
An update from two months ago says this:
"Better Place and Renault are bringing sustainable transportation to Denmark and Israel, beginning in 2011"
Guy dicks around with forces he doesn't have the free cash available to dick around with, blames IRS.

Later finds himself losing work due to working in aerospace as Air Force bases are closed in the 90's, leading into 9/11 and a meltdown in his ability to generate personal revenue. Blames IRS.

Runs out of money, blames IRS.

Flies plain into IRS building with the intent to indiscriminately murder anyone who happens to be in the building at the time, ending his pathetic life. Doesn't even garner a headline on the Huffington Post. Forgotten two weeks later.
"We form discrete groups from discrete sets of people, generally with little overlap."

This is true for some people. Anyone who grew up in a small town, a tightly-knit religious culture, or most of Latin America, for that matter, might have a different experience.
I've actually noticed a similar trend. The few friends who switched to mac, say they love it and they'd never go back, then they find they can't get/afford the mac they want, and go back to Win. Positive comments all around about Win7.
Was the Austin Plane Crash Domestic Terrorism?
What was remail?
How on earth do you call that skill? He's repeating a small set of steps innumerable times. That's not skill, it's being fast at one thing. We tried treating people like machines in the West a century ago, and over time, it doesn't work worth shit.

I thought this article might have been satire, but apparently not...
Colombia Government sites hacked (and spreading malware)
throw this guy in jail for the rest of his life and be done with it. no different than madoff. worse actually. he not only took money, but he also "took" knowledge + intellectual property.
Bump (YC 09)'s Mobile Data Swapping API Now Open To Everyone
Their business practices were always dubious. The fact that they feel the need to hide them in this fashion says all there is to be said.
Google Buzz: What is it good for?
No more than a speculation. Try to follow the links...
The yields he's getting from this system (nearly 350 cherry tomatoes from one plant; 58 cucumbers per plant?) are incredible.

Wonder what kind of square footage you need of this setup to completely assauge the food requirements of one adult (minus, maybe, grains and fruit) - fish, beans and veggies.

Also wondering what it would take to set up something like this on a roof in brooklyn.. Ponderous!
Almost 2,500 firms breached in ongoing hack attack
Introducing the Yahoo and Microsoft Search Alliance
Clojure has optional type hints.

Ex: (fn [#^String foo] (.length foo))

See http://clojure.org/java_interop#Java%20Interop-Type%20Hints
The author seems to discount the person that is passionate about legacy -- the parent that has "settled" into raising a solid family and a steady job so that her kids can have the luxury of becoming a "passionate."
Well, hey, never blame your industry when you can attempt to tar the government that just bailed your sorry selves out. (and yes, that includes you, even if your bank was not directly involved).

Nice chart. I went to college with Shiller's kid, believe it or not. Anyways, it looks like things pick up more in the early 2000s than 97 to me.

My explanation? Super low federal interest rates that were kept way too low for way too long (for political reasons), and an unappetizing stock market in the early 2000s. Money seeking a return had to go somewhere, and that's where it went.

If you were in the field at the time, you'd probably have a similar memory. It's what my friends in the industry were saying circa 2003. None of them were talking about Fannie and Freddie -- they only adopted that when it became a convienent excuse 5 years later.

Since you're an expert, I'd love to see a citation regarding that "remarkable expansion of govt sponsored lending" by Freddie and Fannie at the time? Specifically, was it driven by an act of government or was it market-driven?
Considering that ideas are expensive, I'd say they're getting shafted.

Publicity however is valuable, and $1400 is a small price to pay for the traffic they're getting.
Another reason we need the Pirate Party.
Tragically naive, but naive in a self-serving and narcissistic way. Childish, I guess one would say. Hard to sympathize with for that reason. It's one thing to take a naive and idealistic look at government with the intent of improving it; it's another thing to take that approach to your own taxes.
Mount Roraima
clojure is cool. I just got a book yesterday.
like most things in life that we try to place into distinct and separate categories... it really can't be broken down that easily, I believe it's more of a spectrum of passion types where someone can fall anywhere from 0 passion to infinite passion.

And if you think about it that way, isn't that basically the same thing as saying we're all a little bit different in personality? Replace passion with commitment, honesty, intelligence, curiosity and you could make the same argument for each.
Actually, in that same situation, I believe it was limited by memory (MB per apache+php process), and number of processes available driven by latency. Given the number of processes running on a machine, and the memory that each consumed, we "couldn't use up" the processor capacity, the memory ran out first.

Maybe we could have switched to something lighter, but the cost of all that development and testing would outweigh a handful of extra machines.
> You're claiming familiarity yet are unaware of one of the passages quoted most often?

No, I've actually read the leaked emails in their entirety. And I suppose you're talking about the quote: "The fact is we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it's a travesty that we can't." Because that's the only quote from the email in either of your articles that caught my eye as salient. If you were referring to something else, please clarify. Anyways, that's not talking about the general temperature trends. Go read the email it came from. Or you can read the summary with quotes from Trebeth that MediaMatters researched so that you don't have to:

http://mediamatters.org/research/200912010002

And before you say MediaMatters is biased, their sources are listed and verifiable. If you're gonna link CSM I think MM is at least fair game.

> You're backpedaling.

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

> Unfortunately for that position, they were the source of their "adjustments" and they've admitted that they can't reproduce those. And, it's not clear that the original sources still have the data.

That's not the fault of the group you're claiming discarded the data. It's not feasible for every project to keep every piece of data they've ever touched. It might be approaching that in 2009-2010, but when the original work was carried out (and historically, to account for bureaucratic lag) it was not.

You can argue it's bad, and I won't disagree that it's disappointing. It is not damning, though. The endless cycle of claim/proof/verify is what science is.

> The question isn't whether some glaciers are shrinking. It's whether glacier changes as a whole are somehow different since 1934. They're not.

That's absurd. Have you looked at the EIS data? There isn't enough glacier to sustain that consistent and quick a decline for 34 years. Even lowballing the observed decline in some areas that's hundreds of miles of glacier. Even saying this suggests you haven't even looked at this footage. I encourage you to. Even if you do not believe me or the data, the images presented are beautiful.
Front page.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/18/austin-plane-crash-...
Too beautiful to be real... breath taking
Why wine and not water?
The same thing that happened to every other industrialized nation: they automate and those people either find other work or starve.

How many typists did word processing software automate out of their jobs in the 80's? Easily tens of thousands just here in the US. What are those typists doing now?
It looks like the note was originally found by a redditor who Googled the guy's name after it was released: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/b3nte/plane_cras...
Ask HN: Any non-techies have advice for a good cover letter?
My little brother is graduating from college soon and sent me his resume and cover letter to review. He wants to be a lawyer. I'm a web developer and haven't written a cover letter since... well, since I wasn't a web developer.

I've searched for best practices, tips, etc. on writing good cover letters, but the information on the Internet wasn't very helpful. Most articles repeat the same dull tidbits and leave me wanting to tell my brother not to submit one at all (which I won't do). A couple (newer, edgier) articles suggest being completely different and making a splash with a creative and arguably unprofessional letter. I'll take it all into consideration, of course.

But if anyone here who actually writes/reads cover letters could share a couple high-level criteria for an effective cover letter, I'd appreciate it.