skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd argue corporate welfare in large part enables Walmart to push out local businesses so easily. A lot of Walmart locations have gotten subsidized building permits because counties think they attract a lot of business and grow the economy. They do - in the short term - just due to scale, until every other business withers and dies. You get a slight boost from cheaper prices before you realize rather than having an internal money cycle between small businesses you now have minimum wage workers at Walmart making the Walton's rich off your communities wealth which is rapidly going away.

But Walmarts core business depends on the ability to use state aid to subsidize their employees - pay them barely above minimum wage, give them all the welfare pamphlets to get medicaid coverage, food stamps, electric subsidies, etc - and that lets them outcompete everyone since they don't have to assume any burden as a multinational business operating in a local market where their economies of scale and corporate efficiency mean nobody else can compete with them on goods pricing. Their employees make unnaturally high relative wages because they spend so much effort hooking them up with state programs to subsidize their starvation wages.

And a large part of why these cities are in crisis is because archaic and overzealous zoning and building codes, and an immense amount of property-as-an-investment movements in the economy for the ultrarich since 2008 put up immense barriers to natural business growth. When you have all these regulations in your way it becomes way too much of an opportunity cost to try, especially when regulations are often intentionally written to be impossible to interpret for a non-lawyer, and even remain nebulous intentionally by the corporate sponsors who had them enacted as a means to stifle competition.

Most of us here are in software - why? What keeps the software industry growing so much compared to almost any other business? Part of it certainly is innovation and utility, but there is no way that tech valuations are realistic or that the frequency of unicorn startups is reflected at all in almost any other industry today. And I would certainly postulate that is in huge part due to the incredibly low barriers of entry to developing and distributing software as a product. Everything else has huge physical opportunity costs and often magnitudes more logistical and legal hurdles that make competition impossible, so it should surprise no one major entrepreneurial growth is disproportionately coming from software.
Trust me, Italy is FULL of highly talented engineers, mechanics, etc, and small companies like CLP.

Unfortunately for them, they're not the best at selling their services globally.

Source: I am Italian.
IBM has long seen itself not as a computer or electronics company but as a marketing company. Their approach to marketing is to have salesmen in branch offices selling to businesses. Long they sold business machines for routine business record keeping.

They are still trying to sell, sell something, via those branch offices to those businesses but they have run out of things to sell. And the sales culture is not good at thinking of good, new products/services to sell.
Or an algorithm churned out a list for human "review".

And someone making $200k a year probably spent about 8 seconds thinking about whether to flush this particular site.

"Can't they find someone else to do this job? My stomach aches. I hear there's a new sushi chef over the next building..."
For clarification:

That's, propellor, the property-based host configuration manager (in haskell). By coding superstar Joey Hess: https://github.com/joeyh/propellor

Not propellor, the parallel microprocessor by Parallax: https://www.parallax.com/catalog/microcontrollers/propeller
Some interesting parallels here to Japanese web design, which is also traditionally notoriously dense and link-heavy:

https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...
Show HN: Public KV Store
Suburbs also make kids totally dependent on their parents to get to activities, friends, etc.

Yes! And the deleterious effect of this is underappreciated and understated. It's not just a convenience and logistical issue; it materially alters the nature and quality of the connection one has with surrounding society, and leads to _different kind_ of social relations over time.

Kids cannot "be kids" when their life lacks social spontaneity (and in fact, there is some question about adults being adults as well), when their life is a directed graph and a collection of automobile vectors, subordinated to the rhythms and whims of their parents to drive them.

As a child, I did not immediately understand this paradigm shift as I underwent it, which led me for years to struggle with this great, nonarticulated malaise for which I had no name. It's only with the benefit of hindsight that I understand that I was unable to cope with living "nowhere in particular", which suitably describes 90% of inhabited areas in the US, including places that are notionally urban. Much of DFW should be reclassified as a rural area.
Do all the other hedge funds agree?
Wasn't there something about Warren Buffet investing in IBM?
If this were a game of chess, checkmate is getting arbitrary code to run in the context of the user. If you have an existing ssh process running as the same user then you can attach it with a debugger and inject code into it.
That's the irony of the situation: those who not only have the insight that Europe isn't what they hoped for but also have the resolve to act on that insight are demonstrating qualities that would make them prime candidates for successful integration. It's a weird twist of the brain drain pattern. (But a good one, because those qualities will shine even more in the home country)
if you want to keep up wages, then why artificially inflate the price of going into business (which just prevents potential entrants from offering a better product than incumbents) when you can instead.. artificially inflate wages directly with a higher minimum?
Isn't that clear yet? They were told that by the hordes of smugglers who make untold amounts of money ferrying these people into Europe. To lure them in, they tell them of the golden mountains just waiting for them, the girls who can't wait for supposed 'real men' - there are those who claim that women in Sweden demonstrate out on the streets to 'get real men' - and all the other good, free stuff.

Once here they should notice that they've been duped, but many don't seem to be able to accept this and go on a rampage to get whatever is is they expected. Which, of course, is not forthcoming - not even in Sweden, even though the level to which this country goes to accommodate so-called 'refugees' is beyond the pale (claim to be 16 and you're set as long as you don't look older than 40...).

It is going to take a long time, and cause a lot of trouble for both the affected European countries as well as the migrants who chose to come there to solve this problem. It could break the EU. It will topple governments.
The Comprehensive Guide to URL Parameter Encryption
Someone didn't learn about the de facto monopoly the SEC (federal gov't) gave the Big Three (Moody's, S&P, Fitch) at the time of the meltdown through its NRSRO status: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationally_recognized_statisti...

The whole banking and financial system at that level has its tendrils wrapped so firmly around the gov't (and vice versa) that a failure there is hardly an indictment of free market principles.
Blech!!

It's too bad that companies like both IBM and Yahoo! didnt do a better job in capturing the startup market given the hoards of cash they both have.

Talk about 900 pound gorillas, they got their asses handed to them even though they could have funded every single startup in the valley over the last ten years and not put a dent in their reserves...

I'm curious to know why these companies with massive cash stockpiles seem to literally just sit on them.
I remember Mr Buffet talking about how awesome IBM's pipeline for the next few years is. Also, this:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2015/11/17/wh...
>Honestly, I don't see what difference a missile defense would make to SK, when North Korea can set Seoul in fire with artillery.

While I agree the North Koreans can do a tremendous amount of damage to Seoul with artillery, these are really calculations on the strategic, nuclear level. The North Korean conventional ballistic arsenal is too small to matter very much.

What they're really worried about is South Korea developing the capability to stop the North Koreans from delivering a nuclear bomb. The Chinese are probably thinking the US is more likely to nuke the North Koreans if we don't believe they can retaliate effectively.

Still, it doesn't make much sense to me. If we were to make a first strike on North Korea we would get their nukes with a pretty high degree of confidence. Not that we would anyway, but the strategic consideration there is China's response, not North Korea's.
I've been working at IBM for a couple of years now, started as a grad.

What you must be referring to is the stock price, which has dropped from 200 dollars a couple of years ago to like 120 these days.

I can't claim to understand this company, I think very few people can. There are 300,000 employees and more teams/products/departments than you can imagine. It's absolutely insane.

However, what I can say is the following: IBM is shifting it's strategy completely and that would've been very difficult to do without a drop in revenue and stock price. IBM is going from whatever it was before to a cloud-based company. All services and products will need to have some sort of cloud offering. I'm not sure if you can imagine what moving 300k employees worth of work to the cloud means. IBM has existed for like 100+ years now, this industry has not existed until a couple of years ago and, right now, all teams must re-evaluate their work and make the steps towards making this transition happen.

Many of the employees are stuck in their old ways, many people have been working at IBM their whole career (20-30-40 years) and it might be hard to adjust to so many new directives coming from the top. There's much bureaucracy and many old ways that need to be absolutely obliterated. Also, IBM doesn't have a great reputation for being cool or anything... almost everybody hates Lotus Notes, as an example.

This was sort of all over the place, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about this. Please let me know if you have any specific questions...
My WebGL- and math-fu suck :( I would not have been able to make anything like this.
Brother who turned in the Unabomber: “I want him to know that the door’s open”
From what I've seen, it is mostly Southerners (南方人) or Western people taught by Southerners who have trouble with distinguishing between endings such as -n and -ng.

Also, pinyin IMEs can be fairly fast even with only minimal practice as the matching is done at the word level (and possibly some IMEs look at preceeding characters) rather than at the character level. For example, when entering 南方人, my tying sequence was "nanfangren<space>", and the IME was already suggesting the correct answer at "r", so I could have actually typed "nanfangr<space>".
IBM is suffering the fate of OPEC countries, except with technology. IBM wasn't diversified. (Sure, IBM has lots of products, but it usually sold licenses to all these products in large bundles, rarely did anyone buy just DB2, rather, agreements purchased entire ecosystem of IBM software/hardware).
IBM was built on a single golden goose "massive multi-million dollar agreements with Fortune 500 CTO's for thousands of licenses of IBM hardware/software". IBM solved big problems with big, expensive solutions. Nowadays, developers regularly make the purchasing decisions, not upper-management, so FOSS or Freemium products win out over expensive IBM software licenses. IBM hardware is largely dying out because the Cloud and x86 won the architecture wars and no one wants to develop for PowerPC or AIX. So the legacy IBM is dying on the table.

IBM is losing its old accounts and old business agreements faster than it can generate new revenue with Softlayer/Bluemix/Watson. IBM makes 4.5B from Cloud revenue. In contrast, total revenue in 2015 was 81.7B. So IBM revenue is going to be a bloodbath until Cloud revenue can catch up. Unfortunately, Cloud is a razor thin margin business, where Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are willing to sell at, or below cost to gain marketshare, which will likely continue to hurt IBM's cloud revenue at a time it needs it most. IBM is the underdog here, so it can not bring any of the other cloud giants to the table and make them end the price wars, so IBM cloud revenue is likely to remain anemic.

IBM also suffers from a number of management mistakes. IBM is way behind on automation and lacks the talent, so they've had to make acquisitions and "strategic partnerships" to buy it. IBM previously tried to outsource as much software and operations to China or India, and the unskilled labor available in those countries simply don't have the skill sets to do devops or any sort of basic automation. So you've got datacenters where people still ssh into each box and run commands by hand thousands of times because the skill level isn't there. But hey, a few quarters of lower labor expenses in exchange for long term growth is a great deal when you can just parachute out.

Other mistakes IBM has made includes massive buildup of debt and stock buybacks to inflate the stock price. As bad as the stock looks now, just consider how bad it would be if IBM hadn't spent 8B+ buying back stock. These buybacks have largely been financed by new corporate debt. IBM's market cap is nearly 40% less than only a few years ago. These buybacks hide a lot of the stock price damage (the stock would be worth about $75 instead of ~$130). In addition, buybacks are essentially returning money from the corporation to the shareholders, unwinding the assets. This means IBM management has no plans which could return a higher yield to investors than simply handing back their money -- not great for investor confidence or long term future for IBM.

Source: Employee.
You've reinvented fractional orbital bombardment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardme...
[edit] keep in mind this is just a simple example. Awk is just one tool in the toolbox.

Take a look at 'The AWK Programming Language ' Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, Peter J. Weinberger.

http://www.amazon.com/The-AWK-Programming-Language-Alfred/dp...

Yes, its that Aho and Kerninghan...

operators to C function mapping. you can run like so.

$ awk -f fixed.awk < fixst.in > fixed.c

--- fixed.awk ---

BEGIN {
printf("#include <stdio.h>\n");
printf("typedef long fixed;\n");
printf("void *send(fixed *this, char *message, ...);\n");
}
/^{/ {
Ndecl = 0;
printf("{\n");
}
/^}/ {
while(--Ndecl >= 0)
printf("\t%s\n", Destructor[Ndecl]);
printf("}\n");
}
/^:/ {
if($2~/fixed/) {
sub(/;/, "", $3);
printf("\tfixed *%s = send(NULL, \"fixed\");\n", $3);
Destructor[Ndecl++] = "send(" $3 ", \"~fixed\");"
}
else if ($4 ~ /(double)/) {
sub(/;/, "", $5);
printf("\tsend(%s, \"double\", &%s);\n", $5, $2);
}
else if ($3 ~ /^=/) {
sub(/;/, "", $4);
printf("\tsend(%s, \"=\", %s);\n", $2, $4);
}
else if ($3 ~ /^\+/) {
sub(/;/, "", $4);
printf("\tsend(%s, \"+=\", %s);\n", $2, $4);
}
else if ($3 ~ /^\*/) {
sub(/;/, "", $4);
printf("\tsend(%s, \"*=\", %s);\n", $2, $4);
}
}
/^[^{}:]/ { print }

--- fixst.in ---

int main()
{
:	fixed a;
:	fixed b;
:	fixed t0;
:	fixed t1;
double f;
:	a = 1.00;
:	b = 9.99;
:	t0 = 0.00;
:	t1 = 2.00;
:	t0 += t1;
:	t0 *= b;
:	t0 += a;
:	f = (double)t0;
}
PayPal's Super Bowl 50 Commercial
>they didn't include the frequencies the satellite will be using

According the the article, the satellite has made no detectable transmissions.
Suburbs also make kids totally dependent on their parents to get to activities, friends, etc.

[Highly urban-oriented personality here, decidedly with you in general ...]

Here, a purely rationalistic and quantitative analysis might not back this up. It's not necessarily clear that there are fewer vehicle-miles travelled and fossil fuels expended in stocking every corner grocery in a dense urban metropolis vs. one 3000-mile salad backhauled to a Walmart SuperCenter to which everyone within a 10 mi radius has to drive. Pound for pound, the latter approach might actually be more cost and resource-efficient in a lot of cases.

But of course, there's more to life than robotic efficiency.
It's an established name from economics. The wikipedia definition is: "seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth". You can think of it as a generalization of seeking rent for a property.

For better or worse, that is what you are doing when you lease a property. You want to be paid just for owning something, not for doing anything.

Analogously, if you provide service X, you can seek "rent" in addition to the value you provide.

One way to do this is by manipulating the market for X by reducing the supply of those who provide X, e.g. through an unnecessarily onerous licensing process. The additional amount you make with the licensing process in place falls under the category of economic "rent".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
New stupid projects from the Stupid Hackathon
How  to Easily Incorporate Visual Storytelling into Your Digital Marketing
Warren Buffet has often said he avoids investing in the tech sector because he does not like to own companies he does not understand. For the life of me, I can not fathom why he broke this cardinal rule with IBM.
Unfortunately, this is 100% true...
Sounds like a little pushing and shoving in the big game to me.

Play on.
New vs. old might also be a factor. I live in Atlanta and detest virtually all Sun Belt development in the last few decades because it's so spread out.

The suburbs in the Rust Belt, in places like South Bend, IN (where I spent my elementary school years), or Buffalo, NY, are a lot more dense and palatable in this regard. I'd still dislike living there, but it's a far cry from living truly, honest-to-god in the middle of nowhere in places like ATL, DFW, PHX...
* Take the average person from a high school class you took
In my experience, yes.

The support I have received fromAWS has been literally stellar over anyone I've ever worked with.

Even now, my previous rep got promoted and moved on from account mgmt but if I send him a one-off question he gets it answered and taken care of immediately.

I have literally out of hundreds of calls and meetings with aws been disappointed with one call. That was when I accidentally changed my root account email address and I couldn't recall which email I had set it to, so I clicked the "contact customer service" link from the forgot password page and it connected me with the "Amazon.com" (shopping) customer service agent who apparently had no fucking clue what aws was.
Indian man could be first recorded human fatality due to a meteorite
Reputation and precedent. It's long past time to complain about the US's ICBMs.

And for everyone sarcastically wondering why the US gets a pass, I'm pretty sure there was a lot of criticism at the time over the US's (and Soviets') nuclear buildup.
The problem is that except for a handful of people who have direct contact, the locals are not really any more informed than others. As an European, I knew many people who had strong opinions on the consequences of accepting Syrian refugees, before the first families had even arrived.

TV and social media, not personal experience, shape most of the opinions.
Does AWS approach enterprise sales the same way IBM does? I know IBM offers the one point of contact approach (contact your rep; she/he takes care of it).
Cheers. I thought there might be an interesting back story.
You can use a limited subset. cssnext isn't magic, it's purely a source transformation, there's no runtime. It can't handle the dynamic part of css variables.
> 14 straight quarters of declining revenue

Yeah, but dat Earnings Per Share though... /s
My Life's Page – A ShortFilm on Train Accidents and Thefts – You Must Watch
Super Bowl Special – $15 for .com domain and 1 year hosting
Hi Guys
97cents.net is currently running a special limited to the first 20 orders. $15 for your own .com domain registration and 1 years hosting.

Visit 97cents.net

Select US, EU or AU hosting

Enter the domain you want to register

Select annual payment

Select ID protection if you want it (Free)

Enter the promo code "Super"

Your total for 1 x .com domain registration and 12 months hosting will be $15.
A Life Aquatic for Microsoft's Experimental Underwater Data Centers
Robert Cringley has a recent book about the decline of IBM - http://www.cringely.com/2014/06/04/decline-fall-ibm/ - I found it pretty interesting. His thesis is that IBM's management has consistently goosed short-term profits by making cuts that hurt it long term. It off-shored technical work, under-invested in quality, tooling and automation, laid off older more experienced workers, etc. I don't have any first hand of experience of IBM, so I cannot vouch for how true Cringley's story is.
Permutations and sorting
A debugger injecting code into a process under the same context isn't a vulnerability. It's supposed to be able to do that. And OpenSSH is supposed to allow you to multiplex sessions. It's a feature.

The vulnerability is the attacker being able to run arbitrary code as the user.
You've posed a false dichotomy. No one is talking about a free market in violence. A free market is tightly constrained by social custom, ostracism, and economic forces that are often more powerful than law. Lack of regulation does not make violence any more tolerable.
America has been building suburbs for 100 years so there's a lot of variation— I grew up in a walkable streetcar suburb of Milwaukee that was right next to the city and looked like many urban neighborhoods, with narrow streets and sidewalks and a decent mix of multifamily housing.

Most people still drove for transportation, but it wasn't nearly as mandatory as in many post-1970 suburbs.
Kids who go to schools in the suburbs tend to be a hell of a lot more integrated than their urban counterparts.
Trees vs. Cars || Ultimate Dash Cam Fails Compilation
I grew up in an older suburb that still had sidewalks, so I could walk to friends houses, the park, and even a movie (the local theater is actually closer to my parents' house than my local theater is now in Brooklyn).
Credit is tighter and the economy is rough.

I envision automated lightweight safe single-passenger vehicles and something like a Hyperloop for long distance.

http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_%28horse%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_sulfanilamide
This is the sort of generic ideological tangent that adds little value and reliably turns a discussion into a flamewar. The tell-tale signs are (a) that there's nothing specific, no engagement with the concrete material of the post, no sign of curiosity—just blaring a pre-existing position, and (b) the casual dropping of a match ("how ISIS works, how feminism annexed academia") on the ground that was just soaked with petrol.

It doesn't matter what one blares for or against; please don't do it in the first place. HN threads are for conversation, not ideological soapboxes.
In West LA in the 90s? No way any sane parent would let their kids bike on city streets.

One of the things that's actually made me optimistic about suburban California is the proliferation of bike lanes. Definitely makes the whole environment more livable, for kids especially, and makes public transit a lot more practical for everyone.
Watson is quite impressive from the outside atleast. It's sort of the opposite of the Palantir approach to unstructured data; which is to say Watson processes and outputs the conclusions as opposed to aiding humans. Is that getting any traction?