skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I of course agree with you that the startup visa is a great idea, but I think Brian's other point is that US immigration as a whole is so fundamentally flawed that there are lots of areas that need large amounts of additional funding. This is a true political point, but there's not much we can do about it. As a political issue, the average American doesn't care about immigrants except for knowing that they want less of them.

I give you and startupvisa.com for actually taking a political issue to the point where one of the power-holding senators was willing to introduce legislation. And maybe if it comes to a vote while attached to the military funding bill or something it will pass! I don't think populists have enough power to speak out against the bill, so whether or not it passes probably comes down to random DC "inside baseball".

META: I ask that if you (anyone reading this) do not have something profoundly interesting to say that you not reply with any political discussion.

US immigration is so unbelievably messed up that there is little productive we can say. Like... there are actually networks of secret immigration prisons that lose people regularly. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100104/stevens

Also see http://www.amnestyusa.org/uploads/JailedWithoutJustice.pdf but note that there is a much stronger political message.
> For people like you who want to believe that Africa is in a war,

I happen to live in Africa. You ignored all of the examples I gave you. Zimbabwe has probably one of the largest displaced populations in the word – yet you do not view this as a “war”.

> Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_conflicts

Yeah, it doesn’t include Zimbabwe. It doesn’t include the eastern DRC. So you use unfinished or badly written WP articles as your source? Or do you use an extremely strange definition of conflict?

> The Asian wars are killing a hell of a lot more people than the African wars also.

Again, you are wrong. Firstly, of the Asian countries you mentioned, only India counts as a 1000+ deaths per year (with a population of 1.5 times that of sub-Sahara Africa).

> If you want to believe that nothing is getting better, then let's not continue the conversation.

You seem to base your argument on ignorance and self-delusion that is typical of the African renaissance movement. So I doubt that this conversation would be informative from your side.

> If you are willing to actually look at the facts and compare the 80s to now, then we can talk.

You made the statement “Of the ongoing conflicts with 1000+ deaths per year, 6 are in Asia and only 2 are in Africa.” which is blatantly false (by your own citation). Sure the place stabilised since the 80ies – only because the USSR fell (a major sponsor of conflict).

Then again, the 90ies an early 00ies were not particularly rosy (Rwanda, DRC war).
Thanks, Google, for continuing to provide useful features in Labs.
I don't like to see this kind of story reported. If Facebook doesn't now buy Loopt it will look like something bad came up in due diligence, making Loopt less attractive to other potential acquirers, at least for a while. Further, Facebook will be tempted to use that fact for leverage.

But maybe reporting on it makes no difference because enough people in the industry would know about it anyway. I don't know.
As long as they go through all the proper channels first. Don't want anyone complaining that they just wanted a press day. Unfortunately, this may take sometime. However, I think it'll be worth it.
I haven't started a business in spare time, but I've put similar amounts of time into various open-source, unpaid projects.

I'd second the guy who said, "do something you really care about." I find that programming stuff that motivates me at home makes it much easier to keep writing the grind-work code at work.

Of course, there's a lot of stuff in starting a business that sucks. I'd say to try to arrange your work so that you're writing code you like when you're already feeling pretty burnt out, and doing more "normal" business tasks (write documentation, set up servers, do paperwork) when you're more energetic.

Writing code to refresh yourself isn't perfect. And starting a business is a lot more than just coding. But it's a hack that can help a fair bit, especially in the more coding-heavy sections of starting up.
Theoretically, so long as that library produces the same output as Clout. This means the route needs to be able to be specified as a regular expression.
To be fair, a few idiots in the Itallian judicial system add themselves to this list. Lets not paint the whole country with one brush.
In other news: pipe and cigar smokers are found to be smarter than non-smokers.
P.S. Consider how widely the net from Italy's privacy code reaches. Not just sites to like youtube, vimeo, break, or even flickr, but to just about any site that allows users to post their own content, including comments. By my reading if I were to post the home address of some Italian citizen in this very comment that would be sufficient to make it possible for Paul Graham to be convicted of breach of the privacy law in Italy.

By such criteria the fraction of, say, the top 1,000 most popular web sites that could legally operate in Italy currently without being vulnerable to a legal problem of that sort is probably fairly small.

Looking at Alexa's top sites I see the following sites within just the top 40 that can't operate in Italy without risk of a prosecution of this sort: facebook, youtube, wikipedia, blogger, twitter, myspace, wordpress, amazon, ebay, linkedin, livejasmin, rapidshare, flickr, craigslist (most of the remaining sites are search engines).
> For most systems the single master system and its potential for catastrophic downtime if failover goes badly (which it _always_ does eventually; if you claim otherwise you are a novice or selling snake oil) is the worse choice.

I don't know what you're talking about. If implemented correctly, a hierarchical system is extremely unlikely to fail. I mean, if your network is split into 3 partitions, the master will be unavailable, but in that situation you're going to have worse problems than availability, because your web-servers are unlikely to be even reachable from outsite the datacenter.

> I call BS. An O(1) routing p2p system like Cassandra has no inherent speed disadvantage over a heirarchical system.

Nope. If you have a master that stores the dictionary, then all lookups are also O(1). Even better, you can randomly distribute keys across the nodes and are not bound by the hashing algorithm.

I don't know about the performance between HBase and Cassandra; I'm strictly talking about theoretical performance.
Living with Complexity
YouTube - Future Designer laptop - ROLLTOP //Diploma Thesis//
A video use case of Google Chart Tools in business applications
We need things like distributed, encrypted backups for your data, and backup MX to receive your mail. These already exist. What's left to do is the automation of the set up.

I don't think most people really need high availability, so UPS and redundant connections sound like overkill. For fail-safe hardware, we just need something "unplug proof". A Beagle Board (with a few GB of Flash and a small battery) is more than enough.

I am aware that such a solution will be a little less convenient than storing everything "in the cloud", no matter how easy it can be. But the cloud has its downsides as well: you hardly have any privacy in the cloud, and they can shut everyone down, for any reason.
This is crazy enough that a supervisor will probably fix it instantly once business hours start, but on the (~15%?) chance that they don't fix it, you might want to record the call and announce that you are recording it.
...well the amount of code 'snippets' developers copy from the Internet (tutorials, QA forums, tech websites and blogs) - I would argue that almost all software contains 'open source' code :-) - which again makes a farse of this type of legislation.
Well, actually this article fails to answer the main question. I would restate the article as: "Why are my code snippets in Scala perform slow compared to my favorite (and well known) library?" This title would be fair then.
Tech's heroes and villains - Slideshow
I think given this ruling there is a very strong case for Google to block access from Italy to any of its sites that could run afoul of Italian privacy law. That would include blogger, youtube, picasaweb, google docs, google groups, wave, buzz, and possibly even gmail.
I would argue that Javascript has a standard way to build an object hierarchy. It's just that people find it bitter and can't help but add some syntactic sugar.

bitter:

myClass.prototype = new parentClass;

myClass.constructor = function(){...}

---------------------------

sweet (relatively speaking):

myClass = Class({

Extends: parentClass,

initialize: function(){...}

})
Huge number of websites barely visited, report finds
That's exactly my point. The process of growing the trees that produce the charcoal should remove as much co2 as is released when the charcoal is burned, thus a closed system.
US immigration as a whole is so fundamentally flawed that there are lots of areas that need large amounts of additional funding

Fixing the world one step at a time is not a bad approach.

Starting by steps that have great potential for generating wealth is a sensible strategy if you are thinking of taking any more steps.
Virgin Media: 100Mbps access across entire network next year
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Canada Flower
Mandatory upvote for Borges, the three versions of Judas is also quite interesting.
How To Integrate Your Google Buzz and Twitter Accounts
To clarify, I think I first need to define globalization. I mean the current world order where the wishes of all of the countries has someone become much greater than any of the individual countries. On defining globalization, I will quote the real rms: "...there are other kinds of globalization, the globalization of cooperation and sharing knowledge". My real definition for globalization is closer to world government, but those two words are not nearly enough to describe the complexity of globalization.

I have a 3 hour lecture on DVD from a powerful Chinese CCP member/academic talking mostly about globalization, I should really digitize it and post the highlights sometime. If anyone wants to see this lecture, email me.

--

The only country where a conviction like this would have been meaningful is in the USA, because Google is from the USA and in some important ways the USA owns the internet. Even if the conviction of the Google executives was upheld at the EU level, it wouldn't do much more than cause Google to open up divestment discussions with Europe, similar to their ongoing discussions with China. Europe is not stupid enough to kick Google out, though China (and by China I mean the rulers of the CCP, not the people of China) probably is that stupid and evil.

By the way, though the Italian court system is clearly very flawed, I do give them credit for being able to hold executives accountable for crimes committed by the corporation.
I'm quite curious how Scala performs against Erlang in terms of this sort of programming. Scala looks like it brings a decent implementation to a language that's perhaps a little bit more within the grasp of ordinary programmers and also has a vast amount of Java code available through the JVM. However, I'm curious how that all works out in practice...
"Objects are typically also used as maps (although the keys can only be strings, and not even all strings)"

What do you mean keys can only be strings? And not even all strings? Wait, you mean the following will not work:

arr = [1,2,3]
regex = /a/g
x={}
x[arr] = 'array, ha!'
x[regex] = 'regex, ha!'
x['function'] = 'function, ha!'
alert(x[[1,2,3]])
alert(x[/a/g])
alert(x.function)

In javascript, you can use objects as keys and ANY string including reserved words, so long as they are wrapped in quotes.

[edit] I guess technically the keys are the result of the toString function of the object used as a key so:

x = {}
x[[1,2,3]] = 'wtf'
x.toSource() === "({'1,2,3':'wtf'})"
Are you feeling touchy?
Hacking Hardware: "Flippy" retro wristwatch.
A lot of science nowadays is data collection and crunching. The reductionist viewpoint of finding "laws" is over, The complexity of biology, which is the majority of science today, is too great for humans to even attempt to fathom.

In this age of computation government funding with grants, with all the inefficiencies and politics, is a waste of money and a drain on the talents of many of the brightest individuals in society.

The current model should be ditched and replaced by the netflix prize or darpa grand challenge model. Only then will real progress be made.
There are the comments. I wouldn't be trivial to just link to them instead of actually hosting them.

Also, I am not certain this would be a good thing to always require content to have someone be accountable for it. If I want to express, say, a dissenting political opinion, I may want to be anonymous, and I may not want to pass the burden of accountability to someone else.

This is worth reflecting on it, however.
Indonesia Java International Destination « Dwiki Setiyawan's Blog
You're ignoring the "living on their desktop" part.

Sure, you can make "private" branches (not actually private) with SVN, but they're still on the server. That means:

1. You can't commit to them (or check out from them) when you're offline.
2. Commits, checkouts, diffs against older revisions, etc are slower when you are online.
3. Bisecting would be painful because of point 2.
4. You can't make a bunch of commits and fold/reorder them with something like the HistEdit extension because someone may have seen them.
Now the programmer has an incentive to make their subsystem hard to use, so users don't go there and report bugs. C'mon, add some more epicycles.
I agree.

META:

Lest someone else respond to me, I don't mean to imply that there aren't many more viable strategies for fixing the world! If you think you can save the world, I would prefer to discuss it with you via email rather than in this thread.
The direction seems backwards to me. Vague criminal laws have had the purpose and effect he describes for centuries. Before the current crop of vague criminal laws, people used to be brought up on charges like "tending to undermine the public morals".
Community Performance in Google Street View
The points you make are good, and I agree with what you are saying. My point was that from an environmental perspective, this device is basically on par with available power generation in terms of efficiency, and when used with natural gas simply moves the co2 generation from a centralized location to many distributed locations, but doesn't cut it down significantly per unit energy produced.

IF the device were to be used with biomass fuel, it would certainly be a huge step forward environmentally, but I don't see where the incentive would be outside of environmental stewardship, which some companies value but many do not.
From your reply: "...which means it could be used to store PV energy collected during the day and reuse it at night. But, this system produces so much more energy than a PV cell that I'm not sure it would be of much use."
This is exactly why I wouldn't call it a game changer from an environmental standpoint. Basically we're still stuck with the fact that it's much easier to produce power by burning, oxidizing in a fuel cell, etc. than by using solar, wind etc.
In my book a game changer would be a technology that enables a move to truly renewable power generation while remaining practical and cost effective. Could the energy server fit that description? Perhaps, but it depends highly upon how it is operated.
Many people can appreciate any genius. They can't appreciate incoherent rants that wander from technical points to politics to cultural criticism to analogies doomed to distract any reader from the technical points.

You will be recognized as a genius when you make insightful arguments others can follow and which teach them something; not when you require them to wade through a pile of irrelevant drivel, as if it was a high school exercise in summarising.

Erik doesn't even make arguments. He just states things, like

Remove the syntactic mess that is attributes.
(You will then find that you do not need them at all.)

Yeah, that's a really solid argument, that immediately convinced me that seperating syntactically between metadata elements and child data elements is not necessary...
Hi, 38, married, 2 kids, full time job and a mortgage here.

My hours are from 4:30am to 7:15am, 30 minutes at lunch and 30 minutes making the next day's todo list before bed.

Even though the time I can commit is short I'm much more productive now than I was at 28 working crazy hours.
When you merge in Mercurial it's able to trace through the revision history of a file in the source and target branches, find the common revision, then separately apply the diffs from the source and target branches...

Originally subversion couldn't do this, but it has had merge tracking since version 1.5 (a couple of years already). You can now merge one branch into another multiple times without specifying explicitly which revisions to compare.

I have seen a number of people saying that the merge tracking in subversion still isn't as good as what's in git or mercurial, but I haven't found an explanation of the difference. Can someone elaborate, or point me to some good reading?

lallysingh and nollidge point out that in a DVCS model you tend to make more frequent commits, because committing and publishing are no longer the same action, and that having finer-grained commits makes automatic merging more likely to succeed. This seems quite plausible to me, but it's orthogonal to the problem of merge tracking (isn't it?).
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Agree with this, I think their would be more people that regretted not doing a start up straight out of uni than their would be people in start ups regretting not going into work.

If you don't have a great deal yet you have everything to gain and little to lose.
Is there a non hosted Ning alternative?
May I Mambo Dogface to the Banana Patch?
It worries me when people attach too much Physics to Feynman diagrams.
Feynman diagrams arise when you try to compute perturbatively the
correlation functions in a field theory. They appears both in quantum field
theory and in statistical field theory and in general in any theory which
can be expressed via a functional integral.
I see them more as a property of the perturbative expansion
than a description of the "true" Physics going on.
It depends on the perspective.

I tend to think a lot about a "huge startup soon" but not as a prize, but as a completely different set of challenges that needs to be kept in mind right now.

For instance, what I need to improve in order to become a CEO of a mid-sized company? What are my personality traits that limit company's growth?

Another example: the first employees you hire set the DNA of the company. If you hire them as an independent self-motivated agents, it is completely different story than passive helpers.

Also, it is important to reframe your venture into something bigger to avoid the trap of an eternal "side project", which you do not treat too seriously.
Django Advent, Day 14: Scaling Django (Mike Malone)
The Blind Side | New DVD Releases
The same science that lets you heal the sick also tells you how to kill people.
>"Why exactly do people refer to the DNS as 'distributed' ?"

Because it is distributed: both physically/geographically in where the machines are sited and the use of anycast at the root, and architecturally/conceptually in the way responsibility for zones is hierarchically delegated (aka "distributed") to sub-root-level servers which are authoritative for their subdomain of the namespace.
Alright. So now I want to iterate over all original keys, how do I do that (i.e. their original values, not the stringified version)?

Plus, a random object (that doesn't have a meaningful toString method) will probably result in something like "[object]" as a key, which would break when you use more objects like that as keys.
Gmail is really interesting. I'm a big free-software fan - I really dislike running non-free stuff on my own computer. Not so much for RMS reasons, but just because I like the freedom to hack on stuff as I see fit, and partly just to support open source (it has given me so much over the years). I've never had that hangup about online services though, even though logically they're not really that different. And indeed, I switched to Gmail several years ago because their anti-spam was (and still is, I think) way better than what I was able to cobble together with Linux.

However, every now and then I'm reminded that in giving up some freedom, you pay a price. I would love to try and hack in a feature to Gmail that makes it permanently associate certain From email adddresses with people. For instance, if I write someone and set the From to @dedasys.com, I want future email with that person to always use that address. If I use the @apache.org address, then that should be used in the future, unless I change it. I can't implement this, though, as far as I know.
If you like Markdown you could give slidedown a try. You write your slides in Markdown and then render them to HTML: http://github.com/nakajima/slidedown
Yelp facing class-action lawsuit over extortive "ad sales"
Yep, it's not particularly useful -- there's no case I can think of where you wouldn't be better off compiling your scripts to JavaScript first.

But if you just want to play with it, or prototype a web page, it's fun for that.
Why is it hilarious that scientists disagree?
The real deal:

http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Electrodynamics-Advanced-Book-...
Microsoft downs site after top-secret guide published
Wicked! Where can I buy one? :-)
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I've never used it but http://elgg.org/ might be an option.
> I can't implement this, though, as far as I know.

I understand your point, and I know you aren't arguing against Google, but... supposing you were able to... would you? I'd bet at least 999 out of 1,000 users of any given open client- Thunderbird for example- would not invest the effort, or could not due to lack of skill. And this is with Thunderbird- GMail's penetration into markets with unskilled non hacker types is drastically greater.

Ironically, I guess you could say my argument is that like the features they are phasing out- not enough people would truly use it!

If you really wanted to, there might be that kind of ability in gears. Perhaps low level, or perhaps just through manipulating the UI- a bit of a macro.
That's what I use. But Douglas Crockford suggests using a different way of building object hierarchies which he uses. I could ignore this, but Crockford kinda is one of _the_ Javascript guys, who, supposedly knows what he's talking about: http://javascript.crockford.com/prototypal.html