skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heya, let me know your beef with the article's description of Unicode -- I think it's all correct but would be happy to fix any problems. Note that the way we got to 4.2 kilobits per tweet was by using only UCS code positions that are NOT part of Unicode. In other words, the scheme works by not using Unicode at all!
[Edit: as pointed out below it seems like it really is 25,000 unique locations, my mistake.]

so you only get 10-20 of such routes before hitting your daily limit.

Not true, from the usage docs: Up to 1,024 locations may be queried within a single request.

So that's really a theoretical max of 25,600,000 locations per day if you maxed out every request.
Thanks for clearing that out. Most people who discuss Django and other frameworks seem to hammer out the point about its CMS heritage a lot: as a way of contrasting it from Rails' web app heritage for instance, with some strange insinuations inferred. However, a quick glance at djangosites.org suggests that Django has been used for a wide array of projects from ecommerce to photo sharing and dating sites etc.,(not forgetting a newly discovered redditplus.com). And these are just a small sample reflecting the rapid evolution of the tool beyond its CMS heritage.
Brizendine, true to stereotype
When svnmerge.py inevitably yaks all over yet another branch we're trying to merge to a release candidate after a rebase or two, I'm only barely capable of figuring out how it got confused and how best to recover, and the rest of my team (experienced developers all) isn't even as good at it as I am. I hear 1.5 with merge tracking isn't that much better.

svn is an extremely leaky abstraction, and just not a reliable enough tool to unleash on the people you're describing. Fortunately we're switching Real Soon Now(tm).
Hm but only really related to the recent Joel and the he's not blogging anymore situation.

What he says is still very much valid. It's a nice intro into Unicode. Quite refreshing to read.
I wish you had just replaced Peter Schiff with, "Ron Paul's economic advisor" to save me some time.

What you assert is simply untrue. It would be a good thing, currently, for the dollar to be devalued somewhat. Our exports would be cheaper to others and thus more attractive.

Please cite credible people when you attempt to make extraordinary claims like 'the US itself will be wiped out'.
They all are. Trolling isn't about what one says, it's about the intention behind the things that are said. Completely factual statements are still trolling if said with the intention to cause disruption.
This flies in the face of huge, recent investments by mainstream VC firms in (profitable) game companies like Zynga and RockYou.
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717

For what it's worth, I'm in my second semester of biochemistry, and we've studied almost every one of the pathways he talks about in our class, in detail. Dr. Lustig is dead on about the science behind obesity.
From the article:

"First, sucrose is composed of equal amounts of the two simple sugars -- it is 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose -- but the typical high-fructose corn syrup used in this study features a slightly imbalanced ratio, containing 55 percent fructose and 42 percent glucose. Larger sugar molecules called higher saccharides make up the remaining 3 percent of the sweetener. Second, as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized."

I highly recommend watching "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" for information on the biochemistry of the metabolism of fructose and glucose.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
This is further confirmation of a well-known phenomenon.

If you want to watch a long presentation on what's going on, check this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Short version: Fructose is metabolized by your liver, results in a lot of nasty byproducts, your liver stores the excess energy as fat, etc.
True, there's plenty of skinny drug-addicts out there.
Yeah, I still see it as more of a tech demo. The underlying infrastructure for distributed real-time editing is pretty amazing (at least, as far as I can glean from what they've written about it), but the particular webapp they built on top of it at wave.google.com is somewhat underwhelming.
full-text search would be amazing.
Actually I just miss that he doesn't state anything about the downsides of UTF-8. Like that you need to go through the string to determine how many characters it has, due to their (potentially) variable length.
"In 1981, 84% of China’s population was below the poverty line of $1.25 a day (in 2005 prices); in 2005 the share was just 16% (see chart). This amounted to a 6.6% proportionate annual rate of poverty reduction-the difference between the growth rates of the number of poor and the total population.

Nobody did as well as China."
The Economist
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cf...
It's not #1. That's Japan.

edit: the source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/02/16/china.us.treasuries/i...
"3. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which attack the Party, State, government agencies, Internet policies with the excuse of this event."

"4. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy."

-- attacking government perceived as dirty, so must be cleaned up. So too is cheering Google, and must likewise be cleaned up. How sick.
A basic explanation is that fructose is metabolized very differently from glucose. Glucose is absorbed from the digestive tract and directly enters the blood; fructose is routed to the liver and converted into fat.

Considering the difference in these mechanisms, it isn't surprising that HFCS leads to higher weight gain, because it directly leads to increased synthesis of adipose tissue.
If your Google Reader account is linked to a Google Account that's on Buzz, you get all this sharing whether you want it or not. The solutions seem to be: 1) disable Buzz; or 2) create a separate Google Account specifically to use with Reader.
Onion also uses Drupal.. Tho hopefully they've gotten smart enough to ditch it.
Google adds Twitter feed in China
And to think Paul Graham initially resisted investing. He seems to know this stuff so well it seems natural.
Are MPO and JPS mature formats? I'm not sure they are the best choice, but given 3d is getting ready for the mobile space, it seems clear we will want some sort of standard for 3d images, and eventually videos, soon.
I've found Gity to be pretty slick.

http://macendeavor.com/gity/
Manual transmissions can save lives for users that know how to drive well.

They are also a lot more efficient in mountains and other difficult terrains.
I hope I'm wrong about this, but surely this media circus just prompts security researchers to keep quiet about flaws they find? Why are we rewarding them with fawning coverage when they've put us all at risk by not disclosing these issues to the browser vendors?
You might want to read the linked post.
That's pretty cool, but using valid UTF-8 should get you up to 6 bytes per character, since each half of a UTF-16 surrogate pair takes 3 bytes in UTF-8.
I bought a license for Fever, and I hated it. It's a lovely UI and a great concept, but in practice it ended up requiring a ton of fiddling to essentially end up with Techmeme (that is, it only floats content to the top based on inbound links, which is a pretty dim signal of what's going to be important to you if you read about esoteric topics).
That rebut makes no sense.
Seems like there's a bit of a missed opportunity there if a lot of people are looking for content that no longer exists. I wonder if they did something that broke old linked URLs or something.
Only 2 of the top 10 countries on this list are autocratic. In both Singapore and Hong Kong, most of the economic freedoms are for colonialists and not for the local Chinese. Hong Kong has some of the greatest economic disparity of any city in the world. Finally, both cities are open markets with cultural ties, special relationships, and proximity to the largest closed market on the planet, China. They are both port cities, essentially gateways to the hinterland. My point is I think autocracy has less to do it than this article would have you believe.
That was really one of the worst articles I have read in a while. Maybe 2 or 3 lines with any real substance, and while someone may have learned something form them, I think the average HN reader not only knows those lines, but likely can explain them better.
Part of me thought it was kind of neat, in that it is so reminiscent of 1984.
Nice. I'd figured out the problems with the 2 wrong solutions myself but I wouldn't have known where to start looking for the better approach.
Not sure I follow the reasoning here. Can you explain?
Who put them into poverty in the first place?
I personally don't think the problem is the money. The kind of money Ycombinator offers isn't hard to find, a credit card could be enough. The value of some incubators is the mentoring they offer and their rolodex (do those things still exist?)
Mobs Are Born as Word Grows by Text Message
Yeah, I was confused by this. Why is deletion not still O(n)? The back pointer doesn't gain you anything, because you can just drag along a temporary "last next" pointer when you're scanning to find the element to delete, which you have to do either way, so the s-list is asymptotically no slower at deletion--- O(n) to find the element to delete, and O(1) to delete it.
Just don't let them terrorize you. Stand your ground, fight the fight.

I've had several very successful websites and I was always dealing with people and companies trying to "shake me down." I think it's just part of the game.
If the US had a less stable society...

I'd be interested to see what happened with free speech during the civil war days... I really don't know, no class has covered it and k-12 grade school has made me sick of US-history (flat-out fabrications and ridiculous exaggerations in tons of cases, and super super super dry info with few connections for the remaining). It'd be a good measuring point for this, though, as that's about as unstable as you can get. Yeah, slave-free-speech was blocked, but that's arguably mostly because they weren't really viewed as people, thus didn't have that right in the first place.

Anyone know?
TechStars plans to crush Y Combinator and all other competition.
126 years and the scope of the problems solved.

You give an excellent example of the scoping issue:
Someone can write a computer program that will run detailed mathematical models of a bridge and cross-check against established data. I can also write a program to simulate flutter, run simulations of car engines, the power grid, the stock market (You can program almost anything imaginable).

I challenge you to write a program that will run a detailed mathematical model of a computer program and cross checks against established data gleaned from other programs. Even if you did, it wouldn't be terribly useful as it would just tell you that the program runs in such and such a way; you'd still not know if it actually does what it is supposed to do. Does it fit the problem domain, or is there some 'flutter' that you didn't know about?

A lot of the improvements in reliability of engineering disciplines of the last 50 years have been because of the ability to simulate things better... mostly by use of the computer.

There are therefore two types of error in a piece of software:

1. 'Stupid' error (I used the wrong units or I used the wrong function).

2. Thought error (I didn't understand the problem or I goofed in my reasoning about it).

I'd argue, therefore, that the 'stupid' errors are the errors that can be solved by software engineering.
(Using higher level languages, better compilers, better type systems, etc.) The issue being that there is only so much that you can actually do to solve them with software.

The second set is a bit more difficult. Am I going to validate my bridge simulator by using a different bridge simulator? Sometimes we certainly do do this, and this is kind of the basis of iterative development (if each version of a program is a different program). At some point, I will need to understand Civil Engineering as well as Software Development to get my program to function as a Civil engineer would expect it to.

This would imply, that at least in some domains, software engineering is the equivalent of meta-engineering. (I am programming the set of rules used by civil engineers).

It gets more difficult the further away from engineering/scientific disciplines you get.
What exactly would be the discipline be behind web programming or writing an HTTP server?
Where can I get my thought guidelines to understand how I should think about the different problems?

I'm sure that there is progress to be made in software engineering, but I'd guess the progress won't come from looking at engineering disciplines, and I'm pretty sure it is wrong to say that the only difference is timeframe.
I realize you're talking about a collective problem, but at least we can individually choose to avoid this nasty stuff by checking labels and refusing to eat / drink foods that contain it. Save ourselves first, then we can help others.
I use SVN on a 2 person academic project. It works great, I've never had any problems or complaints. Is there some compelling reason to switch to a distributed VCS?
Well, I think you're underestimating the pace of technological progress. Yes, I might not personally live to see the day, but I don't think it will be that far away.

I think you have the possibility to see it. We may not discover how to stop death in the next 30 years, but I'm sure we will have found a way to extend it enough so that we are alive when someone does.
Tracking Cash Purchases Without the Receipts
"Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper’s who is credited with introducing the notion of a flash mob in 2003, said he was surprised by the new focus of some of the gatherings."

Mr. Wasik may have introduced the term "flash mob" to a new generation of readers, but readers of science fiction in the 1970s will remember the term "flash crowd" from the story "Flash Crowd" by Larry Niven.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob#Literary_precedents
I seem to recall the very Internets on which you are now ranting arising out of a government-subsidized research program.

Irony.
The wrong solutions the article describes are certainly wrong. It doesn't really make much of a case that the particular solution it proposes is particularly good.

For instance, here's another much simpler formula that avoids the problems described in the article: score = (pos+1)/(pos+neg+2). It's the posterior mean of Pr(random person likes the product), if your prior is uniform on [0,1]. You can adjust this to favour items with more ratings by, e.g., using a prior that "prefers" smaller values of that probability; one easy way to do that is to pretend that every item starts with a certain number of positive reviews and a certain number of negative reviews; you end up with a formula of the form (pos+A)/(pos+neg+B).

Is the article's formula better than this? Probably, but the author hasn't said why.
I've tried MongoDB with the C++ API. I had a lot of problems in particular with the BSON objects and then switched to Memcached (+ MySQL). Do you think that the "production" version is working ok for all API's?
The privacy policy mentions an exception, in several place, along the lines of "except by court order/legal requirement." Would bankruptcy proceedings, where you're required to sell/auction "everything," be considered a court order or similar legal requirement?

And, there's always this:

"b. Air America reserves the right to change this policy at any time, and users should check this page regularly for such updates. This statement and the policies outlined herein are not intended to and do not create any contractual or other legal right in or on behalf of any party." [emphasis mine]

So, never mind, I guess.

[edit: spelling]
Not true, it's China. "China’s foreign-exchange reserves now total $2.4 trillion, of which about 70% are thought to be in dollars."
http://www.economist.com/business-finance/economics-focus/di...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign_ex...

Edit: Downvoting, seriously? If China has 2.4 trillion foreign currency reserves, 50-70% of which are USD, and Japan has 1.0 trillion foreign currency reserves totally, how can Japan ever be ahead of China?

2nd Edit: http://www.treas.gov/tic/mfh.txt Seems like CNN/FT.com had it wrong?
Learn git one commit at a time
How To Create a Job (Tech in Austin)
So what? It's not like China can call the debt.

The worst they can do is dump it on the market, whereupon banks and money managers across the globe will devour it like money-flavored hotcakes. There will be a brief market burp, and some change in USD value and interest rates, but at great fiscal expense to China.

Disclaimer: IANAT (am not a trader).
But you have to wonder how much of it really is spiders crawling over old pages with links or people actually clicking on links from old pages. Probably many more of the former, and that wouldn't be hard to test for.
Other options:

1) Work on your own time (and be 100x more efficient!)
2) Get a day job that doesn't suck.
Petition to save angel investing (Against Sentator Dodd's bill)
Subsidizing things like education and health care seems like a good idea to me.

Subsidizing poison, kind of offensive.
Sure. But do you really think that the only possible technologies that could give you the features of the current internet are TCP, IP and Unix?

There are lots of ways to do networking, and government subsidy didn't pay for all of them. (Even if HTTP didn't exist, gopher would have filled in just fine!) Nor did it pay for the commercialization of the web browser, which is what made it truly practical for people to use the web. (Remember that before Netscape, browsers from academia didn't support JPEG, and javascript hadn't been invented yet.)
Second paragraph FTA: "So far, little is known about the successful exploits. Until vendors have been informed of the flaws and those flaws have been patched, details will not be made public."
What is enforcing the repayment of said debt, I think is what he is getting at. Not that I agree.
The difference is that you can't do anything without that repository - branching, merging, stashing, diffing, commiting, etc.

In Git, every copy of the code is a repository. If you and a friend are on a train working on code hosted in an SVN repository, you have to jump through hoops without internet access. With Git, you can clone your branch onto a USB key, and then the other person can pull your changeset from that repo. Once you have internet access, either one of you can push the relevant changes to the origin server, or anywhere else for that matter.

You can create an SVN repo anywhere, but everyone has to use the same one. With Git, anyone can use any repo, and they can all interact.
Commodore is back
Details of Redis' virtual memory implementation
Initially, Redis required one's dataset to reside in RAM. With its VM implementation, Redis may swap to disk values. Keys must always reside in RAM.
It's worth bringing this up from time to time, if for nothing else then to educate new developers.
I wish that article wasn't behind a paywall, but I don't think I'm disputing people have come out of poverty. You are not addressing any of the issues I was raising though.
Poverty is the default state, so...no-one?
FYI A lot of things that end up SvN are topics that they have talked about in their normal lives. I got to hang out with Jason Fried at Startup School and several of the things he talked about ended up on the blog in the following weeks, and several of the things posted recently came from dhh's appearance on This Week in Startups (can't plug this interview enough - it's really sharp: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2219-jason-calacanis-vs-david... )
Says who? The government-sponsored opinion poll? Or perhaps the independent one where everybody was too scared to answer truthfully.
I agree with you, and that's what I do now. However, it's quite difficult to cut out all products that contain HCFS since it's so widely used.

Cutting out soda was the easiest, but you'll find corn syrup in everything from bread to lunch meats.
There will always be some hackers/crackers who will stay underground to hopefully profit from unknown exploits. Events like this encourage these people to share their finding and earn money (and street creed) from it.

Did you know that Google pays people to find exploits for Chrome?

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/01/encouraging-more-chromium-s...
I love basecamp and use it daily. It is a beautiful software. However, I find it hard to believe that Jason F and DHH don't think they can come up with an idea that is more brilliant than a PM system.
The linked post itself says it's mostly spiders following links from various place on the web to old/invalid URLs:

> And the biggest performance boost of all: caching 404s and sending Cache-Control headers to the CDN on 404. Upwards of 66% of our server time is spent on serving 404s from spiders crawling invalid urls and from urls that exist out in the wild from 6-10 years ago.

They're still serving the pages, but they're serving them off CDN instead of serving them off their main server.
If the demand for corn drops because of a ban on HFCs, most of the corn farmers would just find some other crop to plant or planet more varieties that are used for other things.
I haven't read Manufacturing Consent, but I did try to read Hegemony or Survival. It was an exercise in frustration and ultimately I didn't finish. Chomsky, on the rare occasions when he does back up his assertions with references, almost invariably references only himself. Combine that with a bombastic style that yet still manages to be obtuse, boring, and repetitive, and it's a recipe for a disastrous book that can convince only those who are already convinced and angry and looking for an argument from authority.

It sounds like Manufacturing Consent has an interesting thesis. I would like to read more about it but preferably from someone more readable, more scholarly, and less prone to hyperbole and unsupported claims.
Sheer speed.
Well, if you can do better, please enter the contest! Glittering prizes are on the line here. I didn't completely follow your reasoning -- first, the code points allocated to surrogate pairs are not Unicode scalar values, and so can't be expressed in well-formed UTF-8. But also, remember that the goal is to encode the most bits per tweet, not to come up with the most verbose encoding. :-) How many bits of arbitrary source information would your scheme be able to carry in a tweet?
But what exactly is being shared by me without my knowledge? I don't get it.

I am not sharing the feeds I read in my Google Reader, nor do I click any individual feed story to share.