skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I strongly agree with the closing argument: "I believe we will really start to see a faster shift towards electronic formats. Which, in turn, will lead to different forms of documentation than the non-collaborative "author teaches, reader learns" model. With online documentation, things can become more collaborative, which eases the burden of a single content provider."

I have been reading more and more books on my phone (and on my PC!) since downloading the Kindle app a year ago. The release of the iPad has frustrated me - now each time I try to read a PDF of a programming text on my PC I think "for $500 I could make this a lot easier on myself". Eventually I'll probably break down and get a tablet if only for reading.
Obviously I wasn't clear enough in what I was referring to. Their blog page (not the site root, but the blog root) isn't following the setup they advise. http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog That's understandable, because it's not as if they had time to change their site right away, but I was just pointing it out.
And you can internalize the effects of vaccination by government sticks and carrots, without having government provide the vaccine.

Of course there's a risk of regulatory capture in that system, that might make it better to let government provide the vaccines in the first place.
Perl 6 Regex Changes
RSI - My Problem Child: 10 tips for recovery
Silk Substrate Hugs Brain's Curves
"The main problem with "it" is that it's a pronoun, so you must be absolutely clear about what "it" refers to. "

Absolutely false. The use of "it" without an antecedent is called "expletive," and is perfectly valid. I agree that it's often bland, but there's no need to go around asking yourself "What does 'it' refer to here?"
Apple names April 30th, 5PM as date and time for 3G iPad retail launch
Iceland volcano: uk met office data unreliable
Spring : inject proxy instead of proxied object
Perhaps. I guess you can have the government help with internalizing the cost and benefits without providing the service itself. Think school vouchers for example.
> By the end of it even the people that knew what was going on had to spend tremendous amounts of time figuring out what specific mortgages were in what packages, whereas under the new proposed rules at least all that information will be available up front (in theory).

The "in python" rule doesn't provide any information about what's in the package.
Can someone tell me why this is downvoted?.
Well I am a fresher just got done with my MS in computer science... could you please suggest where I could be part of such an interaction.
Except that Facebook requires symmetry and Twitter doesn't. (Assuming that most people are not going to set up a fan page for themselves.)
Tornado is a really neat project. It was developed by a pile of ex-Googlers who brought us GMail, Google Maps, AdSense, and some other cool stuff.

"Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed."

http://github.com/facebook/tornado
Sounds like what Charles Simonyi has been trying to do for the last two decades with Intentional Programming.

Of course, I couldn't make heads or tails of the small demos they've given.
The problem (or at least the obvious problem) is not that some schools have higher GPAs than other schools, but that average GPA has been increasing over time at a rate that cannot plausibly be explained by improvements in performance.
Those who advocate government intervention where markets have not performed optimally also miss one important consideration: what the profit motive is to commercial business, the power/influence motive is to government institutions.

Even where a true public good exists, automatically defaulting to a government solution still leaves us vulnerable to corruption and greed where the incentives for political influence do not exactly align with the true public interest, with the added problem that government solutions tend toward centralization and monopoly even more often than commercial markets.

I think that the "market vs. government" model is a false dichotomy - there is an entire spectrum of viable organizational models within civil society, which can deliver public and private goods without compromising pluralism, voluntary cooperation, or individual liberty.
EBay wins online auction patent, and a major new revenue stream
Yes. That's also a good argument for pushing for power from the federal to the state level. (And for having a federal system, or really small countries in the first place.)
I've seen some people try this. It has problems once you extend past Ye Olde Factorial Example. Try converting larger chunks of syntax and it rapidly develops that you are quite obviously just putting different skins on the same semantics and it also quite rapidly becomes clear that having multiple skins is a disadvantage, not an advantage. All putting a new language in a skin that looks more "familiar" to you does is fool you into programming Old-Language-in-New-Language; you really need the syntactic differences to remind you that you are not in OldLanguage.

Try translating at the deeper semantic level and you also discover that you basically can't. The C-semantic equivalent of the Haskell is closer to a for loop, and even that isn't an exact match. (An exact match probably involves "goto".) Non-trivial examples just explode in complexity, and that's long before you get to useful code.

This is in the class of "things that have been possible for decades but haven't taken off for good reasons", right up there with the purely-visual languages and other classic "good ideas".
So all the students in his class are above the average for the class?

That does explain quite a lot about economics!
Securing Access to Amazon EC2
A MapReduce Algorithm for Matrix Multiplication
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1279359
Ryan, I completely disagree. I am surprised that you would think that the society benefits more from the education than the individual. According to me, if I have higher education, I get a better job, better salary, more respect in social circle. Compared to this, what does society get if I am educated?

And looking at how tuition fees are at all time high and people are still paying them, I would not say that people are under investing in education.

EDIT 1:

For some reason, I am not able to reply to some of the replies to my comment, so let me clarify.

What is society made of? Individuals. Obviously, if individuals are better off then society will automatically be better off. Isn't it?

So if you think by providing education to an individual, society becomes better, why don't we provide good healthy food for all the individuals and we will solve the obesity problem and end up with a really healthy society? How about providing free access to a high quality gym and personal instructor? I see that you are disagreeing and you would say, one has to draw line somewhere. And in my opinion, if you think that Government should be not be responsible for good healthy food (the most important thing for an individual, even more than education), I don't understand how you can say that Government should provide public education.

EDIT 2:

And here's why I am not in favor of government programs. A bureaucrat has no incentive what so ever to please their customers (i.e. taxpayers). [Quick, tell me, how many government agencies do a good job in your opinion?] By nature, government will try to find a one-size-fits-all solution to education, which does not work. As someone else said, I am all in favor of voucher system which gives control back to people who care about education and let market place offer variety of solutions for people's education needs.
The comment addressing him directly is from 2010.
Info HUD in RTS games
> > The hard part is predicting the likelyhood of various events. This proposal does nothing to address that problem.

> Actually, it does.

Actually it doesn't. As you wrote later

> Of course, you need your own predictions for the likelihood of various events,

That's the hard problem.

> It lets you, as a potential investor, plug in your own values to the model.

Right. It does nothing to help you figure out what those values should be. It merely tells you the consequences of whatever values you use.

Expressing how payout works as a python program does nothing to help you figure out whether 10% of the mortgages in a given portfolio will go into default. It only lets you compute the consequences of that event.
I don't know how I feel about this. Many of the students probably took Linear Algebra because they believed it would be a way to satisfy their electives without messing up their grades and thus their future. They were thinking about other things than your class. Also, you don't really know anything about your students and what path they might be on. For example, I'm taking an elementary level class right now because it's easy and I have one more requirement left and I am graduating this semester and have a startup on my mind.

University is incredibly valuable but the idea that it's the only thing in a student's life is just not true anymore (if it ever was). Even with amazing grades you will lose out to those with experience.

I'm not saying these classes are worthless, and I value highly the things I've learned that I wouldn't have otherwise. I just don't know what the solution is. I feel like society has destroyed our students' ability to make university their life. Trying to force the students to dedicate their lives to your elective class is just not realistic and you are focusing on the wrong group.
the antichrist: a porn game!
Assuming you're still in MA, check out the Boston Security Meetup. Even if it's too general for you I'm sure you'll meet someone who can direct you to a more suitable venue.

http://www.meetup.com/boston-security-meetup/
As far as I can tell grammars are a way of organizing a bunch of regexes together so you can run them against a document to match and extract all the data. It might make it easier to write parsers but that is a small, though admittedly annoying, subset of programming problems. It doesn't seem like a general enough feature to qualify as "profound".
Well, I'm just learning Perl (work related) and it certainly feels like they tried to include a lot of ready-to-use lisp-like macros in an otherwise traditional syntax when inventing Perl.

And Perl 5.12 has this jewel in its changelog:

New experimental APIs allow developers to extend Perl with "pluggable" keywords and syntax.
Whores, Vegetarianism, Moral High Ground & Capitalist Baggage
I think the Nintendo DS shows that there are always other possibilities.
Your source is hardly a valid one. It gives statistics but does not cite the source of the statistics.

The paper you cited contains statements like this:

"Increases in net tuition have significantly, but not completely replaced the decline in state support per student
from 2001 to 2005. In 2001 total revenue per FTE was $10,100 in 2005 dollars, essentially an all time high. It dropped 8.8% to $9,212 by 2005. While this is a material decrease from the high point in 2001, it is roughly the level of funding available in the early 1990s. "

The author thinks that since the funding per FTE student in 2005 is roughly the same as in the early 90's there has been no decline. This is an astoundingly bad conclusion. There is a thing called inflation. There is no reason to believe that since $9,000 per student was spent in the early 90s then this same amount ought to be adequate in 2005.

The author also writes:

"This amounted to about $10,000 per FTE student in financial aid, half grants and half loans and work study."

See, he counts as part of his funding per student debt that the student acquires in order to attend school. When a student acquires debt to pay for his/her tuition then this can't be counted as part of government funding for higher education. The only part of this debt that can be counted is the reduced cost in interest payments due to any federal guarantees of such loans.

In another place the author writes:

"The State Higher Education Finance study, done annually by SHEEO, shows “net tuition” (tuition revenues less waivers and student aid from state and institutional sources) has grown from 22% of total expenditures in 1981, to 26% in 1991, to 37% in 2005. This is a worrisome trend. "

Later the author writes:

"Increases in net tuition have significantly, but not completely replaced the decline in state support per student
from 2001 to 2005. "

It's a bad paper and a bad source of information.
Definitely agree with this notion. We've already seen glimpses of transparent LCDs, which if proven viable in the future could eliminate the need for a front/back as you've suggested. That or equally useful LCD's on both sides of a device. Then, of course, there are the devices we haven't even though of that may not even use screens, but instead a hologram projected out in front or something equally uncoventional. We're in exciting times, technologically.
That's one of the nuttiest customer service exchanges I've ever read about. Don't know if I would have responded at all, but love that you did!
Government has been defined as a group of people that claim the exclusive right to initiate force against others in a particular area. Government and competition don't go together.
especially after trying to add a few grammar-modifying CPAN modules

How do modules compose with respect to syntax? I remember encountering a big frustration in Common Lisp when I used two libraries that depended on defining '[' as a reader macro for pretty syntax. Whichever library I allowed to use the '[' reader macro, my usage of the other library became verbose and hard to read.

Not to mention that neither altering a module's source nor depending on the sequence of module loading is scalable across many modules.
Oscar Wilde said "a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing". In the same spirit I say "a classical liberal or an economist is a man that believes that societies are nothing more than markets". And libertarians think societies are just an individual multiplied by n, where n > 1; they ignore that people interact and depend on each other.

Besides the list provided, I'd add 4) the state must protect the values of a society, also. Universal health care, avoiding abortions, protecting the environment, controlling proliferation of drugs are ethical values. The state must do it because it is just wrong not to do it.

Think of it as a "social infrastructure" akin to strengthening the social fabric or the human ties, of a society. It makes it more resilient to crisis.
Get over this A/B nonsense. That is not an A/B test. An A/B test is not some path to riches or some rigorous way to prove something scientifically - it's an unimportant way to prove a hypothesis when you have a very large user number.

It's the hypothesis or the idea that makes the difference, not the A/B test! A/B tests will tell you nothing you did not already know, they will just PROVE it if you need to convince someone else.

A/B tests are really the ultimate in pseudo-science. Yes, they make sense for some narrow use-cases (like googles frontpage), but making a button bigger? That's not an A/B test - you already knew a bigger button will result in more click-throughs, you don't need a test to show you that.

And this article with some dude testing out another outfit? You want to call that an A/B test? It's not - it's just some guy trying out another outfit to see if it works. How is this a test? There is nothing rigorous or scientific about this.

If you NEED to do a test, then do an actual test, and factor in everything. But coming up with a hypothesis based off experience or something you read on some blog is not an A/B test. It's just an improvement to your site.

Stop pretending that this is science. It's not. It's intuition, and calling it an A/B test will not make the process any more 'scientific'.
Bingo; To take the topical example (although mostly due to it being the target of a politically timed prosecution), Goldman Sachs is a primary dealer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_dealer). Truly trashing it is simply not an option while the Federal Government is borrowing 1.5 trillion dollars a year at low interest rates (when the government starts finding it difficult to market its debt at the price it likes, that might change things a bit).
Animated ash cloud over Europe: Apr 14-18
And here is Damian Conway's Exegesis for this: http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/design/exe/E05.html
Bruce Eckel is Wrong
I think that industrial designers have reached a limit within our current technological and manufacturing capacity.

There are many concepts that are great examples of "form meets function" that we cannot produce due to these limitations.
You're missing the point. Tuition increases have outpaced inflation. The portion of college tuition that is privately funded vs. publicly funded has increased considerably.

The author of the paper you link acknowledges this but justifies it by reasoning, "Most college and university expense is to pay well-educated people, whose incomes in the general economy have grown quite a bit faster than the CPI".

If you accept the premise that higher education isn't really meant for working-class people, then there's no problem. Bully for you.
He was likely in school for 9 of those months, so if you only have a quarter to sell (13 weeks), that's 26 times per year, or 182 times overall. 20 bucks a session at a lemonade stand is a HAUL.
Simcity source code - http://code.google.com/p/micropolis/

This has a few different versions (even python) and is pretty solid/concise due to the hardware restrictions of the late 80s.
Are you kidding? An educated citizenry is one of the most important things a society can have. The "better job, better salay, more respect" to which you refer are all functions of the value that you provide to the community.
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Those planes are flying just as fast as the others, but their paths are distorted from the map projection.
I'll add that titles are useful in terms of making sure every essential function is covered. No reason early on that one person can't have more than one title, and as noted everyone should also have the title of "janitor", I've always put is as "No one should be too proud to sweep the floor".
How is it relevant to this article ?
You're criticizing the public education, and you may have some good points, but I still don't see any reason to stop paying taxes for it.
Maybe some pay for two educations, but I'm sure the economic and social price will be much higher for everyone (more criminality, less innovation) if there were only private schools.

And almost nobody but the state has an incentive to create a low cost school.
The scariest pricing idea ever. That works.
That opinion seems to come around a lot, but it steams from the faulty assumption that we need to reach an agreement: we don't.

You should only compromise when the utility you get from getting part of what you want is greater than the utility you lose by what you give away.

There is no utility in reaching an agreement in and of itself, so there is no reason to do it.
World hottest news: Barack Obama plays more golf than George W Bush
Aren't the rating agencies a counter example of the success of this model? They have proved that private market "over-site" is just as susceptible to influence of the regulated.

A flavour of this idea already exists inside the government and it has lead to a race to the bottom not increased accountability. Large corps are free to choose whom their primary regulator is.

Interesting take on from This American Life on the effects of the Office of Thrift Supervision's efforts to market themselves to businesses as a regulator.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/382/T...
> For example, universal health care and education are public goods that generate more market wealth in higher productivity than they cost in taxes collected to pay for them,

Oh really? Always?

I ask because the French and German govts spend about 8% of their GDP on healthcare and cover a huge fraction of their population. The US govt spends about 8% of GDP on healthcare and covers a much smaller fraction of its population. Since the US GDP/person is larger, the US govt is spending over twice as much per covered person on healthcare.

Even if we assume that the French and German govt's spending generates more market wealth than the taxes collected, it's unclear that the US govt's healthcare spending does.

That's why I wanted a very different "health care reform".

I wanted to give Obama complete power over the money that the US govt is currently spending on healthcare wrt the folks it currently covers. Yes, employees (state and local too), Medicare, VA, Indian Health Service (which is a real horrorshow), and possibly even folks who work for companies that get >80% of their revenue from govt contracts.

That's a huge fraction of the population.

We then see what happens over 6 years.

And, since govt health care advocates insist that govt healthcare is 30% cheaper, we cut the per-person budget 5%/year in years 3-5. (That's just over 20% total.) He can either return that money to the general fund or use it to cover additional people - the only hard constraint is the per-person budget.
You sound like a petty criminal. Buy a license like all the other legitimate developers or don't use the platform at all? Don't like it? Don't buy and speak out about it.

Of course their legal and digital restrictions are wrong, but it doesn't give you the right to steal and infringe on their IP.
ex-googlers - I wonder how much of an advantage that gives them in terms contacts and possible future buyout.

(especially seeing as it is dead center in an arena Google could easily want to expand into)
Thoughts From the Man Who Would Sell The World, Nicely
"My background is in Artificial Intelligence and my last business was building predictive data. Most of our customers were oil companies, and you can hold that against me if you like. But my pitch back then was 'just give me enough data, I'll figure out something.' And often enough I did figure out something."