skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The US expected to take up to one million casualties.

I'm not sure this was true. The US might have expected to take such large numbers of casualties IF they insisted on invading very quickly for purely political reasons. But given a bit more time, there need not be so many casualties at all. Japan was literally starving. Everyone was on severely reduced food rations, including soldiers. Within a year or so, no one would have the strength to resist invasion anyway. In addition, the blockade destroyed Japan's ability to produce armaments, so the only way to resist invasion would have been wooden spears and hand to hand combat.

A man who's subsisted on 800 calories a day for the past 2 months won't put up much of a fight. Wait a few months more and he'll be dead, at which point he really won't put up much of a fight.
>however i am not using werkzeug anymore as i don't like the way people act in #pocoo on freenode. this is the only reason i am not using werkzeug. they are ignorant and i don't like it.

Care to explain? I dont lurk in #pocoo but I am confused as to why you are putting an entire room on blast.
I know my flaws. It's why I excel.
Probably because you can say the same thing about all blog spam.
In the same way that Internet Explorer's 98% market share was problematic, and that the web is a better place with competition/awareness of browser choice. As it is now, few consumer know of options other than Reader. (And anybody who's had to use FoxIt for professional-PDF use knows it isn't a working solution for designers.)
I concur. Also you will be disciplined into writing scalable code and will not have to deal with operating system issues, setting up servers, configuring db's etc., so you can focus on programming.

(If you want an invite to Fosdev for trying out GAE quickly, let me know.)
To GTA IV's credit, if you click the right options when starting the game, you can play a single-player, local game without setting up a Rockstar Social Club or Windows Live account. They still present the login each time you run it, though.
The only thing better than this would be if Woot took the AP to Small Claims Court over the bill.
Canadian immigration, changes to the Federal skilled worker category 2010
it does NOT matter. It does NOT matter. It does NOT matter.
<blink>12:00</blink>
Get ready: A raft of new taxes are coming next year
Startups fail because entrepreneurs value money more than time.
The thing is, I don't think that any amount of study lets you understand lit crit. It just lets you produce it and nod in agreement at other regurgitations.
"Functional programming has a tremendous amount of value outside of async/multi-threaded environments that cannot simply be replaced by other means."

Functional programming, or closures? I said:
"Closures in particular are a very powerful tool in async/multi-threaded environments, but in the stateless/sync environment of a web application environment, they collapse down to syntactical sugar, and solve nothing that cannot be solved in other ways."

I made absolutely no statement regarding functional programming in general, and the label 'functional programming' applies to a much broader set of topics than just closures, so I am entirely at a loss as to why you think it makes sense to 'rebut' my statement about closures with something about functional programming?

"There are real limits to the amount of modularity one can achieve without functional programming, and modularity is key to great programming."

I entirely agree, modularity is good.

"The state and history of the software industry at large only demonstrates that the majority of software developers in key technical positions within the industry are and have been less than great."

indeed.

"But if your argument is that PHP is "good enough" given a bunch of average developers..."

LOL.

It really wasn't.

Im glad you like functional languages and closures, you really should check out Scheme - its even MORE functional than Python.
Heh, welcome to the world of government spending. What you can see on this list is really just corruption as usual - i.e. quangos assigning large amounts of public money to their friends and relations. In return certain recipient organisations or companies may or may not make donations to certain political parties, who in turn may or may not be able to pay increased salaries to high ranking party members and spend more money on campaigning.
Start Up Help in NYC
Here's an active list in NY for hackers, entrepreneurs, and financing types. Lots of activity and a great resource for meet-ups, networking.
Some perspective if you're using Python: I've mostly done desktop apps (ObjC + Cocoa and C++ + Qt). Some time ago I decided to learn web programming. I'd been programming Python for quite some time so, unsurprisingly, I started learning Django. I never felt at home with the framework. This might just be me, but Django has too much magic -- which can be disconcerting if you like to know exactly what your framework is doing behind the scenes.

A month ago I started dabbling in Pylons. It's the best framework I've ever used. The Pylons Book is great, if a bit outdated. The official docs are nice (they seem nice to me; I've been burned by Apple's shitty documentation). The entire framework basically consists of glue code to tie together best-of-breed Python libraries: Mako, SQLAlchemy, Beaker, WebOb, PythonPaste, FormEncode, HTMLFill, Routes. Oh, and it's all WSGI. WSGI is the best thing to ever happen to Python web development. You should at least skim the WSGI PEP (PEP 333) if you're serious about Python web development.

Next, I'm planning to check out Werkzeug. It's an even tinier set of libraries that allow you to, in effect, build your own framework. If you're building a simple REST-based service, Werkzeug is what you need.

I also know some people who swear by Web2Py. I haven't tried it myself, but I hear it's great for quick and dirty webapps.
Sam's Club will offer small business loans ($5,000 to $25,000)
Interesting idea. I don't see why not. Consider recurring lifetime costs per user and see if you can set a fee that covers that. Remember that from that point on you depend on new customers (as your paying customers will never pay you again). You might want to look at a one time fee for a year's use of the service, or something like that.
my latest nifty screen trick (borrowed from a similar variant for xclip) goes:

bindkey -m > eval "stuff ' '" writebuf "exec sh -c 'pbcopy < /tmp/screen-exchange'"

then when you've made a selection in screen Copy Mode, just terminate it with '>' to stick it onto the system paste buffer.
Version 1.1 of the open source smart grid tool openPDC has been released
This is not always true. Almost all wars are started for "defensive" reasons and oftentimes those reasons are just lies told to drum up support for the war.

The Nazi regime convinced ordinary people that they had to fight against an internal Jewish threat. That was a lie. If ordinary Germans had let "the other guy" go to war, nothing would have happened because there was no internal threat. Likewise, if Americans had ignored the terrible threat that Iraq posed to the US in 2003, then nothing would have happened: Iraq wasn't a threat to the US. Claims that it was trying to do destroy the US or had the capability to do so were lies. Ignoring the lies is not surrender.

The first rule of honorable war fighting is to figure out which justifications are true and which are lies. A people that can't or won't do that can never be honorable since sooner or later, they'll end up exterminating lots of innocent people in a war based on lies.
There is also "good old games" ( www.gog.com ) - steam like site that sells old games without DRM and tuned to run in modern OSes. Sorry for advertising, I'm not connected to them in any way, just like this company (they made The Witcher) and wanted to promote DRM less online software selling.
For me it seem that the difference between these two hosts is probably more about mentality rather than if their source code is all open.

The github guys want to make money with git and gitorious people, well, just want an easy to host git repositories.

The project is supported by a company alright, but it seem to be more of a subsidiary rather than as a way to make money.
Ask HN: Who's Hiring?
I think the last time this came up we agreed on the 1st tuesday of every month - so here we are!

I'm specifically interested in Python jobs in London, but as always, everything is welcome.
If that policy's really derived from WWII I daresy they've completely missed the point. The Data Protection Directive wouldn't help if you Europe were to fall under Nazi control again.

It's just a law that says the government can't process the data in certain ways, they still have the data though, and could start mining it by changing the law, or ignoring it.

If they actually cared they wouldn't be gathering this data in the first place. The U.S. (officially) keeps a lot less data on its citizens than the average European country, but that's been changing in the recent decades since the FBI, NSA and others were founded.
Traction Trumps Everything
I have a coworker that quit his job, got broke trying their own business (he argues he chose his cofounder poorly), but he got his old post back, so in a way he regrets it, but he had his chance and didn't miss on opportunities that much.

I should ask him, but my take is that it shows that you don't risk as much as you believe if you take risks and are good enough.
GNU? Never hurd of it.
Fireunit : Testing in the firebug world
That's why we have the concept of values.

You can't tell whether something is good or bad until you hold it against some value like... speed of execution, or intuitiveness, or least code. Once you do, judge away.

That's why postmodernism is especially challenged, it can't decide what about life is valuable.
Isn't alibaba.com more of a wholesale supplier directory?

Amazon does ship to China, but it takes a while, depending on what shipping rate you pay for: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=5...
> However, it also provides you rights you wouldn't otherwise have. For example, I can reinstall games without having to worry about finding that CD/CD Key.

That's not really a right, that's mostly convenience.

> If I lose the game DVD, I can't play it anymore.

Depends on the game.

> With Steam, I now have that right.

unless you lose your Steam password that is.
Chrome 6: Early peek under the hood
The rise of RTB and our investment in Triggit
A major relevant one:

"Small business expensing will be slashed and 50% expensing will disappear. Small businesses can normally expense (rather than slowly-deduct, or “depreciate”) equipment purchases up to $250,000. This will be cut all the way down to $25,000. Larger businesses can expense half of their purchases of equipment. In January of 2011, all of it will have to be “depreciated.”"
What's so hard about a mea culpa?
Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development - coupon BOOK10 for 10% discount
I can't help but feel that TC has become the ebaumsworld of tech blog. Nothing interesting, intellectual, relevant; just grab whatever you find on the internet, copy paste 90% of the contents and BAM you have a blog post.

I think TC suffers from the same disease as Gizmodo, where the "authors" are encouraged to do whatever they want as long as it brings in traffic. They get bonus on traffic, who cares if its silly even for high-school standard.
You've made me second guess myself. I was getting bit by this bug http://trac.macports.org/ticket/18235. It does not persist any more. Apologies.
Ping from Ahmedabad, India
What exactly is the etiquette for posting a "Review my Startup/Webapp" as an ask or rather as an actual link? I've seen it both ways an I'm wondering if one is preferred over the other.
SHRDLU resurrection
Gotcha politics gone wild
This may not be the best place to ask about it, but I figure it's worth a shot. Anyone happen to have any documentation on the BEAM binary format ( I found http://www.erlang.se/~bjorn/beam_file_format.html but it's quite old) and the opcodes used in it?
This was actually written by my tax preparer. He's very good. A little pricey, but, I believe, fully worth it. He knows his stuff. If you're in the DC area and need a tax preparer for your startup, I'd be happy to make an introduction.
I am an atheist (not the annoying kind) and I feel that this short story has an interesting philosophical perspective if you can get past the literal interpretation of "god" and "reincarnation".

As to what is On topic. From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

56 (as of now) people thinks this gratifies intellectual curiosity.
Hi, my name is Bill and I do crappy designs. But, I think with help from this post I'm ready to move onto Step 2.

In all seriousness, the post comes at a great time. I'm starting to do front end again for the first time since early 2K. I've always been appalled at how functionally ugly my UI's are.
Careful with the apples and oranges. Counting visits and hits are very different things.
I, personally, want companies to profit from open source as directly as possible. It gives me comfort that Github is trying to turn a profit.
Part of living in a city is exercising some basic decorum when it comes to living very close to a lot of people. When you play loud music until 2 am -- keeping your neighbor awake with a bass rumble that can be felt through the bed frame despite ear plugs that shouldn't be necessary in the first place -- you should remember that your neighbor might just have to work tomorrow.

(It might be hard to fathom, but not everybody is a college student or an unmarried 23 year old, and some people even have to get to work early on the weekends -- myself included, during crunch times).

If you can't handle treating other people living in the next room with basic courtesy, you should yourself seriously consider living in the suburbs.

I sure wouldn't want to live next to you.
heh. especially if you and I decide to define "good coder" as "someone who wouldn't apply for a PHP job in the first place"

that would make it IMPOSSIBLE. muah ha ha.
Seeing the sales of cigarettes on reservation that do not honor state taxes and the number of customers buying, I would say paragraph one is not completely true. Smuggling is happening, it is just from a legal source.
This is not a piece on politics -- ie, it doesn't take a position on some political issue or advocate a political cause. Instead it is about technology, news, and opinion.

There's an interesting angle I think the author misses: with thousands of sources all talking at once, the cognitive load on the individual has increased at least ten-fold from previous paradigms. Probably most of what we see in "clanning" and echo-chamber forums is simply an effort to reduce the cognitive load.

If, instead of building something people want, we build something that helps them think/sort, there could be some continuing opportunities for startups here. (Note that helping me think isn't showing me what a bunch of other bozos like today -- it's filtering what's important for me to consume given my knowledge-base and world-view. There is a difference. It's also not simply providing me with me-too news articles. Ideally it would challenge the consumer and help them grow.)
Point taken, but I assume that those guys that want to protect their code from the outside might want to go for a complete in-house solution as well, instead of storing it in the cloud (I know that this is the big thing now and all, but let's assume that I'm not the only one that likes to have local storage, local backup and local basic/essential services).

Those can grab gitorious and set it up locally. Takes (depending on experience with linux, rails etc) half a day for your first installation and you have the same thing running in your office/vpn. With all your closed source precious projects.
What are you doing with it?
I think that this and Helvetica are the level-zero namedrops in a conversation about logos or typography ;-)
It's not about money or ambition it is about focus.

When you have little you have to focus on the most important thing you are trying to do, because that's all you can afford.

When you have loads you lose that focus because you can add this, and add that, and wouldn't that be cool... etc. You lose your focus and your most important thing gets lost in all the noise.
Yeah, but the US Navy might be inclined to deal a tad bit differently with a bunch of russian subs approaching the US shore.
Im working on a service, currently in private beta, that I think you (and lots of others here on HN) would be interested in.

Shoot me an email and I'd love to tell you more about it: Pospischil at gmail
We offer a web solution for a niche to do some ERP and CRM.

We got our first customer by checking the websites of potential customers to find one that could have our mindset.

Although the setup is meant to be done by the customer himself, we did all the required setup-work to match the customers design and populated some first data from open sources. (about 30 minutes of work..)

Then we did the cold call and approached him more or less like this:
'Hi! We have this new thing and are searching for someone who would like to test it out with us. You wont have to pay us until you see the benefit for yourself and your customers, but we require a strong involvement and somebody who gets stuff done as our test customer. And then we thought of you. :)'

One thing to mention about the cold call. We have to get past a front desk. It is not that easy, but I would say it helps to provide information about how long you would like to talk to the owner/ceo. We asked for 5-10 minutes and an available internet connection.

First we explain what we do. When the customer gets the idea, we say: 'We hoped you would be interested, so we already setup a version for you. Go check it out at $sitename. Btw: there is an email in your inbox right now, that contains the link.'

This is how we do it.

Disclaimer: We are just starting and have only a few test customers by now. But once we were able to talk to the owners, all of them opened up, when they saw their own logo and design on our product.
Not really. TechCrunch is in my Rss reader; Woot is not. Most blogspam is on little unheard-of blogs to make a few bucks on ad revenue from that particular post; TechCrunch serves as an aggregator, kind of like HN.
As soon as I see "Obamacare" they've lost me. Same as when I used to see BushCo. or any other informal (biased) naming conventions. Seems like an informative piece but why bias it with senseless political jargon?
Welcome to the United Socialism of America. Europeans have been "enjoying" this kind of skinning every year now.

I don't remember, why did you guys vote Obama again? :)
sorry Michael, this is ridiculous, i like Gabriel but please don't upvote this absolute CRAP here.
She was referencing 9000 subscribers as what it would take to equal Daring Fireball's ad-generated revenue ($234,000 USD annual according the article). Amanda said she only expects her offering to top out at "maybe a few hundred" subscribers.

Still ambitious, in my opinion.
Which is why I said "don't get me started" on them. Every solid body at or past Jupiter orbit is, however, something like 30%+ water ice.
How about the Sahara? Pretty darn barren and a lot bigger than it used to be.
They're a news aggregator; there's no reason to post this article here. If they had additional commentary, then there might be. Like the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) say, "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter".
A living customer is far more profitable even to drug lords than a dead one.
Five Clues To Web 3.0 Opportunities Here Now
That's a heavy assumption. If you're wrong, the result is that Gitorious doesn't fit for potentially a large number of developers.

In my experience, sampling developers with whom I speak on a regular basis (and myself), private repos on GitHub are very popular. This is especially the case for web developers, as open sourcing web apps is less common. It's nice to have all of my open source stuff in the same place as my closed source stuff, such that I (and anyone I deem worthy) can interact with both in the same way.
Your missing the effects of Russia turning towards the east. The US was a little worried about further expansion past the disputed islands. Plus, the Army did want to invade and the Navy thought a blockade with constant bombing was the way to go.
Sorry, why is this crap? People ask me all the time what it takes to attract angel investors, and this is my most succinct answer.
I think it's the ".com" at the end of "buyersvote.com" that did it for me.
What I find odd is that they're hiding their construction efforts at all. Why not start a company and build them out in the open? It's not like it's illegal to construct submarines.
Counting pregnant sheep differently wouldn’t help me tell whether or not all sheep are back in the pen at the end of the day and that’s the whole point of the statement. I’m not making a moral statement about whether or not unborn sheep count. That has got nothing to do with my statement and is very much beside the point.

Whether it's beside the point depends on your perspective :). I spent a few days working on an actual sheep farm in New Zealand, and whether or not your sheep are pregnant is actually a highly relevant fact. Whether or not a sheep that starts out pregnant is still pregnant at the end of the day is also highly relevant. I wasn't trying to say that unborn sheep have anything to do with 'morality', but they are very much not beside the point.

It’s not that surprising, actually. If you change a statement which has proven to make good predictions by redefining one of its concepts, you will likely break the statement. It won’t make good predictions any more.

This is actually one of the salient points of post-modernist thought, with the caveat that post-modernism argues that all statements are always changing, 'definitions' of concepts are always changing. Take our sheep debate for example -- you make statements that are useful to you, and then I respond by interpreting the statements so that they are useful to me, and vice versa.
Disabling adblock made it work again. Even if I add the site to the whitelist it still doesn't work. How odd.
The author argues that PDF isn't obsolete, because it's an excellent replacement for paper forms that need to be reproduced exactly. This is true. But I think these paper forms are themselves becoming obsolete as bureaucracies switch to online forms.

We use PDFs for a different purpose. We use them as a intermediate format when processing and archiving documents from other software. We need to support 100+ file formats, and we need to accurately preserve the underlying appearance.

PDF is great for this kind of "visual capture," because it's the most common format that can preserve arbitrary formatting and graphics. And unlike TIFFs or PNGs, PDFs can be searched and highlighted, because they optionally contain the full text of the document.
It entirely comes down to who knows it (so when you hire, what type of people you get).

PHP has a lower skilled mean programmer who does it. This is not necessarily a bad thing if cheaper programmer is better than better programmer for your company.

PHP is easier to get going, python has more compelling libraries once you do. Python libraries are often better maintained than their PHP brethren, and the debugging stack for python is much more compelling.
I have l aliased to ls -l.
The major difference being that Europeans 'enjoy' some benefits of paying higher tax, such as free healthcare, while I will most likely see no benefits.