skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> why didn't the poor just eat potatoes then

My guess is that potatoes was either too expensive (compared to wheat/rice) and is probably something that can't grow in all climates. Your argument reminds me of the classical French quote where a woman suggested that the shortage of bread could be solved by eating cake instead.

> if a country was short on food, they shouldn't sell it

It's not the country that sells food, but individuals. And individuals (like corporations) are mostly interested in making profits.

> Or if the prices for wheat are high, they should sell the wheat and buy potatoes for the money

The people who sold the wheat would of course keep the money for themselves. You are expecting farmers to sell their crops and use the profits to feed the rest of the nation, but that doesn't happen. And it's also not easy to switch to a completely different crop (maybe even impossible depending on the climate)
It is most likely a client relationship. Pivotal is big on getting their clients into their office so they can participate in the XP process.
read my mind, awesome list.
Silver Sands Factory Stores
Shopping at Silver Sands Factory Stores is quite unlike shopping anywhere else in America. With more than 100 designer names to choose from, you can look for and easily find the item closest to your heart.
The first thing we do is kill all the robots...

If we honestly look at things right now, the only reason these jobs haven't been automated is because we have people so cheap. Even so, in the US, if you strip away the metajobs: service, marketing, entertainment... our infrastructure and creation now is around ten percent of the population. [citation needed.] http://www.yesvirginia.org/Images/charts/EmploymentMajorSect... shows 24% of the working population in manufacturing, construction, IT, and educational/health services. This does not count the unemployed and children.

We are hurdling toward a world where fewer than a quarter of the population are required to maintain the society.
I only see a "File not found" now. Did we break it?
I wish he would say why blueray sucks
So the comparison is between starting from absolute scratch with Lisp -- having to choose a framework, get a dev environment set up, choosing your libraries etc vs an experienced PHP person just using PHP?

This article could easily be turned around to something like "use emacs, lisp and the trusted framework you already know, or try to learn PHP with its inconsistent naming and verbose syntax and ..."

Essentially he's judging languages by "wall-clock time", but only including time-to-learn in one of them.
Arich countries pressure poorer countries to abolish farming subsidies in the name of trade liberization, but the rich countries continue subsidies of their products (farming and otherwise).
This vehicle is priced at $101,500 after federal tax credit, according to Tesla's website. I don't think the article mentions it.
Someone came to my grandma's garden in the dark of night and stole all of her flowers. Apparently, some horticulturists are thugs.
Most 'countries' don't buy or sell food. It's businesses within those countries who do produce and sell food. And if they get a far better price by exporting than by selling to their starving neighbours, we can't assume they'll be any more moral than the speculators (only on a smaller scale).

Wasn't this Invisible Hand thing going to take care of optimally distributing wealth in the face of perfectly selfish actors?
Documenting electronic health records for eClinicalworks EMR
The answer is 1549498368.

Derivation comes next. DO NOT READ IF YOU WANT TO TRY IT FOR YOURSELF.

The program is

n = 2
n times:
n times:
n times:
n times:
n++

=>

n = 2
n times:
n times:
n times:
n = 2*n

=>

n = 2
n times:
n times:
n = n*2^n

=>

n = 2
2 times:
n times:
n = n*2^n

=>

n = 2
2 times:
n = n*2^n
n times:
n = n*2^n

=>

n = 2
n = n*2^n
n = n*2^n
n times:
n = n*2^n

=>

n = 2048
2048 times:
n = n*2^n

Now we use the fact that we only need the last 10 digits.

n = 2048
2048 times:
n = (n*2^n) % 10^10

=>

n = 2048
2048 times:
n = (n*(2^n % 10^10)) % 10^10

=>

n = 2048
2048 times:
n = (n*modexp(2,n,10^10)) % 10^10

Where modexp(k,n,a) computes k^n % a by repeated squaring and internally modding intermediate values:

modexp(k,2*n,a) = modexp(k,n,a)**2 % a
modexp(k,2*n+1,a) = k*modexp(k,2*n,a) % a

When we run this we get the answer 1549498368. This algorithm can also compute more digits efficiently by setting 10^10 higher. Computing 100 digits takes a couple of seconds in Ruby.
Well I'll assume by 'user' friendly, you mean 'developer' friendly.

PHP is ridiculously easy to get started with. I believe it was the first 'real' language and ecosystem that I really knew well [enough]. There's a huge body of knowledge associated with it that you can find on the web or in the bookstore.

PHP is ridiculously easy to grok because it's in the C family when it comes to syntax. PHP essentially enforces no control over the style you must employ while using it and doesn't even suggest a style to use. I made some awesome stuff in PHP but the code behind it was terrible.

Contrast this all with Lisp (which I'm still learning). I've never tried to do web dev with Common Lisp or anything, but getting started with Compojure was comparatively much harder than it was with PHP.
Lisp is conceptually more complex than PHP. You have to think at a higher level. It becomes easier but I definitely could not have grasped it at 12 or 13. Lisp isn't purely functional but afaik (from what I've seen), but it encourages a functional style. It's not as easy to grok as PHP and so I would imagine this creates a barrier for most 'code monkeys'. Why learn to use a new tool when the one you got ain't broken?
So, if I'm reading this right, the servers will be totally distributed?

I don't care about a Facebook replacement so much as a totally distributed file-sharing system where trust and recommendations are based on my real-life friends. It seems like that could happen with this. Also, I think file-sharing is a great hook for the everyday Joe. And it's somewhere Facebook can't easily go.
I was just wondering earlier today how long world helium reserves could last. For airships a 90% reduction in carbon emissions won't matter if helium becomes the economic bottleneck. Sort of depressing how soon we seem to be reaching a point where depletion of earth resources is inevitable.

Hydrogen would be interesting if we could make it safe enough. It could double as a fuel source for the ships, too.
> use emacs, lisp and the trusted framework you already know

It took me 2 years to finally get comfortable with Emacs to the point I trust doing stuff in it, and I still don't know what I'm going to do if I ever start working in a language that doesn't have an editing mode available (it's not Textmate where you can define a syntax file in an hour).

For a whole month I studied Clojure, trying to wrap my head around it. I still have problems.

And now if I'd want to do stuff in Clojure, all web frameworks available suck for me (no, I don't like Compojure) ... which would mean I'd have to write my own ... or use Django, Rails 3, or even asp.net mvc 2 (even that is preferable).

Of course, being the yak-shaver that I am, I'll probably attempt to write a web-framework for Clojure of my own, but not when the clock is ticking.

On PHP ... doing PHP programming / copying popular websites was my first job. It took me exactly 1 week for going from a complete zero to someone that could get the job done.

I don't love PHP as there are truly better options out there, but libraries/frameworks are more important than languages. If Java frameworks would've been designed with an eye towards their users and not to please managers, it would've crushed all other high-level languages by now (and it did in many ways).
It's Time To Stop Subsidising Mobile Phones
Before people go around upvoting this article mindlessly. This article is from 2008, before Brian rewrote this blog twice in Clojure and got the hell off WordPress. I'd be interested to hear what he has to say now about this article (though it may be that his opinion has remained largely the same).
From the FAQ:

What language are you programming Diaspora in?

Ruby, with a bit of Rails and other Ruby frameworks thrown in.
Im excited to try it out.
I thought he was being way too ambitious. If I had to make something like that work, my focus would be on potatoes and possibly a cow for milk, but it would of course depend on more land, the correct climate and probably better timing. He seemed dead-set on eating meat every day, which seems to me to have been very unrealistic, especially with such a tiny amount of land, unless he was cheating and using bought grain etc. to feed the animals.
Simulate Slow Internet Connection while Testing your Apps
Improved latency is one of the major improvements that 4G (lte) has over 3G. Networks are already being rolled out, it won't take long until there is coverage in major cities.
One more thing I don't really understand -- what will Diaspora offer that other similar projects, already implemented don't already have? I'm talking the likes of Appleseed, PeerBook, PeerSoN, OneSocialWeb and Peerouette...
> As a mailing list comment points out, the effect of applying > the for(c...) part to an n is:
> fc(n) = n * (2 ^ n) * (2 ^ (n * (2 ^ n))

This is not true. You need to apply the following formula n times, not 2 times (in this case n=2048).

n <- n*2^n
I personally doubt the big, hard problems in enterprise software.

I've worked in a few Fortune 100 organisations, and I've got to say that enterprise software doesn't tend to solve hard problems: financial reporting, workflow support, resource planning, HR aren't inherently hard.

What is hard, is selling them into big organisations, commitment of the management hierarchy, deployment into the processes and sometimes forcing end-users to deoptimalise their results. This all costs huge dollar figures, and the organisations need to sell that internally and come up with suitably vast business cases.

Maybe I'm being a tad cynical here, but I have participated in the process several times after being informed that a cheaper, more appropriate solution for these "enterprise needs" couldn't get buy-in - and in enough big 100k+ enterprises that it's not just unlucky happenstance.

Most of the software that solves big, hard problems are domain-specific, not really enterprise software. They are deployed for point- or black box solutions for the business: things like industrial process control, tax/logistics montecarlo tradeoff analysis, MPLS tag path provisioning, factory and warehouse logistics optimisation, geophysical seismic analysis for hydrocarbon prospecting, etc etc.
I'm not quite sure what makes you say "the 4 founders...have very little technical knowledge and have outsourced the majority of their code."

Here's what I read,

After getting settled in ole San Fran, our first day at Pivotal Labs was June 7th. Not only has Pivotal lent us desks and monitors for the summer, they push us daily to drive development from the interface and focus on the experience, rather than providing just a tool for developers to hack on. Getting periodic help from Pivots has already been transformative on the outcome of Diaspora.

So Pivotal Labs, thanks for letting us use your stuff, eat your food, and for teaching us your agile ninja ways. We owe you one!

That doesn't sound like Pivotal is writing code for them. It sounds like Pivotal is (1) giving them (free?) space to work and (2) mentoring them regularly. The bits below what I quoted - where they talk about specific technology and features, say "we did this..." and "we are adding that..." Again, no implication of outsourcing.

My recollection was that they were NYU undergrads in CS. Why do you think they lack technical knowledge?
honestly? I think it's hype and polish (then again, i've seen the other sites, and they aren't far away from good polish, so mostly hype).

edit: i'm not trying to make a comment about hype cycles -_- or how they are going to fail. i'm just Diaspora is pretty much those projects, but with the attention and money they all deserved at a time when they were (are?) most active.
It pays to be able to flexibly switch my mindset in a way that is beneficial to myself. On the one hand, I want to always feel there is room for improvement. On the other, I don't want always be feeling inadequate compared to other members of my comparison group. It's easy to keep measuring yourself against an ever tighter, ever more elite group of people. The pressure is not always worth it.
I dislike the tone of both this and "Where Does A Tree Get It's Mass" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1480118). They both have a rather smug, superior air about them that I find really irritating.

OK we get it, kids often struggle a bit in science classes and occasionally fumble for answers. This is nothing new as I imagine we have all done it at various points, and chiding students in blog entries doesn't help anyone.
Why not just write servlets in Clojure?
It's dumber than that. People have been speculating on food derivatives for centuries. They were the first derivatives. Exchange-traded financial derivatives weren't even invented until the 70s.

For example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act , where speculation on onions was banned in 1953. It probably increased volatility, and more probably made pricing less efficient.
Top Most Attractive Bollywood Actress, Wallpapers
Bollywood is the larget Film Industry in the world. Every years so many actresses comming but who is the top most attractive actress in bollywod, No one can say that. Top Most Attractive Bollywood Actress includes Aishwarya Rai, kareena, Katrina, Neha Dhupia, Asin, Shipa Shetty, Dipika Padukone, Anushka Sharma, and Genelia.
Is my google wave account hacked?
Hi HHrs.

I just started using google wave and invited some people to a wave discussion.

I keep seeing in the history, things like "You removed xeymcy8ah@invite.gwave.com from this wave"

Anyone know why and what to do about it?

Thank you,
John.
Indeed, agriculture is one of the original reasons for inventing futures - Chicago Mercantile Exchange starting out as Chicago Butter and Egg board in the 19th century etc.

Wikipedia says the first futures contracts were for rice in Japan in the 18th century.
Yahoo Status Checker | Ystatus
Patent Taxing Startups is Like Child Labor
Some ideas: Stanford NLP tools, libsvm, Mallet, and some of my own open source projects. That said, LingPipe is well put together, and for some organizations may be a great way to go.
Wow people are upvoting this FUD?

> but setting it up is impractical for anybody who
> isn't used to hack emacs and bash scripts all day

This is Hacker News right?

Having built websites in PHP, Python, Ruby, and Clojure ... guess what? They all present you with equal challenges if you're not building trivial small websites on shared hosting.

Getting a website up and running in Clojure is as simple as it gets. Compojure ships with a good webserver baked right in.
What about the first 10 digits?
Isn't the problem with Common Lisp that you have to start with a lot less?

I've dabbled with Common Lisp for webdevelopment and I failed, miserably. I tried various the Mandriva package manager, downloading latest releases from the web, automatically and manually. It was already hard to get a bunch of packages together that where stable, somewhat current and compatible so I eventually quit.

If someone in the Common Lisp community could put together a web stack to get started it would help people like me tremendously. Lisps superiority is no point of discussion for me.
very true. Also, this "Once you manage to get Emacs and SLIME going (I'm assuming you already know Emacs intimately, because if you don't, you already lose)"

sometimes i feel lisp is like an exercise in barrier of entry. "Let's make an awesome language that is as inaccessible out of the box as possible" not just application wise. knowledge wise too.
Does anyone remember the Marx Brothers? "The party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part." And so on. Pretty much dead-on :)
Wow, a really twisted way to look at reality and thus prove with a little sophistry that price-fixing and communism is the only way to prevent poor people from starving.

The only problem is that with communism, eventually everybody starves. I'll stick with free markets, thank you.
Because I just don't need dumb request dispatch.

There are a couple of things a web-developer needs ... data-models, with validations, form/request handling with validations (forms that render themselves are a plus), authentication/authorization (OpenID/Facebook/whatever support should be available of course), CRUD generating (I don't want to work on stupid admin interfaces that show tables of existing items more than 10 minutes), session handling, caching support backed in, a nice templating language that doesn't suck ... and a (lazy) ORM querying language would be nice (bonus points if it has integration with NoSQL databases). And all of them nicely integrated of course, as I don't want to lose time trying to figure out how to blend them in.

That's not much to ask, and these are problems devs have struggled with in the last 10 years ... it is unacceptable to work just with servlets.
... so when you post a message, it's like sending 300-400 messages to up to 300-400 servers?

Uh, yeah, that'll scale.
Getting the Band Back Together
It's been time for about 10 years.
" Your argument reminds me of the classical French quote where a woman suggested that the shortage of bread could be solved by eating cake instead."

The article used potatoes to prove that prices didn't rise because of a food shortage. Thereby he implies that there were enough potatoes to go round. That is completely different from the french revolution when people had no bread and the king said they should eat cake instead.

I have little hopes of a logical discussion here, though :-(
UseTheSource: A “Hacker News” for Beautiful Code
Still, if the farming is subsidized (no matter what country), wouldn't it lower the prices?

Also, the trading they try to blame was in options, I think, not in actual wheat.
My first thought as well. Battery life on my Incredible is poor at best as it is. I don't want to pony up for an oversize battery and wreck the profile, I need it to fit in a case/holster/mount/etc.
First look closer into the countries that actually had a problem with starvation and food shortage. I don't think they were mostly the capitalist ones where actors were able to act selfish on their own.
Good article, and there are lots of good comments.

Some things not said include:

* Some enterprises have nearly 50-year legacies.

* Existing systems are often complex enough that there isn't any one person anywhere who understands it technically, let alone from a cultural perspective.

* The people making the purchase decision aren't even the users of the system. Imagine a company big enough that it is the legal team that makes the decision on which BFE package to purchase. The deciding criteria would not amuse you.

And there is the idea that what we, readers and writers of HN and 37 signals, don't always appreciate that a nice UI might actually be a green screen 3270 application. The CICS screens have the side effect of being keyboard navigable, and therefore are higher throughput than today's idea of mouse-driven beauty. (Not to go all Steve Yegge on you.)

Finally, selling the same BFE software to multiple enterprises is usually a pipe dream. The technical input to the negotiating team can result in a line item in the purchase agreement that is "custom modifications", and which of the salesmen hired by Mr. You-have-to-be-an-idiot-to-not-read-the-resume in the last few hours of the negotiation is going to say "no" to that? So all of us in this particular negotiation--customer rep, technical rep (note that I did not say "development"), compliance rep, and legal rep buy into this, each with their own motivations. You can see how well that works out.
B2B Companies Are Making the Splash into Social Media
B2B, or business to business, companies are newer to the world of social media, even though many popular brands have already made the plunge into social networking. Business.com revealed in November 2009 that 73% of their B2B clients had begun using social media, although they have less than two years of experience.
Most programmers aren't paid to revolutionize the world of computer science. Most programmers are code monkeys, or to put it more nicely, they're craftsmen who build things that other people pay them to create.

To say most programmers are craftsmen is a huge overstatement. Most programmers have no sense of craftsmenship.
I've been really happy ever since I installed Python on my Droid. It's really fun to show off how you can access text-to-speech with droid.speak().

I'm not sure I buy it will be useful for development without a custom VM, but I have the full power of a 500 mhz (ish) processor wherever I am.
The BD standard also includes support for downloadable and streamable content via BD-Live.
The Last Airbender (2010) Dvdrip Xvid pre Release
I almost down-voted this because it's illegal and I thought it was a sarcastic remark, but then I thought about it some more and, aside from working at a job or doing consulting, it sounds like one of the few realistic ways to do what you want to do. The downside risk is obviously pretty huge though - I wouldn't recommend it.
Looks like you need something like Delayed Job:

http://github.com/tobi/delayed_job

Not sure of an equivalent in PHP.
Unencumbered by useful content. "Although DBMS is an old technology, it's also a fresh one". What?
See I read the article as saying that the students are at fault for being all to ready to throw answers at the teacher which they didn't understand. Whereas I'd say that the students are simply a product of their environment, one (created by the teacher or a previous teacher, or a physics dept as a whole) where emphasis has shifted from understanding a subject into hitting enough keywords in your answer to get a passing grade - even if it turns out that the actual question might be a bit silly.
From my experience, this seems to be mostly an issue of configuration, which is impossible to get right, because it's incredibly painful and hostile. He mentions this issue. (Of course, most likely, there are issues with the actual rendering too.)
Choose the best Ohio Health Insurance
Finding the best Ohio Health Insurance might be a real challenge as there are a lot of companies out there that will promise you the best deal.
Windows only app Firefox Throttle, a throttling proxy "Sloppy" is also mentioned in passing.
But the next elephant in the room: suppose with a huge effort, you build a factory that employs all the 100 million (or whatever) uneducated people in your country. Then these people have a steady income and decide to have children. In a couple of years, you suddenly have 400 million uneducated people. Then what? (I don't know a proper answer - simply throwing more money at education seems unlikely to work...).
De Bono's Six Thinking Hats
Dollar Plunges After UN Call To Ditch Greenback
My point was that potatoes were probably too expensive for them in the first place. If millions of people are starving but can't afford potatoes, they have little impact on the price. They could only have an impact on the price if they could actually afford to buy it. Those who could afford potatoes could probably also adjust to the increased wheat prices.

Potatoes and rice are probably in two different markets, similar to bread and cake.
>So something that made sense at the time now doesn't, and a new act is needed to say they can take longer to sell the helium.

This sort of thing shouldn't require an act of congress/parliament.

A general rule of not selling >$Y of goods that are above X% of the yearly market without treasury approval would seem more sensible.
I am looking out something for Linux too? Any suggestions?
A daily startup email list, HARO for startups