skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For a moving violation like that, why does a gun need to be drawn? Was there a threat of violence or just stupidity? The motorcyclist stopped on his own, right?

I'm a mild-mannered introvert. I have a rust belt near-midwest accent and the benefit of an east-coast Ivy League education. Yet, I have had traffic cops escalate levels of hostility on me even though I am doing my level best to be polite and cooperative. I've also noted that some policemen like to arbitrarily order you around, even when you aren't causing trouble. I've read something about problem steroid use in police causing mood disorders and excess aggression, and this seems to fit very well. I also suspect that this is also connected with my having long hair and being non-white.
For anyone that doesn't know it (like me), he mentioned the Ouroboros. I found it pretty interesting. From Wikipedia:

"The Ouroboros or Uroborus[1] is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail and forming a circle."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros
I've seen these people operate up close (fortunately not regarding my kids, but kids of close friends) and they do more damage than good for all the 'best intentions' (assuming they have those).

What bugs me most is that these institutions seems to be staffed mostly with people that have no children, go figure...
It is different when you have kids. I don't know your situation (if you have kids), but the threat of taking my kids, trumps the need for social justice (just telling the truth). If I have to stand so be it, but I will turn tail and run when it comes to my kids and their well-being. Principals only go so far when it involves my kids. Because my principals tell me that it is my kids above all else. Fighting them risks my kids and that is not something I am willing to do.
In C++, any general guidelines for handling memory allocation/deletion?
http://www.pajiba.com/tv_reviews/the-big-bang-theory-review....
EU boosts hi-tech research budget
I wonder what the response would be like if there was a party dedicated to breaking the GPL. Piracy seems to be fine, but anybody that violates an open source license like the GPL gets demonized like they are a criminal.
The cops in all these cases should be charged with treason.
I can't believe no one has mentioned this, but it seems to me the most important thing is how well you can erase the marker. Assuming it works well you should demonstrate this. I simply will not buy a whiteboard without knowing how well it will work over time. Also, I've used Georgia Pacific Mark-R-Board which costs about 1/3 of your product and it works just fine. That made me chuckle when I read the cost comparison in your FAQ.
I don't, and neither should you. :-)

If an idea is worth pursuing, it reoccurs in several ways. For instance, with my current project I can have a casual conversation with someone around a pain point and instantly see how my idea could help.

Many of my ideas seem brilliant when I first have them, but then fizzle the more I think about them. Even if they are wonderful and viable, your motivation to build them out is also a factor.
I have a really long list of business ideas in a .txt file 99.9% of which I'll never get round to implementing. An idea worth doing will stick in your head and eat away at you til you've accomplished it, a poor idea, not so much.
I use Gmail. I have an email thread going (sent to myself) that's I reply to every time I have a project idea. It's pretty rare that I'm thinking about project ideas and also not anywhere near a computer. And if I'm not, I just remember it for a few hours until I am or write it down on a sticky note in my wallet.

I should note that I very rarely actually go back and implement these ideas--I just used to have a thing where I'd want to do something and I'd have no idea what to do. I've become a lot better at generating ideas and so it's no longer really an issue, but I still like keeping them around. It's fun to see startup ideas I've thought about appear here on HN in the form of companies and realize I'd had the same idea a while ago.
If you want to suggest that the main problem is people "trying to solve problems in the same way they've been solving problems all along", then you should have an answer for how you implement memoization "the haskell way".

If not, your "conclusion that Haskell's differences are what throw people off" is incorrect.

I don't think the author of the email is "stereotyping the Haskellers as a bunch of ivory tower PhDs", he's relating a story that's actually true of finding out that a basic technique he wanted to implement was most easily implemented by following the technique in a PhD thesis.
As soon as they get set up in my city, I'll be switching my ISP.
Giving these decidedly private photos to a public agency to develop was an absolutely stupid thing to do

But that's the way we used to live. Before digital, very few of us could develop our own film. Just like most of us buy our beer at a store rather than making it- and therefore some agency could get a handle on how much we consume. In the future this may look like a stupid thing to do, but now it's all we really have and nobody thinks about it twice. My parents had no alternative to developing the pictures of me at a store.
I wonder if Bayes theorem can come to the rescue here like it has for spam?
Indeed. The US laws at various levels are riddled with outdated laws, some centuries old, which can often be conservative enough to do the Taliban proud. At their discretion, the police can decide to enforce one of these on you, which gives them arbitrary power to oppress anyone who pisses them off enough.
Yes, there would be complaints. Once they adjust to the video taping they will forget the tapes are there and act as they would anyway. The big difference comes because the douches would get caught sooner, as everyone would know a complaint would actually have merit.

The cynic in me worries that it would work out this way instead tho: As video of the cops being douches becomes commonplace, people just come to accept it, and it becomes difficult to file a complaint because the official response would be "oh cops are just douches, you shouldn't have gone outside if you cared". Worse, the public attitude would be the same, therefore not voting for, or even voting against, rules holding cops accountable.
List Monad in Ruby and Python
More police are killed during routine traffic stops than during any other activity in the US. So yes things are sadly that bad.

The last time I was pulled over for a traffic violation the officer refused to shake my hand because he needed it free to be able to draw his weapon(or so he claimed).
Actually, arrays in Haskell are automatically memoized and lazily evaluated. So in most practical situations you get memoization for free.

For example, imagine you need to calculate a function f(n) for various values of n (let's say for n ranging from 0 to N). You simply define an array memo_f such that memo_f!n = f(n). ('!' is the array selection operator in Haskell).

Because Haskell evaluates lazily (i.e. not until it absolutely has to), it simply stores a link to the definition of the function for each array element. But once a particular array element is used, that link is replaced by the calculated answer.

I'll post some actual code to demonstrate this in a minute, just in case anyone's interested.
Monads in Perl (take 1)
Hmmm ... if you want fast calculation you should try Fortran 95, I bet you will get a 10x speed improvement versus the Java version. Also the learning curve is not so step as learning assembler and your code is portable to any OS.

From my experience nothing beats Fortran at calculations. If your are using Linux you can use Intel Fortran which is way faster than gfortran and it is free for Linux users.

Paul
You haven't even made it to 'fail'. If you are losing faith during initial development then how do you expect to get through the really tough part of selling / promoting it after release? If you are serious about this then just find a way to get to something released. Otherwise you'll never know if you enjoy or excel at the main challenge of a startup. The only other option is to treat it as a hobby.
Seedcamp UK startups announced
It is complicated and I don't remember all the in's and outs, you can try to get in front of a judge and have him rule that you can provide funding for an independent 3rd party lawyer. He cannot be the same as your defense. But you have to show cause which I remember my lawyer saying that it was hard to do. My lawyer in the end was right you just have to show them that you are not easy to pick on and they will move on. They need to make their numbers and if they spend too much time on you, they miss other opportunities. It is a war of attrition in which you have a severe psychological disadvantage.
I don't think it is the same. A bubble in the stock market is when there is too much money flowing into overvalued stocks. Too many developers will only raise the bar for apps in those fields, and raise the profile of the fields that you mentioned.
HN: What Twitter feeds to you follow?
I'm embarrassingly new to twitter, and am wondering if and how the HN crowd uses twitter effectively? By 'effectively' I mean as a resource that helps stay informed about useful and germane information.
The only option then it seems is to use your common sense

and read books

humans do not change that much.
It's perfectly normal. Double standards are core of our society :)
This was posted here a few months ago. Since then, he's been one of my favourite businessmen. This talk is gold.
Increased budget next year.
If not for the liberal use of cameras the world would never have heard of Neda in Iran. The US is effectively on a path to making it illegal to spread truth... maybe it is just a small sliver of truth. But I would rather be judged on that small sliver of truth than end up in a situation where it is my word against a police officer.

It's an interesting question though.
There is a vast gulf between learning and using.

The original poster obviously enjoys learning new things: he posts on the Clojure mailing list, and hints that he has learned bits and pieces of Haskell. That places him early in the adoption curve. But when you want a language to get things done (one you can "use"), work from a comfort zone - start with a steady base, and branch out to unfamiliar topics. Some people are comfortable finding and reading academic papers as part of their workflow, and others aren't. That's their preference.

Other parts of your time should be spent the opposite way: start at the unfamiliar, and make it familiar. But it's not pragmatic to always work like this.
This looks very interesting. I liked that they provide the command line utility for quick experiments. Search results return very "fresh" social media posts.
"Email them back and tell them to send you a kindle when they get serious."

Agreed ... at least with the point that they aren't very serious about their offer to you, which puts into question some of the benefits that are being posited. They're proposing a wild jump into the dark and expecting you to shoulder all the costs, opportunity and out of pocket (not even a discount???). The idea that you'll be "their goto-guy" looks unlikely; perhaps check out the developer agreement to see if you can even talk about what you learn to others, if you're the sort of person who can turn that into an advantage (assuming the platform takes off in this way).

So I'd say it comes down to how much of a gambler you are (compare Digital Research and Microsoft when IBM came calling for an x86 OS, although note that Bill Gates was very well connected through his parents) and what your current non-Kindle prospects are. Can you turn your current iOS position into something greater? Does an Android or whatever port have a serious chance at getting traction? Right now you have no idea whatsoever if a Kindle app will or even can gain traction; Amazon's success at selling books is as you note elsewhere no indication of their likely success with apps.

Another way of looking at this is that few are likely to buy a monochrome Kindle to run apps on. Many customers have a Kindle for it's fantastic convenience (the ability to read any of a large selection of books while running the kids around town, on a vacation, etc.) and a Kindle app market is a de novo marketing and sales proposition, although Amazon at least has a rather captive audience for the marketing (I'd pay real money to Amazon to have a switch for their site so that I'd never ever see anything about the Kindle outside of reviews). But that doesn't mean they'll ever make any (serious) app sales, beware of the Chinaman Sales Fallacy (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1223405).
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=290785 (nswrapper) and http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-install-flash-on-your-ipad-... (frash)

(not that flash isn't evil...)
As a new father, the most important thing for me was how Josh demonstrated you can succeed in the startup game and still maintain balance in your family life.
Maybe I am just not understanding the true purpose of Monads. I thought they were a mathematic construct which (for lack of a better word, pardon my ignorance) allows Haskell to 'cheat' some imperativeness into it's otherwise purely functional garden of eden. Given that Python is a an imperative language to begin with, what is this trying to solve?

Not trolling here. Just curious.
"what doesn't change with languages is what users typically consider as simple problems.".

If you meant users of the language (vs users of an app built with the langauge) you are wrong.

Consider Text Processing (awk vs Java , even though Java has Text processing libraries), Distributed Computation (Erlang vs C - though you can do DC with C ) , "close to the metal" coding (C vs Scheme), Continuation Passing Style (again C vs Scheme, with a different "winner"), Array processing (J vs Java), statistical code (R vs C++).

What users consider "simple problems" does change with the language used, contra what you said above.

And just like if you start with "Continuation Passing Style is easy" as a criterion , Scheme beats C, or "customized memory management" makes C win over Scheme, if you use "ease of memoizing a function" as a selection criterion you'll end up with a Lisp (over Haskell or C or Java).

Change the criterion and a different language rises to the top. As I said earlier this isn't saying much.
not a lot of folks would want people videotaping everything they did at work

Did you know if you get a Top Secret clearance, you have to have anything related to your work release reviewed for the rest of your life? Being awarded privileges by the government comes with additional responsibility. Videotaping the police is the same as monitoring people who work with classified information; it's just part of the job. If someone is uncomfortable with that s/he should find a different job.
Society as a whole is going to have to go through some major contortions as people get their heads wrapped around the idea that everything -- and I mean everything -- is going to be digitized and recorded.

That is precisely one of the things that give me the shivers about the society today. I understand Mr. Graber's motivation. I also agree wholeheartedly that the "reasonable expectation of privacy" rule has to be applied consistently, i.e. if a police officer can videotape me over the course of his or her work, then I should be allowed to videotape that officer.

That said, what gives me the shivers is that our expectations of privacy, in general, seem to be sliding down a slippery slope of justified surveillance. The first time I read "1984", I was still in school (not even university yet) and it etched itself onto my mind precisely because it's so damn plausible. Everyone would love to think it's impossible because "we would never stand for it", but things keep changing slowly.

A commonplace example is your workplace, where your employer can monitor all your activities on their computers (and I mean all, not just network communication), record your business phone calls or videotape you. Also, it has become commonplace to have to do a drug test when applying for a job.

Another example is the highway toll system here in Santiago, Chile. Certain highways require you to have a device installed in your car to transit them. Instead of waiting in line at a toll booth, your device communicates with a gate under which your car passes and your billed monthly. Every gate also has cameras to record cases of infractions, when a car without the device passes under the gate.

Sure, there are laws and rules that control how all this information can be used. Yet it keeps creeping me out to think that this information is available to multitude of people. Now that information of all sorts can be shared easily and readily on a global scale, it seems even scarier. Now you can be embarrassed, humiliated, falsely accused or harassed literally in front of the whole world.

What creeps me out even more is that our expectations of privacy seem to be eroding slowly. If we're so indifferent to being under surveillance in public or at work because it makes it easier to prove who's right and who's wrong, why does it seem so implausible that in some future we would accept the same things in our homes? After all, wouldn't it help cut down on domestic violence and child abuse?

I hope I'm not coming across as a borderline paranoid nutjob, but I just felt the need to address the issue.
Wow, 4 hours sure sounds fast! Do you know if I can use Authorize.net as a UK company (with a UK bank account)?
A statistic I'd be much more interested in seeing would be police fatalities by incident type normalized by the number of incidents

I feel like traffic stops are also a disproportionately high number of police actions.
I agree that many ideas seem silly after they've sat for a bit, but I disagree that you shouldn't keep track of your ideas.

I get a lot of ideas. I keep track of them. If they fizzle, I remove them from the list.

I simply don't always have the time to jump on implementation of the ones I consider "good" when I have the idea. Also, keeping track of them means that I'll basically never have a point where I'm going "hmmm nothing to do, wish I had an idea!"
I don't see that wasting usernames is a problem. New users are surely far more likely to be able to register their preferred username on HN than on, say, Gmail or Xbox Live.

What do you mean by "digital garbage", and why is it a problem?
I think it's a lot like Robin Hood. Piracy is viewed in some ways as "rob from the rich and give to the poor" which people in general can get on board with. However, breaking the GPL would be more like the opposite. Instead, someone is seeking personal gain/fame (aka the "rich") vs the people who volunteered their time ("poor") and that's just not right.
If you want to install on more than 100 devices, it might be cheap to just buy a second SDK license. But yeah, beyond that its probably less painful to just submit your app to the app store.
If you think of it as a question of ethics, not law, it's perfectly logical. That is; breaking the GPL does not make you a demon because you are breaking the law, but rather because you are being nasty to nice people. Illegally copying a movie is easier to accept, because it is easy to imagine that you are being nasty to the MPAA (if you are at all nasty).
But will there be people who would hire these people?
One issue is that you probably created something that had a discrete 'idea' behind it. I find if you just start coding 'the project' but aren't constrained by a specific idea, but remaining in the same codebase, it is liberating and allows you to cross the 4 week gap. 37signals talked about this when creating basecamp, they mastered a small messaging app first. These days probably half of all web apps could start that way.
I use an emacs org-mode file that is in my github repo of configuration files and other things that go on all the machines I use. Org mode has a bit of a learning curve, but it's powerful and flexible. That's another way of saying it's a mature emacs library ;)

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/orgmode.html <-- article on using org-mode for GTD.
i hope they will get a US branch.. eventhough i believe its wishful thinking..
Washington reacts to 'Top Secret America' revelations
Great great video. As a new father and a girlfriend who complains about me working to hard that was inspiring.
I think geeks would also like the BBC series Saxondale or the Mighty Boosh. I have been an anglophile for many years now and the creative ideas that come from the BBC are very impressive.
Small tips for accessing Gmail with Python and XOAuth
Stop making the consumption of drugs illegal, and it's no longer necessary to have a policeman that looks like a drug dealer.
Wow, the opportunity.co website is unbearable.
Story in comic form: http://www.pbfcomics.com/archive_b/PBF215-Kitty_Photographer...
Sometimes I find myself thinking about the same idea I had in the past because I don't remember why it was a "bad" idea.
The Pirate Party is not dedicated to piracy. It's dedicated to privacy and personal integrity, fighting the patent system and maintaining an open, free internet.
Haskell code: (explanation below)

import Data.Array

f :: Integer -> Integer
f n = sum [0..n]

largeNumber = round 2e6 :: Integer

memo_f :: Array Integer Integer
memo_f = listArray (0,largeNumber) [ (f n) | n <- [0..largeNumber] ]

main = do
putStrLn (show (memo_f!largeNumber)) -- slow
putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber-1))) -- slow
putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber))) -- fast
putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber-1))) -- fast
putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber-2))) -- slow
putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber-3))) -- slow
putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber))) -- fast
putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber-2))) -- fast
putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber-4))) -- slow
putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber-5))) -- slow

When I run this, I see nothing for about 3 seconds (that's the time spent setting up the array). Then the numbers commented '-- slow' take about 1/3 second to print, while the numbers commented '--fast' print instantaneously, because they were calculated previously. (I'm on a recent macbook air, in case anyone's curious about the timings). Obviously to calculate the entire array of values would take far too long (like a week or so).
Here's the announcement post: http://ye.gg/duckco
First National Bank of Montgomery vs Jerome Daly
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard#History) reports: Work for it began in March 1985 under the name of WildCard
A Woman with Two Uteruses Is Pregnant in Both of Them
I notice that the site has a redirect from duck.co to duck.co/#home to duck.co/#AllForums such that I can't just hit the back button to return to HN.

Other than that it looks nice. It just needs more posts to get it going.
Well, the pair programmers would be mentors in #3, but the fact that #2 realizes they need to assign a mentor says a lot of good things about them.

If you're really going to limit this experience to one year, as noted by others #2 or #3 are your best bet, and it sure sounds like #2 is a better/surer fit.

What matters most is what that one year on your resume is going to look like (e.g. how will you be able to boast of success) and what you'll learn about working in the real world. #2 sounds by far the best for those two goals (e.g. pair programming is not widely used). Also note that is sounds like #1 and #2 are going to be a lot more committed to making the relationship work, whereas one bad senior pair programmer at #3 could be the end of your experience there.

Good luck!