skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I too love Ruby and their blocks, but I do have to disagree with Rob's statement that C#'s "block" syntax is "obtuse." Certainly it was in the days of straight-up delegates, but the additions of Func<T>, Action, and anonymous methods have really cleaned that up and made it nice and easy to use. Also, I'm not entirely certain what Rob meant by calling LINQ a "Tinker-Toy syntax".

C# example of blocks (loosely based upon Rob's examples):

//the action argument is the C# version of a block
// - by specifying Action<Artist> I'm stating that the block
// - will take 1 parameter, of type Artist
public void ParseKey(XDocument doc,
string elName,
Action<Artist> block)
{
//using XLinq instead of Nokogiri... *jealous*
foreach(var node in doc.Elements(elName))
{
var artist = new Artist{
Name = node.Element("Name").Value,
ArtistId = (int)node.Element("ArtistId").Value
};
block(artist);
}
}

//called by:
public void Main()
{
var doc = XDocument.Load("..\db\artists.xml");
ParseKey(doc, "Artist", artist=>{
//this is an anonymous method, the equiv
// of a Ruby block. "artist=>" is the equiv
// of |artist|
Db.Save(artist);
Console.WriteLine(artist.Name);
});
}

Certainly it is a bit cleaner in Ruby by way of:

1) Nokogiri is super awesome.

2) Ruby's dynamicness means we don't have to have type ceremony everywhere.

That said, they're pretty equivalent in terms of functionality and expressiveness to me.
I mean anything that can be copied without destroying or removing the original.
BIT operations in PHP (a simple example)
When it comes to Startup Tasks, There can be only one
does everyone want to retire...ever?

I'd say that especially the types of people who hang out here would get completely bored stiff if they did ever retire.

The work we do (programming etc) can be done into your 80s,90s,etc. Sure, people will probably want to slow down a bit, and when sight starts failing etc but it's not like we're sportsmen or builders or anything strenuous.
Microbenchmarking Mono's new GC
Have you tried this site

http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/
Google link: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Times%27+website+visits+fa...
"if you want to get access to the source materials and editorial decisions used to assemble the stories, or to be able to see the journalists at work (for example validating source material), you might pay a subscription. That way people who wanted a deeper understanding could pay to get that."

That seems like a niche inside a niche inside a miniscule market... surely
Certainly a useful service. I know this because the way I used to accomplish this earlier was, create a Google customized search and manually enter the sites that I bookmarked with delicious and search from there.

So you got that covered, and I will use it.

However, I just signed up and imported all my delicious bookmarks and did a search for a tag and the results were not so impressive. Only 5 with historious and 17 on delicious.
Hopefully this will get better.

Looking forward to using your service. Good job!
First some advice you should take: Check out Bob Brinker (http://www.bobbrinker.com/portfolio.asp)

I don't worry about retirement because when I was 19 years old and working in the valley I happened to catch his radio show when he said to pull out of the market. It saved me $20,000 that's still working for me today.

(The 10 year numbers might look low right now but keep in mind the Dow was DOWN 14% in that same time frame)

Second some advice that's based on my semi-educated opinion: 401(k) is a scam for anyone under 50. Yes your employer might match it but even the risky portfolio of a 401(k) is usually very conservative and the guy running it usually isn't the firm's star (no one ever got rich managing a 401(k) accounts). If you're over 50 and can't afford to lose the money than go with that but if you have some time I personally think it's better to take a little risk and hopefully get a bigger reward.
> about as funny as a joke about [..] Americans [..] or italians

Delivered properly, these can be hilarious.
You found a great article yesterday - now you can't find it!

I think the above style of copy works far better for connecting with readers and calling out the problem you solve. It's shorter (always good) and assumes the reader agrees with you (the ones that don't agree aren't your target anyway - so why equivocate? Plus, in fact everyone has had this problem).
My startup is working on exactly this problem. Our customer development reinforces that people - of all ages - know intellectually that they're supposed to save. But they have no idea how to start, or if they've started, if they're actually on track to have a decent retirement.

You can request an invite for our preview at http://www.blueleaf.com and shoot me an e-mail to sachin@blueleaf.com with HN in the subject and I'll make sure you get in before we launch. If there are any pony requests - "someone should really do [x]" - I'd love those too, even if you're not interested in our preview.
Memorizing Shakespeare, though, has nothing to do with this process. Of course one needs a working memory of the text to put it all in context, but rote memorization of a passage is orthogonal to understanding it.

I can only say that memorizing a large passage of shakespeare was demanding and interesting to me in ways I hadn't anticipated, yet still easier than I expected, and the passage and (positive) experience has stuck with me since junior high school (... and that's a long time).
As a UK resident I think the Times missed a trick in their pricing model. Rampant speculation follows: I expect a decent chunk of their visitors are people who receive links via some other Internet medium (social networks, blogs etc.) and who click through to read it. These people are now instantly turned off. If The Times had a decent micropayments model in place (say £1 for 10 articles) this might be a lot more attractive. Unfortunately I don't think Murdoch cares about casual readers.
I want to "retire" so that I can work on things that i think are interesting without having to figure out how to monetize them.
Animals as Leaders.

http://www.myspace.com/animalsasleaders
It kinda already had made me very popular. My colleagues and friends now come to more for advice more often and give more gravity to what I have to say, because they know whatever I say would be well thought out and efficiently said (more than anyone else they can turn to, anyway). Also they know I would listen to there questions and try to improve (customise rather?) my advice to their unique position.
I'm little bit disappointed by fact that almost every text on Unix IPC (including this one) gives too much emphasis to System V IPC primitives, with their one global 32-bit namespace for everything and other brain damage.

Anything that you can do with SysV IPC can be done better using sockets or mmap-based shared memory (or POSIX semaphores, which are by the way implemented by mmaping one page of shared memory, at least on Linux).
My retirement strategy is to die young. If I start making a lot more money or my cost of living magically decreases over the next decade I might reconsider this but otherwise I don't think social security is going to provide any quality standard of living. If I can't continue to work (which I don't mind doing) I plan to check out. (sad but true)
I want to retire in only one sense: I don't want to worry about money, and I want to be free to go do stuff. Anything.
Rules of the web, right.

One media buyer said The Times had doubled its online advertising rates since the paywall went up

Also remember that subscriptions to the site are virtually pure profit, less hosting costs. Unlike actually selling the physical paper which covered distribution.

Add those two together and suddenly you're looking at them making more money than they did before the paywall.

So the exact opposite of your rule.

Still, jury's still out in my opinion, lets see if they can actually sell those spots and if the uniques stabilize as they still look like they're trending down. We've also got no figures of actual subscribers.

I'm sure if it works Murdoch will gleefully be broadcasting it to the world. For the moment, the experiment hasn't run its course and can't yet be called.
You really have to wait for them to come to you with a problem, or at the very least, give them an optional lead in (e.g. "I was having trouble with #{subject x} last night as well, but I think I've got it now. You want me to see if I can't figure out what's got you stuck?"). That way you aren't forcing your way in, or coming off as "I'm smarter than you, just come over here and I'll explain it idiot", which I've seen happen plenty of times (and have done it myself a few times, I'm sure).

On the other hand, once people do start coming to you, you'll find you understand the topic better at the end yourself, and they'll greatly appreciate the help. If done right, they probably won't hesitate to come back for help again, which ends up in another win-win situation for you. Just don't swing to the other side and end up doing their work for them!
I had looked at these tutorials initially when I started to develop for iPhone and found them to be lacking in depth.

Personally I found the code examples that shipped with xcode (especially iPhoneCoreDataRecipes http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/samplecode/iPhoneC...) to be the most helpful when starting out.
...and the pharmaceutic industry also spends more money on marketing and advertising than they do on research.

I'm not so sure they would be worse off without IP protection either.
But that's sort of the point. I don't have a problem with this article which is largely good advice but I think it's useless. Everyone knows what he's saying is true yet people aren't saving.

As someone whose friends are predominantly in their 20s I can tell you people generally give 2 excuses...

1. "One of these startups will eventually work and I know I'll cash out on at least 1 big IPO before I retire so it doesn't matter"

2. "I don't know anyone whose saved for retirement and the average american household owes 20% more than they make. So the Government will have to do something and even if I don't have enough money I'll be taken care of"

So the bottom line is people are in denial and you can print this article up and tape it to their heads and it still isn't going to fix that problem
It's great that you were able to save $20,000 and miss out on a market decline, but why does this mean you no longer need to worry? If anything, you should take this "win" and continue to build upon it. For most people, there is no point where you've saved "enough" - more is always a good idea.

Second some advice that's based on my semi-educated opinion: 401(k) is a scam for anyone under 50.

This is why conventional advice is to only contribute as much to your 401(k) as to receive the employer's matching contribution, which is essentially free money. The rest of your retirement savings which you want to invest should go into an IRA, which allows you to control what exactly it is invested in.
How ironic is it that an article about the abject failure of a paywall is hidden behind a registrationwall, which has proven to be almost as much of a barrier?
£1/30 is £1 for 30 days - the current price.
We've yet to see what happens when the full price arrives.
My 80- to 90-year-old relatives are in nursing homes with failing minds and bodies. That will happen to almost all of us eventually, and your quality of life then depends on paying for quality care. No matter how much you love your work, there will probably come a time when you need to support yourself from savings, not salary.
I would say that not writing code that requires this. Only valid reason for wrapping something in CLI/STI is when you want to directly control some timing-critical hardware, which is something that simply does not belong into userspace. I would say that in most cases such code does not even belong to kernel, but into some interface controller of said hardware. Other cases are pretty well handled by normal APIs presented by kernel (mutexes, signal flags...).
If people will not do a kind of work we value without having their rights to the results protected, than it is necessary to do so.

Perhaps. Would people stop making music, stop writing, stop inventing if we removed IP protections?
He had dramatic ideas for free, wireless power transmission for everyone. His wealthy backer (was it JP Morgan?) said he couldn't see the profit angle in that and wasn't interested, saying something like "Where do you attach the meter?".

Not exact quotes, but the source is my print version of : http://books.google.com/books?id=40NzjS5FunkC&printsec=f...;
What if you don't plan to retire? If you're making money doing something you love (in my case, web development), why would you ever need to retire? To rest? To do all the things you've always meant to do but didn't make time for when you were younger? To see the world?

I'd rather do that stuff while I'm young; learn a new language in my spare time now, start that band now, travel to foreign countries now - hell, I can do my work there if I need to. I think retiring makes sense for people slogging it out 40 hours a week at jobs they hate, but it doesn't make sense for those of us who actually find our work fulfilling.
It seems to me that it is unchangeable in the aggregate. A certain level of unemployment is simply part of our system; the workers are literally incapable of changing the economic variables which create that level. Moreover, a large proportion of the employed are poorly-paid retail workers or laborers; again, it is not possible for the actions of this group to change the size of the different segments of the job market. As such it is a game of musical chairs as to who ends up with the shit jobs, who ends up without a job. The fact that an individual can escape by outdoing his peers only masks the fundamental hopelessness of the situation.
Depends - they probably give free online access with paper deliveries. The question is how many unpaid signups converted into paid? If that number is lower than the decrease in advertising revenue due to lower traffic, then it turned out poorly.
Ah that sucks, it looks like they've stopped selling it. I'm sorry for the bad link.

Adrafinil helped my focus but totally destroyed my sense of humor. Nothing seemed funny at all and I missed a bunch of subtle jokes. It was kind of like medically induced Aspergers for me.
Au contraire. This is just with the reg-wall getting in your face on arrival for the first month of transition.

The paywall only went up in the past week or two.

And yes, they're still counting all the referer traffic that arrives, gets dumped into the paywall and then leaves, as "traffic". That won't last long.
While I'm certainly glad that Phil & co are finally replacing the inadequate WebForms view engine with something better, I'm nonplussed that the "something better" still isn't at least as good as Spark - especially since Louis (the creator of Spark) works on the Asp.net team now.

I realize that Spark's fake-HTML-element syntax would not be everyone's personal favorite (reminders of: Cold Fusion, WebForm server controls), the fact is that Spark provides a good bit of "value add" on top of the normal view engine goodness.

Example (in Spark):

<ul>
<li each="var p in Model.Products"
class="alt?{pIndex%2!=0} isFirst?{pIsFirst} isLast?{pIsLast}">
Product: ${p.Name}
</li>
</ul>

Would output:

<ul>
<li class="isFirst">Product: AAA</li>
<li class="alt">Product: BBB</li>
<li>Product: CCC</li>
<li class="alt isLast">Product: DDD</li>
</ul>

The alternation of rows and detection of first/last row is an _extremely_ common scenario for web developers that Spark totally gets right, but so far Razor just ignores. I'm glad there will be an option for the masses that are just using whatever is packed in the box, but so far I'm not seeing what all the fuss is for those of us that long since moved on from the built-in ViewEngine.
Kodak Video to iMovie - How to import kodak video to iMovie
I'm trying Epiphany now, thanks.
They're not giving away free online access with deliveries, no.
Oh boy! I'm looking forward to when this is deployed on US citizens. It will only be a few years out, you know. Maybe it will be another great innovation like Tazers, which police can use to attack citizens as an alternative to being civil. Need a handheld version first, though. I guess this model will only be good for repressing protests.
I don't know any good collections but di.fm has a radio station for it now http://www.di.fm/chiptunes/
That's fine. This article is aimed at the vast majority of office workers that live paycheck to paycheck, and have no idea what they're in for.
Are there any web startups in Nigera that have been acquired or make significant profit?
I don't think it has to be all bad. The article is talking about people saving enough money to live purely off their savings for 30+ years without working, which seems like a kind of silly goal. Why would someone spend something like half of their adult lives not working? At that age, I expect I'll either have enough presence of mind that I'll be doing some sort of work (even if reduced), or else I'll be senile/decrepit, in which case I definitely hope I don't drag out my end for 30 years. The idea of planning for 30 years of complete idleness seems crazy.

Rather than retiring at a specific fixed age, it makes more sense to me to retire at a specific time-til-death or health status: say, when you're down to 10 years of life expectancy, or too sick to work, whichever comes first. Actually I think 65 was probably chosen because it was once roughly the age where those things were true.
Even more so because he doesn't mention the major danger zone of signals -- your code needs to be async-safe:

https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/seccode...

Signal handlers will be called in the middle of execution of another function. There's no way to tell what locks may be held or what resources may be allocated/reserved; you can only safely call functions that have been evaluated to be and declared async-safe.

That doesn't give you many options within a signal handler, but it also gives you a very good reason not to use them at all, if you can avoid them.

On the BSDs and Mac OS X you can use kevent to handle signals via EVFILT_SIGNAL, which means you can avoid this mess altogether. On Linux, you have signalfd() which will let you monitor a file descriptor combined with select()/epoll()/etc to handle signals.
I don't want to speak for the parent, but in my opinion, there is a clean separation between matter (ultimately consisting of atoms) and the information embodied in the arrangement of those atoms (eg in a book or DVD disk).

In this scheme, property rights would protect the atoms themselves, but not the information of how they are distributed.

I don't know what it would mean to regard the atoms themselves, without reference to their surroundings, as information, as you seem to imply.
You'll find it is still not really the same, they took quite a bit out of the UI and old.thesixtyone.com sadly isn't quite right.

But it is better than the new UI
frankly I think retiring in the U.S. just won't be a viable option for many people...the cost of living is just too high.

I mean think about it....to retire properly, you need to pretty much put away all your spare money for decades.

What I think will happen, is people will just start retiring to other countries where the cost of living is so small, that you can live comfortably on 10-15K a year.
Looks like the site is down. :-(
Ask HN: Generating business lists by industry.
About 2-3 days ago there was a post on here where someone suggested a great way to look up small businesses pretty comprehensively. I did search but none of my terms are getting it.

I'd love to hear that URL from someone AND start the conversation in general: What tactics do you use to generate lists of potential customers?

One neat trick I learned when dealing with bars and restaurants, was to link up with the Health Inspector & Liquor License databases (open to the public).
I suppose it's not legal in most places, but I think if I reached an extent of failing mind where I was unable to do any sort of productive work, even part-time, I'd take the euthanasia option. What's the point of just sitting around senile in a nursing home for years on end?

I do still agree some significant savings are needed, e.g. for the case where your mind is still reasonably good, but you need physical assistance. But this article is talking about thirty years of living off savings! I definitely do not want to live thirty years of my life in which I'm completely unable to do anything but sit in a nursing home living off my savings.
I didn't say I stopped investing but I don't have to worry because even if I don't make any more than the return I'm making now (in the worst economy on record) I'll still be making more in interest than I should be taking out (if I use around the average amount that retired people need per year).
The data on India is interesting. I would have thought there would be more than 50 million internet users in India. That's only about 4 per 100 people.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.BBND.P2

These numbers might be projections
Problem with typical employee agreements.

Build something -> Your own

is

Build something -> Company owns
Could this be used a form of "organic" pest control. Would it deter insects from crops? If nothing else it would seem to keep birds away from berries, etc.
Basically, if you're not either a Wall St trader, or in a government retirement plan, or a company owner, then you're screwed.

Quote from the article:

"In other words, if you have saved just $25,000 -- and remember, that describes about half of all workers -- you are less than 2 percent of the way toward your goal. Your future definitely doesn't include cable."

My situation is that I have diligently saved 12-14% of everything I've ever earned, in the 12 years I've been in the US, into a 401K.

Sadly in those twelve years, I've endured 2% mutual fund fees and two market crashes, all of which hit my savings pretty hard. In fact, I lost money after inflation is taken into account.

So at 42, I basically need to build something I can sell and assure myself of some income over a reasonable time period. In my case as an engineer, I need to build a software company.

I also need to stay healthy, live as cheaply as possible, and shed as many expenses as possible once I get nearer to retirement. Boat or RV living looks like a great way to do that. Certainly paying the fixed costs of a house or apartment is going to be a killer for those on a small income.
The big advantage of 401k is that it is a tax deferred account which can be a good amount depending on your tax bracket. Also they don't have to be limited to just a small number of funds, some companies also provide the option to invest on your own( if this is not an option at you company, have a chat with the person running the benefit plan) and if you leave you can roll it over to a rollover IRA at any broker you want. Finally, if your company does provide a match, that is money you are essentially throwing away for what is usually a very small percentage of your salary.
Webvan 2.0
They're also spared from distracting things like rice.
Ask HN: How do I sell a PDF document?
I've got a useful business document that I think others would be interested in. It describes how to do something and provides data and text that people might want to copy and use themselves.

Are there any services out there that will let me do this and manage the downloads, licenses etc.
Yes. I saw that I few days ago. It's a nice site. Wouldn't that mean 2 separate timezones, HN's and the Daily's?

I would still love to know how the rollover of each day happens.
You could try contacting Yahoo about the email, I'm not sure how well that would work, but you've got tons to work with on the domain name.

You're you, he's not. Dispute the domain, how it's your name and your address: http://wdprs.internic.net/

Additionally check out http://www.icann.org/en/udrp/ if you want to go further.