skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is truly a case of what the reader brings to the text, in this case, I suppose.

My habitual optimism about people's reasonableness led me to assume that Greenwald was being a bit facetious with the apocalyptic tone and/or "decline of empire" talk, in order to draw attention to the fact that the fiscal crisis is more acute than many believe or aggregate government statistics might suggest, in a "death by a thousand cuts" kind of way.

He also choose the examples that he did (complete axing of public transit, for example) to touch on things generally regarded as improbable in a country considered a) wealthy b) highly economically and technologically advanced c) generally providing a First World-normative level of infrastructure, public services and quality of life to a majority of its citizens.
Understood and that agrees with my much more distantly acquired picture of Japan.

What I've gathered is that Japan was divided into a low risk/high gain segment (the 1/3 or so who were salarymen or above) and a high risk/low gain segment (pretty much the rest).

If that picture of some decades ago is true, what has and does it mean as that path to the future (for those who could make it) got and continues to get increasingly closed off?

Great economic catastrophes tend to result in changes of social contracts and resulting secondary effects. Surely some, perhaps a lot of that has been happening in the last couple of decades?

(I do like your Twilight analogy. :-)
To me, if I know that Dave intentionally named an entire software project just to say "Fuck You" then his opinions don't matter.

Sorry, Zed, but that's simply not true.
Many years ago, when I was first learning game programming, I insisted on implementing everything myself, including low level 3-d math and writing to video memory manually. Now, I'm working on a new game and I've created a script-binding technology that makes it very easy for me to incorporate third party C/C++ libraries into the game's scripting engine, like the way the Borg assimilates technologies. So I've had experience at both extremes of NIH.

Here's what I've found: using someone else's library is NOT faster than implementing the code yourself just to do a certain task at hand. The code you write for yourself does no more than you need it to, and you implicitly understand how it works. When you're trying to use someone else's library to accomplish a simple task at hand, you have to learn all the library's concepts tangentially related to what you want to do, and then you can spend days tracking down a silly bug because you misunderstood some small detail of what the library is doing (i.e. the library violated the law of least astonishment). At best, it takes THE SAME time to learn/debug code with a dependency as it does to implement it yourself, provided you're a good programmer.

But, I still recommend learning to reuse code from elsewhere. The benefit of hooking up to and learning a third party framework or library comes after the task at hand, which is that once you've made the initial investment, incrementally enabling other features the library provides begins to cost less and less than reimplementing them yourself, because the initial investment of learning and debugging the foreign code begins to pay back.

So you have to look at it as being like an investment which loses money in the short term but has the potential for earning back interest in the long term.

But here's the most important reason to drop NIH and embrace code reuse: Do you want to push the boundaries of what is possible? If you envision program-space as the set of all possible programs, it must be clear that there are programs on that space that lie outside what one team or one man can write by himself in a lifetime. If all you're doing is accomplishing one task at hand, by all means make the cost-benefit analysis and choose reuse or not pragmatically. But if you're interested in pushing the boundaries of the state of the art, then to reach the "interesting programs" that lie in program-space outside the boundaries of what one man can write in his lifetime, you must do it by extending the work of others who have gone before you, just as all progress in science is accomplished.
That depends on the book. I find large, or tightly-bound, books to be very difficult to read, precisely because their physical form is difficult to handle, and therefore distracting.
It's not exhaustive, but two years ago I asked "the community" what they thought on Microsoft and Ruby and.. http://www.rubyinside.com/is-windows-a-first-class-platform-...

At Euruko 2008, I chaired the evening panel and brought it up too. A room of 400 people went to silence when I asked if Windows support was considered important to Rubyists.
Looks like we're headed down a path that reflects our philosophical outlook more then anything else. To each his own.
It didn't kill it. It did something worse. It withdrew enough resources and manpower from the project to effectively kill it without saying as much.

Now it's obvious why IronRuby was relicensed under the Apache License just a few weeks back.. no-one would have bothered picking up the reins if they hadn't.
Regarding tooling, Java has been massive investment in this area compared to ruby/python etc which is one of the reasons for it good IDEs.
So, thinking out loud here, is there a place for an academic hostel? A low-rent complex with dormitories...

I'd say that cheap living, in exchange for lacking comforts (privacy, being able to cook your own meals, etc) is the sort of thing that only works when you're in your late teens/early 20's. Which is, unsurprisingly enough, when most people who go to college/university are attending.

And to be honest, as someone in his early 20's, it gets pretty tiring after a while. I'm all for low rent and being around great people. But, I'd rather pay a bit more for those comforts and still be around previously mentioned (or other) great people.
See Scala for a concise static typed language.
And the service is just a convenient abbreviation for having http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=andymoe permanently open in a separate browser window.
The reason most people choose dynamic languages is because the most popular static languages have fairly weak and unhelpful static type systems. The benefit of confirming that a variable is an int isn't worth the effort needed to support that analysis in most static languages, and where it is we can shove the trouble into unit tests.

C# is a little better than the big 3 (C, C++ and Java), but you still trade off between helpfulness and verbosity. F# is a lot better IMO, but it's still fairly obscure, so of course not many people are going to be using it.
> in this circumstance C# lets you write many methods, use generics, or (now I believe) use dynamically typed variables.

Or you could be explicit about the interface you are writing the duck-typed code against. The problem here is that you can't assign an interface to an existing type, and adding interface declarations results in more code. It will be interesting to see whether this functionality (extension interfaces and inferred interfaces) makes it into C# in the next 5 years. My guess is that it's functionality which is possible to add, but we're not there yet.
Interesting idea, but not exactly accessible for lots of mobile devices. Pretty bloated compared to image-based captchas as well.
I don't see this as creepy at all, have you never checked PGs latest comments or that of a commenter with interests/opinions you share?

anyway, thank you for making this!

ps. I'd prefer rss
In my college experience, I did the most learning when working my way through the problem sets with my fellow students. It would have been an awful lot harder without that (and a lot less fun). One would have to be fairly motivated to succeed alone in a room watching a video over the internet.
The link includes other responses from other people and about other articles so just the link may have confused people.

As to the attribution; noted -- thanks.
What motivates an attack like this?
Well this is good but what I would really like (and was just thinking about since yesterday) would be the ability to follow a conversation. Some time on an article, the a particular thread starts to become much more interesting than the story itself. At those times (and it happens very often) I wish HN would allow me to "watch" that thread. Sure I can bookmark the link of the thread, but its just a pain to maintain that. And also I usually forget to open it again
I had a look at similar numbers a few years back to back up a debate I was having and was surprised. The UK and US spend in the same order of magnitude per capita on public healthcare.

Sadly, though, this isn't good. The US's healthcare budget covers a minority of the population whereas the UK's covers almost everyone. The only reason the US's budget is inflated is due to the extreme inefficiencies and price gouging that are rampant in the US healthcare market.
tongue-in-cheek... natch.

But more to the point is a prodding for the desire to learn differing programmatic paradigms.
Agreed. I recently decided to go all out and open on the Internet and embrace all that social networking has including some of the inherent creepiness. So far I've received little to zero odd encounters / phone calls / emails. It's kind of relieving actually but certainly blurs the line of where my Internet persona ends and my real privacy starts.
Is this what you're talking about? The layout is messed up for me in my manage area: http://twitpic.com/2cjzay
Wasn't this the same argument made when Apple acted like a douche and banned certain tools for iphone app development? It didn't make sense then and it doesn't make sense now. How is providing better tools for development on any platform dilute that platform? This is honestly a stupid argument and people should stop putting it forward.
The Politically Incorrect Guide To Ending Poverty
A strange project. They are asking for donations, but there is no software to download and no real indication that this actually works.

Also, there's no description of the protocol/algorithm used nor do they plan to be open source. So, we have no way of evaluating its effectiveness or security.

But he did get lots of press for himself. Well done. Now shut up and ship.
The dimension of the configuration space of the juggling pin is six: the minimum number of parameters that specify the position in space is three, and the minimum number of parameters that specify an orientation is also three.

The quote comes from section 1.2 on configuration spaces.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicm/book-Z-H-9.html

Can somebody explain this? Isn't the number of parameters that specify an orientation two, totaling five?

Pick two atoms in the pin and specify the location of one atom. Now the other atom can only be located on a sphere around the first atom. The sphere is a 2d surface for which you need two parameters.

It is not enough to specify the position of two atoms. You need to specify the positions of three atoms. The first atom can go anywhere, so it contributes 3 parameters. The second atom is limited to the 2-D surface of a sphere around the first atom, so its position only contributes 2 parameters as you said. The third atom is limited to the 1-D edge of a circle around an axis that connects the first two atoms, so its position contributes 1 parameter.

If you choose the position of the point of a pencil, and also a point in the center of the pencil's eraser, the pencil can still spin, with the pencil lead as the axis.

Another problem is that you can encode two real numbers into one, for example by interleaving digits. So you could specify the entire pin with one real number. What exactly is the problem here and how can you eliminate it? You need to impose more conditions than simply continuity, because you can make a continuous bijection [0,1] <-> [0,1]^2?

The concept of dimension of a vector space is handled much more rigorously in proof-oriented linear algebra textbooks. This book gives a loose definition for the dimension of a configuration space, which is just good enough to be able to follow the issues they are talking about. You looked too closely at their definition and discovered a flaw. Dimension is not really the number of parameters required for encoding a position in the space, but this can still be a good enough working definition for many problems if you don't get too fancy about your encoding.
Executive Leaves Apple After iPhone Antenna Troubles
practice (keep coding, work on your own projects, work on projects with others), and go find someone who you know to be "good" and read their code.

it really is about that simple.
Drawing application in 1kb of Javascript
Because we saw pictures of their "advertisements", and they were quite obviously designed to trick people into thinking they were invoices, or at the very least make them think they wouldn't be listed in the real Yellow Pages without paying the fee - only the fine print indicated otherwise. The link posted in that original thread had a picture of one of them, and should be at http://avramc.posterous.com/united-directories-federal-court..., though Posterous appears to be out of commission at the moment so I can't check...

Edit: from a later post on this topic, a working link to the image: http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/disreputa...
it's fairly large. There are really two factors in a DoS, though, total throughput and packet size. Obviously, your incoming pipe can only handle a certain total throughput, I mean, that's what most of us get billed on.

However, most routers and firewalls also have a limit on packets per second they can process, on top of the throughput limits. I've got a 100Mbps commit on a 1000mbps pipe, and I can handle 1000Mbps of 'normal' traffic... but I got taken out a month back by a 200Mbps DDos that used very small packets. My router couldn't handle it. (now, if I had spent money on a better router, it wouldn't be a problem. As far as I can tell, even, a reasonable software router could have handled it.)

Another way to measure this is the capacity required to absorb the attack. You can get he.net bandwidth for around a thousand dollars a month per gigabit, and he.net is about as cheap as bandwidth gets, so to soak a 50 gigabit attack, you'd have to have fifty thousand dollars a month of spare capacity.

(I'm sure there are further discounts available between the 1GiB and the 50GiB tier... but you get the idea. )
Hacking 2.0
Massive ice island breaks off Greenland
I can get away with simple dynamic typing in small Erlang projects. But building a large project in Erlang/OTP without static type analysis is hard. You will debug for hours some stupid bugs, which C++/C#/Java compilers usually find for you.

I started using type specs and dialyzer - it finds typing errors, and make building complex systems in Erlang much easier. The only problem that dialyzer requires intermediate step of building PLT, which sometimes can takes 20 minutes and more, but only once per project.
"Reached on his cellphone, Mr. Papermaster declined to comment." - so now we know he already got a job at Nokia.
This article struck a chord for me. Most of the people who form an integral part of my life were met by pure chance. My angel investor was coming back home one night, after a party, and the street dog I take care of started jumping up on him. So, I pulled him off and chatted with him for a while. He told me to come back next day and that was that.

I do the same thing with everyone I meet from security guards to random strangers. Everyone has something you can learn from. Everyone has a story it's just that most people never listen.

On the other hand, I've noticed that if you go out with a fixed agenda in mind; I want to meet angels, or something. There is a higher probability that it won't work. Most people have this ability to sense other people's agendas and that puts them off. No one wants to be used, but everyone likes an intelligent/decent conversation...

[edit: I forgot to add one of the most interesting ones. Recently, I met this woman in the park, who was there with her dogs. I started playing with them and I picked up a conversation with her. It turned out that she was an artist (mainly a dancer) and I spent half an hour with her talking about the beauty of things around us. We analyzed the shades of the trees how beautiful they were dancing in the wind, while the light played with their leaves. We talked about her dogs and her work.

It had to be one of the most interesting conversations I've had in years, and the best part is that she liked it. :) ]
I wonder what features do you like from Haskell, as everything seems to be tied to its type system
I was wondering why I so rarely get any Digg love
Malcolm Gladwell isn't alone in suggesting that the solutions to power-law type problems, which usually require focussing on small parts of the problem rather than making sweeping changes, are unpalatable to government. Jane Jacobs, in the Economy of Cities, suggests the same thing. However, she suggests it's due to the desire of government people to want to cause change rapidly: sweeping changes provide this promise in a way that spot changes might not.
We had been throwing around the idea of creating a quick demo that doesn't require signing up and doesn't persist your data. Recently we decided that we wouldn't implement that for now because we consider it a feature that your data persists in one place and want the trial to be full-featured. We also didn't want anyone to be confused about whether the data gets saved ("so I put some stuff in Atombox and now it's gone?").

I like your idea of persisting the data and using a URL as an access key, though. I hadn't thought of that.

Do you think a screencast would be sufficient to get people over the initial stand-off of not wanting to sign up?

Thanks!
-1 for sloppy, unreadable code and poor presentation.
When it comes to prototyping nothing beats Ruby or Python. The initial solution won't be pretty or maybe even correct and it will contain tons of bugs but it will give you an indication of the viability of your solution. Nobody starts with a ready made program in their head ready to be coded and dynamic languages usually help you get started with a solution much faster than static ones. At least that's been my experience.
A (Saudi-RIM) Deal to Avert BlackBerry Ban Could Be Precedent
"a war in which our government overtly deceived the country into entering"

Well, as I recall reading a bit more than a decade later as I came of age and tried to figure out WTF had happened to my country, LBJ didn't feel he had much choice after his predecessor had 20 days before his own assassination arranged the deposing and assassination of the leader of South Vietnam and his brother/adviser. You break it, you own it, one all too few honorable LBJ's acts.

That said, nothing can excuse LBJ's criminally incompetent prosecution of the war.
I think this raises a good point. Chance encounters are not really all that random. If you go out there with a genuine personality and are a decent human being that is interested in what makes other people unique you are going to be ahead in life. You are essentially making chance encounters all the time.
I think it boils down to the economics of having children: Most women (about 90%) have them sooner or later. It helps to have two parents to provide for the kid(s). Lots of other stuff grows out of this basic fact, including the typical female emphasis on "attractiveness" -- because that is (theoretically) how you get a man.

Short version of a lot of reading I have done over the years: European women put a lot of emphasis on getting assistance from society and government with the burden of bearing and rearing children. This has helped narrow the gender-gap on income, generally without pushing up the divorce rate to American levels. But in America, women generally have taken the political position of "Don't tread on me" and "Get the fuck out my way and I will show you what I can do, damnit!", which is a historical American political position dating back to the American Revolution. This works fairly well -- until you have kids. Women who are unmarried and childless make about 98% of what men make, given similar experience and education. But, overall, American women make about 2/3 what men make, the same figure listed somewhere in the bible as their difference in value (ie from about 2000 years or so ago).

Some of the most frustrated, baffled women I have known are women who thought they could make it on a man's terms in a man's world and did quite well for themselves -- that is until they had children. Then it all fell apart and they couldn't figure out wtf happened or how the hell to fix it. I think I am still alive and doing better than I "should" be because I never tried to make it in a man's world on a man's terms. I followed a female path of success. So having kids unexpectedly early derailed my immediate career plans but did not derail my life unrecoverably.
Nearly everything good that has happened to me that was caused or assisted by other people (most things) has happened in a manner that is difficult to see as anything but the accident of thousands of favourably coincidental factors.

It seems obvious that one can increase the probability of this occurring by interacting with more people and creating more opportunities, from a purely statistical perspective, for something useful to emerge. The best way is to do so in a goal-oriented but not overly-specific or insincere way, as you say.

Why does this merit an article or a book?
This is entirely fair -- my intended point is that C# is /not/ yet concise for operations that are sugar-sweet in Ruby, and that's why I don't love to use it.
So you think software patents are evil? Check out the DNA patents.
In my defense, whenever I complain, its about the opposite ;)

A class I signed up for three semesters ago was listed as "Theory of Programming Languages". Sounds like a great class, right? The syllabus said it would cover Common Lisp, Prolog and Smalltalk, in addition to us doing a "serious" paper studying another language in-depth, on our own.

However, when it came time to take the class (two semesters ago), it had been renamed to simply "Programming Languages" in preparation for future changes to the curriculum. Instead of going over the neat things about the language (S-expressions in Lisp, how dynamic and flexible Smalltalk is, etc), the professor spent a month per language going over over syntax. The hardest thing we had to do in any language was to flatten a list that had lists within it.

The curriculum changes that were being prepared for? The biggest one that I've heard of involved replacing Smalltalk with PHP. The reasoning for this? "Students complained they didn't get any practical knowledge they could put on their resume out of the class."
I'm going with this instead:

If it's a core business function -- do it yourself, no matter what.

Mostly because it's practical advice that's commonly ignored, rather than an observation.
Hashrocket are a bunch of great people running a great company and they went through a lot in the past few weeks.

No. The majority of the people at Hashrocket may be great, but the people at the top that were involved in this mess are just scam artists.

Scam artists that managed to stay just legal enough to keep themselves out of jail, fair enough. But that doesn't change the fact that they pulled some scummy moves to trick small business owners out of their money.

Some of that stink has rubbed off on Hashrocket, for sure. But that's not a shame - it's what happens when a company has top executives that display a complete and utter disregard for ethical business conduct.
My First True Diva Moment (Sean Carroll)