skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Slim paid an obscenely low price for Telmex – it was making $1.1 billion yearly profit, and Slim’s company paid less than $900 million for a 10% stake

So he paid $900 million for $110 annual profits? So a P/E of around 8? That's not an obscenely low price, especially if they already had complete market share and premium pricing. The only way to go from there is down, and it's a high capital business that'd most like need lots of capital improvements to stay competitive. For comparison, AT&T is trading a 12 times earnings, but that's in a much more healthy and stable market than Mexico.

I guess getting a 10% stake at 8 times earnings is an okay deal, but it doesn't jump out to me as a great deal. Would you be excited to buy a stake at that price in a high capital Mexican business with no growth potential because it's tapped out? I wouldn't.
RIP Jon Postel (Oct 16 1998): RFC Devotee and Internet Pioneer
"Use Occam’s Razor in interpersonal relations: look for the simplest, most straightforward explanation that assumes the best of everybody."

Works in general, but not when you are dealing with an outlier.
I wonder why Trapini didn't mention Locale.

> When I'm in a meeting or at a film I often forget to
> disable silent mode when it is finished.

Locale can do this with its "Defaults" mode. When a specified situation (such as a meeting) has passed, settings you specify as "Defaults" go back into effect.

I do this myself. My phone goes silent while I'm in work-related meetings. I also have a sound that plays when Locale returns to its defaults, which effectively notifies me that the meeting is scheduled to end.

The necessary components for this are Locale and the Locale Calendar Plug-in from DroidMunkey.
Mandelbrot on TED:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay8OMOsf6AQ
Neat - thanks for that.
That looks really nice. I have something in my .$SHELLrc file that does something similar:

the extract_archive() in
http://github.com/Rydgel/archlinux/blob/master/.zshrc

but yours looks like it takes care of other things like archives within archives.
That's not the feature cx advertises.
I've scratched that itch as well a few years ago: http://porkrind.org/uz/uz
Barclay card's credit card
Tesco Clubcard loyalty scheme
From your link...

The United States began training insurgents in, and directing propaganda broadcasts into Afghanistan from Pakistan in 1978.[54] Then, in early 1979, U.S. foreign service officers began meeting insurgent leaders to determine their needs.[55]

and...

US "Paramilitary Officers" from the CIA's Special Activities Division were instrumental in training, equipping and sometimes leading Mujihadeen forces against the Soviet Army.

Not Taliban, but relevant...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_t...
Do a trial project (but don't call it that). Say a two or three month project for $N. Tell him that's the only project you plan to do with him.

Assume you will get nothing usable in return. Write off the money as a loss. If you're pleasantly surprised with the results then do a bigger/real project with him. If not then at least there are no messy endings and hurt feelings.
Play Crash Course Football online at Y3 Games
Football gets automotive in our bumper crunching game. Drive the ball into the goal in this bumper against bumper soccer game.
(Offtopic: the article you linked to was killed. It's depressing to see the "flag" feature of HN used to suppress topics that are intellectually interesting, but killed just because the ignorant masses happen to find the topic distasteful.

For what it's worth, I know exactly what you mean by "burnt out googing". It's the feeling you get when you wish other people loved to talk about how to solve random problems as much as you love to talk about solutions to random problems. It's the lack of human-to-human interaction to accomplish a shared goal. It's the sour taste in your mouth from realizing just how little thinking most people you're forced to interact with actually do, and consequently conclude that most people don't care about being stupid. And since most results of most google searches result in wading through wave after wave of stupidity, sometimes your brain says enough and forces you to actually talk with someone who will hopefully make the whole process just a little bit enjoyable.

I have personally felt "burnt out googling", just like you.)
Shutter Island and Religion
Don't listen to this guy. Create your web app.
It's in UNIX Programming Environment by Kernighan and Pike, chapter 3.
Does anyone have any actual numbers on 4chan's traffic or hardware setup?
Trenton Apartments for Rent
Trenton apartment rentals & apartments for rent. Choose Trenton apartments for rent from the CLV Group portfolio of over 7200 rental apartments & townhouses across Ontario.
hi Jacques,
If this is not too late, I would love to get a subdomain :
exo.ww.com == going to ==>
sbstest.typenfind.com
Dan
Without going into what are probably the actual reasons for these war the public justification for them has never been that people are "upset about this one particular event". The US and its allies aren't directly avenging the deaths of those 3,000 people.

Rather it's recognized that if the perpetrators had the chance they would probably have killed 30 thousand, or 3 million. So the public justification for the "War on Terror" has been to prevent similar future events.

See e.g. this interview with Tony Blair where he makes that exact point:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-september-14-2010/excl...
Think about some other angles too. Is he prepared to be your employee? For how long? Do you think he could take you for granted? What if it doesn't work out for one of you? How bad could it get? Are you both prepared to handle the consequences, especially on a personal level?
Bug fixing: Five tricks we can learn from doctors
Medics have to "bug fix" problems with people. Here are five tricks we can learn from them and apply to our own bug fixing in operations, programming or any engineering field.
I'm paying 30% income tax. Am I giving charity to Govt?
Keeps telling me my HN profile doesn't include the required string.

Why is this so complicated ?
I agree that the priorities of the US, and other western govts may be awry. But terrorism is a problem that needs a solution. And the debate on whether the bureaucracy around intelligence gathering and analysis has improved to an adequate level is an important one.
I've never had a chance to use dynamic programming in real life beyond school work. For "challenging" algorithm work in real life, I did topological sort for evaluating dependency graph, bloom filter for skipping lookup, NFA for executing regex-like rule graph, Rete for faster rule evaluation, extendible hashing for fast index storage, complex event flow graph with SQL-like nodes. Those are the ones I can remember now.

BTW, I did got bit by O(nlgn) vs O(n^2) issue, despite computers being fast nowaday. Once I used bubble sort in a cache system. It was quick and simple. Things work fine for small size cache but slowed down substantially when size > 10,000; n^2 => 100,000,000 ops. Switching to heap sort did solve the problem. So yes, understanding algorithmic complexity does help in real life work.

However, 99% of development are run of the mill coding.
This is something I want to deeply understand some day. 1.8 people die around the world every second, and here we are getting pissed over a few thousand dead 9 years ago, the US media is drumming up an old fashioned religious war, and meanwhile 150,000 humans each with their own lives and family die every day. Human psychology is a funny thing.
there's (sort of) related (for-pay) web apps as well:

http://www.metafy.com/index.html

http://www.diffbot.com/howitworks

http://www.aignes.com/

http://sharedcopy.com/public/andthensome

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L5dhj2w...
This looks fantastic. I just need to add support for some more archive formats (.rar primarily) and this will fill a need thats been bugging me for a while.
Couldn't agree more :).

<off-topic>

I've tried Quora and Vark. But until I'm able to ctrl-t and type a question into a chrome-like omni-bar those Q&A sites will be a last resort

</off-topic>
In India's dummy democracy, Govt is wasting 10,000 crore rupees on UIDAI project where 80% Indians are living under 20 rupees per day.
The Lean Startup in 2010 @ TechHub Friday 15th October, London
Jonah Peretti on Viral Media
It's not clear for me if he only coded for ten days. Or he just sad down and thought all algorithms and stuff, and coded in same time.

More over there was no social media sites like twitter, facebook, etc, at that time :)
Sorry nothing to do with "Platonicity" which Taleb strongly criticized. A "greek among Romans", is imo to describe somebody educated, vs a farmer like Cato the old, well versed in refined art vs. propaganda "pompier" political art (to show Power more than beauty or harmony; Romans could only copy Praxiteles), interested in Philosophy more than law. The Circus for the People of Athenes was tragedy by Aeschylus and Sophocles.
Also in Unix Power Tools by Powers, Peek, O'Reilly and Loukides, article 50.8 (3rd edition).
“Yes, but laptop batteries do not last anywhere near long enough to make this feasible …”

Uhm, I never turn my MBP off, I always just close the lid. I’m not seeing any diminished battery life. My 2007 MBP already behaves pretty much like an iPod touch or an iPad. It’s mostly an UI problem, not a Hardware problem.
I also don't understand what jwz's problem with the JS numbers is.

Once you have bit operators, you can do bit arithmetic. So yes it's a bit slower than when having pure integer types, so what? The JS engines were something like 100 times slower up to recently, and nobody really, really cared until Google did V8.

I really think Brendan was right in his decision and I don't get what jwz would like, except to maybe have explicit types in the language, like, hm, JScript.NET or ActionScript.

But even there as far as I know ints are 32 bits. 64-bit OS use is still not so common, so at the time the languages were introduced it was the best engineering decision.

jwz misses this time.
Great article! You want to talk priorities? I am sorry but I think you reasoning is a little flawed, let me explain:
It's not the ~3000 9/11 dead that this article should make you think of but the 100s of 000s of deaths that ensued in wars and other post-9/11 me-hem.
Yeah, I enjoyed it because I haven't read a Stallman interview yet that wasn't about licenses, the FSF, politics or some thing that he strongly disagrees with.

This reminds one that Stallman is a great hacker and not just a campaigner.
Like many others, I've scratched this itch too:
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/code/hacks/untar
a simple bash script. The comments in the source list debian/ubuntu packages to install to support all formats.

It detects and extracts .7z .a .ace .arj .cab .cpio .deb .lha .pmd .rar .rpm .tar{,.gz,.Z,.bz2,.xz} .tnef .zip (including .jar, .xpi etc) .zoo and MIME/uuencoded mail attachments without ever splattering multiple files over the current directory. Haven't compared to dtrx.
What's the definition of REST? I'm tempted to say: "easy to use from the command line with curl only".
I loved the entirety of this article. It felt really genuine like I was being told a story by my grandpa. I cannot explain it, but this article is worth being reminded of in my future.
Raeford NC New Homes
Are you bored? I-Am-Bored.com lists places to go when you are feeling bored.
How can there be a problem in having google.ww.com redirect to Google and facebook.ww.com redirect to Facebook?
Here's a comment I made on LW about Plantinga sometime ago:

"I remember stumbling across Plantinga's modal argument and going "what?" For convenience of onlookers, here it is in a more digestible form.

Premise 1: Besides our world, there are other "logically possible" worlds.

Premise 2: Some cheeseburgers are totally awesome.

Premise 3: To be totally awesome, a cheeseburger has to exist in all possible worlds, because being "logically necessary" sounds like a totally awesome quality to have.

Conclusion: Therefore, if a totally awesome cheeseburger is possible at all (exists in one possible world), then it exists in all possible worlds, including ours.

(facepalm happens here)"
Wooo! looks like i'm not the only one. though my intention was to leave the book lying around in someplace like a cafe and where someone may pick it up and continue the chain.
It's just much easier to have someone specific to blame than just concepts (like hunger, poverty, war, etc). Specifically when these concepts tend to be far away from developed countries. Much easier to feel a direct threat if your enemy has a name or a face and invades/attacks your space. And for that reason governments can get away with these agendas you mention :/
Take a look at http://zemerge.com/
You rock, bro! Also, some very amusing webcams on ww.com - I spent much of today watching two guys in Taiwan play ping pong in hilarious shorts.
"RIP Beniot Mandelbrot, fractal man. Assume he's survived by a number of smaller versions of himself." Eliot Reuben / @ereuben
On a website I was working on recently I addressed this problem by slightly obfuscating the email address in the HTML:

<a href="mailto:user(at)example(dot)com">Email us</a>

I then wrote some JavaScript to modify the href attribute to be the real email address. So for the vast majority of people, they'd get a working mailto: link, but for the rest, they'd get a mailto: link which required them to replace (at) and (dot). Not perfect, but I suspect it stops the vast majority of bots.
At whatever age someone dies, it is sad. It's always sad. Let's not deny that.
It really needs an iPhone app, so when I'm at the movies and see a really cool trailer I can add it to the list. The app needs to be ultra smooth though.
Yes, and that's why you need both...
Bollywood Wallpapers for Mobile - Free Download
bollywood Wallpapers for Mobile - Free Download
Kaspersky KIS/KAV All Version Keys (16-10-2010)
clickey http://venturesocially.tumblr.com/post/1326809078/leanstartu...
Hunting the Hidden Dimension
click on the "Transcript" link to read the article.
If you need to be reminded something is wrong. As far as I understand, the guy made Emacs and GCC practically alone initially. Today every internet user uses the code compiled by GCC whether he knows it or not. And it's not only the technical aspect why it is so. Actively caring about licenses and politics were necessary to reach the current state.
Hello, could I please have kitten.ww.com to www.kittenlabs.com? Or arien.ww.com if the previous one is taken?

Thank you for the service by the way, much appreciated :)
Nice idea. I'll be adding a few domains to the list. However for most of my domains, I'm more interested in developing them rather than selling or trading.

Is there a place to list domains you're looking for help in developing sites for?

A few of mine:

ContractorJobs.com

Knee.com

LocalGasPrices.com

Plop.com

Trustworthy.com

Worn.com
um, yes?

the way i see it exi is to reduce the time to parse xml. but i'm not terribly familiar with exi standard (draft) and would like to know what's so terribly wrong with it.

so, care to elaborate?
The inventor of microfleece refused to patent it.
> an abominable language that manages to wreak incredible damage on something pretty good (ECMAScript) in surprisingly few steps

Can you please give some specific examples? I'm curious. I think you mention yourself that you can get faster execution with it, so that's the positive side. What's the damage?
Do you want to get into a philosophical discussion on what constitutes technology?

No. My question was unambiguous.
lxml.html does a pretty good job too, and offers elementtree and xpath querying. http://codespeak.net/lxml/lxmlhtml.html

Recently I used Beautiful Soup in a very simple program to scrape playlists from Soma.fm: http://www.michielovertoom.com/hobby/somafm-playlists/
1+i minutes of silence for him.
John Huchra Dies at 61; Maps Altered Ideas on Universe
Whether it's overkill or not depends entirely on what the servers are being used for. Without actually working there it's hard for one to say for sure.
You core complaint seems to be that maintainers don't maintain their software. This is sadly true in many cases, but I would argue that GitHub has actually improved the situation.

First, by making it trivial to get patches to the maintainer. Prior to GitHub, if you wrote a patch for a project, you would have to track down the appropriate channel to submit the patch, then jump through any hoops required. Whether it be mail directly to the maintainer, a patch on a bugtracker (probably also requiring signup), mail to a mailing list (again probably requiring signup), patch having to be in a particular format, etc.

The second problem is what to do if the maintainer doesn't respond? Sometimes you might end up forking the project and hosting it in yet another random web page. Sometimes you might just end up dumping the patch onto the net, in the vain hope that someone else would find it if they had the same problem. I have done both, a number of times. With GitHub, the patches are clearly there as forks.

At least with GitHub, the barrier to writing a patch and getting it in the face of the maintainer is almost zero. This is an improvement. If they don't respond, at least it's obvious to users from the proliferation of forks, and if they're lucky they can find the particular fork that fixes their issue.

Solving the human problem of maintenance is a big challenge. If GitHub solves that as well, I'll be amazed.
Ask HN: Zero programming experience and badly want to learn. Where to start? 
I have zero programming experience, since I work mostly on the nontechnical side of start-ups. Ruby and other languages are extremely interesting to me and I am definitely interested in learning how to use them, but I want to have a basic idea of the time involved. Was it weeks/months/years until you felt comfortable writing an entire Web app with basic functionality?

The problem I have is that I have at least one idea that I'm really interested in fleshing out, and I'm wondering whether I'm going to have to sit on it for a year if I want to code the web app myself. Like I said, I'm usually on the non-technical end of start-ups.
5 Great Iphone Apps For Web Developers And Designers
#startups (on Freenode) is an IRC channel, as jacquesm noted.
Tell HN: dnsexit.com is down since hours
Check your domains, dnsexit.com has been down for probably half a day now - not only their website, but also their redundant DNS servers.
The last statement in the article is interesting. "Has philanthropy solved any major social problems in the past 50 years?" Can philanthropy solve social problems in the first place? It feels like charity is more effective when it is a short term issue, like meeting the needs of population hit by an earthquake. Longer and bigger social problems? Anybody know any positive examples out there?
What profound ideas this man brought to the world. Just finished a project for a guy who mentioned he was deeply inspired by Mandelbrot. With the help of a few friends, he built the world's largest VW bus. Can you spot the hidden Mandelbrot set in this header image? http://www.walterthebus.org/the-scoop/tribe-walter/
IBM Abandons Harmony for Java Unity with Oracle
Hey serverdude, hope you'll enjoy it as much as I do.

Thanks for the propositions but it's ok.
Another fascinating story about Feuerstein from his Wikipedia page:

When the Malden Mills factory burnt down on December 11, 1995, Feuerstein decided not only to use his insurance money to rebuild it, but to also pay the salaries of all the now-unemployed workers while it was being rebuilt. Feuerstein spent millions keeping all 3,000 employees on the payroll with full benefits for 6 months. By going against common CEO business practices, especially at a time when most companies were downsizing and moving overseas, he achieved a small degree of fame....it appears that applied ethics in business has positive consequences as Malden Mills continues to garner lucrative Department of Defense (DOD) contracts for 'smart' products that interweave fiber optic cabling, electronic biosensors, and USB ports into polar fleece fabric.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Feuerstein
Rest of Project Coin explored, advantage Java 7
People morn the death of babies, who have accomplished nothing. Ought we not then morn to an even greater extend those who have accomplished something?
Did you even read the article? This wasn't about some random chatter happening in some far corner of the globe it was about:

- An actual identified terrorist showing up at a US flight school. The agents who had him in custody were begging for permission to investigate what was on his laptop and they were denied.

- The team that was charged with the job of testing airport security were actively prevented from doing their jobs (and later, after 9/11, disbanded)

I don't see how anyone could brush this off as just "20/20 hindsight".
Could you expand on the tuning of tcp slow start?
Are you referring to net.ipv4.tcp_slow_start_after_idle?
Amiga Workbench, while not a Unix was very capable of this. I used to do 3D Renders in Imagine while making music on OctaMED SoundStudio without drops. Likewise, you could usually carry on during heavy floppy access, whereas most other OSes of the day would hang temporarily.
That reads like "Slaughterhouse five" by Vonnegut.
It seems that Taleb wants to separate Mandelbrot, a sophisticated, educated, refined, and übersmart person, from the rest of the crowd.

* "To Benoit Mandelbrot A Greek among Romans" is the Incipit of The "Black Swan" Taleb's book.

* Taleb calls Mandelbrot the "poet of Randomness" in the chap.16 "Aesthetics of Randomness"

* "Intellectually sophisticated characters were exactly
what I looked for in life" (and they are seldom). Taleb p.255 The Black Swan, 2007.

* He could also have said an "Athenian among Boeotian" but Romans are powerful (vs. Boeotians) and Benoit Mandelbrot had to fight the establishment with his visual research. "Pariah amongst French Mathematicians". With his Fractal images, his work was "remarkably easy to understand" for the general public.

* Unlike in Rome, the most popular shows in Athenes were not Circus WWE gladiator fights, it was going to Aeschylus or Sophocles tragedies.

Taleb's homepage http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/
You have two options:

1. Lawyer up.

2. Walk away.

Either way, it may be helpful to at least see a Lawyer first.
I found some screenshot of a program which can render Mandelbrot fractals extended to the 4th dimension.

If you have Java and a (recent) NVidia or ATI graphic card you can download the software here http://jogamp.org/jocl/www/ (it is one of the demos). It requires OpenCL.
I study maths and if you asked me what 30/4 was, I'd respond, "it is 30/4, obviously".

Math is not about calculating. I rarely perform calculations on numbers greater than 20, and I do not even remember when was the last time I performed a long division. What is this "2 digit math" you are talking about?
The caveat in paragraph number 19
Theoretical Guide to Thesis Printing 
Getting your thesis printed is often as challenging as the writing of the thesis. If you do not do a good job of this by hiring the best company available, your thesis will not be given a good grade. Therefore, knowing how to select your printing company will benefit you.
Would love to see faces / avatars added like in the Facebook Group, that's a killer feature I think.
You're right. I read the vague headline and assumed the obvious. This is a tar bomb prevention tool and looks useful.
You make a car with intricate, soft-touch interior engineering and you'll get a bigger profit margin from rich first-world people.
Short hairstyles
Short Hairstyles provides an in depth guide featuring the most popular face shapes and the short hairstyles that suits you.
Decycle the bottles into Old Navy fleeces.

If he had patented it, would there be the same 'push' for residential plastic recycling? Would we just bury or burn it?