skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can certainly see that concern, but actually we do source-level comparisons, and we make it very clear up front that this takes place. It happens, but not at the rate you're suggesting.
> Italy has never been so corrupted in the past (transversally, in every party) as it is now

Are you sure? Did you forget the fall of all the "traditional" political parties 15 years ago or so, and the first rise of Berlusconi?
Of 16,000 congressional elections over the last 100 years only one was decided by a single vote. So in some sense your vote doesn't matter, in that if you didn't vote the result would likely be the same.

But one way every vote contributes is increasing voter turnout. Although your contribution is small, it always counts, no matter who you vote for. Mid-term elections have been averaging 37% voter turnout. As turnout gets smaller election results can drift arbitrarily far away from what the whole population wants, because only a subset is deciding. Corruption and manipulation become easier. High voter turnout is really really important to making the the election a legitimate process.

I wrote about this recently:
http://www.kmeme.com/2010/10/why-you-should-vote.html

A thread with other suggestions why voting might be rational:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/2z6/why_should_you_vote...
Khosla and Gates Betting Big On EcoMotors’ Engine Technology
What is frustrating about this is that I would gladly pay $10-$20 for Swype on my phone, and I have never bought another app. They must be making a lot from preloads, or the preload agreements stipulate that they cannot sell the app through other channels, because everyone I know with an Android phone would do the same. Seems like a lot of lost opportunity.
this is by design.. obfuscate the process to discourage participation.
I'll bet that if any Iridium engineers are reading this they are shaking their heads in disbelief.

Once the hardware decisions were made they were locked in. The lead times in aerospace are nothing like software or consumer electronics. You can't exactly tweak your hardware when it's orbiting the earth at 500 miles.

By the time they launched they must have known of the shortcomings for several years but it was too late to do anything about it. The best they could do is launch and hope that a big enough niche would emerge to fund further development. Sadly, that didn't happen.

It was a bold, daring plan that achieved spectacular results. They were very unlucky it didn't work out commercially - even if the reasons are obvious in hindsight. I don't see how they could have done any better.

Who knows, maybe one day somebody will figure out a novel way to capitalise on it.
The difference between using an API and using a bought third-party package is that you can usually continue using the package if the third party discontinues it or goes out of business. You can also usually choose when to upgrade if your app needs to be modified to handle the upgrade. With an API you're at the third-party's mercy: you can wake up one day to discover that you are out of business because the API changed or went away.

If your business has a dependency like this, you'd better be prepared to close sbop without notice or have an insurance policy. The latter could either be many other sources of revenue with different dependencies, an actual insurance policy that will let you take care of your employees and customers and shut down gracefully, or some contract with the API provider that will force them to pay you to do the same.
Only because they never looked for it. Did this program decide to look for it on its own (having some idea of strategy, that would be impressive)? Or did the creator tell it to find fastest 7 roach build?
Can anyone comment on the prevalence of malware on OSX these days? I was under the impression that it was nil. What is this software for?
> So when you're having a day like the one I describe above, it's the equivalent of showing up at the gym one day and finding you can suddenly bench press 50 pounds more than yesterday.

So it's not so far out of the ordinary to be unexpected?

In my experience, those sorts of variances are pretty common with lifting and endurance running. Especially for non-professional level athletes.
Koobface: the cross-platform worm (Windows, Linux and OS X)
Edit: Fine, I rescind my sass.
To say that most elections aren't decided by a single vote, and thus your vote doesn't matter; is like saying that no one goes bankrupt over a single dollar, so single dollars don't matter.

If you agree that single dollars don't matter, send your extra ones to me please....
The power consumption argument was also applied to SSDs partly replacing HDDs in the server - anyone know how adoption of that is progressing?

All tests I've seen seems to conclude that the power-savings are marginal, if there at all.

It seems that the only way SSDs can save real power compared to traditional harddisks is if you (because of troughput-capacity related requirements) can replace several traditional disks with one SSD.
In 1845, the United States was largely an agrarian society. Farmers often needed a full day to travel by horse-drawn vehicles to the county seat to vote. Tuesday was established as election day because it did not interfere with the Biblical Sabbath or with market day, which was on Wednesday in many towns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Day_(United_States)
Oracle buys eCommerce giant ATG for a billion dollars
It started with my making a note of it. It's other people that inflated the balloon with hydrogen, now I'm just riding it into the volcano.
Wasn't there a famous post a few years back by amazon about their a/b tests resulting in 60million in sales increases, just by changing the button colors?

Everyone working on ecommerce sites of this scale should be expected to know about this stuff
When I have a cold (sneezing, coughing), I go running anyway (like I do almost every day) and I feel much better for the rest of the day; most of the symptoms disappear, even when running in winter :)
Oracle to buy Art Technology for $1 bln
I think it is just incompetence. The more you spend time with government, the more you see that, even though we'd imagine they have things under control, they really don't.
How to Improve Concentration with 50-Minute Focus Sessions
I think its a cultural thing. Most people in the US (In my very uninformed opinion, mostly based on television/movies), are very explicit in their political stand.

In India, its assumed almost sinful to ask for political stance/ "Who are you gonna vote for" in the urban society. (It may be illegal too, not sure)
I would like to know why the designer thinks this is better than a normal bike that is properly outfitted for commuting purposes.
This is beautiful. More things like this, please.
Here in Denmark the participation of the electorate in general elections normally lies above 85%.

You receive your voting voucher thing by mail 2-3 weeks before the election.
This was posted before and killed, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1859155
San Francisco Gaining Tech Workers
A complete collection of answers (and analysis) has also been available since at least 1988: http://amzn.com/0131096532
Monarchy?! Sure, you might be lucky and get a good monarch – but their son could be a total douchebag (like Wilhelm II, the gaffe-emperor who led Germany into World War I). I think that on the whole, elections are less random and more merit based than monarchies.
The Times definitely preaches to the choir.

My main problem with the paper is the fact that many of its news articles are enthused with a relatively large dollop of opinion - and quite often the opinion that's being touted, specifically aligns with points of view which are directly beneficial to Rupert Murdoch's business aims.

His media properties do his bidding on a regular basis; the blatant conflict of interests on display, regularly disgusts me.
Why? It's using technology to inform people of things. How's that not HN-worthy? There's no ban on politics, just a suggestion that it be discussed carefully.
we had this system in the past; it was incredibly racist.

read some history, chap.
Don't vote! You are just sanctioning the killing of a lot of people.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1856791
So you claim that there is nothing of interest in the topics that are voted on. How do you know that if you don't concern yourself with them?

You can either be ignorant or informed. Not both at the same time. Claiming that everything is boring by way of being ignorant of everything is dishonest.

I am not saying that current affairs are interesting, but I would prefer people to be honestly ignorant to simply being arrogant.
The problem is that Irridium was sort of an all or nothing design. You needed the whole fleet of birds to have global coverage. Geo-sync birds might have reduced the count but they cost more to launch and have a very noticeable lag.

I'll make a different assertion, at the time they dreamed it up, the business model had no chance of working. There were no pivots or re-adjustments. There weren't a lot of great data options at the time. Most importantly, if you launched half the fleet and then decided to re-tool for data support or something else, you'd have partial and inconsistent coverage during that retooling and then you're data coverage would be partial and inconsistent.

The gamble was voice was good enough and global coverage was a big enough seller that they'd re-coup the investment and become one of the largest telcos in the world and then by the time the birds died they'd launch next gen ones. It's a dynamic equation, there is tremendous demand for voice, unfortunately there isn't tremendous demand where there is no service.

The only "agile" choice they could have made was to stop. The real choices for the business were to wait (but they had money lined up, how many businesses raise the money and then call it off?) or to go forward. Personally, I just think it couldn't have worked, wrong idea at the wrong time. No agile vs. waterfall debate can change that or make a bad idea a good one.
> If more people don't vote it will be harder for them to pretend they have a mandate to raise taxes, give money to the banks, and start wars.

No it won't, they'll just say people who didn't vote were apathetic.
From an SEO point of view, I completely agree with solost - using subfolders like techinch.com/apps is much stronger than subdirectories or individual sites - especially if the topics are all relatively connected.

I'm not entirely sure how easy it is to do and it would take a bit of hacking with your Wordpress template, but as a compromise you could look at having each category page (so /apps, /widgets, /whatever) have it's own background image - although I imagine completely different themes or very different styles could be a bit of a nightmare.
It is actually slower. Adding an f8 function using the ''.join() method:

sikanda-13:30:02:/tmp$ python f.py
[...]
f1 0.07
f2 0.12
f3 0.07
f4 0.06
f5 0.09
f6 0.04
f7 0.02
f8 0.07

Original code linked in the article: http://www.python.org/doc/essays/f.py
It's for historic reasons tied to the US being a farming society:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Day_%28United_States%2...

http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/thepoliticalsystem/a/whenwevot...

I point this out to anyone who complains about how archaic some things in the UK or Europe appear to be.
In fact, forget the country!
I think 50 minutes is too long. In any event, this has been well covered in other places:

http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2004/10/timeboxing/

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/category/timeboxin...
The latter is how democracy was supposed to work (in the ideal world).
It's true that most people aren't willing, however that doesn't really mean people shouldn't be encouraging them to anyway.

Your post reminds me of people who try to convince me that trying to convince people to vote for a third party is dumb/ a waste of time/pointless since most people won't do it.

At this point it's going to take nothing short of a revolution to have a world where leadership, in addition to technology, is actually beneficial to the masses, at this point it's essentially a parasitic relationship. So as far as I can tell, rather people start getting fed up sooner rather than later.
From the article, I'm guessing the author was using a version <2.x.

Incidentally, I ran my function and f6 from the article on a list of 9600 integers using Python 2.6.3. f6 ran in 0.00303250832159 seconds and my function ran in 0.00421450212248 seconds.
Yes, stupid bug, forgot to remove some console.log statements which breaks on Firefox if Firebug is not installed (but works fine on Chrome & Safari). It's fixed now.
I don't know that, but they probably do know themselves. They claim it to be net success, and the only contrary theory out there is they must be rigging numbers. Unless you're Doctorow you'd want some evidence for that.
I get this error when shooting. Browser firefox 3.6.12

$doc.getBoxObjectFor is not a function at line number 1723. Please inform webmaster.
To be fair there's absolutely no frickin' way that you could predict that people would enter their bank in place of their employer.
Here is the original "Offer HN" thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842768
I do not forget it. There could be a political debate on how Berlusconi went into politics just to perpetuate the previous system, but this is not the right place.

Looking at the Transparency International chart you can find Italy at the 67th place, under highly corrupted african countries:

http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/...

Looking at the historical data you can see Italy going down the chart, from position 29 in 2001 to 67 today:

http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/...
In the US, asking who someone who they're going to vote for is still taboo (at least in my opinion), they're just more likely to tell you their political stance. Plus, it's pretty easy to determine based on any number of things (do they talk about what they heard on the news last night? how do they view the current administration? government in general?).

Granted, I'm not American, but I think I've been here long enough to qualify for all intents and purposes.
Making Hash of Election Day
If you are a Libertarian, you should find and write-in your candidates, not stay home. If there is no known candidate, you should write in "Libertarian", if there is a space to do so. And if there is no Libertarian on the ballot, you should learn as much as you can about the candidates and vote for the ones that best match your set of values. Odds are that you lean either more towards the liberal social values side or the conservative fiscal values side, so there may be a Democrat, Independent, or Republican that leans similarly here and there that you could vote for.
Sounds like Nevada.
"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems."
Jamie Zawinski on alt.religion.emacs
What will Apple do with their $51 billion dollar warchest?
Thank you very much. I'm going to revise my resume.
You've been more then helpful.
For a second I thought you were talking about Reddit.
Storage startup busts object location barrier
Related thread: Ask HN: Election Day tomorrow, what do geeks think of the Tea Party?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1856675
There are ideological divides but we don't seem to have the hot button issues (eg abortion) that the US does. This is I believe because religion does not pay a big part in the Australian political system and our religious institutions don't tend to be hugely politically active.

The ALP (Australian Labor Party) are out "Democrats" (in the US sense; we had a Democrats party here that was something else and basically imploded 5+ years ago anyway). It has its roots in the union movement. The majority of ALP MPs (Members of Parliament, the House of Representatives, often called the Lower House) earned their stripes in the union movement, even now.

ALP support bears some correlation with being "working class" and lower socioeconomic position. Traditional supporters are deeply suspicious of anything that (allegedly) erodes "worker's rights" and of any conservative government.

On the right we have the Coalition, which is two parties: the Australian Liberal Party (don't mistake this with the US meaning of "liberal", they're conservative) and the National Party, which is much like the Liberals but only field candidates in rural seats and have a very rural focus.

Calling this a blue and white collar divide is largely accurate.

The Greens are very much on the left and, like the environmental movements in all developed nations, is largely supported by a young, discontent middle and upper classes. I say this not as a judgement but rather environmentalism is a luxury, meaning you see it in rich not poor countries.

The Greens are basically the "ALP in waiting" and deeply entrenched in university politics (meaning the kind of people who run in or care about student elections).
For those of you looking to do some last minute research before voting today, my web app provides candidate information along with information on the positions each candidate supports or opposes: http://elect.io
Is Google a newspaper?
I suggest keeping a clip file. Anytime you see something you like, take a screenshot and save it (locally, create a gallery on Picasa, etc.).

Then figure out exactly what it is you like about the sample. Break it down, see the individual elements and think about how you'd implement them in your own design.

That way you can learn the techniques (how to fish) and avoid wholesale copying.
This is a website, not a startup.

Why is this better than Reddit relationships?

http://en.reddit.com/r/relationships/
Oracle to pay $1B for e-commerce pioneer ATG
But, rrc has a point about voters requiring something to identify them, even if the reason for the license was problematic. The current system allows fraud which could affect close elections. I don't like the idea of a national ID, nor mark on the head or hand, but maybe just a picture of a registered voter and a date of the picture taken.
ZigBee Technology Market | InfoMov.Com
Ask HN: What languages?
Hi

I've had a project up on the net for a while, and because I'm not a coder, progress has been out of my hands. For many reasons, I want to change this and either assist my partner or just plain take over due to current progress rate.

The project is an online press release aggregator and I'd like to find out what languages/databases I'd need to learn to carry on myself, and where I can find good tuts as well as compilers (for mac) for this?

Thanks
Scvngr taps Google Places to take games global
Point 3 is weakened by the fact that map can indeed be faster. http://codepad.org/SzXcubXy -- in fact, point 2 and point 3 are in conflict, because map() does use a C-loop, whereas list comprehensions do not. As it turns out, point 2 was the correct one.

Also, and this is just on a more minor, pedantic note, list comprehensions basically are regular for loops, except with the use of the list-append opcode instead of a getattr-call pair. This produces a minor speedup, but it's nothing to write home about, honest. (using a different pastebin because it has a feature I needed): http://ideone.com/dT1LG . The story is a bit different on 3.x, where list comps are implemented very differently: http://ideone.com/58FGZ
Images and SEO (seo for photographers)
> I'm not making that assumption.

Yes, you are (at least for the question), here:

> How will voting change the system if no candidate is willing to change it?

You have to make the assumption that people are willing to make the change for that question to be valid, otherwise, it reads like thsi:

"How will voting change the system if no candidate is willing to change it and voters aren't willing to change it?"

So yes, you do assume, for the question, that the voters want change. And if the majority of voters want that change, it can be made to happen. They simply vote for it.
A few days ago there was a post on HN about how economists solved the problem of having prisoners live that were shipped from the UK to Australia 200 years ago: by giving the right incentive (paying for live prisoners at the other end and not just how many you load on in England).

When voting is voluntary, certain groups are incentivized to encourage or discourage other groups from voting. This manifests itself as bribery, legitimate "get out the vote" efforts, making the process of voting difficult and so on.

Basically you've created an incentive for such practices by making voting voluntary. All of that goes away when voting is compulsory.

I'm reminded of the Spce Shuttle Challenger disaster in 2003. I saw a TV show about the investigation into that. After launch there was concern about the visible debris coming off the shuttle. The investigation afterwards showed that there was significant resistance within NASA to investigating that prior to re-entry. Certain people wanted to use satellite imagery to see if there was any damage to the shuttle. Other groups resisted.

The reason this was contentious was that such practices weren't required. The solution? The investigation resulted in NASA instituting a policy requiring such imagery be taken of all shuttle flights.

Once something is mandatory, all sorts of incentives (and the problems they create) simply go away.
Starship Troopers: "No. Something given has no basis in value. When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force my friends is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived."

Voting is so badass.
Unfortunately the real argument against the scanning is much harder to digest for the average person.

But let me try:

1. The machines are expensive and made by a company with a large lobbyist-budget.

2. The threat is over stated, these machines are overkill.

3. The machines grant marginal-at-best security beyond traditional methods.

4. The slow but steady psychological appeasement to being under closer and closer government scrutiny is a threat to democracy.

5. The airlines and their terminals are not private enterprises, while the security and regulations are pure government entities. Since TSA agents are government officials they ought to be bound by the constitution which protects against unreasonable search. If Macy's was forcing people to get cavity searches to enter their store, I wouldn't have a problem with it, I just wouldn't shop there. Being searched at an airport is a completely different situation than entering into a contract with a private party.

5a. The risk factor being so blown out of proportion makes a virtual-strip search of an average no-record citizen unreasonable.
If some code has already been written, shouldn't you learn that language? If there's already a database in use, shouldn't you learn that database?
What I ended up doing is creating http://techinch.com/apps with a full new WordPress install. Currently the main site and the new /apps site are running fully different themes, but I plan to bring them together with a customized WooThemes Canvas next year.

We'll see how it goes!
I clarified a bit what I meant in my post before I realized you had replied. I'm not talking about asking your friends what they want, but representing your perspective based on your situation, education, background etc. As an example, most people here have a unique perspective on technology based on those factors. I'm not very familiar with how elections work in the US, but if possible I would rather people here voted for someone technology friendly than not at all.
Life, simplified
There's still an element of stigma around online dating. When you combine that with the fact that nobody wants to admit to others and especially to themselves that they settled, this site is a trainwreck in the making... assuming it isn't some sort of a prank or something. Nobody intentionally goes out looking for ugly people to date.