skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the US, recently a number of small overnight delivery services have consolidated into "regional" overnight carriers, thus offering delivery areas large enough to entice large shippers without requiring national coverage.

In California, for instance, there is Ontrac (http://www.ontrac.com/) which covers the six Western states, offering rates 40% below larger competitors. Amazon.com started using them last year, and has been steadily increasing usage. There are similar regional consolidations centered on New York and on Texas (http://www.ontrac.com/compprofileregionalcarriers.asp).

It appears that these were built by uniting a number of smaller local services by adding a "backbone" to them, don't know on what financial terms.

London certainly has a large number of very good delivery services operating within the M25, mostly on-demand (and fairly expensive). Some of these could perhaps be consolidated similarly, and likewise in other regions.

FWIW, my first-hand experience in the UK is that none of the national carriers (not even UPS and FedEx!) is nearly as good as UPS and FedEx in America; the Royal Mail is just about as bad as the wretched US Postal Service. So there is likely a business opportunity here.
His point is that owning a majority of the shares does not necessarily imply controlling a majority of the board seats.
What was the development time of the webapp in each of the frameworks?
Thanks for the link, but look again: it says those two tests survive in addition to the traditional TSM test.

As for the last question, there's always a risk of an issued patent being thrown out for obviousness when one tries to litigate it. I wouldn't think this changes that much (although the KSR decision, on which this is based, might have changed it).
Really interesting article. I can't help but notice that he used ruby in his example code. Anyone know if this is simply for illustration purposes or is it already possible to use ruby to write hadoop map/reduce jobs?
Believing for so long that I needed someone's money to build something.

After being unemployed for a little over 3 months earlier this year, I built a product on my own (instead of going for the safe job option, and taking the huge of risk of, you know, running out of food money) and managed to get it acquired by a media company here in Sao Paulo.

And that was quite possibly greatest lesson of my life.

Take risks. It pays off.
Learn to skim, it's not hard.
I can't find any more info on either the axe or the incident, despite the fact that the incident was apparently reported on by magazines.
This isn't just another education policy article. This is a manifesto by Rhee and Fenty, the (only?) people who managed to do something about this disease.

Here's something I didn't know. If you've seen Waiting for Superman you'll recall that when Rhee proposed contract changes to pay teachers more as long as they would allow bad teachers to be fired, the teachers' union blocked the proposal from even coming to a vote. (How evil is that?) But they did eventually get one, and here is what I learned:

In truth, when the union finally allowed them to vote, the teachers passed it overwhelmingly, by 80% to 20%

That's a really good sign.
Oh come on, this is at least somewhat funny or approaching neutral. No need for all the downvotes.
True, but if you own your domain, it's possible. If you don't, you're stuck. For example, if you wanted to switch to WordPress, there are plugins that allow you to easily redirect old URL schemes to new ones.
If you go with App Engine, check out Django-cms and Vosao, two ready-made CMSs designed for it. Might save you some time building your site.
Can I do your homework for you and clean your room while I'm at it?
Judging from the dating site of theirs I once used (Nerve), "low production values" is their corporate mantra.
I'll start by adding Peter Cooper's hackerslide ( http://hackerslide.com/ ), which behind the curtain uses my ruby API, ruby-hackernews ( http://github.com/bolthar/ruby-hackernews )
> The revolution began with VHS, which moved porn out of the theater and into the home. This made watching pornography private, an advance that created millions of new customers overnight. But to buy the stuff, you still had to venture out to the store, and who knew who you might run into?

But when you buy something online, doesn't the credit card company (or PayPal) know that you went to the store?
An evil dictator locks up all the academics in his country in a time of war.
As the war worsens the army platoon left guarding the detention facility is called away to the front, and leaves the academics unattended in their cells bottled water, canned food and no can openers.
When the war is over and the dictatorship is collapsed, the detention facility is opened up.
It's found that most of the humanities and social scientists have survived, having opened their cans by throwing them randomly at the walls until the cans broke open.
The physicists had figured out the optimum angle at which to throw the can in order to reliably open it.
Several mathematicians have suffered severe malnutrition, having successfully proven that "there exists a unique optimal throwing angle theta ..."
The cell of a topologist was found empty, though a muffled screaming could be heard from one of his cans. A can opener is fetched, and the topologist is removed, covered in food, mumbling about an error in sign.
You can go surfing in Mar del Plata. Google brings up a couple of Argentinian surfing forums. Maybe ask there?

No idea about skiing in Chile.
They're making it "less difficult," i.e. easier to pass. They claim that's ok because "silly patents [are] not the main cause of problems," so presumably they think they have some leeway.
You are no fun, mate.
I'm at the outer edges of the 14th, so when they do manage to deliver it tends to be in the afternoon.
I live in India.

While food, rent, etc. are much cheaper here than in the U.S., there are a few things software developers need that cost the same, or even more, if you are living in India.

* Paper books are cheaper (local low-price editions).

* eBooks cost the same.

* Hardware is more expensive because of levies on imports. For example, the 15" MacBook Pro costs almost USD 1660. (In the U.S. it is $1200.)

* Software licenses purchased over the Internet cost the same. (Examples: TextMate, UltraEdit, etc.)

* Software licenses purchased through local resellers, subsidiaries, etc. are more expensive. (Examples: Delphi, and probably others).

* Web hosting (if you decide to host with a reputed service provider in a 1st-world country) costs the same.

So, even if the basic cost of living in country B is X% lower than in country A, the difference in the cost of living for a software developer will be significantly less than X%.
They're running a contest to get devs to build stuff using their API. Nothing published yet it appears, but poke around here periodically for updates:

http://appsfordevelopment.challengepost.com/
To play devil's advocate, a single open platform like Android would leave plenty of room for competition.
Japanese phones can surf hacker news maybe (after printing out all of the javascript source to screen) but the rest of the web is sort of illegible on those browsers.

Video calls work, sure. For 75.6 yen (US$0.93) per minute:

http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/charge/bill_plan/plan/val...
Perhaps there's an opportunity in translating apps over to Japanese.
Sure, but their point is that paying for non-theater porn was still a public act. Nobody's going to see you walking out of a website.
The Scene Will Kill You
The point is NOT to sell the biggest number of phones, as individual units. The point is to make the most profit and a race to the bottom in a market already saturated with what amounts to 50 identical wannabe iPhone clones will not be very profitable in the long run.

The point that the author of the original blog post was laboring over, was that as Android will have a larger installed user base at some point in the future, and therefore he thinks the smart money is in making Android apps. He's wrong, of course, but he is entitled to his opinion. As I detailed above, hardly anybody actually buys an Android phone, it is rolled into their contract. It is a me-too product that, while being functional, is nowhere near the iPhone in several important categories, namely user satisfaction, App developer profit, and per-unit phone profit.
I agree that standardized tests suck. I distinctly remember how much they suck. A system based on standardized tests is going to suck. But you know what sucks worse? Utterly incompetent teachers. If we can't even identify and get rid of the most egregious offenders - the kind who tell children "I get paid whether you learn or not" and then proceed to read the newspaper in front of the class -- what hope do we have?

Everyone always talks about how overwhelmingly complicated these problems are. No doubt that's true, especially if you accept certain premises. But there are also some no-brainers. The ideas that teachers get jobs for life, you can't fire a teacher for underperforming, and layoffs proceed in order of seniority are mind-bogglingly stupid and evil (as Rhee writes, running the schools "for the benefit of the adults in the system, not for the benefit of the kids"). No one can tell me this hasn't had devastating effects.

If the best we can do right now is apply crude and mediocre metrics (like standardized tests) to stanch the social hemhorrage that is the failure of our public school system, we'd better do it. Real education, the kind that prepares whole human beings to do great things with their lives, is absolutely what we should shoot for; anyone working as an educator ought to have that in mind at all times. Nevertheless, a system that produces trained rats is not as evil as one that turns out prison fodder.
He changed the page in the interim. It now is more descriptive.
That's right, but you still don't have enough privacy.
Maybe most of japanese websites have a mobile version ?
Not to diminish the contribution from shabda - but what would really interest me is hearing about these frameworks from the perspective of someone who has launched and maintained a complex system, not a toy app.
It's hit or miss. Looking for venue information when you're out and trying to get somewhere is frustrating -- most venue sites are designed for full browsers.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with John pointing out how many dead bookmarks he has today.

Drop.io was designed for temporary storage. My point is that all its links would have expired even if it was kept running.
Microsoft Kinect Hacked? Already?
The Hidden of Sexual Abuse | Your Classified Articles
1. Ads
2. What issues? I doubt ownership can be proven for any of it.
Or, heaven forbid, in a body cavity.
At the risk of appearing too knowledgeable about this subject...

The cultural landscape of recorded sex is changing. The availability of sexual media is breaking old taboos about recording sex acts and amateur pornography is scaling up in every way. This is a new sexual revolution.

I look forward to the day when sex media holds all the taboo of personal vacation photos. I think eventually everyone with access to a recording device will record themselves in every aspect of life.

There have always been attempts to push in that direction:

http://sexinthepink.baywords.com/2010/10/24/free-culture-por...
No I haven't, it's been done and tested a gazillion times and been explained by people more adept to science than you and me. I don't need to dip my foot in the water to figure out I'm going to get wet.
I regret all the times I was afraid of doing something.
There is also hnbooks (hn-books.com)
Can you elaborate on why not? The board exists to run the company on behalf of the owners. If you are the clear majority owner (51% - heck, let's say 75%) - in what way can the board possibly be stacked against you unless you willfully let it?
Great idea - there are a lot of available programming cycles from students who otherwise spend time on personal projects or games. And while that's of course fine, it would be even better if they were contributing to FLOSS. Both for FLOSS and for themselves.
The Third Wave of the Web Will Be Uniquely Personal
I don't see a private message option (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30088, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75407), so I'm replying to your most recent comment to ask: Did you ever find the story you mentioned at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1386010?
The VAST majority of database transactions operate correctly in READ COMMITTED mode. A vanishingly small amount need REPEATABLE READ, and even fewer need SERIALIZABLE, which, in reality, is not actually truly serializable in any MVCC database. The transaction isolation semantics in SQL were created before MVCC databases took hold and generally only roughly represent their intentions in an MVCC implementation.
Exactly, there were examples of startups who had a product at just the right time. But I've never heard of startups who waited until the time was right and then succeeded.

Given the nature of startups and short runways, it's a gamble for a startup to depend on having the "timing right". There are much safer and proven methods for building companies, but its fun to think about.
Ready to be an open source contributor but don't know where to start?
Oyunoyna
Why would a founder give up ownership....

They would give it up because someone offers them money in exchange for that ownership.

As long as you aren't seeking investment capital and are retaining full ownership of your company, you have nothing to worry about with regards to losing your company.. buy if you want others to invest their money - you will likely have to give something up in return...
Marx implicated just about every major feature of capitalism as part of its impending demise, so whenever capitalism superficially looks not as good as it used to be, there's probably some Marx quote about it. He called so many things, it's the broken clock principle in effect.
I'm not sure this is very good advice. The people that are likely to comment here (as with product reviews) are those with unordinary experiences. Yours was positive and I am glad for you, however, for every good experience like this I suspect there are many that regret such actions.
Agreed. I'll always take an imperfect assessment over no assessment, and imperfect accountability over no accountability. The "it's too complicated" crowd needs to get on board or out of the way.
The way I read it, they're not deleting any tests, but rather just providing additional case law guidance on three of them. The reason the other four aren't included is simply that there is no case law to be discussed for them, presumably.

The notice includes this paragraph:

Although the other rationales discussed in the 2007 KSR Guidelines are not the focus of separate discussions in this 2010 KSR Guidelines Update, it will be noted that obviousness concepts such as applying known techniques, design choice, and market forces [the items not discussed] are addressed when they arise in the selected cases. The cases included in this 2010 KSR Guidelines Update reinforce the idea, presented in the 2007 KSR Guidelines, that there may be more than one line of reasoning that can properly be applied to a particular factual scenario. The selected decisions also illustrate the overlapping nature of the lines of reasoning that may be employed to establish a prima facie case of obviousness. Although the 2007 KSR Guidelines presented the rationales as discrete, self-contained lines of reasoning, and they may indeed be employed that way, it is useful to recognize that real-world situations may require analyses that may not be so readily pigeon-holed into distinct categories.

Additionally, keep in mind that the USPTO can't change the test of obviousness. That is the role of Congress (and, some might argue, the federal courts). The USPTO is just giving advice to its patent examiners of its best interpretations of the existing decisions.
Negative probabilities? Perhaps useful in financial math ...
"The below text is a notice from the USPTO about tests they’re removing in order to make it less difficult to pass the test for obviousness"

Am I the only one how finds this was unnecesarily oblique? I needed to read it over 3 times to understand whether the tests had become more or less strict.
I learnt Indian classical music till I was high school and then had to completely give it up for different reasons.I haven't practiced it much since then and I regret it badly. And I really regret not having been much involved in extracurr. activities in college
Craigslists is probably your best bet.

There are Hacker News meetups here in BA every couple of weeks. Also, there's this thing called Palermo Valley (http://palermovalley.com). Check it out.

My email is in my profile.
I think we're at the point where if you offered every traveler a choice of a screened flight or a non-screened flight, most would take the non-screened flight.

I suggest we all write our Congresscritters and explain this. I don't think protesting to the TSA, at any level, will accomplish anything at all.
Nothing official, but it would seem like something useful, like the new Books site.
If they are willing to be honest, they can publish the code in the condition it's in. What's the extra work in uploading a tarball or exporting a single version to a site like github or Sourceforge? The paper (and the data, which should be published as well) provides all the context needed.

I suspect the extra work involved in publishing code is because the code is in such bad shape that it would decrease confidence in the work that depends on it. If that's the case, then it's all the more important that researchers establish it as a standard, non-optional part of publishing research.
Sending Key Logs to Remote Server via Safari Extension
FWIW, I've been using Flask. It seems to be the one having the most traction and support these days.

But I think frameworks are not that important. I use Flask mostly for its HTTP request handling functionality. But everything else is my own (e.g., the overall setup, configuration etc).

I think what's most important is understanding that loosely coupled components are the way to go. Know how your scripting language loads and manages modules and try to get to a simple convention on how to organize your code. Minimize the use of ready-to-use extensions and just try to effing know. how. things. work. Glue code together yourself. Document religiously how you did it[1]. It'll save you a world of trouble.

The one tool that has been central to my web development work in Python is pretty much framework-agnostic: Fabric. My projects start with a single fabfile.py and and lib/ directory. I do most of the prototyping in the fabfile.py, which serves as a sort of adhoc testing sandbox[2]. And then I start adding request handlers and writing markup/css. With this approach, whether you're using Flask, webpy or Juno (my faves) is irrelevant. But sticking with Flask might give you a more enthusiastic and active community nowadays.

[1] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/08/23/readme-driven-devel...

[2] http://jonasgalvez.com.br/Writings/Casual-Testing.html
Headline is wrong, it's not about "fancy web design," nor is it about "power users." It's about how MacWorld.com's users don't seem to mind their headline-feed front page.
Well, teaching's different from doctoring/lawyering in a few ways. If you judge, say, a couple defense lawyers strictly on their success rate, put one on OJ Simpson's team and give another a long backlog of public defender cases, then Johnny Cochran's going to be the best layer ever. Does that mean he would've done better with the cases where you're set up to fail? Not to say that metrics are useless, but they can definitely be flawed.
Marx considered capitalism to be a political system--or, more accurately, that politics and policy are all fundamentally economic. So if you're a Marxist, it's all the same stuff.
My company has a large development and sysop team in Poznan, Poland. In our case, one of the founding engineers was based there, and it grew organically from that. We now have almost 20 people there, including project managers. For the first few years, the product management and sales team was in SF and the engineering was in Poland, but there is a much larger SF Engineering team now (I am one of them). Most communication is via skype, RT, wikis, basecamp. Not so much via email, which seems different to me. We have the same problems mentioned in the article with the time zones and the requirement to do a lot more planning (which is not necessarily a bad thing). I feel that we are very agile for all that and are getting more agile as we add more SF based engineers who are comfortable with it. We try to get everyone sent to the opposite city once a year or so and this year we had an "all hands" meeting in Poznan. I have personally found it very beneficial to get to know the people face to face. I prefer to have everyone in the same room, but I think this arrangement has worked much better than a typical "outsourcing" situation because we are all part of the same team working towards the same goal.
I've seen cases where one absolutely non-technical partner takes 75% of the initial equity, tells the other not-so technical partner to find technical people and that her 25% has to be diluted if necessary to bring them in. That's a recipe for ending up with almost nothing if the firm ever becomes profitable after a round or three of investment.
I'm not actually doing anything useful with Haskell. It's purely an intellectual plaything with me.

That said, I've used Applicative when playing around with parsing, and Monads... all the time. Though mostly just IO, Maybe, Writer, and State, nothing crazy.

I'm still getting comfortable with Zippers, so I have yet to even toy around with them. But the LYAH description was much easier than any of the other (small amounts) of reading I've done on the subject.
I've written to the airline I use for most travel and explained why this holiday season I'll be driving to my destinations.

The airlines have the power in this situation, if they protest, this will be changed.
Would you mind to explain further? What kind of Oracle tasks you do on day to day base?

The reason I asked this is because I've been in a few software product shop and they all unstable. I guess I'm on the other side of the bridge.

But thank you for the warning though. I should explore further before I make the leap.
Cute. If you look at the actual numbers, income distribution in the US looks a lot more like China than the EU, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ...

That's clearly not the whole picture, but it's a bit more interesting than automatically associating income equality with communism.
I regret reading this crap
If I could lead an internal project with the said solution, I'll go for it. I'm a FOSS lover.

Keep in mind that not all internal projects require a custom write from scratch solution. Some would do fine with customizing Oracle modules.
WTF wtf
Mirror: http://pivot.servut.us/frozendefencemirrored/
Petition asking for help restoring George Boole's home
I can see two possible reasons for why the rating agencies were given such a key role.
1. Once the rating agencies give their stamp of approval then no one has to be held accountable for bad decisions.
2. People want to believe that it's possible to predict the future, and rating agencies are just a modern equivalent of fortune tellers.
If you're a software developer I'd argue that it's better to sharpen your skills by having your own vps with your own stuff. Amazon has a free tier promotion thing as you probably already know, so that's a good bet. Also, Prgrmr [http://prgmr.com/xen/] is really good and freaking cheap.
Using Twitter to predict movie box office revenue
Pretty soon they'll be taking random innocent people away--for good. I've stopped flying, myself.