skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks like partisan raging. It's not like the administration or congress only did one thing. The House passed over 400 bills (most didn't make it to the Senate), and the Senate still got quite a few things done.
Facile. People in the professional class don't tend to move "en masse". Residency is sticky for reasons beyond health insurance. Health care clearly is a factor retarding professionals from moving into entrepeneurship; if I saw it repeatedly at my very small company, think how much larger the issue must be nationally.
"But the President tried his best" is not a valid answer to "health care may be a bigger issue than access to capital".
Or a hacker space. Lots of like minded people to share ideas with, help, and be helped by.

My favorite is Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. What's yours?
As has been pointed out before, if teachers unions are the problem, one would expect that states without collective bargaining requirements would outperform states with those requirements. They don't: http://shankerblog.org/?p=895
Good reminder to finally go try this... but honestly, it is the phone usage that's worried me. I hop on Skype many times a day, and the overall noise-floor at a coffee shop makes it possible to do so without bothering anyone (I use earbuds, so hearing isn't generally an issue). I think our library has a nice outdoor area though.. might be okay to take calls out there.
That really sucks if true. Like ericd says, however, I don't think you can beat someone to death when administering corporal punishment just because you "didn't quite know when to stop". I think you're giving the beater too much leeway.

I'm not really advocating the return of corporal punishment in American schools. It's such a political issue, and potential liability, that I have a hard time seeing it ever making a return.
Good read! I always HATE it when things complain that my visual studio .c/.h files are BINARY! WTF!
This is a big reason Apple wins.
In the same vein as "Cluster it", you could also use old computers as testbeds for experimenting with map-reduce frameworks like Hadoop.
Working in a library is second to none, but the advantage Starbucks has over the library is the late closing. University library hours are one thing, but regular ol' public libraries close too early.
I think author has made a mistake:

"consumers do not want bloatware"

This is wrong. Consumers don't care. 90% of people who buy PCs from the major manufacturers probably don't even know what it is. (Some even think it's a good thing when it's advertised as "Comes with free 2 month subscription to X Security Centre")

Hackers/Programmers etc don't want bloatware, but we are a minority. Personally I usually build my own PCs. On the odd occasions when I buy them pre-built (or when I buy laptops) I format and reinstall the OS when it arrives and in these cases I am quite happy that the cost of the hardware has been subsidised quite nicely by something that only requires me to quickly reinstall to resolve.

I regularly get requests for advice on PC buying and from non-techies the question normally goes "Where can I get a cheap [PC/Laptop] that will let me use [internet/facebook/email]". As soon as I hear "cheap" I just direct them to a the current big PC supplier. They don't care if it takes 45 seconds to load the desktop, they just want to 'friend' people and tag photos.
This is the Zero Marginal Product hypothesis. Assorted econobloggers have been engaging in quite a bit of discussion of it. For more info:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/01...

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07...

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/07/the_zmp_hypothe....

It's certainly consistent with the data. The data shows that corporate profit, GDP and industrial production have all recovered. This is exactly what you expect when a recession ends and aggregate demand recovers. However, employment did not recover, suggesting that the workers unable to find a job have a marginal product close to zero.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GDP

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CP

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CE16OV
Microsoft needs to take charge of it and make it such that people can revert to fresh copy of windows. Formatting the computer is an easy solution but then why should I ditch out 100+$ on a windows license. The first thing I do when I get a PC is to format it but none of my friends do and later ditch windows. I won't be surprised if all the hate about windows being slow and resource hog exists because of these bloatwares.
"Our results are therefore consistent with the view that employers use education information to screen workers but that the market acquires information fairly rapidly."

I'm potentially interested in reading this but I have to ask, are they measuring the acquisition of information by changes in employment status and salary? Because if so this seems like begging the question.
Autonomous Jet Fighter Takes First Flight, Aims for Aircraft Carriers in 2013
Entrepreneurs. There is a profit opportunity, soon.

If there is no demand for middle-aged geeks, their salaries are going to drop eventually. And, if their productivity is at least as good as young-aged geeks, it means that there is an obvious arbitrage opportunity.
I'm interested to know in what application you need character counting in which this makes a difference: How about diacritics and accents? Or do you care only about chars and not about semantics or graphics?

Also, if that mattered to me, I'd store the char count in addition to the string length.
All the laptops I had in the last years came with recovery partitions and you could only use them to reinstall the OS. I once downloaded a copy of XP Professional (illegally) and tried to enter the key that was printed on my ThinkPad, it didn’t work.

Maybe I was doing it wrong, I don’t know, but I couldn’t get it to work. I always had to rely on keys I got from elsewhere.

If there is some way that would be great but still not exactly solve the problem. Can you download Windows ISOs directly from Microsoft? I don’t think so. You might have a key but I don’t know of any easy way to get a Windows copy without paying.
Or maybe his paying customers would worry that they're relying on a service that's considered to be a side project.
Actually it has been Perl since 1987. The Practical Extraction and Report Language/Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister joke has been part of the language from the start.
If your uninsured appendix bursts, the volunteer doctors are unlikely to keep you from going bankrupt. The health care problem isn't "doctor visits are too expensive".
Somebody clarify the tax portion for me on this ...
Don't companies only pay half of social Security and Medicare on each employee? ... plus the employee is also a tax writeoff for them right?

So is that 15% number accurate?
The thing in the first set of quotes is not something I said.
That article starts out OK and then suddenly tries to argue that you can use the terms interchangeably. You can not and you will drown in confusion if you try to. Just imagine that tomorrow, the Chinese introduce their own character set next to Unicode, but use UTF-8 to minimize the number of bytes it takes to represent their language (which makes sense, because the frequency of characters drops off pretty fast and some characters are much more common than others, so you'd like to represent those with one byte).

The fact that the HTTP RFC speaks of 'charset=utf-8' is explained by this part of the spec:

Note: This use of the term "character set" is more commonly
referred to as a "character encoding." However, since HTTP and
MIME share the same registry, it is important that the terminology also be shared.

Why does MIME use the 'wrong' terminology? Perhaps because the registry is old and the difference between set and encoding was less obvious and relevant back then. Perhaps it was simply a mistake; a detail meant to be corrected. Perhaps the person that drew it up was inept. Who knows. It doesn't matter, it is still wrong. And don't get me started on the use of character set in MySql...
Thanks, I'll read over these on the weekend.
The Enchanting Allure of Perfection
Also, I forgot to mention. It is difficult to forego health insurance coverage because in most states, this can mean never having private insurance again. Suppose I'm healthy and decide to work at a startup that doesn't offer health insurance. I figure I'll pay for doctor visits out of pocket. But while I'm working there, I discover I have cancer -- I need lots of treatment and there's no way I can pay for that out of pocket. But I can't get private insurance now because I have a pre-existing condition. Insurers can (and will) simply refuse to sell me a policy. If my condition is manageable enough that I can switch to a regular job that has employer provided insurance, I'll be fine because employers generally arrange with insurers to not have any pre-existing condition limitations, but if I'm too sick to get a good job with insurance, then...

Well, you can see how this can spiral out of control until I end up blowing all my savings on health care bills and eventually have to declare bankruptcy. That's the kind of fear that keeps people in boring corporate jobs: the gnawing uncertainty that even if you're healthy now, you (and your family members) are one major medical crisis away from financial ruin and being forever locked out of the good insurance system.

Now, this doesn't apply in MA today and as the new health care law goes into effect over the next few years, it won't apply anywhere in the US. Sorry to write so much, but in my experience, people in the UK just have no reference for how screwed up American health care is and how much fear it can inspire.
It's not really subsidized anymore if you format the computer and install fresh copy windows. Unless of course you have some way of getting free windows copy.
I think there's quite a distinction to be made between the people who did their best to survive under the East German system and the people who actively participated in establishing and maintaining that system.

Consider 1984 as being targeted at those who would otherwise be influenced by equally-simplistic totalitarian ideologies, and who might otherwise be led to collaborate with the equivalent the Stasi in the belief that they were doing good.

There was - and is - an unfortunately large population of such people, and I can't find much fault in Orwell's intention to shrink its ranks.
With Windows XP, you simply need the license code from the sticker on the machine and a "plain Jane" MS installation disk borrowed from someone else. (You have to match your license type with the appropriate disk, Home or Pro.)

The last time I bought a Dell, for $10 I could and did add to the order just such a disk. This was in addition to the crapware-laden "recovery" disk that came with it by default.

I haven't done a Windows 7 installation (nor Vista), so I'm not aware of whether this still applies. And the last time I helped someone shop / potentially place a Dell order, I didn't find an option to receive a such a "plain Jane" MS installation disk.

If some variation of the above still applies, my recommendation would be to use another machine to download the machine-specific drivers from the vendor's web site -- assuming they are available. Then, when the machine arrives, do a fresh install from an MS install disk, first thing. Well, maybe turn the machine on first and use it trivially for a day or three to make sure it doesn't have a physical defect. But don't start customizing it in a way you'll regret losing, until you've reinstalled.

As you describe, such a reinstallation can take a miserably "compromised" machine and turn it into a delight to use (if Windows is your thing).

Oh, also have your anti-malware suite ready to install, post Windows reinstallation, BEFORE you plug the thing into a network connection. (Yes, I recommend using one, especially for most/normal people.)

(As for all the "free" programs that come amidst the bloat: TANSTAAFL. You're better off just installing what you need, picking what you really want and/or, where they are the best or your demand is marginal, free programs.)
Discussion of part I at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2188986.
In my (biased, but well-founded) experience, it comes down to a question of whether I'd rather be distracted by a cute girl or an old man getting reprimanded for looking at dirty pictures.

[bg: I really like libraries - worked at one in the suburbs in high school and have since moved to the city, which exaggerated the weird bits]

One thing that's worth noting: if you're on a college campus, a great place to find some legit quiet time is in departmental libraries, especially the social sciences.
Hence the wink. Sometimes ease of use just isn't worth it.
Cluj, Transylvania (Romania).

Please, no vampire jokes. :-)

I haven't had time to travel around and see the mountains and everything else, but it is really fun being here. Except all the smoking.

Food is good, people are nice. The standard coffee is espresso. Etc.
I'm not trying to start a war here. Python and Ruby both have their place. Just saying, this is a ruby users problem, generally speaking, not a python user's problem.

I actually find that this is one of the weaknesses of ruby (vs python): People who prefer it also know perl and can stand working with perl. The python people can't stand perl largely, and make a billion python modules. So, we have lots of python modules duplicating perl modules cause after python, people were unwilling to return to perl.
You state the problem right in your second paragraph. New PCs don't come with a Windows retail copy. They come with a factory recovery disk that reformats your hard drive, and reinstalls the OS and all the bloatware for you, just as it came out of the box.

If you want a fresh retail copy of Windows 7, unfortunately, you actually have to buy it, which adds about $199 onto the price of Windows. At that point, you're better off buying a Mac, as the price advantage that your cheap budget PC gave you by bundling the bloatware is easily cancelled by the additional Windows license price.

You get better software and better hardware with the Mac, plus a bloatware free and virus free experience. It's a win/win.
Ask HN: Live/Work Space Open in Jersey City
We are three entrepreneurs running three small businesses from two apartments in a building very accessible to New York city. One of the rooms is opening up and we'd love to have a fellow entrepreneur join us. What we offer:
- Free High Speed Internet
- Free landlines
- Wireless access everywhere in the apartments, with network printer and scanner.
- Multiple, great workspaces with lots of light.
- A room with in-suite loft (Can have a personal office as well as a bed in your private room)
- Private roof deck access (also has internet) with Manhattan/Statue of Liberty views (Great for working in the summer)
- Video Conferencing / Media watching in our projector equipped room.
- Room is mostly appointed with bed and desk (can be removed if you have your own gear)
- No need for credit check or proof of income (Rare in the NY area, but we will want some assurances you can pay the rent)
- Very affordable - Only need to pay rent.
- Easy access to NYC - 15min to WTC, or 20min to 33rd st / 6th Ave via Grove Street Path Train.

What we are looking for:
- Strong preference for freelancers or business owners that are Raman (rent) profitable.
- Strong preference for programmers
- We like social people who enjoy networking events and coming up with new ideas as well as executers who have proven track records.
- Cool with having the occasional border hang out for the weekend (we had a few people we met from SXSW work out of our space this year).

Why Jersey City:
- Great for starting businesses: Better taxes than NY, cheap individual health care, easy to register businesses and all taxes are online.
- Very close to NYC
- Great community, with lots of local activities (Volleyball, Kickball), art shows, underground movies and parties.

Who are we:
- We are three guys supporting each other through three different businesses including recruitment, online retail, and internet marketing. We can trade services, if applicable.
- We are still startups, but have been profitable for over 2 years now.
- We have a great network in the NY area.
- We love executing on profitable ideas.
- We are all in our late 20s.

Email me at takrupp@gmail.com if interested. We can be flexible on move in date from immediate to 2-3 months out.
++. I don't know why more people don't do this. The library is a great place to work - for free - and it comes with built in offline distractions for when you need to step away from a problem. I used to spend a lot of time at Columbia University's Butler library.

Libraries are also a great place to get internet access. I spent a lot of time in local libraries while traveling around New Zealand.
Previous discussion of a similar post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758458
Unfortunately, I echo many of the reservations of working at my local public library: can't make calls, horrible hours of operation, etc.

I'll add one more thing: horrible network filtering.
Starbucks still charges for WiFi? I thought they did away with that.

In any case, I always got around it by pretending to be an iPhone. :)
Nope, not directly.
And open too late.
Google executive's tears may be game changer in Egypt
This is one thing I don't get. Why is there so few "premium" Windows PC manufacturers that try to compete on quality (I can think of one, maybe, Lenovo)?

Is it because they're all running the same OS and making better hardware doesn't offer enough differentiation?
Do you really think adding bloatware makes it cheaper by the price of a fresh windows copy?
If civilisation is to survive, education requires a total shift in thinking and perspective. Unfortunately I think it is too much for a lot of people to accept, as our notions of how education should be are too interwoven with our notions of our place in society.

We need to stop thinking about academic education and vocational education as separate. We need to stop thinking, 'clever kids to the universities, the rest to apprenticeships if they're lucky.' This is a bad meme.

We do not need to 'repair' the distinction between academia and the trades, we do not need to put them on an equal footing, we do not need to stop treating less-academic kids as less important than more academic ones.

We need to recognise the distinction for what it is, a myth, a cognitive dissonance, and destroy it.

We need everyone to have both aesthetic skills and dextrous skills. We need everyone to be comfortable with interpersonal skills as much as they are with technical, or manual skills. We need that dreaded[1] term, a holistic approach.

Most of all we need to stop educating our children in factories using the logic, language and paradigms of industrial manufacturing. We need to educate our children to be happy and adaptive human beings. The employability part will follow from that, we don't need to worry about it directly.

[1] Damn you hippies, for ruining our perfectly good words.
Anyone spot an inverse relationship between religion and literacy on that last picture? haha
Not sure if this is a stupid question. How do you fire people? Do you need to give them any buffer time (e.g., 1 month, just like you can give 1 month notice before resign)? How about the potential damage they could leave in that time?

I'm just curious.
So startups/entrepreneurs don't move to the valley in order to increase their odds of success? I agree that many paycheck seeking professionals might not do so, but that's a rather different question.

Health care clearly is a factor...

I wasn't disputing that it is a factor. I was disputing the idea that it is a larger factor than access to capital or talent. Look, we hear about people moving to the valley all the time. People move to NY as well, though it's less common. Are all of these entrepreneurs "insane" (to borrow sachinag's language) for chasing capital/talent rather than Romneycare?
The reinstallation disk I mentioned in my other post was stolen in a burglary. A couple of months later, I really needed to reinstall my Windows XP Pro machine. A friend volunteered to send me a burned copy of his Pro disk. It worked just fine.

(With the disks being stamped wholesale, I don't see too much wrong with this. Stealing the license code / functionality -- that would have been another matter.)
What's being said in this thread is that many (most?) companies don't want to pay for that.
What do you guys think of our system?
Not to troll, but Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Leonardo DaVinci etc. were all technical people with understanding of philosophy, art, history, mathematics. Obviously these are cherry-picked examples, but having only technical knowledge isn't a great solution either.
I‘m not sure. When my fiancée asked for help in speeding up her computer (a Compaq laptop) I ended up uninstalling a bunch of bloatware. She knew that having too much stuff installed was the root of the problem, but she was worried that removing stuff might break the computer in a way she wouldn’t be able to recover from.

In the end seeing as it was running Vista Basic I took the ultimate step of removing the OS as well and putting on Ubuntu, which she was much happier with :)
>>it gives you code that's faster than gcc with the options at the bottom of this page<<

1) Here are the timings for the C program you linked (x86 Ubuntu one core) -

spectral-norm C GNU gcc #4

N	CPU	Elapsed

500	0.09	0.10

3,000	3.31	3.32

5,500	11.13	11.14

2) Here are the corresponding timings "if you tell the SBCL compiler..."

spectral-norm Lisp SBCL #2

N	CPU	Elapsed

500	0.06	0.16

3,000	4.64	4.70

5,500	15.69	15.72

3) Is the program on the page you linked to faster or slower than the SBCL program ?

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?test=s...
Then be direct and say what you mean since I don't know what you're trying to say.
Gran Turismo 5 Patch Coming This Month
IIRC (I may not), I do seem to recall reading that with Windows 7, there is more of a distinction between full/retail and "OEM"/recovery disks. I guess, another lever they use to justify/raise the fees from the crapware vendors.

EDIT: Perhaps I should have said / mean "licenses" rather than "disks".
I know I had problems with XP, but with Vista and 7, I haven't had an issue just using an OEM disk with the key on the sticker. Activates and receives updates without a problem.
Instead of just complaining, why don't these guys review the machines as-delivered, with the bloatware in place? That would give the potential consumer an idea of what there up against.
Go 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea With Today's Google Doodle
Ruby Modules: How Do They Work?
I just graduated from a state college and all of my friends are great readers and writers.

I think you are seeing different issues.
Google Will Never Be Good Enough
That was my first thought as well.

Though I remembered that my MacBook came with a pack of games and OmniOutliner, and my wife's with Quicken.

Sure, it's not really bloatware and more like freebies, but it's good to remember that Macs don't come perfectly clean either and that Apple gets paid a little too.
1) I didn't say Windows ;) I use Ubuntu for general PC tasks.

2) I have an MSDN subscription which covers OSes and MS dev tools when I need to do work in C#.

Yeah, I know it's not something most people have access to, but it works for me.
It's free at the Starbucks where I live.
Re-designed ‘Strait Power’ Water Turbine Inspired By Earth’s Laziest Predator
Well, the last laptop or two I've bought have come with Windows licenses such that I found it easy to install from scratch. Although I know some manufacturers won't ship a real Windows install DVD (I may have grabbed one from my workplace instead, I don't remember), I have yet to see one that doesn't put on a little sticker with the license key.
And don't let you have coffee.
Library uses crowdsourcing & games to digitize archives