skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The finance people have a point. The high level of government services and comfort thereby provided are funded by unsustainable levels of government debt that are well beyond any Western country, and practically all of it is privately held. By old people.

At some point, the old people are going to start dying, and then there won't be anything to fund that debt anymore. So Japan will default. It will be the biggest sovereign default in the history of mankind. And of course, dead old people will be footing the bill. In the meantime, the birthrate continues crashing and the young in Japan will languish. This is why it's said that Japan will rot, but it will rot in isolation.

The big unknown that I'm interested in is how the collapse will take hold. There are two runaway trains that I can see. The first will be the debt. It seems likely that we will see a restructuring towards a bureaucratic economy that takes care of the old people, but eventually all the old people will die. Then we may have another runaway train if the mechanisms for defunding the services racket are in place.
Relax. That's true for 99% of all programmers.

I just died a little...
There's been some work on it:
http://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2409
The short version is yes it will work... for the most part.
Island Def Jam Partners With The Echo Nest, Creates Opportunities For Developers
What I don't understand is why people who say, "Why should I pay rent? That money is just going down the drain" never think to themselves, "Why should I pay interest on a mortgage? That money is just going down the drain."
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_behaviour

At a research company I worked at we used swarming concepts for controlling swarms of sensors, robots, and UAVs. We also used ant colony optimization techniques mixed with genetic algorithms to do predictive intelligence. Really powerful stuff.
To someone who bought a 2010 MBA in October and doesn't get an OS that supports TRIM until this summer, what's going to be the impact on the useful life of the SSD?
Here's a thread from the forums regarding love2d+luajit:

http://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2409

Seems to be somehow possible to get it working. It is not officially supported, though. I guess as luajit matures there is a decent possibility that it will be a supported option since games (even 2d) would benefit from the increased speed. OTOH portability of love2d would probably be decreased, too.
> Carlyle and other buyout firms are swallowing up VC firms like a toothless prostitute.

stay classy
Consumer Reports: Verizon IPhone Suffers Same Antenna Issues
Here's the HN submission of the original, rather than the zero-value TechCrunch shell:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262611
How Apple Dodged a Sun Buyout
I see we have some teacher's reading HN. Pointing out the inefficiencies in the system gets me downvoted. This is a good example as to why our schools in the US are failing.
None, I'd say. I've been running an older X25-m generation on a Win2K box for 14 months now. No TRIM in firmware, no TRIM in W2K. Disk has been filled and cleaned out numerous times since I bought it and it still performs adequately. I'd be surprised if your SSD would suffer from the few months until you get TRIM in 10.7.
Facebook Profiles Are Now Part Of 80% Colleges’ Admissions
The best thing you can do is accept an assignment for work that is over your head. The kind of thing where you think, "I really don't think I have the skills to do this". Get the the requirements, any documentation you need and then just start writing. It doesn't matter if you do it wrong. Just do it. Make a little start. Then add a little bit at a time. It'll take forever. You'll have to backtrack constantly. But it'll be the 2 steps forward 1 step back kind of thing. You'll inch toward your goal. And suddenly it's a few weeks later and you're done.

I can't express to you the kind of satisfaction I've achieved when I've done stuff I thought I had no skill for. But those first 2 weeks are scary! I keep thinking, "Crap, I can't do this--I'm a fraud! Everyone is going to find out soon. Oh, what have I gotten myself into!" And then suddenly I realize in my brave attempt to just fake it I've actually accomplished something. My thoughts become "I think I can actually pull this off!" It's a very cool moment.

Diving into the deep end of the pool is the only way I've ever significantly advanced my skill set. Reading books/papers and writing little test things can advance your skill set incrementally, but biting off more than you can chew is the only way I've found to level up in life.
And regarding the "harm" that workers do by raising the cost of labor, why aren't management's salaries also "harming" the business by raising the cost? Why the double standard?

The corporation negotiates with management from a position of equality. Both parties are permitted to make or reject offers as they see fit. If GM offers too little, Wagoner is free to take a higher paying job elsewhere. If GM can find someone cheaper, they are free to reject Wagoner. GM is also not permitted to collude with other employers to reduce prices.

The corporation does not negotiate with a union from a position of equality. They are not permitted to reject union offers and procure labor at lower rates from the competition. They are also not permitted to fire and replace union workers who fail to do their jobs. Labor sellers are legally permitted to collude with each other to raise their prices, and they are given a government granted monopoly on the practice. Competition is illegal.
yes. these problems wouldn't make sense in the finals
The traditional process of "sales" doesn't provide nearly as much value as it once did. We now have google and more efficient social networking available as a means of locating solutions to various business problems one may have.

I remember the halcyon days of the dot com era when hot redheaded sales reps from Exodus would take you on datacenter tours and treat you to dinner to secure a lucrative two-rack deal.

I remember pushy but friendly Oracle salespeople selling you on a $250k six-processor O7 license predicated on "well ebay's using it".

Nowadays I refuse to take vendor phone calls. If I need a solution, I google it or ask around my circle of tech friends.

The claim that sales is "valuable" is lost on me at this point.
Brainstorming 2.0 - Making Ideas That Really Happen
I love how many of comments on this article have no idea who Brad Feld is, and nobody bothered to read his bio before deciding he's a spammer. He's one of the more famous tech entrepreneurs and investors. He's had companies acquired, sits on the board of a bunch of big companies, and runs TechStars. Networking is his job, and he's been doing it for over 20 years. If he wanted to run a spam newsletter (which he has no reason to do), he has the resources to use something way better than Gmail. ;)
You are not doing that bad. It took me a lot of time to discover that about everything I've written so far is not something I'd write today.

http://consultuning.blogspot.com/2010/10/this-code-is-crap.h...

Then I realized that realizing that you're not that good is the first step towards becoming really good.
Ask HN: What techniques do you use for personal goal setting?
I've had a laundry list of goals for a few years now that I review every month. I don't think it's working for me because I don't seem to be achieving them.

What methods, techniques and strategies do HNers use to set goals and achieve them?
from the article: "I'm not an expert on enteprise focused SAAS businesses. I am not going to address that part of the market here."
Minecraft Documentary
that will work (as good as can be hoped for).

the process can be thought of as a map-reduce.
first pass would be figure out where all your SETs are located and how big they are. then intersect all co-located SETs. then (in parallel) take smaller SETs and MIGRATE them towards larger SETS, intersect those and repeat (respecting new sizes). A pyramid of SET intersection can be done until the result is the final two SETs being intersected, a process will need to coordinate all of this, but luckily intersections are idempotent, so if one parallel job finishes quicker, it doesn't need to wait.

W/ redis speed, the overhead (for the coordinator) to get the size of the different SETs in all these steps should be minimal as compared to the time taken to MIGRATE the data (meaning for-free). Also w/ redis' speed the MIGRATE will be very fast and the cross-node-join (or cross-node-intersecton) bottlenecks on network I/O, so if a good framework for this redis map-reduce is created, it will be a pretty optimal setup, and it wont bloat the server w/ tasks that can not be done directly in the server (cross-node-intersections are done at something more like a proxy level, they require intermediate results).

this problem is a hard one, data analytic stores optimise to this problem by storing data redundantly w/ a "pre-joined" colocation strategy, which works for star schemas and a limited number of tables, but doesnt make sense w/ 1000s of SETs, so this is a real good solution and classic redis anti-bloat.
If you eat processed stuff, those manufacturers can blunt price increases by using lots of subsidized commodities like corn and soy products.

I think this is an important factor to consider. In many ways, this stratification simply offsets the costs into health issues later in life.
HP webOS Developers Await TouchPad, Pre3 With Questions, Optimism
The problem is that there are a lot of projects you can go into as a cargo cult programmer, do an OK job, and come out more or less still a cargo cult programmer - you can build a pretty good web site by iterating on tutorials and copy-and-pasted snippets.

If you follow the guidance of, say, SICP, there're "projects" geared to expand your abilities.

So, I agree, but look for the right project - don't learn a framework, learn to do something.
Direct and useful client code guidance
What, you mean because HOFs can't be tortured into unreadability?

Readability requires that the programmer conspires with both the language and the reader. Unreadable code can be written in any style, any paradigm and any language. Sometimes it doesn't even take effort, talent or skill.
So, an annoyed blog entry by the sort of petulant user who bitches to his IT guy when a web-application run by another company says "You're over your limit."

No indication that they're paying for anything, just whining about the limits of a free contact system.

ETA: Fair enough, he does have some sort of enterprise support.

Mind you, this post sure has a lot of search-baiting links (like every single instance of the string "Google Apps", even in quoted blocks) pointed at other blog entries.

Dude, enjoy your 10K contact limit and your plummeting search ranking.
danudey left a helpful link to a comment I made recently about TRIM support in Lion. Apparently, 10.6 is doing some good SSD maintenance even without TRIM support, and SSDs do not experience the same performance drops as they would on a Windows machine without TRIM support, but it is not clear why this is the case.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-pe...
Life Without Axioms
Please advise: Someone is blatantly copying my startup, on the .org of my domain
My friend and I started a simple company in the beginning of January just to start specking out the idea. We just bought the .com of our domain when we got started, and are now kicking ourselves for it.

It turns out that our startup might actually be a good idea. We received a bunch of press without really meaning to, and 19 days after we had bought the domain, someone from France bought the .org and put up a holding page that used some of the same copy we had on our site.

I immediately started digging into the domain. I found and archived the person's name, home address, phone number, list of friends, other domains, and whatever else I could find from the internet. I also archived his twitter account and his version of our website for reference.

Flash forward 1 month; As we get ready for our launch, the person has updated his website and started tweeting about it. His updated version clearly shows that he is building a competing product.

Now, I'm all for competition. If they had chosen a different name for their site, I would be fine with it. However, to me, this just feels like they are being a bad internet citizen and it really bothers me.

So, please advise. Have you ever been in a situation like this? How have you dealt with it? Do you have any suggestions for how we should deal with it? Tips, thoughts, etc would be really appreciated.
No, Its not arbitrary. In the above mentioned scenario, the decision is based on actual data points of the current system, with possible growth projections, and a judgement call from business perspective. Hardly arbitrary.
I don't know if that's more genetic fallacy or poisoning the well. Possibly both.

"Their failure to do so in fact breaks the law."

Well, no kidding. The whole idea behind jury nullification is to prevent people from going to jail because of unjust laws. Are we supposed to be surprised that the same system that has an unjust law makes it against the law to refuse to enforce an unjust law? Why not just make it against the law for juries to find proponents of jury nullification innocent?

Jury nullification would not have that great of an effect, and it certainly wouldn't make society "fall apart". It would affect one trial by jury at a time. In each one you would have to convince 11 other people that a law was unjust, if just one was convinced of the law's correctness and the defendant's guilt, you'd have a hung jury.
Update FTA - this was essentially just a hire, not an acquisition.
What I find interesting about the "We beat Canada" idea is how few Canadians move to the USA in search of better health care. Rich Canadians take advantage of the porous border by travelling to the US and paying for certain procedures, but generally when someone permanently moves from Canada to the US, it's always in search of economic improvement.

I would like to see statistics showing that Canadians would happily take a job with the same or worse pay just to get access to US health care. If the US system was superior in ways that mattered to people, we should be able to measure this effect by looking at immigration.
At a certain point you need to have something more than Gmail to handle that many contacts, like a CRM type application.
> The MBA uses a Toshiba t6ug1xbg controller, which seems to provide a SATA interface.

Yes, the MBA uses an SSD, just not one that's in a normal drive package.

> So it is an issue.

As I said, not really: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3991/apples-2010-macbook-air-1... (scroll to the second half of the page)
Those feds number are cooked. They replace steak prices with hamburger prices and say it is the same thing to show there is no inflation, while they have the printing presses running 24/7.

Food prices have doubled based on the receipts I enter into Excel. Everyone should do this and find that the Fed's numbers are totally fraudulent. Knowing this, you can then make better business decisions, such as to get rid of cash as fast as you can.
To me, Computer Science has always really been more about math than anything else. I tell people that CS is basically a glorified math degree. Although it is possible to create programs without knowing much advanced math (beyond high school), they still require you to understand math.

Also, telling people I'm a glorified mathematician means that I don't get as much requests for tech help.
If food prices increased 6.7% (which, BTW, is a lot less than 100%, the number bugsy claimed), but CPI only increased 4.1%, that means other goods and services must have increased less than 4.1%.

You have now changed the reference period, and you are also looking at a different quantity. Wages and salaries have actually increased 28% since 2001 (data doesn't go back to 1998). See my previous timeseries.

Household income is a separate quantity - it can be raised or lowered by a variety of factors. For example, it can go down as household size decreases or as per-household hours worked go down. That's not the same thing as a wage decrease.

Also, your time period seems a bit cherry picked - you are comparing the top of the last bubble to the bottom of the current bubble.
Best Droid Apps for Businessmen | AllTime Best
The Advantages of Green Fields: Taming Effectful Programming
Not that I'd know, but it must be a lot of fun lurking in the shadows/periphery with a bunch of mysterious money.

It's the hedge fund vs. web startup mentality :)
Suggesting that the political situation in the UK is as bad as it is in the Middle East is a slap in the face to all those who have given their lives to overthrow brutal Middle Eastern dictators over the last two months.
Everything I Know About Debugging
Interesting view of how Linux would have worked out, had Sun done the right things with x86 processors.

But this strikes me as denying Sun's position, as per Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma". Sun passed on a number of opportunities for disruptive innovation. For example, the folks who started Auspex came from Sun, I think (and in turn, Auspex missed the boat that took Network Appliances away). Sun had a processor that was pretty darn good, when intel released the 80386. Let's face it, SPARC architecture still makes a lot more sense than x86. And Sun kept up for a surprisingly long time. How many people did Intel have squirrelling away at the x86 architecture? How many people did Sun have on SPARC? I imagine it was 10x less.

I think suggesting that Solaris could have taken the place of linux in the market is very much wishful thinking. Now, if Sun had listened to Larry McVoy's Sourceware Operating System Proposal in '93 (http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html), that might have made a big difference.
I guess you'll have to find a new place for email when your business grows beyond 10,000 employees...

When you have 10,000 employees, you could probably just get a team to author their own version of gmail.
IFixit: "a donkey" could upgrade your Xoom tablet to 4G
I am not a lawyer, so I strongly suggest contacting a lawyer and telling him exactly what you're telling us.

I also suggest contacting the 'squatter' and seeing if he chooses to tell you a story.
Some routes to take:

- Found a company with the same name, then send cease & desist

- File a notice with WIPO, nab the domain when/if you can prove that the person registered it in bad faith?
Code Complete was an epiphany for me. I read it right before graduating from university and it was great preparation for real-world programming work.

The other programming epiphany books for me were:

* Eric Evans' "Domain-Driven Design"
* Steve Maguire's "Writing Solid Code"
* and SICP
I agree, it would be nice to see some data on that.

A few days ago we had a discussion here on HN about the viability of Montreal as a startup hub, and when I raised the question of what Canadian cities in general could do to counter the higher pay and better climate down south, I somehow completely forgot (as did any responders) about the potential advantage of our kinder (if at times sluggish) healthcare system, especially in light of medical tourism options.
It was a sort of medium sized thing. In the telco industry. They've since been subject to some kind of acquisition, which I assume was part of the motivation.
That's true, Norway is an exception. IIRC, all their oil revenue has been placed in a sovereign wealth fund. Then again, their neighbors don't have that same luxury, which no doubt pressured their own politicians into behaving. The Middle East is almost entirely ruled by dictators & monarchies, so it's not like the people can just go to a neighboring country if the going gets rough.
Goals don't work for me. Habits do. See if you can transform your goals into things you can actually do, rather than things you want to reach.
Microsoft Endorses Do-Not-Track Tool for Browser
All you need is a mascot and boom ;)
I've wanted to write some exploratory algorithms for flocking for a long time now. This is just the motivation I need to start working on a silly side project.

Thank you, everyone in the comments who submitted source code or demos. You never know when something you upload will really brighten someone's day (even if it's written in java).
Nicely designed slides.
Thanks for pointing this out. I've removed the spam claim.

I still stand by the research that makes it evident human beings can't maintain relationships with more than a couple hundred people at a time, and I doubt very much that Feld( or any other human being )is capable of even remembering a small fraction of the people on that list.
"Interview" with Freeman Dyson about climate change
I'm amazed, what kind of work is entailed by that exactly? I don't have a clear concept of what lifestyle biz work even is!
You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)
A good part of the presentation is a critique of worst-case-analysis, which is often not relevant for practical problems. The author doesn't mention smoothed analysis which addresses this very issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothed_analysis
Do you hav any kind of legal registrations, trademark, business filings. If so send the cease and desist but also send a copy to their domain registrar maybe they will shut down the site.
The main difference between Arch and Gentoo is that Arch is binary (IA-32(e)) package based and Gentoo is source based.

They both can deliver you to about the same point on install (Gentoo stage3 install).
Nice read, you should submit it on its own.
The linked article seems to refer to an incorrect star. The correct one (which is also named in the BBC article linked from this article) is BPM 37093: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPM_37093

All in all, the linked article seems like a direct restatement of the BBC article (with errors added), so I recommend you read the BBC article directly: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3492919.stm
Not saying its the route I would take but you could share your story and the site name here and at other social sites like digg, reddit, etc and internet vigilantes might just do their thing to drive them away.

I have seen it happen before with design / logo theft etc.
Roger Deakins (cinematographer for the Coen brothers) on his craft
It seems the universe wants me to know this. Immediately upon loading the page, the coffee house I'm in decided to start playing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".
Immigration requires a whole lot of push. Given how many Canadians already live within easy driving distance of the US border, even gigantic differences in efficiency and quality wouldn't drive much actual transnational immigration.

You move across a border for a better job, not to potentially shave 45 minutes off your wait time after a putative future cycling accident.
Why does Adobe Reader need so many updates?
"Famous" is a relative thing. You're the first person in a 75+ comment thread to admit to knowing who he is.