skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AT&T was right that telephone service is a natural monopoly. There's still only one set of phone lines running into your house. This trend on HN of expecting every argument to be entirely self-supported and encyclopedic-length, defining everything from first principles, is really quite annoying. You don't win an argument by going "HA HA YOU DIDN'T DEFINE A TERM." If you don't know what a natural monopoly is, go look it the fuck up. Utilities such as telephone service and internet access are the textbook definition of a natural monopoly.

Government run services already have tons of special privileges corporations don't. Try not paying your taxes and see what happens. Regardless, it is my opinion (and I'd believe the article writers would agree with me) that infrastructure is something that is inherently in the public interest and therefore best managed by the public (through government.) You don't drive on four separate interstate systems, you don't have eighteen sets of phone lines running into your house, and you don't have 4 sets of power cables either.
Just because someone disagrees, an issue is not necessarily controversial. You have to take the substantial merit of the arguments into account.
Isn't that just how they count CTR / from-Google traffic? I thought the previous poster was suggesting that traffic from HN to his blog was upping his Google ranking (in addition to CTR), because Google detected a traffic spike indicating some variety of trending/breaking news. But if Google doesn't use Analytics data for ranking, how could they know that his blog was getting a spike of traffic from sources other than Google search?
YouTube Amps Up Its Content Quality Efforts, Buys Green Parrot Pictures
I have been wincing looking at new logos for as long as I knew what a logo was and I've come up with two reasons why it's always so painful:

- the old logos were usually hand drawn and done by a very small creative team. More often than not this just makes them better

- any new logo today by a major company is usually being done by a rather large design firm and they are following a zeitgeist. Designers run in packs and themes are seasonal. That limp wristed font you see in the Rolodex logo is probably the same one you see in (_________).

So, in the case of Rolodex, it looks fairly commonplace and has a whif of groupthink added in. It's okay to throw up a little bit.
Right, and while it may be unprofitable to build roads to the trailer park, if a city thinks the trailer park deserves connectivity to the rest of the city, the roads will get built. Equal access is a fundamental principle of infrastructure projects -- or at least it should be.
Cappuccino has this neat feature of being able to use nibs that you create in Interface Builder by converting it to their own format cib (iirc for web optimization, at least I've noticed .cib filesizes in general be (significantly) smaller than their .nib counterparts, but this could be coincidental).

Normally you use a commandline tool called nib2cib for this which you had to execute everytime you changed your nib to get a corresponding updated cib. This arguably breaks the workflow a bit (it's pretty easy to forget to do a nib2cib after modifying your nib). The tool Klaas Pieter created aims to eliminate that extra step by watching your resources directory for changed nibs if I've understood correctly. Once it detects a changed nib it will run nib2cib for you on that nib for a fresh cib.
Two And A Half Startup Lies And How To Navigate Them
That seems to be really badly taken out of context. From the one and only quote within the page you linked:

As previous Commerce Clause cases have all involved physical activity, as opposed to mental activity, i.e. decision-making, there is little judicial guidance on whether the latter falls within Congress’s power...However, this Court finds the distinction, which Plaintiffs rely on heavily, to be of little significance. It is pure semantics to argue that an individual who makes a choice to forgo health insurance is not "acting," especially given the serious economic and health-related consequences to every individual of that choice. Making a choice is an affirmative action, whether one decides to do something or not do something. They are two sides of the same coin. To pretend otherwise is to ignore reality.

It doesn't look like he's saying that mental activity can be regulated by Congress, but rather the claim that deliberate choice not to do something is "mental activity" rather than "physical activity," and thus cannot be regulated, is a meaningless semantic game.
Out of curiosity: how do the REST folk feel about differentiating between resources with urls like /user/1.json and /usr/1.html ? That has been pretty popular, from the little I've seen, and has the advantage of being GET-able with a browser, where header modification is not.
"gNewSense" sounds like a play on the word "nuisance."
rentzsch's clicktoflash is actually considerably out of date at this point.

The new, Safari-extensionized version that is mentioned second is much better and updated frequently. (this link: http://hoyois.github.com/safariextensions/clicktoflash/)

(mathematical stickler: seeing as ClickToFlash is free, it's price/performance ratio is always zero)
Were you able to capitalize on any of the traffic? Get signups to the RSS feed at least? That's the problem with junk traffic: most don't really provide any value other than raw pageviews.

Content is still king though.
Thanks for the Skype-Tip!
Firstly, I feel for you. Its a strange commentary on the human condition where little bits of institutionalized dishonesty like this are allowed to persist despite the fact that literally everyone knows that its wrong. I'm not sure how the people answering the phones tell old men that they owe $13,000 overages are able to do this job.

The advice is that persistence is key. Everyone knows that this is a mistake, even the jerks at the phone company making this stuff up. You just have to keep calling, insisting that there's been a mistake and moving on up the chain. Try to find other routes into the system as well, call some PR guys, look up the names of company officers on the internet and email (or call if you can find numbers).

Even if your phone did DL 900meg, it probably did so outside of your fathers control, and the marginal cost of providing this data to an iphone in a big city is 0. Its just a stupid shell game intended to fleece a few hundred bucks from folks here and there that in your case went horribly wrong. Make enough noise and you'll probably be able to get them to agree to take the few hundred and let it go. It will take some work though.

You local TV news might be interested in it as a fluff piece as well.
I'm all in favor of supporting fallbacks for more limited clients. But query params are not a great idea since they can prevent caching from happening.
> Python do not have annotations. Decorators are not like java annotations.

Sorry, yes - wrong word. The point stands, though. For class methods to require the use of a feature as outside the core syntax as decorators just screams of a hacked-in afterthought.

> I think "self" is good.

I am indifferent to it, but the fact that the space in the syntax opened up by requiring an explicit receiver on all method definitions is not taken advantage of for class methods speaks volumes.
How Not To Pitch Techcrunch
I think you're focused on the wrong set of users. Because of the nature of your product there are so many alternatives that people use.. I would focus on that very specific niche that need these features to try to build a loyal base. I think in general the subset of people that want the pictures at original resolution, is the one you need to focus on.
This article dramatically misses the point! Uranium is peaking. Oil has already peaked. If we intend to use reprocessing to conserve uranium, then we need to come up with new reactor designs that require less fossil fuel energy and less money to build.

The problem isn't that reactors are inherently unsafe, but that building new reactors without dramatically improving the underlying designs is inherently inefficient. This means that nuclear energy, when all insurance and other costs are included, does not present ANY savings over any other form of newly-built power plant.

The main cost argument in favor of nuclear power is that existing thirty-year old plants cost so little per year. This is an obvious diversionary trick. We paid off the bonds ages ago. My house is also the cheapest on the street if you don't include the mortgage.

The main argument in favor of nuclear power is that it provides reliable baseload energy, which must only be shut down once every fourteen months or so for refueling. This disaster is the proof that nuclear baseload energy is only as reliable as its safety investments and contigency planning. Fukushima is not the first plant to go silent forever.

The Fukushima disaster reminds me of what really happened to our I-35W bridge locally. Over thirty years ago, someone built bridge with gussets too thin. Over a decade ago, our state replaced its government bridge inspectors with a for-profit firm that promised it would "save money" through efficiency savings on labor. Seven years before the disaster, HNTB Corp. of Kansas City performed a bridge analysis to try to win the contract from URS. They found the under-sized gussets and demonstrated how the Minnesota Department of Transportation could use "supplemental plates" and a new "oversize gusset" to strengthen the bridge. HNTB never got the contract and improvements were never made. Later, URS had the option to either re-inspect the bridge or to brace the bridge as HNTB had suggested. They chose to re-inspect.

During court filings in the victims lawsuit, a URS bridge contractor stated in an internal e-mail that they chose not to determine the stresses on all the components in the bridge because "it was too much work."

The moral of the story is that saving money on engineering does not always save money. I could cite numerous similar examples, like the infamous Boeing 787 project that I was involved in as a Cray Inc. contractor.
Quantitatively, cars are extremely safe based on the number of drivers and the frequency with which they drive. If you put a billion people around Chernobyl during the accident the number of people dead would greatly outnumber the number dead from all car accidents throughout history.

Put another way, on average driving 100 million miles is safer than flying 100 million miles (contrary to popular belief that flying is safer than driving).

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risk-01.html

You can see the fallacy of "cars are dangerous" when you compare cars to motorcycles on that chart, because most people don't ride motorcycles so the probability of death for most people is lower than for a car.

Fukushima is extraordinarily safe for everyone living in Iceland. It is far less safe for everyone living in Japan.
Beijing Airport Eclipses London Heathrow
Thanks for your patient responses. I'm so curious because all this goodness you guys are cooking up at DE makes me want to sell something, anything on the internets so that I can use your awesome product.
Something something "living Constitution" something something.

I don't think I'd be going out on a limb if I said when the founding fathers penned the Copyright Clause, their original understanding only contemplated civil action.
The Analog Hardware Startup
>There's no reason I should have to go on the internet to find out how to use columns. Or sub figures. Or appendices. It should just work.
>I'm not a less-geeky user who needs to be coddled (unless by "less geeky" you mean 99.99% of users). I just want to write up my research, and I don't want to have to think about typesetting theory.

I agree that those things should be easy to find. What I meant is that for the current user base those are nice to have but not essential. I have long since accumulated enough examples of the type of documents I write that I can quickly do the basic things just by copying them from somewhere else. I assume that people that write scientific articles already have working examples of two columns, sub figures and appendices that they just copy when they do a new article.

If you wanted to make LaTeX much more widely use then you'd need all the goodies you mentioned. But to even make those possible the environment under them needs to be much more consistent and robust than it is now. Something like LyX could work well if manual intervention in the typesetting wasn't so needed.
In some U.S. states, cars cannot legally operate on the road unless they've been "validated" by the government. This worries me greatly; I should be able to drive whatever car I want, free from unwanted control.

And this is why, instead of getting my emissions checked every year, I choose not to use cars, or even public busses.
Of course you're right. But there is no indication in the OP that he has done that in any way. Nor amongst the literally dozens of identical claims regarding TMI I've seen on HN in the past few days.
You have to use the "getlist" method instead of "get" if you are expecting multiple values.
Union of Concerned Scientists conference call on Fukushima
There's one web thread per process (and JavaScript can either run on it or the main thread), but home screen apps run in their own process.

Nitro doesn't use substantially more memory than the earlier engine.
1M/1M Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs In Latin America
Ok, I'll bite - what incident/article?
> Is there a benefit that exotic financial instruments offer that I'm unaware of?

They allow traders to trade otherwise untradable items.
On the same token, they allow traders to hedge things that are otherwise un"hedgable".

It's important to remember that at it's base a financial instrument is just a legal agreement between two parties.

Some times there is an underlying item that it derives it's value from, in this case it's called a derivative.

Whether or not you consider this to be a benefit or not is up for debate:)

> Otherwise, why is the US government not actively ensuring that these instruments are not allowed unless they are deemed to be a valuable financial tool?

Once you understand this you start to understand why the government might not want to get involved. If these instruments are just legal agreements then how could the government get involved with out it getting messy.

After all how can the government say that you and I can't make a deal.

Under what terms can't we make a deal?
What can't we trade?
Is there a maximum value of a trade?
Can I sell my part of the trade to someone else?
etc...

As a side note, I make my living converting these legal agreements into models that can be priced.
I actually met Sam Bensalem at the last TechCrunch50. He's a nice guy.
Motorola Droid 2 Global
functional programming naturally provides for reducing the complexity of the system being modeled by the discovery of common patterns in the data and the algorithms applied.

The foundation of OO approach is modeling system as it is with all its complexity. This approach is cheaper, ie. easy on the brain, yet it results in the much more unnecessary complex, bloated, system. The same, structurally, code is multiplied through the system because it is bound to different data. Please spare me lectures about how it is an incorrect approach - you'd insult hundreds, if not thousands, of smart people whose source code i've seen during the last almost 20 years. You can look yourself at any OO project in the open source or at your workplace.
The process of front running or domain tasting 'should' be a thing of the past. Last year or perhaps 2009 ICANN imposed strict fees on any registrar that pulled more than 10% of their monthly registrations in the first 5 days.
Obviously this only counts for ICANN TLDs and not ccTLDs.

So... When you register a domain the registrar has to pay the registry com/net/org etc immediately. The registry will return the registration fees for any domains that are canceled. However if a registrar has >10% or their total monthly registrations cancelled within the 5 day grace, they do not get that money back.

This has essentially ended these practices.

HTH

Full Disclosure: I used to work for a registry.
Bookmarklets to Sort Hacker News' Comments
It looks too much like the Samsonite luggage logo:

http://www.samsonite.com/home/images/samsonite_logo.gif
Don't forget FlashControl for Chrome:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mfidmkgnfgnkihnj...
(I actually posted this earlier under a different title but I don't think anyone saw it.)

A while back I had the urge to sort HN comments and figured a javascript bookmark was the best way to go. My thoughts eventually led me to, "Hmm what other cool stuff can I do to modify my favorite websites?" And then of course that led to, "I'll create a repository for this kinda stuff!"

So I registered the domain jsmods.com a while back and finally had the chance to whip something together last weekend.

The entire site is contained within a single PHP file under 600 lines long, and I don't use any database... just encrypted flat files with file concurrency prevention algorithms.

And I actually didn't find out until yesterday that it's called "bookmarklets." I googled the term afterwards and I must say, the current bookmarklet repository sites out there are horrendous.

However, I think JSmods is the appropriate name as I created it for people to create and share javascript modifications for specific websites, not just the usual any-site-bookmarklet.

I'd like it to be conducive to learning and hacking.

After I get some more submissions I'll add a search function (similar to the instant searches we see everywhere these days) and some other fancy stuff. And I may end up replacing the disqus comment system with my own custom system because the disqus system doesn't work as seamlessly/smoothly as I would like.

Overall it was a pretty fun little project to whip together over the weekend. :)
Mobile App Users Are Both Fickle And Loyal: Study
It probably has more to do with antenna response characteristics due to polarization (antenna is similar to a j dipole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slim_Jim_(antenna) or a modified inverted V (since it's a U) maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_vee_antenna ) + isolation from your hand. Without your hand (which is similar to a non-efficient ground plane) screwing up the antenna response, a vertical iphone would likely have better reception, especially if it's a dipole-like.
Ah, now I get it what you meant, thanks for the explanation
For users as well. If you're the only one using a social networking in your circle of friends, then it's not going to be very useful.
Another frequently updated source:
http://iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html
You're absolutely right about the hardcore photographer crowd. But as Facebook's image support improves, and Flickr remains static, I think you'll even see that shift.

Even if Facebook's own image support doesn't improve to the level of Flickr Pro, don't you suppose that a service like SmugMug, plus social integration via Facebook (or similar), would match or beat Flickr for both quality of hosting and social connectivity?

By the way, I'm a Flickr Pro member. I got tired of managing Gallery 2, but I'm pretty disappointed by the lousy uploader tool, the restrictive 'photo stream' concept, etc.
>Instead of a list of methods, you get a list of methods (which do not have to stay the same, by the way) and a tree of resources. Theoretically you should be able to crawl a REST API using only the document types and the root URL, I don't think I've ever seen a "public" API letting me that.

Oh yes you have. Ever browsed a ftp server with your browser? That is a REST API, using HTTP and FTP for transportation and HTML and WHATEVER for the actual data. You can start from the root of the server (or more commonly, from /pub/) and crawl through the file hierarchy as much as you like.

But your point is valid. Not many APIs allow to "crawl" the data, even though one of the four guiding principles for interface is:
Hypermedia as the engine of application state
"If it is likely that the client will want to access related resources, these should be identified in the representation returned, for example by providing their URIs in sufficient context, such as hypertext links."

REST is an architecture style, not a protocol. HTTP is protocol well suited for use in a RESTful system. The API in question violates REST (atleast) by not using the methods provided by HTTP.
That's a lot of "azerty" accounts...
Also of note, most antennas at towers tend to be an array of dipoles with reflectors.
Apple Keeps Right On Approving Amazon & Netflix Updates Without In-App Payments
I attended a 10-day Vipassana course (http://www.dhamma.org/). In my opinion, this is the easiest type of meditation to start with. There are sites for these 10-day course pretty much everywhere around the world. The course runs on a donation basis: you are fed and housed for free during the duration of the course and at the end you choose whether to donate or not.

I met a lot of very nice people in my course. Some were new (like myself) but some were experienced veterans (a couple of guys had been practicing for over 15 years) and everyone seemed so happy. The course is very difficult, both physically (you need to sit on the floor for at least 9 hours a day, and believe me you will only realize just how bad/painful this can be once you do it) and mentally (you are not allowed to talk at all during the duration of the course). But it was all more than worth it at the end.

During the actual course I became more at peace with myself and gained some important insights on my personality and some of the roots of my misery. There's a lot of philosophy behind the actual technique but the basic idea is that you are taught to be indifferent to sub-conscious sensations of 'good' and 'bad'. By no reacting to 'good' sensations, you limit your craving and hence your misery. Similarly, if you do not react to 'bad' sensations you can keep your cool, not get distracted and just be happier.

I am definitely very happy I was exposed to this technique at a young stage of my life. Even though I haven't been practicing since I took the course I am determined to make Vipassana a part of my every day life.
local tv news sounds like an interesting option. you need a powerful advocate, and local news could be that.
This incidence is an example of "QDF", or "Query Deserves Freshness". When a certain competitive keyword gets temporal spikes in links, tweets, and etc, Google uses QDF to give immediate boosts to these keywords on SERPs where it might not otherwise have been able to assault for years.

QDF is something that's supposed to hypothetically "turn off", but with the new valuation of tweets and shares, it seems increasingly likely that these social mentions are actually beginning to count (and persist) much like links.

See SEOMoz's study of how a similar thing happened to them for the term "Beginner's Guide" when Smashing Magazine tweeted it out suddenly even when it had existed (and not ranked for the term) for months: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected...
This and phonegap — up, up and away!
PLEASE do not use the Wikipedia article as a citation. It's historically so full of misunderstandings that even Roy Felding himself has said it's nonsensical. This is a case where Wikipedia isn't quite "good enough" to let slip as a proper source for an argument.

Your arguments about nice looking URLs in fact have absolutely nothing to do with REST, except that REST says you must use your transport protocol according to its standards, where appropriate. It says nothing about how URLs should look. I you're talking about the HTTP spec, call it by its proper name please. We don't gain much from conflating different terms like this, it's just a source of confusion.
The Secret to Japan’s Family Firms
Cleaning up a molten core is quite a bit more complicated than dismantling a functional reactor.
On the earliest evidence for habitual use of ﬁre in Europe