skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am originally from rural North Carolina and happen to be visiting my parents at the moment. I'll give a quick run-down of their internet options over the years:

From 1995-2000, their only option was dialup. 56k dialup was offered but the quality of the phone lines in the area only allowed for 26k - 28k at best.

Sometime around 2000 or 2001, "broadband" finally moved to the area. However, they can not get DSL or Cable. They have a wireless ISP (radio installed on the house, receives signal from a tower.)

They get about 1mpbs down and about 10% packet loss. Last night I was battling 35% packet loss while trying to do some work.

Parts of the county do have DSL and Cable. A guy who lives about 10 houses up from my dad has Time Warner broadband. He's had it for 10 years and loves it. My parent's can't get it, however, because they're just over the county line and apparently this county has some sort of exclusivity agreement with another small/local cable company.

That small cable company does have broadband, but only to small/select area of the county, and they don't seem to have any interest in heading out this way.

I really don't even know what to do to help them anymore as far as connectivity goes. I just know that it annoys them.

Anyway, the point of my little tirade is: It angers me to see possible additional imposed limitations to an area which already struggles to have anything to begin with.
Immediate IE9 Success Unlikely: A Tragedy Of Statistics
Grand ideas, vision, and clarity of thought are no excuse for asinine behavior. This is what really puzzles me the most - why people are so willing to make so many excuses for "visionaries."
Yeah there was the fraudulent fallout map. Yeah somebody who hadn't slept in a week may have misspoken and used the term "nuclear explosion" when they really meant "conventional explosion involving nuclear material".

I haven't seen a lot of overreaction. People are still in Tokyo even while detectable radiation levels rise to many times background levels.

What I have seen is a huge number of media outlets and bloggers falling over themselves to assure everyone that everyone is safe and everything is under control. And they look more and more wrong with every new explosion and every new fire at the plant.

The real heroes are the 50 plant workers who are there putting water on the melting fuel rods.
The Chinese government also runs the Great Firewall using primarily open source technologies.

Free software on phones? If anyone can sideload whatever they want onto any platform they want, it's the Chinese. How does this help you, when the cellphone towers are tracking your phone's every movement, and when attempts to evade that tracking are sufficient to get you arrested or worse?

The nature of the license for the software running on a radio has nothing to do with the ability to triangulate that radio, sadly.
I'd wager that a landing page that just had the contents of the pop up would do even better.
I do not associate the word "modern" with "mobile" at all (at least not in the Windows OS / desktop browser market).

Though, falling over backwards trying to post something negative whenever Microsoft is praised is associated with a few other things such as: zealotry, lack of confidence, ignorance.
Caps are inevitable. Human wants are infinite but human resources are finite. While some resources are more plentiful than others, and human wants may not have caught up with resources in the short term, those fundamentals will never change.

As one would expect, there are no resources in the world which don't have caps at the limit (or a per-unit charge, which is the same thing in aggregate): water, electricity, gas, oil, fish, wood, bulk voice communications etc. Greenhouse gas emissions and dumping are the notable exceptions, and soon to change once the situation gets so bad that politicians set up the appropriate economic systems to properly account for externalized costs.
It's got the same flavor of sadness that an Amiga ST fan has when describing their favorite computer.

I hate to say it but by the time Windows Phone 8 comes out, if it ever does, the iPhone, Android and quite possibly RIM will be way ahead. Seems like 2013 at the absolute earliest for Microsoft.
Ahh that is exactly it. I am just not using the correct syntax. Thanks! This looks to be very cool, looking forward to trying it :]
All I ever see is ads for "Cloud vs. Claude" and none of them make any sense. Microsoft cloud computing for editing photos? Huh?
so Common Lisp? :)

The Problem with putting everything in a language and supporting everything equally is that people tend to do the wronge thing (like in JS up until the last years) and languages get to big (scala, d, CL).

I think a language that tends to FP (and makes it idiomatic) but allow other styles but makes them a bit harder to use.
(in a lisp you can always make it look good again if you really know that, that is the right thing to do).
Astroturfing? "Why I'm not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors."
The fuel is a fire risk, not an explosion risk. To get a decent explosion you would need to mix the fuel with a lot of air in the right ratio. Real life is not like the movies/TV; sealed tanks of gas are unlikely to explode if punctured by flaming debris. As an example, the fuel in the planes is what eventually killed the WTC buildings, but this was because the fuel burned, not because it exploded.
There was a reported death in another prefecture, when someone taped all their windows shut after hearing about it on the news. He forgot to turn off the gas and suffocated.
Improve the OS so it doesn't feel like a big iPod Touch! Maximize the iOS Core for the tablet environment, not just stretch it!
Google Apps' awesome new Release Calendar site
Yes, turn on CNN or MSNBC right now, and all you will hear about is an imminent meltdown, and what it means for US nuclear power. This article is a drop of sanity in a sea of stupidity.
I think even this is a optimistic scenario, as more often, you'll go through even more failure (i.e. your business model didn't work, you run out of money, and so you had to abandon your first idea altogether) before you succeed.
It would be specifically handled by the return type from validateData and the argument to ProcessData. It sounds clunky, but with an algebraic data type it would be fairly clean - just another pattern to match in ProcessData.

For a simple example like this, that might be the cleanest solution. For anything more complicated (like recursive descent parsing), a processing chain like this is an ideal application for a monad, where the binding between functions would be customized to avoid calling ProcessData altogether.
Not just the Obama admin, but any that manages to get elected. You can't even hope to win a modern election without billions in funding from corporate or wealthy private interests. Even Obama's small-donor-oriented political machine raised roughly half its campaign funding from the former.
The IE blog is quite good and devoid of any marketing / bs: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/
270 FPS in IE9 (yes 270), 48 FPS in Chrome 10, 23 FPS in FF 3.6

I just installed IE9 and am kinda feeling it. Even though it completely stole Chrome's interface, it works.
> 1. The list can be very long. As far as I can tell, there's no scroll bar indicator or even a alphabet marker.

That is a completely valid insight. Either solution would definitely make it easier to scroll to the correct area of the list.

> 2. It's sorted by alphabet, not by install time, so it requires you remember the name of the application. If the name is different than in the market, you're really in trouble.

I would imagine that for anything not just-installed, having the list sorted by install time would be a nightmare. I have no idea what the relative order of installation would be for any of my apps. As for the name, I would hope that application authors wouldn't be so daft as to have the package's name be different that the actual launcher's title, although I wouldn't put it past somebody to do that.
Google cache of a story about a google cache? The link raises questions, but I can't tell that it answers any of them.
cpp (the C preprocessor) is alive and well
"I don't think we need a bill to make that illegal."

It doesn't sound like this makes it illegal. It sounds like it makes it illegal for municipalities to engage in anticompetitive practices, or what we'd call anticompetitive practices if they weren't a government. That's not the same thing.

I have no opinion on the bill itself. I found the article thought-provoking, but being libertarian I'm still inclined to say that a municipality shouldn't be running a business like that. Not even because it'll give bad service to the customers necessarily, but also because a municipality just shouldn't have to deal with a case where it builds out millions of dollars of infrastructure and then can't recoup the costs because its business analysis was crappy. Society has solid, tested mechanisms for dealing with that when companies go wrong and have to go under, it's a lot harder for a municipality. They shouldn't be engaging in that sort of risky behavior, even as I'm not sure I want to ban it.
"I really do believe that we should be investing in these technologies to make nuclear power safer."

This is my major beef with nuclear power. We could invest scads of dollars into expensive and fairly mature nuclear technology, or we can put that same amount of money into renewables which have tremendous room for improvement (that and money towards the advanced power grid that would make renewables also more efficient). I think it is a mistake to neglect the opportunity to shift focus.
Instead of fetishizing horses, why not appreciate this butterfly that I'm calling a horse?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv5woNs9WRE

Being accurate with a technical term is not a 'fetish.'
Right, we're getting a nice snapshot of technology with IE9, and if that doesn't include Web Workers or some other feature, fine. But the key advantage of Chrome is that WebGL barely worked a few weeks ago, it's better now, and it will be much better a few weeks in the future. Without agressive updating, IE9 will be out of date in a very real way by September.
Crowdsourced teaching from SitePoint
Thanks for the information. I wonder if there are any "music universals", like the ones for language, i.e. universal grammar. If favoring certain tone ratios is a characteristic of the human auditory system, then there should be.
Why does it matter? Ok, I agree that you probably shouldn't label something with an incorrect term, but does not having more than one URL, and not using the different HTTP methods really make a difference in terms of programmer usability?

I personally find that sometimes I have trouble spotting the "oh! I forgot to make it DELETE instead of GET" bugs. When the parameters of the API are all in the url and/or query, it feels better encapsulated.

(promise I'm not flaming, and I fully expect to get told, yes it matters, and here's why! ;)
I came here to say the same thing. For those of you who aren't going to bother reading the Rdio API spec (I did, because there's something I want to hack together with it): the whole API is literally just a single URI that accepts a "method" param, where the method is a list of verbs like "get all tracks in this playlist" or "add a friend".

There's a case to be made for relaxing the definition of REST to accept "just a bunch of URIs" APIs that don't follow the discoverability/transparency conventions of REST. But you can't call "here's a list of verbs" a REST interface.

What you'd want to see in a Rdio REST interface would be:

* /rdio/api/1/playlists
* /rdio/api/1/playlist/foo
* /rdio/api/1/artist/1
* /rdio/api/1/artist/1/tracks/2

&c &c &c. But, from what I can tell, none of the state inside Rdio's database is mapped to a URI.
Chernobyl clean-up expert slams Japan, IAEA
Actually both sides support this issue (don't know about this exact bill though), but from what I've heard supporters for full amnesty are holding it up the issue in hopes of a comprehensive bill and those completely against any type of immigration are obviously against it. A bill of this type is likely to pass, it's just a matter of when.
This is really great. I think many people do feel a bit of surprise, even if it is good surprise, with their application updates, and ideally, that shouldn't be the case. I mean, I love good surprises, but change can be unsettling in itself. Replacing the surprise with eager anticipation of a good thing, and the knowledge that it is being planned and tested wins hands down over changes appearing out of nowhere.
MongoDB on EC2 and EBS
I’ve found that I don’t need to check Twitter as often, or spend as long
processing it. It’s not an always-connected, always-communicating tool
that some people think it is — you can choose when and what to process,
and only do it 1-2 times a day if you like, scanning your messages and
not necessarily replying unless you feel the need to do so. It will be
another inbox, but not as tyrannical as email.

This sounds remarkably like email to me. I don't understand the difference. I was expecting an article about ditching email-type communication entirely, which I wouldn't dream of doing but would be an interesting experiment.
REST is as simple as it gets. You could make that argument if someone were to advocate using REST outside of HTTP. But HTTP is inherently REST, so you should have a good reason to not use REST rather than the other way around.
Actually, I'd argue that HTML had a very similar goal to TeX with a very different philosophy. That goal was purely the sharing of information. Some early browsers even had postscript interpreters so you could link to papers and view them in the browser. The first website at SLAC (first site in the US) was purely meant to be a gateway to the SPIRES database.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Physics_Information_Re...

I guess what I'm trying to say is that their histories are interwoven, and despite being different technologies, they shared a common goal and worked together. It's possible philosophy of what a web browser is probably led to their divergence more than anything.
While I don't like realtors much, I don't think it's fair to send them all to jail.

They all took a long position in housing and the market punished them soundly for it. They now need to find a new career. Sending them to jail is overkill.

Same for the millions of other people who contributed to the crisis - the real estate speculators/"homeowners" have lost lots of money. Construction workers have suffered 30% job losses.

What next, sending people to jail for buying into the pets.com IPO?
It appears that "streaming" infringing content is considered to be a public performance and thus exempt from felony prosecution while "reproducing" or "distributing" infringing content does. I honestly fail to see much of a difference between "streaming" and "distributing" so I am in favor of making the laws more consistent. Whether they should warrant felonies is a different discussion.
I use LaTeX in an academic setting (theoretical linguistics) which only occasionally requires a lot of math, but I'm still saving tons of man-hours by using the LaTeX + Emacs + AUCTeX combo. Here are some frequent use cases where LaTeX blows a text processor out of the water.

* Bibliography. The median article length in our field is 30+ pages, with reference lists of 60+ not uncommon. Maintaining these in Word/OO is a nightmare, even with (non-free) bibliography software. RefTeX allows me to find and insert citations in a matter of three keystrokes, and whenever I reshuffle the reference list I'm 100% sure it's in order (i.e. everything I cite in the text is in the references and there are no uncited references)

* We don't use math, but we do use a lot of tree-like diagrams. Drawing these by hand is a chore; using logical markup to get trees which need zero to very little tuning saves enormous amounts of time and frustration.

* Floats and numbered examples. TeX floats are notoriously unreliable, but seriously, are Word's any better? And it gets worse with numbered examples (and pictures in numbered examples). For instance, a frequent feature of linguistics papers is an interlinear gloss: two or three lines of elements that have to line up with each other. These involve tables or tab stops in a word processor, and are notoriously fragile (e. g. if your sentence doesn't fit on one line, you get horrible issues with breaking lines).

All this is in addition to the common advantages like keeping track of numbering. These are all things that can be done with a word processor, but usually require significant amounts of time and self-discipline.

A lot of people in our department use LaTeX; most are not of the "programming" type, and are not deeply "into" LaTeX, interacting with the very basics and using some googling and copy-pasting. They still get much more satisfactory results in a shorter amount of time than the Word people.
How many cancers would you wager could be linked to emissions from a coal plant of comparable energy output? What if there was a tsunami and it blew up?

What if we took the average number of fatalities per gigawatt-hour generated for coal and compared that to the worst-case ever scenario for nuclear, Chernobyl? Does anyone have these figures? I think we could all really use them to put this whole thing in proper perspective.
Yes. In this case, it makes an enormous difference. Your application can't just go to rdio/api/1/artist/whatever to look up the tracks for an artist; it has to make a SOAP-style request for the tracks for a given artist. This isn't a style nit.
Problem: To Catch a Lion in the Sahara Desert.
I can't recommend it, because I haven't used it yet, but OpenFeint works on iOS and Android, if that's important to you. http://www.openfeint.com/
"If people don't fight the campaign to stop nuclear energy, the factoids are going to dominate the discourse in many years to come."

I don't think it's fair to characterize the opposition's arguments so flippantly (as "factoids"). I'm far from an opponent of nuclear energy, but there are a lot of damned good reasons to be contemplative about a system where one bad day can injure thousands of people, and simultaneously make thousands of square miles of land unfit for human habitation for hundreds of years.

We (humans) seem to have a remarkably bad ability to correctly estimate the likelihood of "improbable" events. When that unfortunate trait crosses with the potential for out-sized, long-term impacts on the environment, it's right to be wary. It isn't totally irrational to argue that an extremely conservative position on risk is appropriate in that situation.
Not only that, but do not assume that what works for one audience automatically translates (which is when testing helps). Different websites/products should target differently.

So even if this worked for one of your sites, it may not be the best thing to do with another.
flagged, ssl errors
It's not RESTish.
Efficiency in Forth
I'm on TalkTalk (UK), last month I went twice over our monthly bandwidth and all that happened is that the download speeds went from 1600kps to 800-1100kps, which for the UK is still a pretty good speed. Talktalk BT and Sky who are the major three, just have general shaping, not aimed only at high users. It's timed, so you can download all you want 11pm to 5pm, then in what they call peak time, you can still watch HD films and so on, the slower speed is still enough for a lot.
Yes, this is why I use EC2 instead of other providers.
Manufacturing: Rustbelt recovery
If it were me in this situation, I would talk to the guy who has the cable and share his connection (even pay for his monthly fee to provide incentive). It's relatively easy to connect two houses by using directional wireless antenna.
In the US, pretty much any crime other than jaywalking is a felony punishable by a mandatory sentence of 25-life in prison.

"Land of the free" indeed.
You're right, that's what I meant to say with "or would be about to be shut down". Three of the seven would have been shut down this year, another one in 2012 and the final three in 2013 (source: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Kernreaktoren_in_Deut...). Last year it was decided to extend the lifetime of these reactors to 2019 or 2020.
Like Chomsky's search for universal grammar, the search for music universals has been a failure. Nevertheless, there are some ideas that pop up surprisingly often. Doing a quick mental search, I believe every musical tradition I've heard that emphasizes accurate pitch, and at least one I've heard that doesn't, utilizes the pentatonic scale: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pentatonic_sc...
REST is now just a generic term for any HTTP API that's not SOAP. Like Xerox and Kleenex, the popular usage is technically incorrect, but in practice, it doesn't matter.

Most REST API consumers today are more like CURL than a web browser. In the CURL-like case, the RPC pattern works quite well. HATEOS and other browser-centric REST ideas often just don't fit naturally into a simple API consuming app. People need to move on.
Note that the richter scale is outdated, the current scale (while sometimes mis-named Richter) is the Moment Magnitude Scale.

It is also a logarithmic scale.

Furthermore, as with Richter,

> This means that a Richter magnitude of 9 has a 10 time bigger shaking amplitude than Richter magnitude 8

Yes, and a bit above 30 times the energy released (2 magnitudes indicate a thousandfold increase in energy)
Bug Hunt: One Man QA
I believe the post hit the nail on the head when it stated that -Apple- made it clear it considers Flash obsolete. Flash's obsoletion is hardly the reality of the situation but Apple has enough clout to actually put a dent in Flash-adoption by merely issuing a press-release.

Also, where's everybody getting this Flash is closed/proprietary business from? Oh yea, that's right, APPLE! iOS is actually no more open nor any less proprietary. The ability to use open tools (javascript, css, html, etc) to make apps for it does not an open system make. I can download the source for the majority of the AS3 virtual machine from Adobe. There's nothing close to that level of transparency w/ Apple.

While I like that the post focuses on actual technical problems faced in the implementation of mobile Flash, I disagree when poster says the majority of the issue isn't politics. It's -all- politics no doubt about it. Apple has a long history of working closely w/ Adobe to help implement their technologies on Apple platforms, yet recently they've been one of the only companies that gives Adobe trouble over the issue of access to browser-based hardware acceleration. The only reason this has changed is because they realize how well suited Flash could be to mobile and now see Adobe as a threat to their closed system. They want you making apps for -their- store that have to pass through -their- screening process (suposedly in the name of quality which is a crock because so many bad apps make the store), all while using their programmatic tools. They want -huge- lock-in.

Besides, in my opinion, Flash will be around for quite some time. Those I can think of off the top of my head who're the closest to modern day renaissance people are high-level Flash developers. May Flash lose the consumer content video war? Perhaps, but seeing as how it's possible to make robots (or other sensor/motor based machines) that are powered by Flash, highly interactive billboards, and hardware accelerated data visualizations/graphics rendering (on the desktop at least), Flash has it's niche all cut out. As far as mobile goes, I think Flash will still play a large role in helping prototype the cutting edge of innovative touch and/or mobile interfaces, not to mention all the embedded devices that now use Flash for display purposes.
as I have stated before those felony laws already exist, both President and US Congress refused to enforce them and changed many of them at bankers request to avoid facing 'the music'..