skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couldn't upvote you more. If people cared about ecosystem so much during industrial revolution then UK would be the only industrialised country in the world today.

This whole web startup thing is still so new. As Gary Vaynerchuk said "The internet is still 15 years old. The fucking thing hasn't even had sex yet." Who knows what will be the Mecca of internet startups some 10-15 years down the road.
It's the reverse of a class action lawsuit, the plantiff is singular and the class is getting sued. I wonder if there is a mechanism for that.
I meant, explicit checks on the return value will break (not that this is a bad thing). Specifically, neither `'disabled' == true` nor `undefined == false` will ever be true[thy] and are thus breaking changes.

Perhaps you meant implicit conversions to boolean still working? Eg `!!'disabled'`, `if ('disabled')`, `!!undefined`, or `if (undefined)` will continue to work.
I read through the other comments before commenting here. There is an interesting issue regarding the distinction between status of an occupation and the pay of an occupation (which has much to do with schoolteacher pay, as it happens). But as to pay, currently job classifications involving related work have higher pay if they require higher education degrees as a barrier to entry than if they don't. One example that is familiar to industrial psychologists and individual differences psychologists is the pay of engineers and technicians in the same industrial category. AT EVERY LEVEL OF TESTABLE INDIVIDUAL ABILITY, the economic return from becoming an engineer is better than the economic return from becoming technician. Even if what the engineer does on the job is decide that a key technician has to accomplish a task (that is, even if the technician is essential to the process in real-world terms), the engineer will be paid more. This is why there is demand for degrees from second-tier and third-tier engineering programs that look little better academically than glorified high schools, and appear to offer less hands-on technical training than a well designed technical certificate program. Where a worker can fit in the division of labor in a company makes a difference in the worker's pay, and people pursuing education or training look for what will help them make the most pay.

Mike Rowe's thought-provoking testimony to Congress submitted here identifies a problem, but it's not clear that the solution he suggests will work as well as simply reforming immigration laws in the United States in the direction of opening up work-related immigrant visas for skilled trades workers. Perhaps the workers who can best improve their own lot in life as tradesmen in the United States economy are those who have already invested in learning a trade in another country, and who perhaps are learners of English as a second language who might have particular difficulty pursuing a postsecondary academic degree in the United States. That may be the way to fill the skilled trade gap in the United States.
"Maybe some people just have a knack for this stuff" is a different way of saying "I was also raised on a farm and took wood shop and engine shop."
A few years ago, we had some remodeling work done on our house. A union plumber came in on a Saturday to do the plumbing portion for cash. He told me that his most recent union-sponsored continuing education class was a call-to-action on the shortage of young plumbers. The union was worried that it could not find enough young people interested in the trade! I had always regarded the unions as exclusionary, but they're now worried about their own survival due to attrition (well, at least the Cleveland-area plumbers union).

This same guy noted that the real concern wasn't residential plumbing. This work is fairly low-skilled. The issue is that large commercial buildings require much skill and experience. Perhaps a solution would be to stratify the definition of "plumber" to allow those with a lower-level license to do easy work. Those with the upper-level licenses could do the more complicated stuff.
In both cases, standardization of spelling and grammar, they have the role of streamlining communication. Try reading posts that have non-standardized spelling. If the spelling is phonetic based, you have to pause and think how the word sounds. Awkward grammatical sentences are hard to parse.

There is a point to standardizing these things, though, past a certain point, it's a bit absurd and your point stands.
High courts rule Twitter included in super injuctions
I already blogged about this problem 6 weeks ago:
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-smartphone-paten...

The new stories that surfaced today sounded similar, but James Thomson told me on Twitter that it's about a different company and patent this time around.
I think that leasing plans (such as the $20/mo student plan) and the fact that all your data is stored on the cloud are bigger factors here.

There's more to Google's new approach than just a browser-based OS. Hardware is completely interchangeable, and the prospect of accessing all your data anywhere has become increasingly popular in recent time.
Yeah, I agree that 2.0 would be a great time to really innovate. I understand breaking sites with a point upgrade could be met with a lot of resistance. What they have built though is probably good enough that they could soon afford to branch off with something new for 2.0 and those that don't want to rebuild their code to take advantage could happily stay on the 1.x branch.
The tech community has a diversity problem.
I'm confused about this, too. Is this mostly to replace discussion about DDG on IRC? Why is this exciting? (As with the parent comment, I'm not trying to tear anyone down. People are clearly excited about this, and I'm wondering what coolness I'm missing out on.)
Most of this is quite clever, but "The Great Communist Empire of Ubuntu" seems a bit over the top.
"MongoDB does geospatial stuff" - FYI, PostgreSQL with Postgis has many more geospatial querying capabilities vs Mongo which primarily uses geohashes.
I searched this entire thread for the words "illegal immigration" and didn't find 'em, but surely it's gotta be an important factor here? A helluva lot of the carpenters I see around here are Mexican, and I'd be surprised if they were all in the US legally. If US-born carpenters are being forced to compete with under-the-table seriously-low-wages carpenters in the construction industry is there any wonder that it's an unattractive career path?

In Australia right now, skilled tradesmen are making money hand over fist, and the skilled trades are rapidly becoming more prestigious than the lower end of white-collar work (see the Sydney Morning Herald's "Australia's Hottest Tradie" competition for more details...)

But this will never happen in the US because there's an effectively infinite supply of semi-skilled workers being allowed in by an immigration policy which is highly restrictive for high-skilled workers (who leave a paper trail when they get hired) and practically unrestricted for low-skilled workers (who don't).
To be frank - your comment is just an appeal to nostalgia, not practicality. It comes off in the same way as when some people try to tell you that buying MP3s on the net is wrong and that buying physical CDs are the only right way to do it.

Ebooks have huge advantages compared to physical books. They're availble everywhere (no need for long errands/waiting just to find the book you seek), much cheaper, searchable and don't take up space in your home. They're not lendable (yet), but that's the only issue with them.

I'm not saying that ebooks are "the correct choice". A lot of people still love the feeling of physical books, perhaps rightly so. But please don't tell me that buying ebooks are somehow wrong or any lesser than buying physical books.
Actually skilled blue collar type workers make a lot of money. If they also have business/management skills they can make tons of money. I have a friend who was in CS in undergrad until he realized that he can't sit inside all day. So, he dropped out of college and learned concrete (did go back and get a civil engineering degree). He's now next in line to own the concrete business he's a part of when the current own retires. Sometimes he works 12 hour days and he usually comes home dirty, but he and his family also have more money than they know what to do with.

BTW, he's also that kind of person who can fix/build anything as mentioned in the original article.
Speeding Up Compressed Sensing Algorithms
Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings. Inquire within.)
Every once in a while, I throw up an offer to give free help. If it's something I can do in 10-15 minutes, I'm happy to oblige (within reason).

- I'm a full stack web developer (LAMP primarily),
- I've helped a lot with personal development-type things (resume critique, self improvement suggestions, etc),
- I've done my share of business model and product pitch reviews,
- I'm an early adopter and provide strong/constructive feedback,
- I've got great aesthetics and design sense

So if there's something I can help you with, just ask here or @mikegreenberg on Twitter. :)

Cheers!
It's also, in a larger and more historical sense, the bastard child of the dickless X workstation. Which is quite an achievement for that old eunuch, come to think of it.
I have two things going every morning:

1) I flip through my Reeder app on the iPad which has a mix of blogs in there that either publish far too ofter (like techcrunch) or far too seldom (like avc.com; ok that one's in between). I however try to have a great selection of various topics in there from architecture, design (like swiss-miss.com) to the tech kind-of news.

2) Then I have a selection of apps or Safari bookmarks sitting on my first iPad page that I go through in a bit more detailed fashion. I'm listing them below:

- dribbble.com (dribbblr app)

- quora.com

- forrst.com

- macrumors.com

- thenextweb.com

- flipboard app

- twitter app

Then I'm ready to start the day and go on with it. Not included are philosophical books I try to read, but I don't read nearly as much as I should.
I think that this is the patent in question:

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=nA2AAAAAEBAJ&dq=7...

If this is the one, then this is an unbelievably broad patent. I encourage everyone to at least skim through this thing, it is incredible that this can constitutes a valid patent.

The way that patent system in this country works for software patents is wrong, period. If it is this easy for someone to get sued then it should be made easier to fight back against these type of lawsuits.

At least doctors can get medical malpractice insurance to protect against the liability of losing a frivolous lawsuit. Software developers are on their own.
Actually, fixed-width fonts arose with the typewriter, which is how these sorts of differences have had time to get established. Variable-width fonts basically didn't exist except in professionally published documents before computers and word processing.
The Economist (dead tree edition)

http://lesswrong.com/ Thinking about thinking

http://www.realworldtech.com/ For really in depth articles on computer topics, and the forums

http://www.anandtech.com/ for hardware benchmarks and reviews

http://blog.regehr.org/ a blog about C compilers and hiking

http://marginalrevolution.com/ Economics progressor joint blog

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/ Intelligent and sane liberal blogger

http://www.theatlantic.com/megan-mcardle/ Intelligent and sane conservative blogger. "Conservative" might actually be a bit of a stretch there...

http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/ About space travel/combat - its almost a guilty pleasure.

Also the blogs of a few authors and friends.
second.

hubski is my daily stop for interesting reads.
I have an account on my own XMPP server. I just added "im@ddg.gg" and I can now do DDG searches through my chat client. Not sure how useful that is, but nice nontheless. And all without having to sign up for an account directly with their XMPP service, because of federation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput...
As a product guy, I would want my family to try the competition. My products should win because they are better, not by edict. You can't give an edict to the whole market!
Like the two spaces after a sentence rule, the traditional quote style has much to do with typesetting. And so in the monospaced, limited font, early online setting, those rules were not very relevant, and were often ignored. When it wasn't being overdiscussed. Waaay before Wikipedia.

Now, the programmer style is actually different from these. You'll occasionally see a programmer write «He said "Foo.".»
Ask HN: What are your favorite books (both fiction and non-fiction)?
In the "Ask HN: Apart from Hacker News, what else you read?" the top comment is currently "Books".

So, what are your favorite books?
well as the device exists now, you cannot even finish booting/logging in without internet access.
One week in Toronto, there was a massive snow storm. I lived in the suburb of Oakville, and when I got to the commuter train station in the morning, I discovered that the service had been canceled. They were running replacement buses, but the buses couldn't carry that many people. It was chaos.

I spotted someone I knew from my Financial Modelling days, a LBO entrepreneur I will call "T." T was into buying and selling companies. Unlike the typical cost-cutting LBO types, T was a marketing specialist who thrived on identifying brands where company management were operations focused and had dropped the ball on marketing.

T was also a deadhead who once told me that money really does change your life: He and his wife could fly to Grateful Dead concerts instead of driving the VW bus of their college years.

T could afford a limo and driver, but his wife drops him at the train station every morning, because they only own one car. Even in a snow emergency, T was not fighting for a cab, he was trying to get on a bus. We linked arms and charged, and wound up in adjacent seats.

He was pleased to see I had made it up to home ownership, and that I was reading a book about personal finance, "The Richest Man in Babylon." He told me about a book he said was the best book ever written about money, "The Millionaire Next Door."

When we got to Toronto, I decided work could wait. I waded through the snow drifts to a book store and bought it on the spot.
I must admit, before the Steve Jobs Vs. Flash drama unfolded, I paid little attention to the performance of Flash. I know my system would kick up a bit when I visited a flash website but it wasn't terribly uncomfortable. I think myspace pages crippled my computer more than any single flash application ever could.
That sure worked magnificently for Python and PHP.

The problem with branching off like that is that now you're suddenly faced with a fragmented community. The worst thing of which being that everything is written for the "old" branch. Then nobody wants to use the new branch because there are less batteries included.

When nobody wants to use the new version, no new batteries get added.

It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Man tracks stolen laptop hundreds of miles away, calls thief
Neat, but not nearly as cool as the original XKCD map since that one actually had real size correspondence.
I currently maintain this list on Quora: http://www.quora.com/What-books-are-on-your-must-read-list-f...

Mostly Startup/Entrepreneur themed stuff.
It would have been more interesting if the sizes had been based on some approximation of downloads/users/market share. The xkcd map, although a guess in some places, attempted to be grounded in something empirical.
Just keep the day of the week relative to local time; it isn't really important except in local issues anyway.
You are absolutely correct, but "ethically repugnant and tantamount to extortion" are not crimes. Congress needs to change the laws so these behaviors are illegal.

Unfortunately, most legislators from my state seem to believe in business by extortion. I'm so frustrated with them I've given up even communicating with them. Does Hatch ring a bell? :(
I wrote a snarky reply to illustrate that your broad and generalizing assertion didn't really hold up.

My use of "rent seeking" is fine, there is other gain to extract than pure monetary profit. One is personal prestige: Being the boss of a big department with a big budget is nice (and well paid, even in the public sector).

An example of a public company, a railway one even, squandering billions on useless prestige projects: Danish State Railways procuring a small run of entirely custom made intercity trains instead of getting something off the shelf. It's a 5 billion DKK project, close to a decade late now. Also, changing governments failed to maintain the signals, so they're utterly rotten, causing delays daily.
Well, malloc() is very much doing the right thing in a world where (virtual) memory is plentiful. The performance of the program improves substantially, without impacting memory usage that much.

I never understood why the system doesn't do the accounting strictly, even if it waits to actually hand out individual pages. Then, it could give an error on brk() or mmap() when the memory would be "overbooked". Memory "saved" this way would be unusable to other processes, but it would be usable as buffer cache, and fork() would still be fast.

edit: Another possible solution would be a special "out-of-memory" signal. The program could trap that signal and do the right thing with it. The problem with that is that it's difficult to program for out-of-memory conditions. Something as simple as printf() won't work at all, and could cause a signal loop depending on implementation. Given that, almost no programs would do it, so there would be little benefit.
CoffeeScript: The Cool Parts
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So this seems to be largely a rehash of existing arguments against Steve Ballmer with the added bonus of the skype purchase being thrown in. I cant say that I disagree with the article, but I would agree with others' comments that direct comparisons of MS to Apple and Google are not completely valid. I personally think that there is space for all 3 companies to thrive(which to some degree is the case) since they all have a different niche. It does seem that MS is not the less agile and forward thinking company of the 3. I could liken it somewhat to Detroit vs japan/Korea
You might be right with Python, I think with PHP though it was pain that was needed if the language was going to be around long term.
Transition to Python 3 is going well and according to schedule AFAIK.
FB Cash 2
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What is your dream - UK SEO Forums
I actually say "erbivore", as do most people I know.
It is that surprising that is what he says in an interview? When it comes to PR, "Ballmer Says No iPods, Google in Household" is better than "Ballmer Family Uses iPods, Google". I recall Melinda Gates saying the same thing after being berated in NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/magazine/24fob-q4-t.html)

It is Ballmer's/Gates' job to convince the world to use Microsoft products, not Microsoft's job to convince them. In public sphere, they are of course going to present a unified front. But in reality, I would be shocked if he actually never used a competitor's product.
Here's EFF's take on the bill: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/protect-ip-act-coica-re...
You would be surprised by both how many are legal and how many are illegal.
Bill Kaiser and Donald Fischer on why they invested in Typesafe
Young Chinese developers hit jackpot via App Store
Memphis,Tennessee National Attention Coming Week - Memphis Travel | Examiner.com
When its smart to take a LOWER valuation
Could the Chromebook be Google's iPad?
Heh, that would be precise.
This is certainly a way to go about taking websites off of the most commonly used web. And cutting off ad funding is like strangling them.
But this power can very well be misused and used to quiet organizations. I dont believe the government should have the power to dictate who is allowed to do business with who. Also filtering DNS is only a precursor of what is to come with internet censorship.
A Rationalist's View to Functional Programming
You know, I think the next INTERCAL may come from ideas like this.
Tom Standage's book "The Victorian Internet" is an entertaining and easy read on the history of the telegraph system. Recommended:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Victorian-Internet-Tom-Standage/dp/0...
Indie Comics Seized by Customs Agents at US-Canada Border
Is Google’s Chromebook The Death Knell For Antivirus?
I've been using Goodreads to log 'interesting' books that I come across online, and getting from the library&amazon when I need more. They do get more in depth, and force you to focus a bit more - no mail or tweets popping up in the middle of a chapter!
Fairwinds: Fukushima Groundwater Contamination Worst in Nuclear History
Could you imagine if corporations were required to blacklist all companies that had done anything illegal? Everything would crumble. This is such a ridiculous idea.
The Ad-Supported Kindle Is Amazon's Best Seller
I completely agree with this. Up to a couple weeks ago, I had only programmed in .NET and php. I got bored one day, and decided to learn python. I loved it right away, and now I'm learning Django and building my first web app in python. You can ask other people about which they think is better, but you're going to always get different opinions, so the best thing to do is try to figure it out yourself.
But then you don't get the 100MB "free" 3G data plan from Verizon.
The selectedIndex example really nailed down why .prop() exists, at least for me.
Especially because the government dictates what is considered illegal. Should I welcome us to china?
Was this written by a Markov chain text generator? It makes no sense at all.
Definitely needs sources! I'd love to read more about the cases (and do the biasing myself).
- Canvas apps can be bookmarked (i think they're bookmarked by default), which means your users will easily find them

- Facebook can ban your domain for spam at any time, and then go figure. We had a simple redirect from our registered domain to our canvas facebook game, and somehow facebook considers it spam for months now.

- Users like the cozy environment of the facebook canvas around them, they find notifications instantly, chat etc.

- Consider this: Zynga launched farmville.com , but it didn't get traction so for their next game Cityville, they did not launch cityville.com

I believe there is a significant advantage to stay on the canvas. That means though that your app must give them 30% of your virtual currency revenues, and you can only use their approved advertisers. However, you can go via the third route, create a landing page for your external website in the facebook canvas, so you at least get the bookmark link.
I hate to be the one point this out, but my drug consumption, aside from beer, has declined over time as my internet connection has speeded up.

Prescription medication, or the abuse thereof, has increased because the current pain management models in the health care system have been employed in conjunction with introduction of easily transferable pain medication that is better than heroin and equally cost-effective and desirable to the delivery system and the end-user along with lax oversight and promotion by the drug manufacturers. For example, back in the day, it was a huge pain in the ass to find and acquire, through healthcare professionals, high-dose codeine in pill form yet today Oxycontin can be had everywhere for cheap.

In other words, someone is blaming the use of the internet to acquire prescription drugs instead of blaming the drug manufacturers and the doctors that dispense said medications to the general population as an easy cure-all.