skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is horrifyingly bad. Most of the facts are wrong. Most of the people that were quoted were wrong (having class-based OO will impact performance on mobile devices? what?). Finally, the conclusion is wrong. (I know I should expand on these points, but I think a quick read through will render that unnecessary :)

Personally, I would be happiest if all non-essential features were removed from the language and implemented as standard libraries. Once you have a language with metaprogramming capabilities and an easy way to use libraries, you have every language feature you'll ever need. The language would never need to be redesigned again; you could just load a library to get the feature of the day.

Unfortunately, it seems that language designers (and users) think that every feature needs its own special syntax, and that means we have to deal with bloated langauges like Javascript, ECMAScript 3.1, and ECMAScript 4 :)

(Yes, I think we should script web browsers with Lisp. Why not?)
Because real estate always goes up? The "houses are the greatest investment ever" myth is amazingly persistent.
I'm pretty excited about this, just have to see about those plane tickets.
Pandora, we need the Sign Off ability
I hate those obnoxious ads that spin your CPU to 100% for no reason at all :/
Mobile advertising: Better measurement leads to new opportunities
try this out: with your hands fairly far apart (so as not to alert the fly), clap very hard (and quickly) about 4 inches above where the fly is -- whether their escape route is front/back/left/right it almost certainly involves going up...this works great, seriously.
Minidavinci
breakthrough newspaper industry renovation web based technology,,super lucrative, a definite homerun,,hands down.
works now. Thanks! Awesome app!
putting money into a house that maintains its value or even drops slightly is better than paying rent. rent money is gone forever. a mortgage is building equity that you can draw on. plus I don't get how people don't realize that renting out a house to pay its mortgage is basically free money. Someone else is building equity in a house for you and all you have to do is pay the down payment and manage tenants.

My personal plan is to buy a house that has something that can be turned into a studio, live in the studio and rent out the main house. I have a feeling this type of situation doesn't go on the market too often for obvious reasons though.
This article is really poorly titled. The first paragraph should be the title:

Despite the recent economic downturn hitting the United States there is a buzz of activity in the internet world. San Francisco is not slowing down, neither is the thirst for innovation or knowledge.
Meet the Godfather Behind Mob Wars’ (Real) Money: Super Rewards
I don't think that's a correct analogy. This announcement is about signal detection in the presence of noise not information decryption.

My interpretation of the article is that two noisy quantum channels (where each individual channel is too noisy to recover any information) can have their noisy results combined to recover clean information.

There is no classical analogy to this case. If two classical channels are too noisy to recover information from them individually, then there is no way to combine the noisy results to recover any information.
Extremely well said.

I think the academics specifically dislike Wikipedia because the information has to stand on its own merit, rather than the author's reputation. They are used to being able to say, "I say this is true." and having everyone believe them. In the WikiWorld, that doesn't fly.
Ask HN: military reserve for startup owners?
Are there any startup founders here who are members of the military reserve?

I am considering joining the coast guard reserve for a few reasons, maybe bad ones. I'm actually posting this under a sockpuppet because my friends in real life were completely revolted by the notion that I could even consider this. Here are my thoughts...

- I'm not going to get shipped to afghanistan in the coast guard.

- I like boats and the ocean and would be able to get paid (minimal amounts) learning more about them. Normally, this hobby can be very expensive.

- a while back the sfbay craiglslist actually had many job listings for the coast guard. This makes me think that I'd be able to stay in the bay area, rather than shipping off to a base in west virginia or somewhere else far away.

- I would be able to get health insurance through the coast guard

- I'd meet new people.

- It sounds like fun...

and lastly: I just read an article about a guy in brooklyn who joined the army reserve and received a $150,000 small business loan only available to people in the armed services. he then used the loan to open two really hip bars in Williamsburg.

This seemed like an interesting way to get funding, and if the guy got $150K to start a BAR, surely I could get funding for a technology business.

I'm not sure if I can even do this, I may have a physical condition that disqualifies me from any military service.

But, I was wondering if anyone on HN was in a military reserve unit, or was in the past, and can offer any insight.

edit: here's the link to the small business loan, and an article about it:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR2007061301116.html

http://www.sba.gov/patriotexpress/

Any comments are appreciated. Especially appreciated if you've been in the armed service and can say why this is or isn't a good idea.
all things are relative. You can be the smartest person in your state, but not the country. You can be the smartest person in the country, but not the world. Same thing with wealth, you may be a millionaire but there are MILLIONS other people who are richer than you.
install Ad Block Plus
Why, oh why is it not in silicon valley? Sounds like a great idea though.
Both satellite piracy and creating DVD decryption software require cracking the decryption process in a sustainable way.

But for getting one-time copies out, there will always be an analog output at the end of the chain. Watermarking allows the distributor to pinpoint the device used, but the only thing they can do with this information is shut down the device. I don't see how this can be an economic threat when player prices must be kept low for consumers, but there are millions of people wanting pirated content (which is easily distributed after extraction).
I'm thinking if I were going to spend $70k on a car, I might as well go all the way around the bend and get a Tesla at $109k. Though the Skyline is a beauty, and much faster than the Tesla. And, I drive so little that it probably isn't going to make a big difference one way or the other to the environment (factoring in environmental impact of battery production, etc., I guess...I dunno).

I think California is getting to me, because I'm also thinking the Altima hybrid looks pretty swish.
The keyword I read through this is that your brass ring is a $150K LOAN. For this loan, you obligate 1 weekend a month and 2 weeks a year, if I recall my reserve obligation right.
If you are doing it just for the money, I'd suggest don't. Find some other path. If you are interested in the reserves because of your patriotism and/or sense of duty, then by all means explore it.

I enlisted in the Army for college money. Were I to do it over again, I would have gone through ROTC and made connections as an officer. Connections I would be able to use to help in business once I was done with military service.

That's just my 2 cent.
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Professors don't distrust Wikipedia because they regard it as a threat to their supposed monopoly on learning. (They don't regard themselves as as a single unit at all.) The reason they distrust Wikipedia is that there's no accountability.

The problem is not that it's online, but that the work is unsigned.

I think you're misunderstanding the value of Wikipedia. Its main value is as a fast source of leads, not as a source of authoritative answers.
Isn't that the point?

Those 143,000 are probably generating more costs for Comcast than they generate revenue.. Cutting them as customers makes the business as a whole better.
(I assume that's the argument anyway)
written a bit too simplistic for my taste. then again, i like a decent book and look down on anyone who's writing or saying "tl;dr".
I'm actually less interested in the money. I had the idea to join about a year ago, but kind of gave up on it. I just read the article about the loan literally about an hour ago while I was on the bus, so it got me thinking about the reserve again. Thanks for the comment!
So if you're the smartest person in the world, does everything stop being relative? Or do you start worrying about alternative Everett branches?
Wait, are you thinking of joining the coast guard reserves and then starting a startup, or joining the reserves while starting a startup?

The latter seems very much impractical. Startups are mentally all-consuming, and if I understand the reserves correctly, you still have to report for training regularly. The mental strain of this would probably be too much, and you'd let the startup falter. Plus, what if the startup takes off and then you (heaven forbid) get called up for active duty?

The former might work, though it seems unlikely. I have friends & relatives in the military, both on active duty, in the reserves, and formerly in the reserves, and they generally have been positive about the experience. But they have personality types that are very much at odds with the typical startup founder: they like (or believe they need) structure & discipline, while successful founders usually thrive on ambiguity and change and can make decisions with very little information. Seems unlikely that the same person would have the personality traits to do well in both the military and in a tech startup.

Also, never ever join up for any branch of the armed services on the assumption that "Well, I'm not going to get sent to a war zone anyway." Geopolitics can change very quickly, and in a war, coast guard ships get deployed right alongside the navy.
for the love of god leave this shit on reddit
there will always be someone smarter, better looking, richer, and with a bigger ____ than you

Oh, come on, nazgulnarsil, where's your spirit? You can do it!

Bart: You make me sick, Homer. You're the one who told me I could do anything if I just put my mind to it!

Homer: Well, now that you're a little bit older, I can tell you that's a crock! No matter how good you are at something, there's always about a million people better than you.

Bart: Gotcha. Can't win, don't try.
Did you go to college? Why not be an officer?

I have a friend who went to the Coast Guard academy. There are indeed some people from the Coast Guard that go to Iraq to guard offshore oil platforms, but comparatively few compared to the other armed forces.
250GB??!!
I wish.

On our biggest ISP (Telstra) we can get 60GB/month for $129 for Cable (or $149 for ADSL2+)

(Okay, We can get something like 40-50GB / month for around $60-$70 on other ISP's, but the point still stands..)
"lots of apps catch script tags but miss event attributes."

This is a good point. I know at least one really popular web app that does this.
Google Clues Developers in on Android Market
"`returning` violates "Do the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work" flat out without giving you anything in return."

We agree on the maxim while disagreeing with how to apply it. For me, "returning" is simpler because it seems to involve fewer moving parts: you don't have to remember to write 'squid' at the end and you get a local variable that is scoped only to the block where it is needed.

To you, it is a gross and needlessly complicated way to write begin; squid = ...; squid; end. I can see how you would feel that way without feeling that way myself.

I'm curious about the aversion to Symbol#to_proc. If you see [...].map(&:name) and think of it as an abbreviation for { |element| element.name }, there isn't much to like.

But coming from Smalltalk, does your brain ever click over and make you think of [...].map(&:name) as meaning "map the message :name over this array"?

I ask because when I think of languages like Smalltalk and Ruby, I go along with Alan kay and thenk of them as being message-oriented rather than object-oriented. Symbol#to_proc seems to fit that somehow in my brain. I dunno how to explain it any other way, it really feels less like an abbreviation to save some characters and more like getting closer to what I am trying to say...
Comma "we hope."
I see. "Hurt more than it helps" wasn't the best wording on my part.
I have a degree in physics. In fact, the job ads on craigslist were for reserve officers. This one is for Tacoma, but was essentially the same one I saw for SF back in April.

http://coastguard.jobamatic.com/a/jbb/job-details/26481
I am also skeptical of the conventional wisdom of home ownership. I think a mortgage is simply a way to force yourself to save money. If people save with the same commitment as mortgage payments, even while paying rent, they should end up doing just fine.
True.
Although I haven't heard all that many gospels congs that mention Balaam...

And so off to the Biblegateway.com I go...
0 results for ASS in the NIV.
76 results for ASS in the KJV
I have an LLC that is just me. I do a mixture of electronics and software consulting. I do OK, maybe a little bit more than I would if I was a senior programmer at google or yahoo. (or maybe not) I would like to do more electrical engineering. I have an electronic product I would like to bring to market (ok, a bike computer) that ties in with a desktop and web based analytics tool. This sort of thing is hard to get funding for in the valley, which is why the loan was interesting. (if I'm wrong about this, let me know who would fund such a product... ;-))

I think I could handle the regimented nature of training. Until I got hurt, I used to do amateur cycle racing which involved getting up at 5am every day and riding for 2-3 hours, and long group rides on weekends.
It really depends. If the definitions of foo.bar and foo.bash make sense independantly of the assignment to foo, I prefer the second form as well. If in my brain the whole thing is "atomic", I prefer the returning form or to make a helper method so that they are composed into a logical chunk.

For the same reason, I write:

foo = bar
bash = blitz

When teh two statements are independant, and:

foo, bar = bash, blitz

When they are deeply related and should not be broken up. Sometimes that is hard to read and I will get gratuitous:

begin
foo = bar
bash = blitz
end

What can I say... that uses more characters than needed. It isn't always about saving electrons for me.
Linux Space Cube Ready For Blast Off.
I will definitely be there. Not that that's of any major consequence.
what was your injury? one that they will still allow you in the military with?
What if you don't want to smash a fly in your hands?
OK... I would think that if you really want to do it, do it. I respect military service as something of a quintessential human experience. I'd consider it myself if I wasn't such an anti-military liberal weenie.

Realize, however, that bait and switch is common. You're told you'll be working in one place but really you'll end up somewhere else. The Coast Guard may not send you to Iraq but they very well may send you to some God forsaken island in the middle of the Pacific. If you're not mentally prepared for that worst case scenario, you shouldn't sign up.
really good article - especially the part about patience and not being a pig because pigs get slaughtered.
slipped discs. I don't know if they let people into the military with that. if not, then i guess this discussion is moot.
Government work and start-up work are diametrically opposed. My advice to anyone considering any kind of government employment... DON'T DO IT, it will suck the life out of you.
Ian Albert: How to create a poster containing every Unicode character
>if I'm wrong about this, let me know who would fund such a product... ;-)

Y Combinator?
Sexing | A Mom's Life
Well at that point I guess you can strive to be the smartest person ever. But its a finite measure, at some point there is always that 1 person who is the richest/smartest.
Let's go (to my placefav...poetically)
I don't see what IT consultants have to do with lawyers, or how you think the two relate. Just because people waste money on IT consultants does not mean hiring a lawyer is a waste.

Also, anyone can just call themselves an IT consultant. You have to go through schooling and pass a test to become a lawyer. The barrier to entry is a lot higher.
what does "kick the dog" mean?
Album-loving artists blame iTunes for changed music tastes
yes, that movie is awesome
Realize, however, that bait and switch is common

Yeah, I've heard that. That's why I was thinking coast guard. There are 8000 reservists and only 400 are "active." Of course I might get activated but it seems like most of the work to be done is in the USA.
I guess it can't hurt to apply.
Not surprising really, people went to Live Search only for the deal not to try out search
You could extract a list of traits from these posts and make a survey (agree, strongly agree, etc.), then score it. That would give a clear scale and quantfy the fortune-teller aspect. Psych is harder than math, after all, since the answers are never clear/simple. :)
The Inside Details on iPhone 2.0.2 and Dropped Calls
I was a Marine combat engineer veteran and then a reservist and a recruiter for a bit of time.

You're jumping the gun on a lot of things. Military benefits, especially for a reservist, isn't as cheery and rosey as you're picturing it.

For example VA loans are only given to veterans, the same goes for the health insurance coverage.

In addition, I find it somewhat disingenuous that people (this might not apply to you, feel free to email me to say I'm a pompous douche) are interested in the military, to only want the benefits but not the burden that few carry.
Because mortgages remain a great leverage instrument. Find a bank who will lend you 4X your initial deposit with a low fixed (or not...) interest rate, without margin calls, in any other investment vehicles?
I seem to have no problem killing them when they fly on my windows and stop moving. I swat their ass and bury them before they even know what happened. My record is 262-12 (been keeping track for three years).
Well, smartness is a bit more complex. I may be better at skill A, but my friend is way good at B. Thus, he is "smarter".
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"!@#$%^, we need a phoneme-based name-matcher but the programmer who built it in assembler retired years ago!" (Trans: Doug, we need you to write a fuzzy ILP system in Mercury)*

Two words: code reuse.

Various soundex algorithms are readily available in lots of languages. Even without them, implementing one shouldn't take more than a couple of hours... this guy seems to be more of a salesman than a programmer.
Duplexes sell fairly frequently. For mine, the rent of each unit is greater than the mortgage...

As a note, though, home ownership (esp. rental ownership) is more expensive than just the mortgage (and taxes, and utilities). Like any business, there is time and attention required. Like any other depreciating asset, there is also ongoing maintenance costs. And they are not smooth like the income stream. If your rent is $1000 and your monthly payment (mortgage + escrow) is $800, you may be netting $200/mo. Great! But then you have to scramble to find the $10k to replace the roof. Or it takes two months to replace the tenants (there goes 8 months' profits). In the long term, it should work out. Your mortgage + tax payments should increase slower than the monthly rent payment. But renting out a house is not free money.
Stale Green Bacon: it appears that _why is a combinator
Actually no... They were not trying to overcome noise. They were actually testing what can come out of combining "entangled" noisy channels. The fact that they retrieve information out of nothing (noise is the equivalent of "nothing" information-wise) is the beauty of their work.
I was in the Army Reserves and then the National Guard. The biggest problem for me was the 7 months of straight training before I could get started with my unit.

What the experience will be like almost entirely depends on the job you get. Some units are very active and actually a lot of fun. With other units you might do absolutely nothing, and the weekend ends up being a long nap.

I was in an aviation unit and my unit allowed me to fly in the Chinook helicopters. We did a lot of civil stuff like helping carry supplies to the top of Mount Ranier for the forest service. I also met a lot of new people and got do to some interesting jobs. One of my "2 week trainings" was really a two week party and sleep during the day. Really, it could be a good way to break things up.

Really what you need to do is go talk to your recruiter. Make sure you figure out what sort of units and jobs are available. If you can, talk to the unit you would be joining first. Ask your prospective unit about the sort of jobs they need filled. You might find something that interests you before you even start the process.

Also take a look at the other branches and see what is available for them. You might find you won't be able to do exactly what you thought you might be able to do with the Coast Guard but something else might interest you in another branch. As I mentioned, aviation can be a lot of fun as well.

When looking for other branches, the likelihood of getting deployed overseas really depends on the job and the unit. If you have a unit that has horrible readiness than you might not get sent out because of that, but those units are not as fun to join. The job is also a big factor. If you are in a high demand unit, then you would be screwed. Chinook units are fun to be in but they are probably more likely to go to war. Also, steer clear of infantry. ;)

You don't get much pay so the money won't really be worth it if you are a decent earner. You get access to things like a break in health insurance but you have to consider how much that is really worth to you. As you mentioned, there are other perks available only to people in the service. Again, you have to decide if the reward is good enough.

Personally, I couldn't do it. I would have to kill all my freelance jobs, put my networks on hold and generally get stale for at least 3 months. I would hate to be out of the loop for that long and it would negatively impact my real "day job."

If you are not in this situation, I say go for it.
Merb seems to be a great platform.. I hope the community grows to the point of more adoption because it is a little too esoteric at this point. For example there aren't even any books published about Merb yet.
I thought that was a fairly inane point. While I have no doubt that Joe Millionaire feels like he's not rich if he can't buy a new Lotus without blinking, that's pretty much irrelevant to any practical discussion of wealth.

When your income places you well into the top 1% of earners and you're still hurting for cash, that's your problem. Learn to live within your means.
I don't have a problem with that criticism. I posed the question the way I did because I thought I'd get better feedback. Mentioning the "serve my country" part of the decision has caused a lot of crazy arguments for me in real life, so I left that part out.
Top 10 things that annoy programmers
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