skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is the real pro-XML argument, then, that it currently has support?

That's the only one I can find which would be relevant to milweed's assertion that:

> Large data sets should be published in XML.

Apart from the rarely used ability to mix data formats into a single semi-coherent document and some sort of backwards compatibility, I don't see much in the way of reason.

> As far as I know, there is nothing inherent to JSON to prevent anyone from writing a streaming parser.

Of course there is not, and there are several such parsers, hence my writing that they are not widespread. Were they impossible (or non-existent) or at the very least unknown to me I'd have written that they don't exist instead.
It works on the Mastercard PayPass hardware. Adoption is already pretty far down the road on the POS side.

EDIT: Go here to search for Paypass merchants in your hood: http://www.google.com/wallet/where-it-works.html
My personality and political views won't fit into a HN comment box. And I dearly hope that yours wouldn't either.
"If electrons are spheres and so are protons and neutrons, what type of matter is filling up the area in between?"

In quantum theory, a particle is described as a probability field that fills space. For example, an electron might have a 2.5% chance of being in some little cube of space, a 10% chance in a nearby cube, and so forth. The rules for how it works are called quantum mechanics.

So the particles are fuzzy. They have no defined size, they can overlap with each other, and so forth.

As usual, this research has been simplified to the point of silliness for the popular press. What they probably mean is that a particular electron orbital in a particular type of atom was measured to be spherically symmetric. That means that they went looking for lumpiness of that electron's probability cloud and found to be perfectly smooth and round.

Particle accelerators have already measured this smoothness at high energies. They crash electrons together at high speed, watch how they scatter off each other, and the scattering statistics are consistent with electrons having no internal bits and pieces. They're just smooth, continuous electron all the way through. (Proton collisions scatter as if there are lots of lumpy bits inside. The bits turn out the be quarks and gluons.)

"Can electrons get squished into different shapes depending on arrangement?"

Yes. While electrons can overlap because their borders are fuzzy, they repel each other in the process, changing each other's shapes.

Even just sitting around in an atom, they often start out various funny shapes because they have wavelike properties: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital#Orbitals_table
I think a lot of people actively seek that consistency, especially while traveling. Knowing that a McDonalds is a McDonalds wherever you are provides a safe choice for a traveler (especially since they're everywhere). That's what a chain provides, consistency across locations, not a unique experience.
Ex-Google Engineer: 'I Think There’s Too Little Consumer Fear'
"I think its fair to say that someone who's had no break in their unemployment more than a year (assuming they aren't a full-time student, seriously ill, a stay-at-home parent, etc.) probably has something wrong with how they approach becoming employed, and a lot of those somethings would also negatively impact their performance as an employee."

I suspect that captures the essence of why companies have this sort of policy. And, as you point out, its pretty straight forward to be "employed" if only self employed by creating your own business and running it.
I'd be interested in hearing what you mean here by the video performed better, in terms of conversion to clicking the trial button, conversion to signup for the trial, conversion to becoming a paid user? Are you tracking results all the way down the funnel or just to the next step you have chosen?
It's Time for Bill Gates to Come Back to Microsoft
You went after his first link but ignored the second one on collectivization which I think is more pertinent. At least with privatization the government, which represents the interests of the people, acts within its mandate: It sells assets that belong to the people. With collectivism the government is coercing citizens to give up property against their will. If anything, collectivism is theft.
Yes. But they're all missing the point. It's the quality of advisors and the nature of their advice that shapes a great startup. Just throwing some cash at them is akin to giving fish to a poor man. The poor man will eat the fish and ask for more. But teach him to fish and he may become a millionaire fisherman.
Japan is very cash centric when it comes to transactions, while I was there I never saw a credit card lol (2 yrs ago)
It handles both cases. Storm can be used to asynchronously update databases in realtime in a scalable way (replacing traditional systems of queues and workers). Using Storm for Distributed RPC lets you do intense computations on Storm and return them to a waiting process.
TakeOnIt - Opinions of Leading Experts
Is there an argument here? Care to expand?
To summarize, if you own the code for both endpoints of data exchange (and will always do so), then JSON wins by sheer terseness and schema.

If you do not, then you will guaranteed run into schema differences of common objects (ie, SAP "Customer" <> Oracle "Customer <> Salesforce "Customer" etc etc). XML w/ XSL/XSD wins here.
> Government owning the means of dissent seems extremely frightening to me.

And corporations, whose intrinsic and only raison d'etre is monetary profit, owning the means of dissent doesn't?
Great point. Your question reminded me of the scene from Aviator: "Dr. Branson is a mathematician of some note...yes. And he will prove that, in fact, Ms. Russell's mammaries are no more prominant than any of these other fine ladies. Doctor? Doctor... you forgot your calipers."
Bitcoin, Digital Currency of the Future?
Regarding putting things in the hands of others: another good example is data analysis. Say you're the sole programmer at a startup and all your time is focused on building your product. But you also have lots of data coming in that needs to be sliced up and visualized. Write a script that sticks your data in a format your business-types can easily work with (hint: spreadsheet). And let them go at it.

Of course this is a general approach for analysis. Get the data into a tool that makes data exploration easier: R, Excel, matlab. That rather than writing lots of custom scripts.
Yea, I think the problem here is lack of technical competence of legislators.
B2C vs. B2B product management differences
I interviewed there recently and went through a few rounds - it was very clear to me in the interview process that the internals of twitter were chaotic.

Much like Google is today as well.
Do you measure how far people get in the video? People might click to hear Spolsky, but not for the whole hour.
Is that Balsamiq you're using for mockups?
yes, which is a major problem... hopefully one which they can release an update to rectify
So you think that MixPanel, KissMetrics, Google Analytics and all the other advanced analytic services provide no essential value to both the site owner and the public?

A/B tests last more than a session (if you return to the site 30 minutes later after doing some research, you want to see the same site, right?). Cohort analysis requires tracking how people use your website for months or years to see the effect of changes on long-term activity and customer retention. Simply tracking the effectiveness of your own advertising efforts (how many and which campaigns contributed to this sale? what's the lifetime value of a customer from this source?) requires multi-session tracking. Many purchases happen days or weeks after someone initially clicked an ad leading to your site.

Now it's possible to do some of that kind of analysis without cookies, but it requires you building and running all the tracking and reporting on your own server. To expect even a tiny fraction of the site owners that can currently plug into KissMetrics/MixPanel/Google Analytics/Optimizely/etc. to build out the same capabilities in house is absurd.

None of this has to do with serving customized ads to you, yet you are arguing that companies in the UK should not be able to do any of that, and they won't be at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the world?
Not so heterogeneous if the only data exchange format available is XML.
These are parallel to my thoughts: All fine and dandy but what's the point? I don't want to copy FB's business model. I'm looking for a new mission.

FB keeps adding features we didn't know we were missing. If what I build is better, it means going beyond functionality to build something that redefines what the Social Network is.

I don't just want you to sign up for some feature you'll detest in a year. Maybe the question I should be asking is "What do You Wish the Social Network Could Do for You"?
Personally I'm not in favor of enforcing such strict conventions, especially in a dynamic language like Python. Also isn't this pattern he repeats throughout:

class Shape:
def __init__(self, **kwds):
self.shapename = kwds.pop('shapename')
super().__init__(**kwds)

Better written like this?

class Shape:
def __init__(self, shapename=None, **kwds):
self.shapename = shapename
super().__init__(**kwds)

It seems like there are some things about Python's which the author doesn't like, and he solves them by adding a lot of boiler plate to each of his classes. It's probably a better idea to just embrace the Python way or use a different language.
A Year After Diaspora Another “Facebook Alternative” Emerges
Normally a fan of your comments Jarek - you're a smart dude and I like reading what you have to say - but when you see an incorrect generalization, you can just point out how your experience is different rather than saying "that's wrong" without saying where or why.

As for incendiary, I don't know man. Is calling the Nazis really fucking bad incendiary? Is calling the Crusades utterly barbaric incendiary? Is calling the Genghis Khan not a nice guy incendiary?

That's the class and order of magnitude of horror we're dealing with here. So, you were 2 years old when an SSR started transitioning to a liberal democracy (or whatever the system is, I don't want to be assuming). Yes, "everyone educated" is a generalization, but it's true enough to be correct.

I do see people that are pro-Communist, but they tend to be the uneducated nationalists. They're the same kind of people that are pro-white power in the American South, neo-Nazis in Germany, and Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East. I don't think they're actually pro-Communist in terms of the economics, so much as they're in rage and want to cling on to any cause.

That's what I've actually seen with, y'know, walking around and talking to a lot of people and doing business and socializing with a lot of people across a lot of different classes. The people who are educated don't like communism. Pretty much all of them, from taxi drivers to entrepreneurs to professors to writers to journalists to construction workers to... everyone.

But again, I've liked your comments so you're welcome to express disagreement here if you want a discussion. I do think communism is really, really bad, and should get the same treatment as Nazism, slavery, the crusades, etc - because when it was implemented, it did equivalently large amounts of damage. (Actually, more damage, technically, than any of those)
Nice article. But no real reference to code documentation. As someone who's done a lot of maintenance programming, few programmers seem to care about this.
It seems to me that the example of combining built-in dictionary classes is naively optimistic. For starters, OrderedDict, as it happens, does not use super! It calls the dict super-class methods directly. Since dict happens to be the next class in the MRO, this doesn't really matter for the purpose of this example, but I can envision a scenario where some plucky programmer inherits from both OrderedCounter and some other dict subclass, and the result doesn't work because OrderedDict does the wrong thing.

And OrderedDict isn't the only one. Maybe for some reason I would like to have an OrderedCounter where all the counts default to 42. So I do this:

class DefaultOrderedCounter(defaultdict, OrderedCounter):
pass
doc = DefaultOrderedCounter(lambda: 42)
doc.update('abracadabra')

Which results in:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "c:\python32\lib\collections.py", line 507, in update
_count_elements(self, iterable)
File "c:\python32\lib\collections.py", line 63, in __setitem__
self.__map[key] = link = Link()
AttributeError: 'DefaultOrderedCounter' object has no attribute '_OrderedDict__map'

Whoops! Apparently defaultdict doesn't use super either. Of course a better way to do this would be to subclass DefaultOrderedCounter and just override the __missing__ method by hand, but that's not the point.

The article goes into "How to Incorporate a Non-cooperative Class", which basically says "wrap it up in a proxy class". But that's not really going to work here, since the result would be two separate dicts, with the defaultdictwrapper methods operating on one dict, and the other methods operating on the other.
I think whoever came up with that deserves some type of Nobel Prize... If he/she can get it implemented!
Having taken Unified more recently than when the OCW material was posted (I took it fall 09 to spring 10), hopefully I can clarify more how it actually works. Unified I and II are taken concurrently sophomore fall as a student enters the aero-astro department, and III and IV are taken the following spring. You learn the material equivalent to the four intro MechE (thermo, structures, fluids, and controls), but it is taught concurrently and totally integrated. There are weekly problem sets and labs which combine 2 or 3 disciplines, and then a weekly exam which focuses on a single discipline (imagine having a 2 hour midterm exam every week). And each semester also has a culminating project which combines all of the disciplines as well.

That said, we call it unified because its actual course numbers are unwieldy (16.001-16.004); while the material is challenging, the real difficulty lies in having four classes thrown at you at once. I can't say whether its any more challenging than J-Lab or 100B, having not taken them, but I do know I am so glad to be done with it.
Ha, I was exactly in the same boat you're in. First, since you specifically mentioned the word 'engineer', you'll want to think like one and train yourself like one. If you haven't done so already, build up your math skills to at least a solid understanding of undergraduate calculus. This will pay massive dividends, and may very well expand your programming horizons, but that is another matter. Also important is a good grasp of the first semester or two of college physics if you don't possess this already. Physics, like math, not only blows your mind but provides the intellectual foundation you'll need to press on into the depths of EE. Use the MIT OpenCourseWare curriculum for structure and perspective. The book for the 'Circuits and Electronics' course: 'Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits' is one of the finest textbooks I have ever read in any topic. But in addition to all this theory you'll need hands-on activities. If you're just starting out in electronics, humble yourself and read 'Make:Electronics' by O'Reilly publishing. A great practical introduction to electronics. Good luck.
> And people defending XML namespaces will appear in 3, 2, 1...

0. I don't really like XML (and most stuff around XML), but I rather like XML namespaces. Not all of them, mind you, but my issues mostly have to do with default namespaces and the way they're treated on elements versus attributes.

All-in-all, XML namespaces solve real issues in rather smart a manner.

Now tooling access to XML namespaces is a completely different bucket of filth, most APIs and XML-related stuff don't fare well there.

> Unfortunately non-trivial XSLTs are a little much for many programmers to grok, you have to be able think functional.

To think shit functional. Functional without real functions, with broken scoping, with an implicit state throughout, ... A "functional" language where you need something like 6 likes to write a recursive function which does nothing but recurse is closer to dysfunctional.

XSLT had a smart idea (only one) in XPath-selected templates, but the whole implementation is garbage.

> People want their loops.

XSLT has loops. It's not loops which throw people off, it's the unreadable verbosity and having to jump through hoops in order to do the simplest processing. It is also hard (as in, you need quite a bit of experience) to create anything even remotely reusable, and even then XSLT has no modularity worth speaking about. And the namespace handling is a mess.
> what makes your landlord the legitimate owner of his property? .... Go back just a couple generations and you will find a corpse.

You touched off this subthread by arguing that

> Soviet dairy farms once belonged to the Soviet people [who] were not adequately compensated for their loss.

You find corpses in the past of the Soviet people's dairy farms as well. Why, then, is their ownership "legitimate" such that they should be "adequately compensated"?
Humans are much more complicated.
The annoying thing about the chip in my AmEx is that the charge shows up as "Expresspay Blue" on my statement, instead of showing up as the merchant ("Best Buy" or what have you). This throws off my pretty charts and budgets in Mint and has resulted in me reverting to just swiping the card everywhere.

I still have a dozen or so "Expresspay Blue" charges sitting there in Mint, uncategorized, because I can't remember who I paid $12.57 to back in October (or whatever).

Minor annoyance? Absolutely. But if NFC-payment-via-phone has the same issue, you can bet money that I'll ditch it and go back to swiping my credit card.
Interview with Kris Moore, Founder of PC-BSD
You know they developed self-driving cars for a reason, right?
Specific Emo reference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDmeqSzvIFs
Google Wallet: Yet another thing to carry in your pocket
I'm not seeing a lot of U.S. tanks in Canada...
"I’ve been to McDonald’s in Russia and it tastes exactly like in the US. Is there a way to avoid this homogenization with large growth?"

That's exactly the magic of McDonald's. Having a different experience at every restaurant would be bad from both a customer perspective and a management perspective. Customers know exactly what they will get every time they go to a McDonalds. Franchisee's have clear processes and procedures to follow for food preparation, hiring, etc. There is no ambiguity and very little variation (I'm glossing over the fact that there are some very large and necessary differences due to localization issues).

I think in the examples given, hiring can be a huge differentiator (Starbucks, Applebee's, etc.). A friendly/knowledgable barista, or a skilled server can really humanize the purchasing/eating experience and perhaps mask a lot of the chain-store feel.
Peter Thiel (PayPal) bets 2.4 Million Against the value of a College Degree
by Adam Clark Estes
How to come up with a good company or product name
I've been beaten to it, but here's how coderwall would have looked in the 80's... http://github-high-scores.heroku.com
Perceptions of communism is actually an interesting topic for me. I can't right now, but I'll try to write up a reply longer than three lines later today here.
The thing we found is that when it crashed under load, it could take over 24 hours to consistency check and rebuild its queues on-disk. Insane for a highly-available environment.

This is why you should NEVER let an architect choose your software - ALWAYS the sysadmin who will actually be on-call to support it should have the final say.
Why does it matter what carrier my Nexus S is on? If all the Nexus S models have NFC capabilities, what difference does it make that mine is the GSM model on T-Mobile or a regional GSM/CDMA carrier vs a CDMA model on Sprint?

Edit: nvm, didn't see the other discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588380
This system doesn't allow for going paper-free on books, right? Unless you rip the pages individually?
A widely quoted aphorism, originally from a USENET post:
"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems."
—Jamie Zawinski,

This as a re-purposed quote, originally referencing sed or awk, and numerous people since have substituted in XML.
I bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 a few months ago and I love it. It's a document scanner that scans both sides of the page as it goes through, and the desktop software runs OCR and converts the document into a multiple-page searchable PDF. If something goes in crooked (like a long receipt) the software automatically straightens it out. And since Spotlight indexes the text in PDFs, I can find any document I've scanned within seconds. Storing the scans in DropBox allows me to access the scans on multiple devices, and gives me the security of an online backup. Going paperless is liberating, and the ScanSnap makes it enjoyable. Highly recommended.
Have you checked out Pattern Tap? http://patterntap.com/

It has a nice collection of UI elements for the web.
This is big, but not because NFC will be a tremendously better way to pay for stuff. This will just act to get a high population of capable NFC devices out to the general public.

NFC will enable a whole lot of latent demand for data exchange in the mobile context. Wherever/whenever people are away from computers and need to exchange a few hundred KB or less, there will be opportunity. (Specialized instruments/readers that people read data from of, then key into another device.)

It will need to avoid the pitfalls of the previous technologies. (IR)
Unless this is something that has been known to be ignored or rejected otherwise, or unless you feel you can't approach them, I'd just recommend filing a support request or asking on the rubygems-developers mailing list or #rubygems on Freenode.

My main focus is on conflict points right now.
My understanding: we measure it (Michael Pryor posted a link below), at least some people really do stay glued to the tube for a long time, and then they convert like crazy.
"Our Page Load Speed Is Up Fog Creek" And How HN Has A Slashdot Effect
It's not funny if you edit the articles and remove links to force it to be true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Set_%28mathematics...
Okay, I give. What's the markup for posting code snippets on this site?
Thanks. I've tried reading the zeromq guide before, but it was confusing because it used concepts that I wasn't familiar with and it didn't define the concepts. Also, its examples are in C, and I don't know C. The RabbitMQ one looks helpful, though
Yup, looks like Wordpress just fell over. Restarting...
Sen. Ron Wyden places a "hold" on the Protect IP Act
Yep: http://balsamiq.com/products/mockups/fogbugz
On Supported devices: i perceive that they are planning this as a long-term all-over-the-place thing, so they are probably talking to as many device manufacturers and as many banks to support this.
Well then, why don't we just stick to your statement that privatization is theft. Bonus points if you can show me how your arguments do not fall in any existing ideology.