skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice. I agree that Nivi/Naval probably did not mean that Tweet to be interpreted as such, but your PS nails it.
I find two things odd about this.

First, in one of his articles he says 43 states already have such laws, and you need to be licensed with them to do business nationwide.

So, why is one more state (California) adding licensing a big deal?

Second, when I Google for more information I come across almost no one complaining about this bill other than this one guy. If the bill is anywhere near as bad as he claims it is, I'd expect to see a lot of discussion.

The last attempt to discuss it here on HN was quickly flagged and killed.
Highly resistant TDL-4 botnet grows over 4.5 million after only 3 months in 2011
So clearly you have to compile it into legal English. I don't see a conflict here.
Why can't we use stackless python?
That crushed me until I discovered the secret where you could go back in time and bring her back to life.
I think he means the mobile baseband chips run microkernels.
Txtzilla.com PHP SMS API is for sale (great startup venture at crazy price)
Image to CSS Conversion
This is a legitimate concern and I fear whenever I hear of people lauding things like the Khan Academy without ever having used the KA themselves significantly yet. Bandwagon praise is not good and I think constructive criticism is needed lest we fall into the irrational exuberance trap again.

I think Sal and the rest of the crew at KA have been keeping this at bay by acknowledging all the good will and keeping on with the daily load of videos, enhancements to the site, open source initiatives with the exercise dashboard, and maximizing exposure with the press while not loosing vision of what they're doing or the quality of the material. That's a good thing.

But I do agree, the material on KA is a little too soft and I would appreciate more higher level material but at the same accessibility and ease-of-use as KA. OCW efforts seem to be filling this gap for awhile, but I think there still needs to be something better. Thankfully, there's Youtubers like commutant[1] who does the same video style lectures as Sal on partial differential equations, numericalmethodsguy[2] who does lectures on numerical analysis, real analysis by Francis Su[3] on the Harvey Mudd channel, UNSW lectures[4] on engineering math, algebraic topology, and digital signal processing, JimBobJenkins[5] who does a fantastic and intriguing lecture series on Game Theory, TheIntegralCalc's[6] great videos on early calculus, as well as MathDoctorBob's[7] clips on a wide-ranging list of higher maths. Abstract algebra[8] by Benedict Gross is also another class I am currently going through, really fascinating.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/user/commutant

[2] http://www.youtube.com/user/numericalmethodsguy

[3] http://www.youtube.com/user/HarveyMuddCollegeEDU

[4] http://www.youtube.com/user/UNSWelearning

[5] http://www.youtube.com/user/JimBobJenkins

[6] http://www.youtube.com/user/TheIntegralCALC

[7] http://www.youtube.com/user/MathDoctorBob

[8] http://www.extension.harvard.edu/openlearning/math222/
Problem 1: California has a tangible net worth requirement and surety bond requirements. Most states have the latter, but not the former. Some states have asset requirements, but that means counting assets on the balance sheet, not shareholder equity. California counts shareholder equity, so essentially you have to have $500,000 in cash in the bank that isn't from a loan.

Problem 2: It's not really $500,000. The DFI uses its own non-published standards which are much higher. This makes it impossible to know how much you really need to raise.

Problem 3: Silicon Valley is in California.

Most of the people who should be complaining about this bill either don't know enough about the law to know what to do, or they're just too small to know that the law even exists. That's precisely the problem, though: sometimes great innovations happen where you least expect them, and by regulating small companies out of existence, they're not very likely to ever come up with anything.

Also, VC-backed payments companies that have recently disappeared (Bling Nation, for example) have no incentive to explain the true reasons behind their disappearing.
It's probably simply more cost effective to drop the Affiliates as it is for all the smaller businesses with affiliate programs that are also dropping affiliates.
Yeah, I'm sure they didn't. I think the thing that got me riled up was that so many people retweeted and liked it without thinking about what it actually meant.
Bitcoin comes out swinging off the ropes
QNX is proprietary and is very expensive (with occasional free demos).

The only useful thing you can run on L4 is Linux, but that's pointless.

EROS/CapROS/Coyotos never had any useful userspace.
What are the odds the FCC allows it?
Rampant window breaking incentivizes people towards inventing new and more innovative ways to create shatterproof windows. Still a win!
Always carry a few LEDs and resistors in your pocket!
Damn. There goes my $300-$400 a month passive income... And I already report my use-tax to begin with. Guess it's time to start calling up friends out-of-state for their mailing address.
Do you know if they are also much more cost effective than existing pens ?
Cam's guide for Designing with HTML (for designers) (1996)
News corp apparently made 900 million off of their advertising deal with Google, so they probably aren't horribly depressed.
Five things about Google+ Facebook should worry about
Ten Minutes With DIY Book-Scanning Pioneer Daniel Reetz
"and the state has a right"

Governments do not have rights. Only people have rights. Governments exist to protect the rights of people.
I can't comment on the other three, but Standard Oil was fantastically good for the United States and the world. I'd really recommend the biography "Titan" by Ron Chernow about John Rockefeller's life.

Tons of advances in efficiency, chemistry, operations, logistics. Oil prices fell dramatically, consistency and quality went up, supply went up through all of Standard's monopoly years. Breaking it up was far more about political factional conflict than it was about problems for consumers.

(Preemptively: Before anyone decides to jump on it, Rockefeller's rebate deal with the railroad wasn't above board. But Standard Oil was a huge net gain for the world. Absurdly so, actually.)
Yep, i actually get charged a fee on top of my line rental because i dont make phone calls on it. I despise that i have to pay BT line rental then pay broadband from my other provider. I'd like to see 1 fee from my ISP of choice including line rental, just to make things simplier even if its the same price.
True, but the great grandparent post is by an old friend -- and he's probably still right about node.js in the near future ;)
I don't think politicians are nearly as ignorant of the situation as you claim. They know full well what they're doing, however their main objective is to get reelected, so they're going to do things like extend unemployment benefits, because their unemployed constituents will no doubt vote for them come reelection, and the negative consequences are abstract and vague, thus easily dismissed.
OpenGL is a success by any objective measure

OpenGL is a success. D3D is a success. Two competing products/APIs/services can both be successes. The game is about providing solutions. Both D3D and OpenGL did that for a large customer base. It's not about winning/losing, but does it help solve your problem.
Great news for Laundry employees.
I wish he would do Python; it would be über-cool if he suddenly had a fascination with Twisted. :3
The real mitigating factor is the car. When you cut out car payment/car depreciation, insurance, gas, maitenance and take that money and put it towards your housing, it evens out.

No. I moved from a 1800sf 3br house, 2 cars lifestyle in Austin, TX to 650sf 1br apartment and no cars in NYC. And the cost of living difference was still huge. I'd say even more significant than 90-vs-140 ratio proposed above.

It's hard to pinpoint a single reason for this though. Honestly, if you're an engineer in Austin TX and you're moving to NYC you should stop even attempting to calculate the "comparable" salary. You can't have an equivalent of a 1800sf house in NYC on any engineering salary. Frankly, it's kind of pointless anyway since the difference in lifestyles are so vast that the meaning of "comparable" becomes fuzzy.

And no, it's not easy to have a kitchen in NYC for $1900 (in many neighbourhoods you may like), and most likely your A/C situation will drive you nuts: I never owned a window-mounted unit until I moved and my first summer I was cursing every night. Just for the record: the COO of a hedge fund lived on the top floor of my building and he had the same shitty, noisy window-mounted units but he didn't even notice the noise.

Finally, to throw some numbers out there, just for fun: after 10 years in Austin it _felt_ like 200K/year in NYC was what I needed to feel comfortable there. YMMV.
I think it goes both ways. I personally prefer not having to create an account, but others are concerned about privacy, don't want their accounts linked (like in BSG), or don't have accounts.
Off topic: "Java's only real advantage is raw speed...". Tell this to some one 10yrs back and they would laugh. Java has come a long way.

I think, using node.js or a Java stack is just a matter of personal choice.
I'd say that's like arguing that "My language is better than yours at doing 'Hello, world!.'" This isn't a hard problem and even poor solutions can solve easy problems.
Unless you are a hacker and want to work on this. hn, hn.
Heh heh. Quite hilarious to see my premise voted down to minus one when its math ( two nodes below ) is voted up two points! If the premise is wrong, so is the supporting math. If the latter is right, then so is the premise.
If the premise & the math are both wrong, I spent 2 years and 50k on a useless quant masters at the university of chicago where the above premise and math is gospel. Mommy where's my refund...
> it must not only beat out Facebook, but Twitter too.

Ah, yes, just like Facebook had to beat out Twitter in order to... wait a second...
I think this is part of it. The people who would have to write/design the visual programming system think that it is for losers and are thus not interested in working on it. Most hardcore coders I have met are quite proud of their chops and kind of brush off those who can't cut it (which is fine imo).
No, the government did it. Member of the public were encouraged to buy shares and invest in share trading. IIRC many lost money.
Add all your friends to a "friends" circle by default, and make that circle the default audience for all posts.

Extra feature - no breakage.
And CA won't be collecting income tax on your $300-400 per month (since Amazon has canceled affiliates in CA), so their tax income is actually less.
Big win here (for me) was the File API finally got added so you can do DnD uploads now. IE has actually supported the DnD API for a while now, but didn't have the File API component to make the upload happen.

Rendering speed didn't seem much different than 9 and slower than Chrome 12 for me; not by much though. Now adays it seems all these browsers are rendering at insane speeds given what they could barely pull off 5 years ago.

I love the browser wars.
No kidding it doesn't take a genius to figure this stuff out, also statistically at a 95% confidence interval, of every 20 studies you read 1 is pure chance.

I have a feeling that most of the reason for the weight gain from an extra serving of potatoes is the cola and burger that comes with it, all loaded with salt and sugar, that will spike your blood sugar, make you hungry in 20 minutes, and thirsty for another cola that will pack on more pounds.
They have developed on amateur frequencies since the FCC denied them an experimental license.
Missing the fact [].map has been around in some browsers for a while is one thing, being surprised that there was a crap language design decision made in JavaScript is making me laugh though.
I want DTrace probes in Ruby
Isn't that what the Sparks component is for? (Connecting based on interests?)
The funny thing is that at the time Linus made his famous remarks about microkernels, QNX was thoroughly kicking Linux's butt in nearly every area Linus thought was a problem for microkernels.
Joking aside, one of the places I worked tried to hire an ex-Google CTO, He basically wanted to be the CTO and then have 20-30 developers reporting directly to him. That to me is flat. And that did not fly well with the business people. "No! We must have 3-4 subordinates max under each role, reporting up the hierarchy!" I imagine you can't grow to a large size without hierarchy, but with 20-30 people it is possible to be flat.
And if I have to start filing tax returns with every state and county my small business happens to do business with (~$1000 / year business), I'll probably shut that down entirely for not being worth the bother as well.
So I'm unclear (really - I'm not being obtuse) is the new law actually impacting this or not? It sounds like the DFI has their own terms, how does the law make a difference?

If the California DFI were to deny our application for a license, we would be at risk of being denied licenses in every other state in which we apply. (Each state's license application asks whether the applicant has been denied any other kind of license for any reason.)

If this is a problem why not just get all your applications in now before you've been denied?
Interesting, very interesting. Now, I haven't watched any programming-specific videos other than the one linked, but my immediate thoughts were something along the lines of "But you need to know [that a program executes from the top-down] first!" where [] is pretty much everything I know about programming.

But I think that I might be wrong. I think that Sal might be right, and just go. Python is easy enough that some people might pick it up just from following along - not to mention that you don't want to fill people's heads with crazy words they've never heard before. That's only going to stop people from trying to program.

The problem is that I'm a fairly experienced programmer by now, so any thoughts I _do_ have are going to be skewed. I can't look at these videos from a beginner's eyes because my mental model for programming is already set, and no matter how I look at something, I'll try to fit it into my existing model.

Either way, this is fantastic. Absolutely excellent. I think it's wonderful. Honestly cannot shut up about it. I'm going to tell my sister to watch them, just to see what she thinks.

Given that Sal focuses an awful lot of time on getting Khan Academy in schools, this may be the next step in teaching the entire world how to program. I can't wait to see where this leads.
That's assuming that people's choice of bookstore is influenced by links. When I buy a book from a website (or pretty much anything from a website) I always check the price on Amazon. So the only way the affiliate program helps them to sell to me is by encouraging bloggers to write reviews. I'd guess that's true for a lot of people.
this. and I went to a shitty school.
Hm... I failed to find any liveable 2br apartments for $2,700 in Park Slope in the fall of 08, despite banks going bust left&right. And from what I hear it only got more expensive since then. Ironically, UWS turned out to be cheaper so that's where I lived.

Haha, this was a typical NYC experience: comparing rents and not believing the deals other people are getting :)
Agreed, but the novelty here is that the personal information was given to one organization, but is now owned in toto by another organization.

It's different than Google's insight into your buying interests from Gmail, because they're the same organization.

People should know this intellectually at least, but they haven't been faced with the implications.

Analogy: I give a box of old family photos to a cousin. The cousin later needs medical treatment, and sells the photos to a pawn shop. Then the shop goes through the photos looking for the really outrageous ones to sell to third parties. I get really mad. Who do I blame?
just like law school, the value comes from connections and the piece of paper. If you look strictly at the value of the education proper, it will always be overpriced. That's why its worth spending money to go to an ivy or mit or stanford.

When I was raising money, it was easy to leverage pedigree (top school) and connections (lots of rich friends) to reach my target. These are benefits from college that aren't reflected in the degree.
Google invents a magnificent spam engine
Will someone please tell those idiots at Google that you can't unsubscribe to Google+ if you have a Google Apps account? I get a 404 error.
Yes, most smartphones actually have two CPUs - the one running the OS and doing web browsing and stuff, which runs some monolithic kernel, and the one driving the radio chip, which runs a microkernel. They don't have much to do with each other.

I think the main reason for the separation is the realtime constraints needed by radio codecs - if your web browsing slows down because you received an email, it's a minor annoyance, but if you stop sending radio packets because you received an email, you probably lose the connection or worse.
Every now and then I do click on an ad and get a service I wanted, but its rare, since most of the time I use AdBlock.

However, I run AdWords for our web design agency, and every so often we gain a new client through them. And, I'm proud to say, the vast majority of our clients are very pleased with our service and level of quality. So I would argue that for them, Google has brought them a significant amount of value, just as they have for us.
what a waste of time. i cant believe i commented before reading this...
I was thinking primarily the widgets. I'd check out a program like Omnigraffle or Visio to get a sense of the kind of objects they have there and see the visual style that they are using. I am assuming this is kinda meant to be a lightweight replacement for one of those.
Great post and loved the plays on words.
Is the lack of computer security due to programmer laziness and/or incompetence?
The exploits of lulzsec in the past several weeks, and the relative ease with which they infiltrated so many websites reminded me of a question I have had for a while.

Basically, is the current state of affairs, where so many websites are vulnerable, where your computer can get a virus just by reading a PDF or playing an MP3, etc, due to programmers' laziness and/or incompetence, or is this a fundamental problem than can never be solved no matter what languages are used and no matter what computing paradigm is implemented?

Things like SQL injections and buffer overflow attacks seem eminently solvable. For example, to address buffer overflow attacks, simply do a bounds check before writing to any array.

I'm not a CS major or security expert, so I may be mistaken here, but in theory at least, it seems reasonable to have an OS where you can say something like "this action is a read-only action, and therefore no part of the hard disk of the computer will be modified upon executing this read-only action"

For example, playing an mp3 song, or viewing a jpg or pdf file, are all read-only actions, and so any program which attempts to change anything on the computer while performing any of these read-only actions will be intercepted by the OS and stopped. To me, it has always seemed ridiculous that the way computers and languages are designed today allow a computer to be infected by simply listening to a song or viewing an image.

Is the above feasible in theory, if not with current OS's and programming languages?

If it is not feasible, can you explain why not?
If it is feasible, can you explain why there are so many compromised websites and computers that have been taken over by hackers?
Even if I were making money on Amazon's affiliate program and it got cut I would continue linking to Amazon. For the reader using my site to find information going to an online location where they can purchase the book easily will help them come back to my site.

Especially if I have diverse traffic from around the United States or bigger linking to a retailer that is more likely to ship to my readers will let me keep their eyeballs.
If this is a problem why not just get all your applications in now before you've been denied?

Right, just submit an application now for everything you think you might ever need to apply for in the future, everywhere. Imagine how many denials you will have on your record then.

Not a good strategy.
Agreed on XP. It's just a complete dead-end waste of effort at this point. XP is already 11 years old, and two major releases have happened since. Even RHEL2 is newer!

It was plenty good 6 years ago, but time marches on.
Ask HN: What comics do you read
Apart from the obvious such as xkcd and Dilbert what popular comics do you read regularly?
So, 5.8GHz or 2.4GHz or 900MHz, or what? Are the 40s (MHz) still available?

I wonder how this beats the curvature of the earth, or is it being bounced of the ionosphere, or penetrating through the earth?

It is either a lost work of Tesla or a bad version of this Douglas Rushkoff novel...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1887128905/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
The best trick I know is one I stole from Ernest Hemingway, that is to always stop working when you're doing good, and don't think or worry about your work until you start again the next day.
Former Yahoo engineer quits to build a Flickr killer on Kickstarter
Former Shake Product Designer: Apple Not Interested in Pro Market
I'm not on Google+ so I can't really say for sure, but I understood Sparks to be more like a global stream that you subscribed to. I didn't understand that Joe would write his hiking posts into the Hiking Spark unless he was sharing something he thought strangers would be interested in.

It still demonstrates the issue with circles based on what content your friends would be interested in. Circles seem to make perfect sense to me for security (you don't want to see your mom posting photos of you partying maybe), but for interest based valuations it seems like you pretty much always want it to be public (at least public on your profile page, even if you don't particularly want it to show up in other peoples 'feeds')
The law specifically states that the tangible net worth requirement is a floor, not a ceiling; like the surety bond requirement, it scales up with transaction volume and net receivables. The DFI FAQ basically says that in practice the minimum is more like $1MM.

There is a reasonable-seeming concern in this post: the California DFI has effectively unpublished tangible net worth requirements, and ostensibly the only way to find out what they are is to apply for a license and be rejected --- which is something you have to disclose on all future applications even in other states.

The notion of "tangible net worth" requirements is the flip side to the 2008 complaint about banks being able to overleverage and thus create "too big to fail" scenarios. The subtext, I think, of the DFI's fuzzy requirements is: if you meet the tangible equity requirements, you know you do. For the types of businesses we're talking about, $500k is a joke (can you imagine Paypal being backed by sums denominated in the single-or-double-digit hundreds of thousands?) It's simply very expensive to be a money transmitter in a state as big and dynamic as California.
Apple, MS, Google Etc. Imagined As Fun Org Charts
Can you articulate for me your resolution to what appears to me to be an irresolvable conflict: on the one hand, firmly believing in the welfare of animals and, on the other hand, electing to eat them.
Hrm if all the states start to outlaw this will we see a tax haven somewhere being put up to absorb all of these retailers?
seems appropriate: http://ieatpaste.com/2010/10/if-you-have-ux-in-your-title-yo...