skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry, but that is a terrible analogy. Redirecting a link is blatantly deceitful and dishonest. Not to mention we are talking about advertising space here, not search results.

The comparison would be if Google did not allow Facebook to advertise in Google. Either way, I think it's hard to compare their advertising spaces due to their very different natures.
Probably this one, which I use for testing

function becho($value, $key = NULL)
{
echo '<br /><span style="background: #FFFFFF; color: #000000;">' . (NULL != $key ? $key . ' = ' : '') . $value . '</span>';
}

I also like this one

function s($num)
{
return $num == 1 ? '' : 's';
}

Which I use like

echo 'Showing ' . $results . ' result' . s($results) . '.';
Lost to technology advancement? Last time I checked, there were shitloads of travel agencies, retail outlets for consumer electronics, and newstands all over the city.

Everybody does not shop on Amazon and use AirBnB.
Well then, you were entirely correct. I suppose that my search was both fairly cursory and didn't include all of the right search terms. I find it very surprising that this is the first I've heard of it, though; the "apple stole from xerox" meme is really entrenched, to the point that I never really doubted its truth.
The long-term structural fix is probably that "industrial" value creation (manufacturing, tech R&D, etc.) will be concentrated in a smaller and smaller number of people (essentially, Silicon Valley plus robotic factories), and that everyone else will have some kind of job which is either a service job or an artisan manufacturing job (i.e. if you can have 1k farmers with agritech produce ~1% of the world's industrial corn, you might still want to support small farmers growing heritage/etc. crops which are more labor intensive). A combination of "personal service" services jobs (while automation can reduce headcount in services too, e.g. recorded video lectures, it's a lot less effective than in manufacturing or pure information goods) and intentionally labor intensive manufacturing is a much better alternative than mass unemployment and welfare, or mass unemployment and death.

The funny thing is this world almost ends up like a computer RPG; you can give away mass-produced n00b gear to everyone for free, but then the specialty stuff becomes even higher priced. It's pretty easy to argue that no one in a rich society should starve to death, but it's a lot harder to argue that the poor have a right to purely luxury versions of basic goods.
I actually use this as the primary authentication mechanism for sites I rarely/occasionally visit... password reset at every login!
I agree that "a TV that gets ABC but not CBS" sounds ludicrous. But look at it another way. Isn't one of the longtime geek rallying cries about cable "I just want to pay for the channels I want, not the whole bundle?"

Plus, with the gradual move to an on-demand model for entertainment, it strikes me that "channels" as we know them (where something specific is on at any given time and you don't control that) will become meaningless. Why shouldn't we be buying content direct from the creators (or from the company that funded its creation, more accurately) rather than worry about what "channel" it's on? It seems weird to think about paying Disney directly for Disney content but that's only because we're used to paying for channels. Maybe in the future we'll have choices to buy either unlimited streaming or individual shows from the companies that make them -- and your monthly bill, taking inflation into account, will probably be roughly what you'd pay for cable today. (What, you didn't think things would get cheaper, did you?)
Corporations cannot be expected to educate any of their own employees because it's a drain on the balance sheet - The Market will not create educated individuals left to its own devices.

Corporations educate their employees all the time. My company does this. So does Walmart, McD's, Accenture, Infosys and Goldman Sachs (to name a few).

http://walmartstores.com/careers/7740.aspx

http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/careers/hamburger_universi...
Scala Actors verses Erlang gen_server performance
Nine is also a good choice - http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25
I don't think it's fair to categorize everyone who lacks an education or job as "lacking ambition".

Why are we all not millionaire successful entrepreneurs? On this site, I don't think it's because we lack ambition. I think it's more that there's a path toward success (or technically, several paths), but it's really easy to step off that path, and most of us have never been there before, don't have a guide, and only have the fuzziest of maps.

It's the same with people lower down on the socioeconomic spectrum. Most don't personally know anyone that has successfully jumped classes; they have no idea what this looks like, or what's entailed, or if anything they do is on the right track. And so they make very subtle mistakes.

You can see this a lot with the choice of institutions they go to and the fields they study. Popular articles - like the one posted here - simply say "Go to college and you'll get a job." So what many poor people do is they go to University of Phoenix and study Sports Medicine or something, and take on $200K of debt to do so.

You and I know this is stupid - but that information never filters down to the people who need it. The mainstream articles just say "Go to college and you'll get a job", they never say which college, or what to study, or how to study, or what it feels like when you just don't understand a concept but need to pass the final to graduate. I can give you a list of a couple dozen top colleges off the top of my head - but that's because I've worked in elite institutions, and I know which schools my coworkers went to, and I have lots of friends in that social circle. For the average person, that list is "Harvard. MIT. Stanford", and then if they don't get into one of those, they have no idea what to choose.

It's really easy to forget just how much we know simply by being part of a community that's "made it". Much of this stuff is not obvious at all until you see someone do it, and if everyone you know is in similarly dire straits, you have nobody to teach you.
I wrote this simple Python function to create random strings from various character sets. I wish every NES game that had a password-based save used 'alpha_numeric_hardtoconfuse_lowercase'. There's no telling how many times I've mixed up 1, I, i, and l, pending on the crappy font being used. Same goes with hand-written Windows activation keys.

# encoding: utf-8
import random

CHARACTER_SETS = {
'alpha': 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', # 52
'alpha_lowercase': 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz', # 26
'alpha_uppercase': 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', # 26

'alpha_numeric': 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789', # 62
'alpha_numeric_lowercase': 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789', # 36
'alpha_numeric_uppercase': 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789', # 36

'alpha_hardtoconfuse': 'abcdefghjkmnpqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ', # 47 --- Omits: i, l, o, I, O
'alpha_hardtoconfuse_lowercase': 'abcdefghjkmnpqrstuvwxyz', # 23 --- Omits: i, l, o
'alpha_hardtoconfuse_uppercase': 'ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ', # 24 --- Omits: I, O

'alpha_numeric_hardtoconfuse': 'abcdefghjkmnpqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ23456789', # 55 --- Omits: i, l, o, I, O, 0, 1
'alpha_numeric_hardtoconfuse_lowercase': 'abcdefghjkmnpqrstuvwxyz23456789', # 31 --- Omits: i, l, o, 0, 1
'alpha_numeric_hardtoconfuse_uppercase': 'ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ23456789', # 32 --- Omits: I, O, 0, 1

'alpha_consonants': 'bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyzBCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ', # 42 --- Omits: a, e, i, o, u, A, E, I, O, U
'alpha_consonants_lowercase': 'bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz', # 21 --- Omits: a, e, i, o, u
'alpha_consonants_uppercase': 'BCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ', # 21 --- Omits: A, E, I, O, U

'alpha_numeric_consonants': 'bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyzBCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ0123456789', # 52 --- Omits: a, e, i, o, u, A, E, I, O, U
'alpha_numeric_consonants_lowercase': 'bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz0123456789', # 31 --- Omits: a, e, i, o, u
'alpha_numeric_consonants_uppercase': 'BCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ0123456789', # 31 --- Omits: A, E, I, O, U

'alpha_consonants_hardtoconfuse': 'bcdfghjkmnpqrstvwxyzBCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ', # 41 --- Omits: a, e, i, l, o, u, A, E, I, O, U
'alpha_consonants_hardtoconfuse_lowercase': 'bcdfghjkmnpqrstvwxyz', # 20 --- Omits: a, e, i, l, o, u
'alpha_consonants_hardtoconfuse_uppercase': 'BCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ', # 21 --- Omits: A, E, I, O, U

'alpha_numeric_consonants_hardtoconfuse': 'bcdfghjkmnpqrstvwxyzBCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ23456789', # 49 --- Omits: a, e, i, l, o, u, A, E, I, O, U, 0, 1
'alpha_numeric_consonants_hardtoconfuse_lowercase': 'bcdfghjkmnpqrstvwxyz23456789', # 28 --- Omits: a, e, i, l, o, u, 0, 1
'alpha_numeric_consonants_hardtoconfuse_uppercase': 'BCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ23456789', # 29 --- Omits: A, E, I, O, U, 0, 1

'binary': '01', # 2 --- Base-2
'decimal': '0123456789', # 10 --- Base-10
'hexadecimal_upper': '0123456789ABCDEF', # 16 --- Base-16
'hexadecimal_lower': '0123456789abcdef', # 16 --- Base-16
'octal': '01234567', # 8 --- Base-8
}

def random_string(length=32, characters=CHARACTER_SETS['alpha_numeric']):
random.seed()
return ''.join(random.choice(characters) for x in range(length))
What's the point of completely automating everything if you still have to work 40 hours a week?
Your points about DRM, network effects and studios building crappy streaming services are spot on, but there's one thing that overrides all those: Content-owners hold hostage practically every important work since the 1930's. They can simply refuse to renew their deals with Netflix. The only place you'll be able to get their content is from approved services.

I think the studios will continue to raise their licensing prices for Netflix, until eventually Netflix has margins close to zero. It won't be fun for consumers, since the negotiations will cause movies on Netflix to disappear and reappear randomly.

618c5b50e71cee32de7515ab70d371e8c5c9e00a
I attended the International School of Brussels for my high school education, and most teachers were from the UK. I can vouch for the difference in culture regarding grades. I once had an English teacher tell me I should be "leading the class" since she had given me an A- the semester before. Such an attitude was prevalent among all my teachers, and I felt it really damaged my college application to American schools. I applied to stanford and of the 4500 early applicants, 2500 had a 4.0 GPA (perfect). Not one student at my school had an unweighted 4.0. I had a measly 3.4.

Other than the comparative nature of GPAs in college applications, I thought it was a great approach. The only class I was able to coast through was Math, but I was one of the few who could do so.
Use node.js instead!
Zuckerberg on Innovation
You can also do http://www.google.com/?hl=fr (or whatever language)
Not by "someone", but by "someone not like them". That is someone of the wrong socio-economic level.
Ask HN: Why don't banks take your photograph?
Simple really - I can pretend to be my friend at the bank to withdraw cash at the counter with his card. I can't sneak into the gym with his card for there. And they are still MASSIVELY reliant on signatures.

Seems like it would be so simple to just take a photo of customers when they join.
history function for ruby console (irb) sessions:

def history(num=100)
h = Readline::HISTORY.to_a
start = [0,h.size-num-1].max
h.zip((0..h.size).to_a)[start...h.size].each do |cmd,i|
puts " #{(i).to_s.rjust(4)} #{cmd}"
end
end

I keep it in my .irbrc file, really useful to avoid stepping through command history to find previous commands.
€500 house sounds like they are monetising the construction of future slums / shanty towns.

The Indian government need to get their act together and not leave it up to the private companies to clean up the mess in India. I have spent time in Delhi and what I have seen is shocking. Private companies run taxi services for their workers because it is so unsafe and the government run services are so unreliable that they are left with no other option.

The major commercial districts are built with private money and thus you see great big modern buildings with dusty and potholed roads without any paths connecting them so stepping outside the campus of these buildings you go from 1st world to 3rd world in a matter of a few steps.

There is more to making someones life livable than simply constructing four walls with a roof and some windows. You need to implement proper sanitation and other fundamental facilities such as appropriate policing and transportation. without these you are just fueling the growth of these slums and the internal migration from the countryside into the cities.

I can see India with an incredible future and rapid growth if simply the corruption and mismanagement is sorted out in the government sector.
OK, this is interesting but as best I can tell he's talking about splitting profitable from unprofitable courses. But there is another way of drawing the line between the functions of modern unis. The offer is;

+ undergraduate education

+ postgraduate education (including research degrees)

+ scientific and engineering research

+ research and scholarship in the humanities

+ nationally televised sports (subset of US only)

+ We provide accommodation

+ A social experience for late teens / early twenties

+ We set and assess exams (could split again here)

+ We provide accreditation (our courses are worthwhile as we say they are; this is complex, though, and depends on course, jurisdiction, much more)

+ We provided a branded experience ("I went to M...")

Now it is unlikely that universities that offer much of this will ever split out the functions (Vince Cable suggested it in the UK and didn't get very far). What do you reckon on the chances of some nimble new entrants taking away some of this business from the incumbents?

[edited to try and get the list to work]
I saw this post and thought "Man, I should do this in my town," because my local transit authority makes no effort at making it easy for people to take the bus.

Then I looked at the route names/numbers and realized you are in my town! Thank you for making my part of the world better.

My coworkers and I were just talking about how difficult it is to navigate the public transit system here if you don't have a smartphone with Google Transit.

St. Louis is not like Chicago, NYC, or SF where people of all walks of life take public transit to work, either because it's highly convenient or because parking costs more than their car payment. Transit here is not convenient and the people who rely on the bus here are the ones who can't afford a smartphone with Google Transit, let alone a car payment.
Typically this is what file_get_contents() is for (with fopen_wrappers enabled) if you just want a simple GET.
What Do You Really Know About Quality Circles?
I'll be surprised if it materializes, but an anonymous (the literal term, not the group) is pretty neat.
We already have examples of this. What happens to people with Down syndrome? Where do chronically brain-damaged folks work? Where can senior citizens who have fallen prey to dementia get jobs?
I agree. Also they are the only old money people who refrain from overt display of wealth. For an example, see this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilia_(building)

It's unfortunate that I see similar behavior for all stratas of upper and upper-middle class. In my community it's almost a norm to spend at least half a million for the whole wedding affair. Weddings offer a dozen or so cuisine or sub cuisine types, and in some cases I have seen fireworks as elaborate as some 4th of July celebrations. It's even more unfortunate that we as a society do not have any type of popular counter-culture or even a counter point. It's all a blind race to the moral bottom. Sorry for going a bit off topic.
The NLSY doesn't include a test of IQ. It includes an AFQT test. That stands for Armed Forces Qualification Test. The NLSY tracks young people who are between 14-22 in 1979 through time. Therefore, they take the AFQT test when they are at least 14 and often older. The AFQT test isn't designed to measure intelligence per se. Your argument is pretty much that students who score well on standardized tests in high school and college are much more likely to graduate (or to have graduated) from high school. There are all sorts of correlation/causation problems there.
Would you consider a growing middle class with an increasing standard of living to be desirable, though? If it's a good thing, then it doesn't matter whether it's been the historical norm, we should work toward it.
HBO is owned by Time Warner (WB) and Disney / Fox have multiple content venues to roll into a big On-Demand channel. They have then content in their library and know how to create new shows. Look at Netflix and see how much of the content is owned by a major company.

I am not saying Netflix will go away, but I believe they will stick around being the front for content of indies and tier two studios without the content libraries of the bigger players.

> Not to mention each of the studio streaming services will suck compared to the one created by a company living and dying on the streaming itself.

I think it will come to a point that Disney, Fox, and WB are living or dying on streaming.

> DRM

I don't think they will do much different than Netflix. It will be an app thing on every device. They already have expertise from other ventures (e.g. Hulu).

Sports might be an interesting part of the equation. ESPN (Disney) / Fox Sports might end up as the sports channel for sports without the huge following to support their own service. Each does have original content, so they would be bonuses for their parent company's respective streaming offering.
I expect busses to be mostly on time, and most of the time they are. It's not that the evening rush hour comes as a surprise every day, so it can be accomodated in the schedule.
Of course, on really dense lines, time tables may just look like

16 5 minutes
17 all 3 to 5 minutes
18 all 5 to 7 minutes
19 08 18 28 38 48 58
...

And on the main bus stops there are the real time displays you want: http://www.flickr.com/photos/christoph_bellin/5305848773/
Independent TrueCrypt implementation imported into DragonFly BSD
Actually, it's a perfectly reasonable statement. That which truly proves anything would be able to prove a statement and its own converse, creating a contradiction.

Evolution, of course, is true, but that doesn't mean that everyone who tries to claim that X is an effect of evolution is correct. There are other causes for things, after all and people are right to be wary of easy explanations trotted out without any discussion of the basis for them.
Get a floor torchiere lamp along with a full spectrum bulb, and use it to have indirect lighting off of the ceiling. In addition to your viewing comfort, the whole place will instantly look better, a lot more cozy.

I've found the dedicated fluorescent torchiere lamps (even the "expensive" ones from GE), have a crappy lifespan.[1] I'd recommend getting a much cheaper one that accepts a standard bulb socket, and then using a compact fluorescent bulb rather than an incandescent.

Also, make sure your building maintenance won't have a hissy fit about it. They have reasons, e.g. ensuring there are no code violations nor fire risks. In my experience, if you have a standard/boxed product and ask nicely first, it's no problem. Or, depending on the place and attitudes, just put it up and never ask at all.

[1] It's not primarily a matter of the bulb, but rather the ballast that's built into the lamp. I have an old lamp that's still going strong, but all the newer ones I've purchased have had the ballast fail within some months.
I suppose I concluded: that if the engineer has no affinity with TDD then there is little point in continuing and practising it badly. For those who do (or learn to), who may be in the minority, the benefits are well worth the effort.
Haskell:

(\>) x f = f x

Allows me to write in a more readable manner

[1..10]
\> map (*2)
\> filter (<5)
BrowserID only depends on a third party if you have a browser that doesn't handle BrowserID natively.
I learned programming a little later in life and then got into professional software development. I would say the huge thing that makes programming (not IT in general) relatively lucrative is not about education but about skill. Good programmers are hard to find and therefore expensive because they have put a lot of time into developing their craft. If you look around at other fields, having a specific skill that requires practice and time to develop almost always pays off (especially if the skill is a practical one). Highly skilled carpenters, electricians, and plumbers make salaries very similar to good programmers. And at the more extreme end most of the highest paid people in the medical world are surgeons, who are also valued for a highly practiced skill.

If you have a practiced skill that takes years to develop you are, in most cases, valuable because this is a rare thing. Truth be told very, very few people have the patience and enthusiasm to learn a skill well, so it's almost always valuable when someone does.
Permutations Mafipulations Pt. 1 | Code Exposure
That might be true but having to deal with the government is a painful path. And anyway there is a real risk that they can't actually engineer it so cheap like the nano. But as in the nano's case it'll help a whole bunch of people with low incomes.

And since other companies have failed at this, I still think it's very entrepreneurial and ballsy to attack this problem.
Yeah, I should have mentioned Be... I used them myself until a couple of weeks ago. I never pulled your 500G+ but I can say I never noticed any shaping or other artificial limits or significant congestion on those occasions I did pull many Gbs around in one go).

I've shifted over to an FTTC provider - 10Mbit upstream is nice to have especially coupled with as many IPv4 addresses as you can justify for nowt extra (only a /29 for me (all I need) but people get more - you just have to ask and promise to follow RIPE's allocation & use rules) and native IPv6, the upstream is unmetered like Be but not downstream.

Rumour has it Be will need some significant infrastructure updates to keep with that policy when they join the FTTC roll-out unless they make their FTTC based products uncompetitively expensive which they may not be able to afford to do.

The reason I picked Sky is that they are advertising the "unlimited" thing pretty aggressively on TV right now, and I know their network is shaped to buggery as are any other ISPs other than Be (that I know of) who offer "unlimited".

For people interested in Be (I'm happy to recommend them, even though I can no longer get a "referral" discount for doing so!) nip over to https://www.bethere.co.uk/
Heh, next time I hear someone talk about how wonderfully optimized all code was back "in the days" and how wasteful we all are now, maybe I'll send them this article, referring to the shipping software on the 1541.
In newer versions of PHP, you can use `stream_context_create` to make post requests and more, using `file_get_contents`
Mentioning Google+ gets you banned from Facebook ads
Well given the high numbers of math majors who go to work on finance one could argue that it's economically less beneficial. :-)
Did you read the article? In the last paragraphs he tells the story of how he almost did not get any compensation at all for his software. Ironically, since his program was mostly used to pirate software. Apple, Amazon and Google are close to offering a solution to this problem.
Could Apple Shut Down Android in the US?
Why do you still have to work 40 hours a week once everything is automated?