skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So you're calling fractional reserve banking "counterfeiting". I assume you oppose it.

Let's analyze your argument. Fractional lending doesn't particularly benefit the rich. A lot (IIRC, the vast majority) of the current millionaires in the US are 1st generation. They got their money in their lifetime. The vast majority therefore required a loan at some point, to fund their money-making venture. Even the evil financiers in virtually all cases get rich by leveraged (i.e. loan-fueled) investments.

So at least for those people who are able to help successful businesses - by creating, funding, or helping them in any way - fractional lending is a good thing. The vast majority, or at least a substantial number, of poor people who are now rich were able to do so because at some point, they received a loan of money that fractional reserve banking made more readily available.

You can still ban fractional lending, pulling the financial system back 500 or so. By doing that, you will get all the effects of the system that existed at that time: limited money supply, reduced lending, limited allocation of funds and investment to grow businesses, therefore stunted growth, less innovation, reduced social mobility, etc, etc.

Are you sure that's what you want? Because you haven't explained why fractional lending is bad yet, so it seems like we'll be sacrificing an awful lot for unclear benefit.

In all seriousness, a community focused on creating new businesses is the last place I'd expect to see fractional lending attacked so severely.

Edit: phrasing.
Yes, it is just some notes on a dude's blog. Well put.
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That puts a very different spin on things. If Google is going to make a show of this patent acquisition by Apple/MS they need to respond to the offer they had to be brought in the fold.
That was Benjamin and Arment, not Gruber.
I believe he was referring to the Windows 7 taskbar behaviour.
The problem is that Python's AST looks different than Python. In Scheme there is no such intermediate step.

They don't write a scheme(subset) interpreter in scheme. They write a scheme interpreter in scheme.
Sounds like simply an observed fact to me. He didn't say he felt sorry for them, just that it causes them stress. The point was that these people aren't beyond financial worry.
Haskell For Kids
Also, is this U.S. specific? Canada included?
How Google makes online advertising more effective using R
One word. /b/.
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You're absolutely right. Here's (yet another) example of Hacker News violating one of Apple's patents (as asserted against HTC): http://www.google.com
It's like when Google calls Android "open" but then withholds the source from non-privileged partners.
Discussion already underway here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2843162
To put their money where their mouth is, Google should may be put their thousands of patents in the public domain and license it to anyone as per the alternative system they believe is better than the current patents system.
Has anyone ever had a code from here work? I can't think of a single instance where I've had one accepted.
Suppose I had invested $1 million in a private company 10 years ago. It is now worth much, much more, how much no one really knows. I go to a bank and mention I own 100,000 shares of XYZ corp. Could I have a loan please, collateralized with some of my shares? The bank says sure, how about $2 million at prime +0.3%. I say that's just fine.

Under current tax law there is no capital gain recognized, and it's hard to imagine how there could be, I don't even know how much my income is at this point, only that some bank is pretty sure it's bigger than $1 million. It's not that this was some complicated tax avoidance strategy through the Isle of Mann either, it's just a loan. Taxing non-cash income as cash income causes many difficult problems. Ask folks who exercised options on shares whose value evaporated during the lockup period how they felt about their tax bill?

This is an arms race we can't win, I'm pretty sure there's always going to be assets with values to murky to tax, but not too murky to borrow against no matter how generous we are with defining income. The top 0.1% are going to be a moving target, there's too much money at stake for them not to be.
volatile int b = 23;
if (a + b < b) overflow;

Tada. That's how you get around the GCC optimization issue in practice. I suppose though this doesn't suite as a proper answer since overflowing as a result of adding two signed integers results in undefined behavior..

The solution is to cast the integers to unsigned and then do the overflow check. The following two standard sections should demonstrate the standards-compliance of the code below.

> ANSI C99 6.2.5 Types #9

> A computation involving unsigned operands can never overflow, because a result that cannot be represented by the resulting unsigned integer type is reduced modulo the number that is one greater than the largest value that can be represented by the resulting type.

> ANSI C99 6.3.1.3 Signed and unsigned integers #2

> Otherwise, if the new type is unsigned, the value is converted by repeatedly adding or subtracting one more than the maximum value that can be represented in the new type until the value is in the range of the new type.

---------

// shift the MSB to the LSB
#define signof(x) (!!((x) & INT_MIN))

int x, y;

// bits stay the same thanks to 6.3.1.3
unsigned int a = (unsigned int) x;
unsigned int b = (unsigned int) y;

unsigned int sign_a = signof(a);
unsigned int sign_b = signof(b);

// a+b should have the same sign as a and b, otherwise an overflow/underflow has occurred
// note that a+b is well defined for unsigned ints according to 6.2.5 #9
if (sign_a == sign_b && signof(a+b) != sign_a) overflow;

The code for checking overflow on unsigned ints is trivial:

unsigned int a, b;
if (a + b < a) overflow;
What gets defined as work? That is where it gets fuzzy for me. First thinking about work related issues starts at 6am, is interrupted for a couple hours with getting kids to school, then back at it until 6pm, break for dinner and spending time with the family, and then back to work thinking until bed - about 10pm. I have been self employed most of my life and all of my children's lives. So this fragmented work schedule is normal to me. I generally work 6 days a week, sometimes only 5, and have noticed that if I work more than about 17 days straight I start to get really grumpy.

I have selected 50-60 since I would guess that I end up in the high 50s as an average.
You could graduate it over many years and the departures would unlikely be noticeable. Investment capital levels cannot trump everything.
you might want to look at designmoo.com and http://365psd.com/

Both these sites provide free social icons regularly.
I agree with the statement

"Just because people choose to do X does not mean that X is good for those people."

I am guilty of generalization, again.

Nyan cat, Farmville, smoking are all examples where the benefit to society is very well hidden. I would say smoking is a perfect example. Smoking kills, makes people sick & those around them, it is a great burden on the health system, etc. Yet millions of people smoke how can this be good for our society. In my humble opinion: It isn't. Smoking, just like gambling hacks the reward system in the brain and makes the hazardous habit rewarding (in the short term).

I was tempted to argue that smoking has it's positive sites like higher productivity and so fort. This would have the equivalent to arguing that the WWII was good for the world, crazy. Yes a few innovations came from this catastrophe, but imagine what the 50 million people who died due to it, would have invented. The world would be much better off without this war. Look at the pace of innovation in the past 60 years with few international conflicts for the 1st world countries, war is almost always destructive.

Just because people choose to do it, does not mean it is good for them. Agreed! Lets say you take all decisions of people in their life and at the very end of it added it up. Smoking, drinking, the second mortgage on the house to go on holiday, brushing your teeth every morning, buying a newer car, everything. One can only guess what we would find, but my guess is: on average the people tend to do what is good for them.

In hindsight it is always easy to say, that was a bad decision, this one was good. But it is impossible to say that Zynga is predominantly bad. It might have saved a few people from social authenticity & suicide, it might have been a complete waste of resources 20 million working people wasted on it. I don't dare to judge.

I argue, by looking at the big picture, on average, over decades, people tend to make the decisions that are good for them
That correction is a concession.

If you have more resources and more people and you're not producing more, you're doing something wrong. Very wrong.

Second, the talk of "abstract level" and "tangibility" is basically the same sort of interdisciplinary rivalry we've come to expect between the science and engineering groups. It's old. It's tired. Let it die in peace.
I too did the same exact thing, and I share your opinion. People in the upper echelon, especially in the finance industry, have lost their minds. What ever happened to aphorism living below your means. I guess people that the quote references are not financially prudent, and honestly, deserve to suffer in my eyes, since they probably caused this mess to begin with.

Shit, to be honest, I'd be lucky to net 1/7th a month of that income while working this year. Hopefully, if everything goes better than plan, I'd be able to land a fulfilling job where I can net 1/6th, but I am highly skeptical though.
Unfortunately the article does not describe how the feds "hacked past anonymity":

"The Western Louisiana grand jury indictment, unsealed today, doesn't disclose how the Feds got through Dreamboard's security wall,"

It is kind of funny that the ars technica author used "doesn't" but the lawyers who wrote the indictment had the sense to include "sic" when they quoted "doesn't" from a dreamboard post:)
Agreed.

I also think that bottom-up learning might lead to a false sense of completeness, a sort of "now I know everything". But in reality, there is always some other perspective that will really improve understanding.

That being said, I think learning fundamentals is very valuable, of course.
the takeaway for me is respect privacy and other general laws of the country you do business in

i personally believe kissmetrics had to fully know they had figured out a way to bypass privacy settings and thought themselves clever for it. Most likely they said the far too often: "It will only be a problem if we are successful and then, hey we are successful"
If you make a degree a prerequisite to getting a specific job, or even a specific job at a specific (higher) pay scale, you always end up with people treating traditional four-year programs like trade schools. Especially if you also make people think of trade schools as where you go if you only barely passed high school, or if you failed high school and wound up with a GED. (And we could recurse and talk about how one-size-fits-all high schools aren't the only option, either, but we won't.)

Now you have four-year programs becoming the only option. This leads to a mix of philosophies, and by 'mix of philosophies' I mean 'raucous all-out war between two different groups punctuated by useless tracts calling for peace like this one.' The two different groups are the people who want to understand the theory at a respectable university level and the people who are on a fetch quest to get the paper to get the best ending (uh, job).

Neither group is wrong, but one group would be much better served by a non-stigmatized trade school system.

This fight invariably leads to the airing of two philosophies:

One, the student-as-customer philosophy, says that as long as tuition costs money the schools damned well better dance to the students' tune chop chop. They're more sympathetic than that once you realize how eager companies are to shitcan anyone who doesn't have enough letters after their name, which might actually be the real problem.

The other, the university-as-noble-institution philosophy, says that universities are places apart from the world where real research can be done and grants can be funded and, incidentally, there are these undergrad things running around that the exterminators refuse to extirpate so we might as well rope some researchers into making them the next generation of people educated enough to further our culture and, incidentally, keep our technical society from collapsing. In this model, the students don't get to influence pedagogy and coursework and so on because they, as per hypothesis, aren't educated enough to know what they want: If they were they could teach themselves and save everyone a lot of money.

Like I said, neither philosophy is wrong. It's just that one of them should be in a completely different set of institutions.
I don't think it's very practical to argue which group produces more life-changing technologies. Suffice to say, both have their place.

Regarding restrictions, there are a great many researchers who would love to see their contributions widely applied and have big impact. While there is sometimes cross-over between industry, a lot of the time researchers have no resources to advertise or widely implement their discoveries.

The basic point of your blog post is absolutely correct of course: people can have a big impact on the world without going into academics. It's not always clear where it will come from either. But equally, there is no harm in exploring the other side.
Then you're restricted to HTML. You can parse Markdown and emit LaTeX, HTML, OPML—anything structured.
I currently work about 20 hours a week on my day job, 10 hours a week freelancing, another 20 hours day-dreaming about my own startup and reading Hacker News/Techmeme/Reddit.
Interactive Game Development using iPad Application
Google IS a patent troll.

Google is a major investor in PATENT TROLL Intellectual Ventures

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures

http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2011/05/intellectual-ventur...
If every trucker in the US quit tomorrow, they would be replaced in a week or so, by similarly paid drivers. Not enough truck licenses? The government would pass emergency legislation, allowing anyone who has held a car license for 3 years (with no major traffic offenses) to drive a truck for the next year or so. It might cost a few thousand in sign-on bonuses, and there would be some horrific accidents caused by inexperienced drivers, but the supply of replacement drivers is there.

If every programmer in the US quit, they wouldn't be replaced nearly as quickly.
How we got back the @emo2 handle - thanks to Twitter, you could too
By "ONE" do you mean at least one, as in implying there are none right now. Or by "ONE" do you mean that you wish there would be one and only one GUI/DE for linux?

If it's the first, I would agree because I would willingly pay money to use the Windows 7 or even OS X interfaces in Linux. Essentially, I feel that while Linux has software I can't live without, there is not a single WM/DE out there that I can use without being annoyed every 20 minutes or without having to spend weeks configuring it. Gnome came closest before the gnome-shell move, now KDE is the closest but it's seriously still too buggy and "WTF" inducing. I'm not sure if it would be less work to remove all the "default/assumed" features from KDE (like the wallet that irritates me even when browsing websites) or to set up XFCE to some bearable degree from scratch.

Regardless, I'd still take this selection of environments that are all either ugly, time consuming to configure, buggy, or flat out annoying over having no choice at all. Even if the "no choice" option was really excellent, I would not like the thought of being stuck with it knowing that under some rare condition it might be useless and my only way out is a complete OS switch. Example: as much as I praise the windows 7 UI, I would hate to try and deal with it if I lost my ability to use a mouse. Meanwhile, I know there are nice options in the Linux world that I could use if this was the case.

Pretty much it boils down to my opinion that no interface is going to be good at every use case. And for that reason I'd rather have a slew of mediocre ones that span a broader range over a single one that covers a small spectrum but does it well.
official site - http://reaper.fm/

I've been using reaper for a couple of weeks now and cannot believe that anyone would want to go back to insert $500+ big name daw after using it.
The first sentence on diveintopython.org is:

Dive Into Python is a Python book for experienced programmers.

Deciding it's an appropriate choice for an entry-level Computer Science course is baffling to me.
The whole "did Android copy iPhone or not" is beside the point in the patent debate. The patents Apple is asserting against HTC (the only ones that made it past the first round of the ITC process that determines whether Apple can get an import ban) are from the 90s! 1994 and 1996, IIRC.

Can we all at least agree there is nothing innovative that Apple did for the iPhone that dates back over 10 years before it was released?
I think this article misses the point.

Yes, MAC addresses are not to be trusted. They can be easily changed. However, the corollary to "you shouldn't blacklist MAC addresses" is "you shouldn't whitelist them either." Great, you just threw out DHCP, and are going down the network access control blackhole. (802.1X supplicants for everybody!)

Most ISPs don't put multiple clients in a layer-2 domain, you can't trust it. So, most ISPs already don't trust MAC addresses, nor do they care.

On a college campus, things are different, and locking down the network can only go so far technologically. You need technical measures and good communication to cover 98% of the users (IDS, automatic quarantine systems, simple registration), accommodation for the 1.9% of technically inquisitive/advanced users (forums, workarounds for edge cases), and a big stick for the remaining 0.1%.

When I was at WWU, they ran a very liberal network. You could change your MAC address (as long as it wasn't taken from another user), you could run your own WiFi (as long as you took responsibility for it), you could run servers, and almost no protocol was banned (although it might be throttled.) But use someone else's credentials or interfere with the functioning of the network? Stick time.

Sounds like the problem at this school is bad communication, and not having a holistic network management system. Not surprising: they're both hard, and most schools don't invest the time with any serious effort.

... and don't get me started on the campuses that ban IRC.
I had this exact experience that Rachel describes the other day -- was signing up a new startup and saw that, was already feeling like the service was too expensive, then got annoyed at the idea that me (some sucker from the web) was paying more than other people and just ditched the signup process.

Granted, I wasn't going to make that startup rich, BUT, I didn't even get past that signup page to experience their product and give them a chance to win me over.

With so many choices for every kind of app, I think she brings up a really good point here. Don't make your new customers feel like suckers about to pay sticker-price if they don't have to.
送给恋人的七夕情人节祝福短信
This detail fires back on Google. Google too had a partner for bidding; just that they didn't want to partner with their competitors. They were trying to portray their defeat as a conspiracy which this post proves it was not.
Google Threw A Punch, Microsoft Fires Back With A Missile
Python has things they call closures but they aren't what Scheme (or Lisp, or Perl, or Ruby, or Smalltalk, or JavaScript, or C#...) would call a closure. I think it's fair to say that Python is the odd language out here. The scoping rules are different unless you use the relatively recent "nonlocal" keyword.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/141642/what-limitations-h...

And Guido has said that he intentionally crippled the lambda keyword.

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358

Anyway, why are you getting offended? Python is a great language.

Some people just think Scheme teaches certain aspects of programming better for various reasons. For instance, in Scheme, the program listing is a representation of the parse tree. Python will construct a similar tree, but this is not revealed to the programmer as much. So if you learn Scheme you can imagine how what Python is really doing (and writing parsers is much simpler because you have an intuitive sense of how they work).

And the ability to manipulate code as data is exclusive to s-expression based languages. This enables (for instance) truly hygienic macros. You don't get that in Python.

On the other hand, object-oriented programming in Scheme is pretty terrible. The part in SICP where they try to simulate it in Scheme is a travesty. Although it is somewhat illustrative of what's "really" going on, without the syntactic support it just looks ridiculous. So that's a win for Python.

Similarly, whipping up a complex data structure takes far fewer keystrokes, and is more transparent, in Pythonic syntax. Just as Scheme benefits from having built-in lists, Python wins even bigger for having lists and dictionaries everywhere. And overall Python is objectively more practical, with its vast array of libraries and ease of use.

I honestly don't know if you're trolling or are just being partisan. Not all languages are the same and there isn't any one "winner" language.
The author claims that without Steve Jobs, Apple will become more like Google. If anything, Apple will become more like Microsoft.
Google is a web company born and bred. Data, open-source and commoditization are key to their strategies. Google's approaches are quite different philosophically from Apple.
Apple is a hardware and only coincidentally software company. Because of these origins, Apple is more similar to Microsoft.
Exactly my thought.

My introduction to Scheme, incidentally, came while I was learning JavaScript, and it was through a book that hadn't originally been written in Scheme, either: http://javascript.crockford.com/little.html
If you asked me a few months ago I would've said 60-70 but since I started time tracking I've found it's only 40-50 hours on average. This is with being strict about what's considered work time (meals, "general research", etc. are all off the clock)
It allows real computer scientists to laugh at stupid webdevs reinventing the wheel. </sarcasm>

(Except no one was claiming that it was a novel idea, just that in the past, most Markdown processors just convert directly between Markdown and HTML, but now they are changing that. It's also funny that there seems to be some animosity in that post towards Ruby programmers for whatever reason. It's not like Markdown is an invention of Ruby, the reference implementation was written in Perl.)
Ask HN: Anyone know a good Joomla guy?
I've got a woefully out of date Joomla site with a few moving pieces that no longer make sense to me 3 years on. Would like to find someone to upgrade anything that needs to be upgraded, move it off shared hosting to Linode, and then install a new module or two. Contact info is in my profile.
To unruffle your feathers a bit -
I read this article earlier this week on a finance blog. To an extent, the language and profession influence here is slanted towards people following the financial readers.

His larger thread is about how the lower 5% are different from the top 1%. That the top 1% is made up primarily of finance types, but that he has clients who have reached the top 1% from different entry points.