skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This economic crisis isn't about economics, it's about politics. When the GOP goes off on "cutting spending", they're not being fiscally responsible. Ideally, they would literally like to cut every dollar that isn't going to the Pentagon. "Spending cuts" is a dog whistle for the idea that the Federal government shouldn't exist at all.

It doesn't matter if borrowing and spending (some might call it "investing") money is good fiscal policy— "spending" is just wrong.
+1 for that. Expiring the tax cuts and reducing foreign military expenditures is our best option. We have an obligation to keep our current military personel employed but I would rather they be spending their salaries in local businesses here. Military cuts can occur by shutting down foreign bases and drastically reducing the recruitment of new military personel.

It would be funny, if it were not so serious: a lot of my conservative friends harp on the need to stay in the middle east, but refuse to pay for it with taxes.
Give Me A Lever
I think the crowdsourced, content rich, story telling of Instructables will benefit Autodesk and the maker community at large.

Autodesk will just have to understand how to keep the community energized and make sure the site has the resources it needs.
that's not the only reason, they also need to keep buying it for as long as we're a sizable portion of their export market. We still are, for now..
A Brief Explanation of Microsoft's Anti-Google Patent FUD
Radii Straight Jackets-mens green radii shoes
There was a project mentioned on HN fairly recently (~weeks ago) about an extended pipe system, using JSON and a bunch of common schemas, as I recall.

Both http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit and http://blogs.perl.org/users/rocco_caputo/2011/05/apppipefilt... seem to fit what I was thinking of, but I'm sure there was something else.

Nice ideas, but the inertia of existing unix tools is going to be hard to overcome, and a system isn't much use until all your common tools support it (or at least don't break it).
> But why now, when it hasn't in the past?

Maybe now, unlike ever before, computers and robots can do most of the tasks that (relatively) unskilled humans are capable of, for less than minimum wage.
The thing with Social Security is that it's such a huge, tempting cookie jar for Congress to reach into -- remember that this is a program that easily runs a surplus when we just leave it the hell alone. So instead of cutting it, how about we build a big damn electrified fence around it? ;)
Got an invite to stripe. Thanks guys.
I back up my computer over wireless (I share a huge networked drive with my family), but whenever I'm browsing or uploading code, I feel more comfortable (for some inexplicable reason) being wired-in.

And yes, I do on occasion unplug. And it feels good.
Neutral routers could trump politics in net neutrality debate
One of the ways in which most grading systems are fucked up is that there's more downside than upside. One failure cancels out 3 or 4 successes, no matter how great. If a teacher decides that any late work gets a zero, then being half a day late on one paper nullifies several great, on-time papers.

I think it's a vicious cycle. This sort of system is designed to produce the sort of risk-averse rule-followers required by old-style industry: people destined for jobs where creativity isn't required but following orders 90% of the time is failure. But for that system's defense, it's good practice for real life. Humans are vindictive and focused more on stigma, gossip and the aversion to failure than in seeking out excellence and creativity. Hence, they create societies (like our society at a macro level, like most corporations, and like many school systems) that punish failure brutally but don't really value (or even fully trust) excellence, and which actively discourage the risk-taking usually required to excel. (And no, our society's outsized reward for economic fortune is not "rewarding success" since most of those people at the top are effective social climbers or hereditarily-placed parasites.) The "vicious cycle" is closed if one believes that the vindictive, punitive nature of people comes from how they are taught. Or is it innate? I'm really not sure.

The way I think grading should be done is an inverse of the current system. Make the problems really, really hard. Some should be so hard that the hardest exam problems go for years without being answered. Make it so hard that 20% is passing and 60% is exceptional-- instead of 70% being passing and 95% being exceptional-- and so that students are used to it (and therefore they don't panic when they take an exam and can't solve half the problems). I argue for this because the reality for the most creative, hardest-to-get-right pursuits is that for 60% of one's efforts to succeed is exceptional.

All that said, I think grading is important, but it shouldn't be started at such a young age, and that grades should generally be internal (for the student's and school's benefit) only. Many business schools actually prohibit their students from disclosing GPA or transcripts, only verifying which courses were taken and passed. If I were running a college, full transcripts would be available only to academic graduate departments-- not to future employers or professional schools. I'm not going to do their job (sorting) for them.
I don't think it is unreasonable to believe that in 40 years China will have per capita GDP half of the US (The Shanghai and Beijing areas are already close on a PPP basis) - indeed some GS research paper argues this. At that point its economy will be about double the size of the US...
Read Dan Pink's "Drive" for an incredible full overview of what we know about motivation. Alfie's work is source material for Drive. You can drive deeper into this aspect later and pick up his works.
OT: if you are on an iPad, be aware the site uses that broken OnSwipe theme, which has a good chance of running your browser out of memory and crashing it. Might want to wait until you are on your desktop or laptop.
Also, remember that the United States is bound by treaty to defend more than two dozen nations. That includes keeping bases in some of those nations. Those treaties will have to be renegotiated. Those nations will have to increase their own defense spending.

Not having read the North Atlantic Treaty, I don't know that the US has any special obligation above and beyond the rest of the NATO members. Yes, the US is obligated by treaty to defend Latvia, but by the same token Latvia is obligated by treaty to defend the US. American deployments to Europe are likely above and beyond American treaty obligations.
The rise and fall of RIM in three words
Look, I get it, you're pissed. But the real world isn't a framework, and that's all I'm saying.
I use minecraft on a ubuntu 10.04, with java version 1.6.0_25, and I don't have any such problem. Unless I use bad password or my connection gets into trouble. Then I can use the offline version, which outputs this message.
The Plastic Bag Wars
This downgrade may just be the first sign of real problems to come. For detailed coverage of the coming US financial storm see the documentary I.O.U.S.A. from former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker (I've seen it on Netflix streaming).

http://www.iousathemovie.com
On point #3, while I'm sure it can be better, it is worth noting out that historically medicare has done better at cost management than private healthcare (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/medicare-versus-...). I don't have the answer either, but health is one of those areas we know enough about yet to optimize using the same techniques you would in manufacturing, for instance. It is about investing in preventative measures as it is in reactive treatments. In Canada we face similar issues where more of our tax dollars being spent on healthcare with lesser returns. This is due in part to an ageing population, but can also be attributed to the lack of broader innovation in the delivery of care. A first step would be to encourage a more team-oriented approach where the doctor's lobby group (aka union) doesn't retain so much influence and control over policy decisions. From afar it looks like the private insurance lobby is one of the larger distractions preventing the US from getting down to the real issues of efficient and effective health practices.

On the business front propping up failing business models is a tough one. There is something to be said about preventing a complete and sudden collapse. The number of unemployed would hit the system in so many other ways. What we have seen from the auto industry, as much as I disagreed with the bailouts, is reinvention and retooling. I hope they take their bailouts with a great deal of thankfulness and invest wisely. I look at the next generation of companies like Tesla Motors and hope that more auto industry giants will seek to innovate and evolve rather than focus on just getting bigger (and slower).

The message I believe we all (conservative and liberal) can and should agree on is respect for the tax payer dollar. Money in government isn't free, the debt and deficit isn't free. As they plan out capital and operating expenses they need to do so with an passion towards building a better country while taking calculated measures and risks. Government's role, in my mind, isn't to innovate itself but instead to facilitate innovation by its people. It should focus on facilitating the success of the people through "just enough" regulation which means refactoring how they work on a regular basis to find the most effective means in which to operate. They need to continue to question their own purposes, not get comfortable in the security of a public sector job for life. Most importantly they need to share with their shareholders, we the people, on their progress in an open and transparent manner. I don't need fancy marketing campaigns to tell me about the good work that they do, but I don't want to see them hiding it either. One way to do this is to add a more direct measure of how tax dollars are spent. In Canada we pay a good portion of our taxes into a general revenue pool. I would like to see that eliminated in favour of a clear indication of what portion of my taxes go towards specific ministries or sectors of government. I think that next level of granularity would provide a bit more awareness that public money really belongs to the public.
Germany and Japan pursue their own national industrial policies--unlike the United States, which doesn't really have one. The industrial policy of Germany and Japan is to compete in high-value, highly specialized niches, where there are few competitors. This way they maintain high profit margins to support middle class wages at home.

Germany's exporters get rebates on the VAT taxes of the goods they export. The United States has a big disadvantage compared with Germany in this respect. German manufacturers receive government subsidies, and there are investment incentives. In the US, the tax incentives encourage offshoring production. Labor unions sit on the board of directors of German manufacturing firms. Unlike the US, labor has a voice at the table in Germany.

Japan also has an industrial policy, with significant government subsidies to support targeted niches. Japan's Ministry of Finance engages in vigorous exchange rate intervention to keep the Yen undervalued (read: mercantilism, similar to China's currency policy). China has extensive subsidies: cheap land, tax holidays and cheap government financing. It does have environmental regulations--but China doesn't enforce them. Multinationals can pollute with abandon in China--and the subsidy that they receive is someone else's negative externality. This is hardly the level playing field that underlies any reasonable interpretation of free-trade policy.

These realities stand in stark contrast to Ricardo's classical notion of comparative advantage, the heart of which involves full employment. A true reckoning of comparative advantage should include the impact of negative externalities.
Trillions in debt is perfectly fine for an economy as large as America's. It's tens of trillions where you have a problem long-term.

I agree that you should just run the short-term deficits. That said, if we have to cut short-term deficits (which I don't think is a wise strategy), it is significantly better to tax the rich than cut benefit programs.

Finally on military, I'd feel it'd be a better use of resources to transfer the 300,000 people to infrastructure projects. The ROI on the investment is much better than the wars where we have ground-troops.
Doesn't dropbox essentially have infinite potential?

Pictures folders shared with your contacts and you have flickr etc. A shared music folder and spotify/grooveshark etc?

Basically an infrastructure company in the most elemental and violently grand sense of the word?
Anyone else try to do a lazy AND evaluation for chapter 12 and have it fail? I did

fC(gC(function(){success,failure};),failure);

but the desired answer checked gC even if fC already failed..
The real story is that S&P thinks downgrading the US debt will provide political cover against investigations into their role in the mortgage securities debacle by the SEC and Justice. They were determined to downgrade no matter what. Their original justification is the US didn't make their $4 trillion cut target. When Treasury showed them a $2 trillion dollar error in their arithmetic, they changed the justification to political gridlock. Time for a perp walk.
I dont know if its what he is referring to, but it would be an awesome coincedence if it wasnt

Bob Ippolito wrote mochiweb (the erlang web server) and looks to be involved in eventlet http://eventlet.net/doc/history.html
From the article:

Because of these performance requirements, we originally wrote the
server in Erlang (with MochiWeb) two years ago. After two years of
iteration, the code has become difficult to maintain. No one on
our team is an Erlang expert, and we have had trouble debugging
downtime and performance problems. So, we decided to rewrite it
in Python, the de-facto language at Mixpanel.

My first impulse would have been to have one or more team members become Erlang experts. Was that considered?
Spain: Linking to Copyright Infringing Material Not Infringement
Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite
The article is almost unreadable due to the many grammatical errors contained within.

It's a shame too, for such an important story.
The absolutely massive photo database owned (or at least permanent irrevocably licensed access and storage) by Facebook, combined with the metadata people are more than happy to provide (Tagging their friends bodies & faces) sounds like an absolutely perfect training set for an automated recognition system.

You'll even get all sorts of different angles, lighting conditions, age variations, and just about anything else you might want.

I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but there's something about it that makes me at least a little uneasy.
> Is it the government's job to keep people employed for the sake of employing them? No!

The most basic task of government is to maintain a stable social order (see, e.g., the preamble to the U.S. Constitution). With sustained, pervasive unemployment comes social unrest (see any number of examples from the past 100 years). So ....

> The government spent a lot of money on public works projects to help put some people back to work. But this didn't do much to actually end the depression. It was the onset of WWII and the subsequent ramp-up to a war economy that really ended the Depression.

According to most economists (from what I've read), the New Deal was doing OK at getting people back to work until 1937, when the government suddenly cut its spending and raised taxes. That threw the economy back into recession.[1] And yes, the massive deficit spending of WWII did indeed pretty much take care of unemployment, and then some.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_of_1937
Air Jordan 13 Retro
Sophistication is often the ultimate enemy.

H. Thoreau once said "In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex.." (Walden, Princeton University Press, 1971, p.323-324)
As somebody who tried to read it _after_ having read some other philosophy, I found it entirely boring and put it down before 100 pages.
I'd love to listen to this, but it seems like the mp3 is corrupted. It won'd play in iTunes or Quicktime. Shame.
Nintendo Wii Remote Controller
Yes, but... Milgram is pretty famous for two different things... this, and his "small worlds" stuff.[1] Being more interested in the latter, and associating Milgram's name more strongly with it, that was what I initially assumed you meant.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_experiment
One minor elephant in the room that only a few seem to be mentioning is the 500+ point selloff on Thursday.

On Thursday evening, the economist talking-heads expressed some confusion about what was driving that sell-off on that particular day. There was vague talk of problems in Europe, although there has been worse news out of the Eurozone for months without that kind of drop.

On Friday, we get the S & P announcement of a decision that may impact markets. One can only imagine when this particular decision was actually made.

What drove the sell-off on Thursday?
Wanted to check out Krugman's take on this:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/sp-and-the-usa/

TLDR:

1) The 'madness of the right' holding the debt-ceiling hostage cost us the confidence of investors (and S&P).

2) The ratings agencies have shown they aren't qualified to rate anything, much less sovereign debt.

3) S&P miscalculated the downgrade by $2T before going ahead with it anyway.

4) S&P's magic number for averting a downgrade was $4T deficit reduction over the next decade. The Congressional deal failed to reach that, but according to Krugman that number is barely relevant to the US debt costs and should not effect the credit rating. The real downgrade risk is with long-term unfunded healthcare liabilities, which S&P seems to have ignored here.
Wow, this post made me feel like the world's most incompetent intern.
A lot of your points seem to cover international issues/action.

The US needs to come to the realization that it is part of the world economy and not the ruler/leader.

A large percentage of the US economy was damaged in the events that occurred after September 2001. Trying to to do business, travel or get workers to the US requires so much paperwork that a lot of business has simply gone elsewhere. Even trying to do financial trade in the US these days ends up with so much taxes or the threat of your money being taken as it may be linked to some terrorist organization.

And your health insurance.... well I like collecting dividends. If you like I could go into the oil industry, I will say thank you to the American tax payer for electing to go to war and making me some money.

The US has managed to dig itself into a great big hole and gave people like me money. Congratulations on your sinking economy and thank you.

So keep watching that propaganda you call Fox News :)
Is this a first year philosophy class? Reminds me of kids in law school. Ad hom this, straw man that...pointless discussion. We can all go look up the definitions if we want & decide for ourselves. Let it go & discussion the actual issue.

Fact is having a second means to communicate (a .me or whatever address) doesn't mean speech isn't an issue here.

http://www.thedomains.com/2011/08/05/federal-court-rules-dom...
Should you wait before adding +1 to your blog?
$ curl 'https://www.facebook.com/ajax/flash/user_info.php'
{"user":0,"is_fb_employee":false}

Probably a referrer check. Nice.
There are two kinds of lambda expressions: combinators, which only combine their arguments and make no reference to any other variables; and open functions, which refer to variables that are not bound by the lambda expression.

A closure is an open function paired with an environment that maps the unbound variables to values. The pairing is called a closed function, or the closure of an open function.
Practical attacks against WEP and WPA Book
IE6 has extended support until 2014 or market share is under 1%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6
If you own any sort of vanity domain,

"At least annually, a registrar must present to the
registrant the current Whois information, and remind the
registrant that provision of false Whois information can be
grounds for cancellation of their domain name registration.
Registrants must review their Whois data, and make any
corrections."

http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/wdrp.htm and whois is a 5-second task.

I'm not sure where the 'registered by a private individual' details masking services fit into it, I assume there's some provision for personal privacy, but I'm not 100% certain.

Anyone to whom I give my email address can very easily find my full name, phone number and current address. I should really check out some of those masking services.
I know a guy who lost one of his legs in a boating accident. After a few years he was able to run again with a prosthetic. No big deal there...
If you were only interested in measuring accomplishment, you'd keep the grades secret (say, until the end of the year). Instead, grades are used as a stick/carrot for motivating students.
I'm tempted to extend the analogy by pointing out that we already have a unit testing framework: a constitution and judicial review. Test only work if you have an idea of how the system is supposed to run and assertions that respect that idea.

Another analogy that I like to use is one that relates governments to operating systems:

Federalism is a microkernel operating system. The states are user land processes where we can experiment with the code without taking down the entire system. When we discover something that is a universally good principle, we implement it at the kernel/federal level. After all, another name for the states is "Laboratories of Democracy".
Inflating your way out of debt is as bad to debt holders as a (partial) default.
Specifically, a federal democratic republic. There's no contradiction between "republic" and "democracy". "Republic" refers to sovereignty (the people hold sovereignty rather than a monarch), while "democracy" refers to power (the people hold power rather than a dictator).

Some democracies are not republics--the UK is a constitutional monarchy. Some republics are not democracies--the Roman Republic was an oligarchy and to some extent the early United States was, too.
Disruptor: ultra-fast concurrency framework
It's fairly widely understood (though I guess not by Professor Krugman) that Medicare offloads some of its own costs onto the private sector by the below-market rates it pays providers.

He's also neglecting to make a real comparison of the services that private health care provides vs. Medicare. Sure, private insurance premiums may have risen faster than Medicare spending during the '90s, but Medicare wasn't even paying for prescription drugs (a huge cost driver) until Part D was implemented in 2006.
I understand that this is meant just as an experience report, but I have to say this article didn't convince me in any way that this rewrite was a good idea. Obvious questions:

1. How does the performance of the new system compare to the old system?

2. What exactly were those maintenance issues with the Erlang server? Did just no-one in your team find the time to learn Erlang well enough? I know Erlang isn't the prettiest of languages, but async I/O isn't the only advantage of Erlang. A battle-tested concurrent runtime and built-in support for fault-tolerance are two obvious examples.
Japan spends 3% of its annual budget on defense.
There are countries who don't use debt payments as political tools. A congressional stalemate that leads to a failure to pay bondholders is entirely possible.
related: http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html

tags: HFT, caching, false sharing
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that.
The real world isn't a framework but we only understand it in terms of frameworks.