skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't want to subsidize mail for people in rural areas. If you do, feel free to donate for that cause.

I can't think of a good reason to subsidize mail. If people live where mail delivery is expensive, they should have to bear the cost. This would cause them to conserve their mail use. Instead of getting mail once a day, perhaps they should receive it once a week, or once a month. Maybe they could pick it up where they buy groceries. Maybe they could just use email or phone. Maybe they would get less junk mail. It's hard to tell how they would adapt if they had to pay market prices. But they would adapt and that's a good thing. It's not a good thing to pretend that delivery costs 40 cents when in reality it costs 40 dollars. And it is unjust to force people who chose to live in areas where it's efficient to deliver mail to subsidize people where it's not efficient.

Also, if subsidized rural mail service is something the taxpayers want to pay for, they could just as well subsidize private carriers.

In short, I don't see any good reason why the USPS should have a monopoly on mail service, any more than it should have a monopoly on email, or fax, or telephone, or TV or any other means of communication.
The crazy thing is "why do they even enforce such a crazy law in a tourist area"??? Surely NO ONE will be taking photos in a touristy type area of the world.
httplib2 is part of why you should use requests: it's far more respectable as a client but not as well documented and it still takes way too much code for basic operations. I appreciate what httplib2 is trying to do, that there's a ton of hard low-level annoyances in building a modern HTTP client, but really, just use requests instead. Kenneth Reitz is very motivated and he gets the degree to which simple things should be simple whereas httplib2 feels more like an academic exercise than something people should use to build production systems[1].

Disclosure: I'm listed in the requests AUTHORS file but can claim credit for, oh, about 0.0001% of the awesomeness.

1. http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/issues/detail?id=96 is a good example: an annoying bug which affect many people, there was a fix available for months, which worked great when I applied it in a fork and pounded a couple TB of data through it, but it took over a year to make it into trunk and even longer to make it onto PyPI where any other project which required "httplib2" would get the working version.
I strongly disagree with your recommendation. The article talks about saddles with relief cutouts or depressions, to make sure no pressure is put on the perineum. Saddles with cutouts are fine--even better than normal saddles for some people. Noseless saddles, on the other hand, address the problem entirely wrong. The tend to produce an uncomfortable position for long rides, as the nose is important for bike handling.

Back to cutout saddles, a cutout only helps if the saddle is heavily padded. When the padding compresses, you don't sink from your sit bones into your perineum. Another option is a firmer saddle. My saddle is hard as a rock, but it supports me properly, and I have no pain or numbness on even the longest rides.

Source: Me, recreational cyclist.

Read what Sheldon Brown had to say: http://sheldonbrown.com/saddles.html

Sheldon on noseless saddles:

"The lack of a nose can compromise lateral control in some cases.

The pads must be angled downward, which tends to make the rider slide forward. This is liable to lead to hand/wrist/neck problems as the rider braces on the handlebar to keep from sliding forward off the seat.

If the pads are not angled downward, they tend to cut off circulation to the thighs, and to interfere with the thigh muscles."
Forth is cool up until you try to write some monster program in it.
The example written in urllib2 instantly reminds me of Java and the classy query joke [http://ejohn.org/blog/classy-query/]. Just a thought: are most Java-related APIs over-engineered, and does Java have a bad influence on many API design work?
"You can be a techie like Marissa Mayer, and on the red carpet and have people comment on your awesome date or outfit."

I stopped reading. The emphasis of the article was on "coders" (fair enough) and then Marissa Mayer was bought into the equation.

No one considers Marissa Mayer a 'techie' - she's a business executive at a technology company. Two different things.
What are some best viral marketing techniques for a B2C startup?
Hi All,

Just wondering what are some viral marketing techniques for a startup in B2C space. What you have tried which worked or didn't work. Please share your experiences.

Thanks,
This would have happened. The odds that it would have gone to a charity and not to an iPad are pretty small.

I see a lot of irate comments on Jonathan's blog and the card's Facebook wall from people who likely cannot appreciate the ease with which money could be siphoned from this card. As far as I'm concerned Sam demonstrated an obvious and intrinsic security hole and then owned up to it, but most of the complaining crowd are convinced that his Evil Genius alone is the reason their feel-goodery has to come to an end. The alternate conclusion I see is that unknown agents would take advantage of this card until the experiment because too unpleasant to continue and then no one would feel anything.
The fact that the article is unsigned means nothing; only opinion pieces carry bylines in the Economist.
What will be a "Perlis language" will necessarily individual. What makes it so for you, is that it have some features that is conceptually new for you. For me BASIC, C, and Simula was Perlis languages, but none of them has features completly unique to them, but I learned new concepts from them. On the other hand Java, Python and Lua were not, because I had encountered their core features previously, and learned little from them for that reason. People with a different background would have a different experience.

Few concepts are unique to any computer language, so I would argue that it should be about learning new concepts rather that a new programming language.

Some of the examples he picks are rather good at that, since they contain concepts not part of the mainstream paradigms, and so will have new concepts for most programmers.
And here I am trying to get a bunch of 2d lines rendering quickly in a 2d canvas for some charts. So strange to me that something 'simple' like drawing 20,000 lines chugs along at ~20fps and a water simulation with caustics is there running at 30fps just fine. Goes to show how much you gain from a GPU if you're using it for something it's designed to do.
The current model is that 20-30 kids who want to be moving around and interacting with each other are forced into seats and restricted from moving for hours while teachers talk at them until they get distracted and zone out the teacher to think about other things. And then they go home with an assignment to complete which they may or may not do depending on how motivated they are. When Khan Academy flips this, they make much better use of the situation. There's no reason for everyone to be lectured at together, but there's every reason to allow students to interact and work together while solving problems. There's very little motivation to go home and complete a rigorous assignment when you can be playing outside or watching TV, but watching a couple 10-20 minute videos is enjoyable and completely digestible.

Personally, I believe that the act of working through problems is often more important to learning and development than watching or listening to lectures explaining how to work through problems. If a student's conditions at home are so unstable that they cannot concentrate on watching a single video, then they are clearly never going to be able to put a reasonable amount of effort into homework assignments in the normal education system. I would rather they fail to watch Khan videos at home and interact and explore exercises in class than listen to lectures in class every day but never put those skills into practice because they fail to do homework at home. However, yes, availability of computers at home is an issue. It would be great if Khan Academy were the cure-all for education and would be perfect for everyone, but this is never what has been claimed; unfortunately, for the time being, Khan Academy is not a viable solution for those without computer access.

I'm not sure if the phrasing of drilling exercises was supposed to imply something negative, but the goal of KA's exercises is not to drill students on a question until they can answer it as quickly as possible (this is what I think of when I think of a drill). The goal is to allow students to explore and advance at their own pace, proving mastery of a concept covered in a video and then feeling confident to move onto a more advanced topic. We try to make the exercises as modular as possible (which may make them outwardly resemble drills), but we do this so a complex problem can be broken down into many smaller and easier problems. Instead of making a staircase with huge steps that would take a giant to leap, we're making a staircase with small steps; that way, everyone can advance at their own pace.
Well, you're lucky, then. Regarding hearsay, perineal paresthesia is not something you brag about, usually.

Pudendal nerve compressions are real and non anecdotic (but probably not widespread either, I don't know the numbers). I wouldn't worry about it before being symptomatic, if it ever becomes the case.
For most cases (like yours), using _blank would just annoy users. If they want a new tab, they'll open one, and if they don't but want to come back, they'll just hit the back button.

The only place where using it makes sense to me is on a web app or sign up / payment page which you don't want the user to accidentally leave and lose the state of.
Similar idea -- http://www.extensis.com/en/WebINK/fontdropper/index.jsp
This is hilarious because

A) I've been planning a 1400-mile road trip to Long Beach for weeks, and I leave tomorrow.

B) I'm an avid street photographer.

C) I have a bad habit of pushing authority figures' buttons, because of my disrespect for them generally, because of things like this.

I doubt it will, but if anything interesting happens I'll be sure to write about it and share on HN. Geuis makes a good point, but my main thing literally is photographing strangers when they're not expecting it. (not to be a whore, but if you're interested: http://nnife.com/images/pinhole/spring/2.jpg http://nnife.com/images/film/1/7.jpg http://nnife.com/images/film/1/29.jpg)

As this will be my first time in Long Beach and I have 8 rolls of B&W film sitting around I plan to be very prolific this upcoming week.
I had never heard of her but her wikipedia background seems to be quite 'techie'. BSc in Symbolic systems, MSc in Computer Science, first female engineer hired at Google.
> propaganda, especially of the Goebbels sort, is directly opposed to the pursuit of widespread thinking and big ideas that this article is promoting.

The problem I have with the article is that many of the "big" ideas that happened during past history were only big and influential because they were absorbed by vast numbers of ill-informed people. In other words, it wasn't so much that an idea itself was big, but that most people didn't have alternative sources of information and therefore were ripe material for absorbing the given idea. Totalitarianism thrived on persuading people through clever control of the (new at the time) mass-media channels to believe into this or that idea.

> nationalism isn't a big idea in the same sense that communism or western democracy are.

You are equating "big" with "well-intentioned," which I believe are different things. There can be no doubt that nationalist ideas had a major impact on modernity, from Nazism to Balkans to post-colonialism. Regarding tribalism, it can take many forms, not just nationalism. One of the channels which the early USSR used to spread communist ideas was precisely tribalism. Russians were imagined as good and communitarian "by-nature" while people from Western countries were portrayed as more mean-spirited and selfish.
Show HN: I've created a third place. (for getting to know HNers)
Thanks! I thought I'd tried . but since it clearly works I must have done something wrong the first time. I haven't done any serious Forth programming since about 1988, I must be a bit rusty.
This technique changes:

- Downloading and parsing metadata about modules YUI can load (eliminated)

- Calculating what files to download based on the metadata (moved to the server)

These tasks are usually started by the script loader inside of YUI's seed file, which is a small script that provides the loading API in the browser.

Instead of doing these two steps, the seed simply asks the server for what's needed and gets it back, near-instantly: it's likely in your browser cache, or a Yahoo! CDN edge cache primed from another visitor.

Most savings come from a combination of less code downloaded and cachability of the result. Slower browsers (old IE, mobile phones) also benefit from less execution time, because they are particularly slow at doing the loading themselves -- IE 6 users enjoy 60% faster feature startup after the switch to server-side loading.
I only partially agree. There are a tremendous number of unwanted, used bikes in the world. They're stashed away in garages and barns, they're piled up in thrift stores and junk yards, and they're crushed and recycled en-masse.

If there were very few (unwanted) used bikes due to redistribution, that would be a wonderful thing, for multiple reasons.
Your last comment is not necessary or helpful and detracts from the discussion in my opinion.

Thanks for giving context to the grandparent post, but when compared to the actual wording of the policy it is certainly not "bullshit" and within the realms of reasonable interpretation. When you take into account how police officers practically interpret these policies I wouldn't be at all surprised if this behaviour was "caught" by the policy.
What Startups Can Learn About PR and Crisis Management
If you are the solle person to call the shots on what goes into prod and has the degrees she has, you're a techie.
Schizophrenic Computer Points to New Theory of Disease
@rubergly handled the drilling comment well, so I'll just quickly add:

1) We do want kids to learn lessons at home so that teachers are freed up to do more project-based learning and...well...teaching (instead of lecturing). This doesn't mean the world falls apart if kids aren't watching videos at home. As @rubergly says, computers in the classroom allow for individualized instruction and solid data, which humanizes the kids' experience by helping teachers address individual needs.

2) On the school front -- there are lots of ideas floating around when thinking about the future, but I can assure you that our primary focus is exactly what it says on the website: "providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere."
I am talking about a dilemma, where they must choose either to report news or obey the law. I would also rather that they do both, when possible, but sometimes there are situations where they must pick, and I would rather that they pick the choice that serves the public rather than the government. (Remember, copyright is established by the government, to protect artists and scientists, to promote cultural progress; it is not an innate right!)
I'm curious about this as well. For example, during the implantation of a mammal embryo, endogenous retroviruses are produced in large quantities. I don't know if the double-stranded RNA targeted by DRACO is present in that situation, but it's certainly something that would need extensive testing.
I remember this site from a Netted email. Looks promising but I believe it will be hard to convince people to switch from Delicious. Good luck though..
In the timeline you present, how did you get access to the Google sarches Zuckerberg did while he was a student?
I would be interested to hear other people's take on this issue in their city.
Not all combinations of hardware and drivers work yet. See:

http://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/BlacklistsAndWhitelists
Very cool. More code reading posts, please! :)
What class of letter(s) would not be sent if prices went up?
Adventure Games - Free Online Games (FOG)
Yes, which is why no one else delivers non-urgent mail. You'll get shut down by the postal inspector.
Always wanted to try this out:

http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=53&id=9
Eric Ries: “Don’t Be In A Rush To Get Big, Be In A Rush To Have A Great Product”
If that's true he must have been misquoted because there is no way anyone who writes Ruby code, will compare Ruby to Node.js
Is there a service that alerts you when there are broken links to pictures/css on your site?
Backstory: This concept spawned from feedback received on HN for a previously failed idea. I look forward to your feedback and to getting to know some of you!
Not that I want to be That Guy, but there are plenty of programming languages that aren't turing complete -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness#Non-Turing-...
Indeed, I am a Mac user and the blog is about tech. Thanks for the feedback, dropping the _blank.
Wow. That needs to be enabled by default.
Makes absolutely no sense. MyBART isn't even related to BART, its a site to find activities that you can take the BART to.

Of course, I don't expect much more from Anonymous.
Hmm, sorry, thought I was being funny. Didn't work out that way I guess.
CCC Camp 2011 talks are online
Also: ftp://media.ccc.de/events/camp2011/video/
Ask HN: How many lines of code per day?
How many lines of code do you write per day on average? Whats your record? Please specify in what language, im curious
I first heard of Meyer in my information retreival class when implementing an algorithm from a paper she wrote. That's pretty 'techie' afaict.
I think Delicious is popular for its Firefox add-on which gives you all the functionality you have on the site. Thats why the first thing AVOS guys did was implementing an add-on for Firefox 4 which was something everybody was dying for. I think you guys also need such an add on instead of something just lets you bookmark. Other than that the design and the simplicity of your app looks good enough for me. Keep up the good work.
Social Media "Guru" TuggGently likens platforms to body parts
I don't understand why anyone would settle for a job where they're considered "low status". Especially in an industry like ours where even fair to decent coders can essentially write their own ticket.
I think it would somewhat depend on your audience. The tech crowd may find it annoying but I know people who get immensely annoyed at having been taken away from the site they are reading after clicking a link. That's possibly all wrong but that's the way it is sometimes.

Personally I've been conditioned over the years to expect _blank on blogs so I don't think leaving it in will cause any great tremors in the force. TBH, taking it out probably won't make any real difference anyway. So, er, my point is
The Ugly Future Is Speeding Toward Us
WebGL would draw your 20,000 lines much faster. It's not just for 3D; charting would be a perfectly reasonable use for WebGL.
I'm up front about bringing in other people when needed, and typically have one separate bill rate for those people, and it's disclosed up front before the project starts. I don't try to pass people off as my own employees - I simply indicate I have professional colleagues in my network that I collaborate with, depending on the project's needs. Most people seem to understand that, and I've never had an issue so far.

I've occasionally submitted to being subcontracted out under someone else's company name, and it's ended poorly about 80% of the time, due to misunderstandings about communication between all parties involved.

I typically charge per hour with a base estimate up front that spells out the understandings. If the understandings change, more work is done and more hours are used, but I let the client know, and they make the final decision as to whether or not to have me/us do the extra work.
This didn't work for me in Chrome 14 or FireFox 5. What the hell browser does this work in?
As long as it's a negative number, it's a win. I feel like LoC as a measurement for anything is pretty outdated.
Dunno. SLOC just isn't an important enough metric to track. Here's an example of why that is:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
Ask HN: About launching a .FM music web service
I'm interested in targeting a niche music genre and my goal is to make at least $100/year to help pay for the FM domain. I was wondering what would be the best way to get some sort of revenue?

Please not that I don't want to clutter my site with too much ads. Thanks!
You are quite right about the delicious add on. We started working on some improvements to our Chrome and Firefox extensions which will hopefully make them have the key functionality of the site itself.
I'm getting the "This demo requires OES_texture_float extension" error. Strangely, in the conformance test (https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webg...) OES_texture_float passes without error.

using latest chromium dev build on latest ubuntu 32bit. same error in firefox 5.
The vast majority of the routes that the USPS runs are money losers. Try delivering a 44-cent piece on a mule to the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Don't you think, the way the Congress can be bought, that a private company that thought it could do the USPS' job wouldn't have bought its way in?
Waves don't reflect off the sphere - they just pass right through it. Mind-bogglingly beautifully, of course.
W3Counter uses node.js for a real-time site usage dashboard

http://www.w3counter.com/stats/demo/1
Piwik [1] is a great alternative to Google Analytics. It is free, open source software, and it is typically self-hosted.

While I do not think it supports Do-Not-Track at this time, Piwik does have configuration options to respect emerging laws on data protection and user privacy.

[1] http://piwik.org/blog/2011/03/piwik-can-be-used-in-complianc...
Cool, how is this diferent from http://box2d-js.sourceforge.net/
Same here. Anybody have a YouTube demo we can all watch?
The "write their own ticket" idea is both a myth and a misunderstanding. Even if you're say a coder in NYC making 200k at an ad agency, your status isn't as high as the coder at FourSquare making half as much. By status, the zero sum part of social capital ways in more. For the amount of capital generated in Silicon Valley, coders at 6 figures are underpaid. 7 figures is the ticket they should be writing.
Lies of B-School
You could look at the size of your diffs instead. Though that's not such a good metric, either.

But really, last week I helped a co-worker rip out 80 of the 100 lines of his Parsec parser.
Which graphics card?
Review of coupon codes and printable coupons
So what "hacking" do Anonymous plan to do? I hope their only target is the website; for anything else would put commuter safety at risk.
I spent quite a few hours a while ago trying to organize languages into different language groups in order to pick which languages to learn next. If you're interested in that see the blog post that came out of that: http://hacklash.posterous.com/how-to-choose-your-next-progra... .

Just be warned that I'm coming at it from the outside with most of these languages, to make your final decision try and find someone experienced in multiple languages from the paradigm and ask them which to learn the paradigm with.