skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good arguments but limited interpretation in this article - namely the fact that growth in Soviet bureaucracy correlated strongly with a decline in overall (real) productivity, while growth in US bureaucracy comes during a time in continued GROWTH in productivity, not decline. Then the author mixes in this observation/fact that the US experiences a quickly growing income gap between rich and poor, and it's hard for most readers to realize that that fact doesn't necessary support the idea that central planning is taking place. Central planning is top-down (the central leaders have most say over what industry does) and I'd argue that it's the opposite in the United States - namely business has more political sway than our elected officials when it comes to making policy and changing laws.
Anyone interested in the structured programming vs. goto debate should also read Knuth's "Structured Programming with Goto":

http://pplab.snu.ac.kr/courses/adv_pl05/papers/p261-knuth.pd...

Among many other things, it explains how eliminating goto removes certain useful optimizations. In fact, I think it's hard even to think of some of the constructs that Knuth uses if you are only practiced in goto-less programming.
Thanks! I happen to think so, too :)

The reason is that putting humans inside software lets you do incredibly powerful things.

Here's one of my favorite examples from the academic world, but it took a slew of difficult crowd-control hacks and months of research to get it working on Turk: http://hci.cs.rochester.edu/currentprojects.php?proj=vw

It'd be a weekend project to rebuild it on MobileWorks.
still a burglary is when stuff is stolen when no one is there (as in the fine article). A robbery is when something is stolen from your person (like you are help up at gun point for you wallet).
Most subway systems are actually privately owned/operated, yet state funded entities. Or at least that's my understanding of many of them. The MTA and MBTA are this way I believe.
I like the central theme, but there's not really a lot of facts and I would argue the details. For example, he claims there has been a simultaneous growth in wealth concentration and government control, resulting in misallocation of resources. But it was deregulation and lack of government enforcement in the financial markets that allowed them to misallocate capital so egregiously.

I would say that the checks and balances that kept our country strong have been steadily eroded, with the result that he describes.
I'm laughing at the fact that BART thinks they can effectively control people with this. This will only make things worse.
it sounds like BART just powered down cell towers in their underground stations. then notified the service providers afterwards.

ability-to-disable seems like a pretty basic provision for allowing others' services into one's facilities.
People With ADHD Do One Month's Less Work Per Year, Study Finds
I think the best solution is to simply take the computer away. Like you said, that's group punishment, but there's a reason that group punishment is so effective. When I was a teenager, I didn't care what my parents thought about me, and so if all they did was ground me, I would just focus on getting through it and making sure I didn't get caught again.

But when you use the punishment to indirectly alienate the child from his/her peers, that is much more effective. Then they have to face not only your anger (which they don't really care about), but also their peers' anger (which they do care about).
Travel to Near-Space in a 400-Foot Diameter Balloon
30 minutes or less,trailer
30 minutes or less,trailer
bumble their way of pulling off the theft and recover the money and minutes or less skilfully Travis.30 Dwayne bounces between its multiple plots within 83 minutes of execution.
It's good news to see people wanting to do the same thing, as it's a kind of validation.

I can understand your being upset by the wholesale copying.

Sometimes the competitor can't actually deliver on what they promise: if you contact them, you could offer them affiliate marketing fees for sending traffic to your site (which presumably can deliver on what it promises).

You can probably report the ODesk job offer to ODesk. Their policies / Terms of Service probably include something like "Don't post jobs which constitute intellectual property infringement."

Lastly, you could just be the best in your category, and beat your competitors regardless of their shady tactics.
That would make more sense - I know from renting commercial space (with cell towers on the roof) that the power and service can be independent of the building (i.e. power comes from the street). Maybe that's not true in BART. I'd agree that their "macro-switch" is probably legal (contractual), rather than a physical switch. I'm interested in hearing a file opinion on this, considering that BART is self powered rather than connected to grid(s) the cities it serves?
In this hiring environment I'm not above the occasional shameless plug. Your point about vagueness is well taken, but I'd have to write 3 pages to really give you a detailed understanding and I'd rather just show it all to you over a beer.

My company is hiring:

We do e-commerce where people can set up their own fashion boutique -- we have a massive catalog full of top-tier designer products. We have made incredible partnerships with brands, the fashion industry, etc. People who set up stores facilitate social shopping via their store and make a small commission per sale. If you don't get why this is cool b/c you wear sweatpants or the same pair of jeans, that's OK, I have data to show you.

Our site, www.styleowner.com is solid on the backend but needs a lot of frontend love. If you like backbone.js, web standards, etc., come join us and help make it one of the best sites on the web. Backend developers wanted too however. We use Ruby, Sinatra, DataMapper, Node, Redis and more. Interest in IOS is also a plus.

We're hiring for 2-3 positions. We are looking to make some key hires right now and the goal is a superb team.

If you're in San Fran let me meet with you over coffee or beers and show you our codebase, tell you in incredible detail what we're working on, etc. I'd also like to see some of your code. The goal is to give you an idea if you want to work on our app and what that would entail over at least the next few months.

We're funded by Accel, have great investors, etc. The only challenge has been in tech hiring b/c if you're good you probably already have a job you enjoy. So give it a shot and meet us and see what you think.

Putting together an awesome engineering team is our #1 priority. We're in the stage where we're making key hires and ramping up.

email matt@styleowner.com
He saw a flaw and abused it and publicized it for others to abuse for a while BEFORE he announced it to the world. Had he announced he had found a flaw (or better, contacted Jonathan that there was a flaw) his altruism would be real.

And, they (we/I) are not deluding themselves into thinking they are doing something good for society. They/We are showing goodwill to others.
Well Gruber did give his reply to this story:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/08/12/itunes-account-h...
I'm speechless. This is insane and I fear it will only get worse.
Are they really concerned about public safety?

What if, while the cell sites were powered down, a crazed lunatic with a knife started stabbing people on a BART platform or train? How could anyone call for help?

This is lunacy.
I think some people on here took too much offense to his 'holier than thou' attitude. the kid showed off a neat little hack (we're all nerds here) showed it to the world, put the money towards a good cause, and hopefully educated some people about security issues. i think is hilarious, I give sam some props, and I can live another day without free coffee...
Looking Around Corners using Femto-Photography
Was it the underground cell repeaters? Or the cell towers on BART property --for which they lease out the land to telecom providers?

If it's the underground repeaters, that's their business. If it was the towers on Bart property but property of telecoms, then that's problematic -as it interrupts service to non-Bart users.
I think that when cell-jammers first became available, the FCC said that they were illegal regardless of whether private citizens used them or municipalities. The FCC is the regulatory body that has the last word on radio technology, and since it is a federal agency the whole area is under federal authority; it isn't an area states and cities can enter into.
Ask HN: If you were seventeen and had passion and time what would you do?
Hello! I would take a gander and say I'm one of the youngest startup employees on here. I work for a pretty nice startup that deals in social political advocacy. I just graduated high school and have been dealing in the web since I was 12. I taught myself CSS/HTML and have learned through many designers how to tell the difference between good and bad design. I'm a fan of usability and helping people do things easier. I am always looking for ways to make things better from the minute I step into a room.

So my question: Say you were 17, had little monthly expenses (<$250), and had a decent amount of free time on your hands taking a year off from college. What would you do to make the best of it? Projects, jobs, knowledge, or what? Or if you could have gone back to my age, what would you have done or done better?

As of now I would say I have a basic understanding of the startup world and business process. I am proficient in HTML/CSS and have little knowledge of an actual programming language but am familiar with how it works. And on top of it all, I have a huge passion for the web and learning new things.

Thanks in advance!
All the heavy lifting in apps like that is done in SIMD.
The notion that BART areas are not public and subject to the First Amendment ("right to peaceably assemble...") is absurd on its face and in detail.

Of course it's public space. That's where the public is!

And, BART is financed by public money and operated by an agency that reports directly to regional government.

What qualifies as an expressive activity? Saying "I love my friends!" is an expressive activity, and so is saying "BART police shouldn't shoot people who don't deserve to be shot!"

You should definitely be able to "assemble" peaceably and say whatever you want to say.

BART should be within its rights to remove people who actively disrupt the service by blocking platforms or cars or ticket booths, but going beyond that (i.e. removing someone from a train because they were critical of BART or its policies) is too far. If that's what this release is indeed implying...
Entrepreneurs Should Be Unreasonable
Could you give a realistic scenario for the present case? Safari exploit that installs a keylogger on the victim's iOS device? It seems much more likely someone was hit by an exploit on their desktop machine with iTunes installed.
Do the workers speak and write English?
Principles of Accounting: International Accounting Standards (IAS)
I was hoping this was a joke like the top non-pg comment.
It's not, so why do you think it's okay to post a job listing in this thread?

Edit: the OP added the statement about "not being above a shameless plug" after I left this comment. It's still spam if the job market is tough.
Let me also add that you probably know my co-founders Prayag, Philipp, and Dave from their days at Cal. MobileWorks spun out of Berkeley's Department of CS and School of Information, and was built in response to the pain we all felt as they struggled to get good results out of crowds.
...and I'd argue that it's the opposite in the United States - namely business has more political sway than our elected officials when it comes to making policy and changing laws.

I think you missed the main point of the article. This isn't about business vs. government having more power, it's about few vs. many.
Really just seems like they're adding fuel to the fire. Its kind of a boneheaded move, as people will just organize the old fashioned way the next time around.

Just silly.
Unless the AP CS test has changed significantly since I took it, it was a worthless test. No college I applied to accepted it for credit or placement, which is the whole point of AP tests.
There are probably more sales of non-Honeycomb tablets than Honeycomb ones so far. Non-Honeycomb tablets are still being launched right now, too. So yes saying all Android tablets are the ones with Honeycomb is definitely disingenuous.
This has turned my Google logo black while searching:

http://mustachy.heroku.com/?src=http://www.google.com/images...
Is there a legal ebook version?
To compound matters, a person not convicted of a crime by a court of law is a suspect who may or may not know the laptop they are using is stolen goods. I think its wrong to treat suspects as though they are convicted criminals. Presumed innocent before guilty and all that.
Gartner: Google & Apple Obvious Winners in Smartphone Market
This has nothing to do with cell-jammers. BART normally offers cell phone service underground as signal usually can't travel there. They just flipped the switch.
I'd like to add to this. In addition to checks and and balances being eroded, the ever increasing technological advancement and efficiency of our economy means that welfare for the unemployed is even more important. Instead of chasing unrealistic employment goals with central planning, we should just install adequate social welfare.

We need to start accepting the fact that near 10% unemployment could easily be equilibrium in a modern economy like the US.
This is pretty much dead on.
Ahhhh, glad I had the CDROM version. The biggest floppy software I installed more than once was the 23 disk Microsoft Access which came out around that time. I wonder how many floppies it would take for the current version?

Of course, I'd just upgraded to my first CD player, the old Mitsumi one where the entire drive was the caddy, and sort of prolapsed heavily out of the machine. Yes, a glorious 1x speed.
Oh god, please don't do this. Said "jQuery sliders" and "jQuery calendars" are awful to use on touch-based devices. The click targets usually aren't big enough.

And I wouldn't be surprised if the slider doesn't work at all on touch-based devices, because their browsers usually don't generate onmousedown or onmousemove events. (There are specific touch events for this, but most programmers tend to ignore them.)
For your "I find it hard to believe that you wrote", you might read my:

"I'm sure that there is a lot of good material in that book, especially on core computer science topics."

If you look carefully, then you will find that as my first sentence.

I'm "aware" is about me, which is not appropriate, instead of about the book, which is appropriate, but, as explained early in the book, nearly no course covers the whole book.

But I was kind to the book: It made an even worse mess out of probability, and that material was farther from the back cover. Also see another post on this thread saying that generally in the book the proofs are poorly written.

"For those skimming the book, or perhaps more commonly, keeping it as a reference, it's a great compendium of algorithms references, much like a slightly more rigorous, paper version of Wikipedia." I can believe that, but it doesn't conflict with what I wrote. Indeed, I found and downloaded a PDF of the book for just the purpose you mentioned and that I mentioned in my first sentence: The book likely has some core computer science stuff, that is, not just poorly done, hijacked applied math that apparently I know much better than the authors, that I may be able to use as I finish the software for my server farm.

Gads, it looks like they want to use the approximation approach of starting with a minimum spanning tree to solve the traveling salesman problem in the plane. The idea also works in any Euclidean R^n. It's a CUTE idea. I first saw it in a paper of Karp who easily has some nice proofs of some astounding properties. Sadly in the book I saw some references for the idea but not from Karp, and I didn't see mention of some of the really nice properties. There's a chance of a biggie point there: For all the teeth grinding over NP-complete, that problem is NP-complete but surprisingly easy to solve with surprisingly good accuracy; so, the suggestion is that there is a crack in the armor of the NP-complete difficulty. That suggestion is actually more important than the problem itself which in practice people are not struggling with. Yes, the traveling salesman problem remains important, say, for production scheduling, but there the problem is not on a Euclidean R^n.

Some computer science is nice and useful. Hopefully there has been some such since I put down Knuth's TACP! So, maybe in some issues of handling deadlocks, transactions, race conditions, reliability via parallelism, and more, there will be something useful in the book it would take me more than 90 seconds to reinvent!

Still I'm correct: They should clean up their act in their math. We should get better from MIT.
I'm just surprised to learn that the VirtualBoy outsold the 32X and the Jaguar...
Yeah, it's actually a fairly old (but still interesting) observation that very large corporations are a form of top-down central planning. In fact many old-school communists first got inspired by late-19th-century capitalism's trend towards managed technocracy. There was a large movement in business that argued that production could be scientifically optimized using statistics, data collection, scientific management, etc. The communists just took it to its logical conclusion and asked, why not organize all of society in the optimal manner, using principles of technocratic scientific management? Even that argument was more or less originated by capitalists; some of the large industrial trusts argued that there was no problem with monopolies, because they were simply the most efficient, scientifically managed form of industrial production, unlike the messy, inefficient web of competing small businesses they had replaced. So really the only thing they disagreed on was how the profits of the centrally managed monopoly should be distributed.

There's an odd amount of borrowing in the other direction, too. Many large businesses do realize that they internally are basically inefficient, bureaucratic command economies, mirroring some of the problems with the Soviet system. So they introduce some of the same attempted solutions that the Soviets tried: intra-corporation pseudo-markets, competition and awards, recently the trend of "gamifying" workplaces, etc. (At the risk of self-promotion, I recently wrote a bit on the latter similarity: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/soviet_gamification.html)
It's certainly true that a lot of central planning plays a role in US housing. The income tax mortgage deduction and Fannie Mae are the two striking examples. It seems they did play a role in the housing bubble -- however, I don't see that specific example as a result from a concentration of wealth.
http://zimride.com is the only other one I know of.
Congrats Anand et al! It's gonna be fun competing...
A large chunk of international free trade is actually centrally managed transfers within multinational corporations.

The bigger they get, the more central planning we have... And they're gettin' pretty big.
When it does succeed while BART is doing this, affected riders will be w/o rail AND cell service.

And many of them will be angry @ BART for disabling their ability to contact friends / family during delay, look up status and alternate routes on the web, etc.

wide ripple to heavy-handed tactics.
You answered your question with your own final sentence:

"I have a huge passion for the web and learning new things."

That's exactly what you should focus on. What catches your eye? Read up on the why's and what-for's of each faction of web reality, from data storage to real-time GUI processes. See what you think is most exciting, or which elements of the "real world" you want to be a part of, and see how technology helps them do their work better.

I hope you continue the path you are on: whatever direction you take, you will be ahead of the many around you that don't have that Passion. Match your work to your passion, and you can not help but excel-

Best wishes-
Thanks for the mention (I'm Chris from http://www.gusta.com and previously Airbnb). I do think a distinction should be drawn between "an Airbnb for food" (where regular people are cooking for strangers) and the established "pop-up" movement, often hosted by professional chefs. The first is a social site with a payment layer and the second is a ticketing site with a social layer.

Longer term, I think both models can coexist as they are approaching the industry from opposite ends. "Legality" is going to be an issue for any disruption in the food market - dealing with that is the cost of doing business. Personally, I hope Gusta gets to a point where people care enough to want to regulate us :)
Oops, that will teach me to post on HN and then go out for the evening. I upped the quota.
Can you add the Sony PS2 on there too?

150 million units!
Images of smoke-filled rooms secretly steering our lives may speak to the imagination, but it all sounds a bit too much like silly conspiracy theories to me.

There are simpler models if you want to explain the current economic malaise. Just look at the fundamentals: we've run out of cheap energy!
The majority do, but no all. We track accuracy obsessively, and tasks requiring fluent English won't go to workers with the weakest skills.

Our crowd is surprisingly diverse – there are medical students, engineers, doctors and housewives.

For our best-tested category of work to date, optical character recogition, even workers with the weakest English skills do well at recognizing English text.
I can still remember how excited I was when URLs first started appearing in IRL locations (billboards, magazines, etc), around 1996 or 97. At the time, of course, a lot of the people seeing them had no idea what they were....
Congrats guys! This team has been studying crowdsourcing for a long time and this startup is a product of everything they have learned.
On the contrary! You should be using our crowd instead of Turk's.
They are asserting it's the underground repeaters. Apparently, they approached the telcos and the telcos wouldn't play.

We need to find out who is repsonsible for this. We need public personal accountability for organizational decisions, particularly in the case of public and government services.
A critical look at the interface and ergonomics of Android
The tricky part here is, BART shut off the communications, and told everyone else after the fact.
I think this patch could certainly do with revisiting:

1) reference counting used atomic operations on Windows but on Linux used a full pthread mutex; if that was necessarily back when the patch was written it's definitely not necessarily today.

2) Garbage collection could eliminate the reference counting problem entirely.

3) There's been a lot of work on immutable data structures that could address the dictionary locking issue.

I do wonder if this is really a deeper issue - programming isn't nearly so simple once you have multiple threads concurrently modifying your data structures and you have to start locking etc. A lot of the appeal of Python is that it's so simple, and I think threads and locks would greatly affect that.
Sounds interesting. Similar to Crowdflower, but with less management on the user end. Crowdflower provides "gold tests" that help filter out mistakes and makes it my go-to source for Turk tasks with a bit too much complexity. Of course, that means I have to manage questions, gold tests and review results. The value proposition here is thus quite appealing. Suppose we wanted to grab information from historic form D's:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/vprr/03/9999999997-03-0208...

These older forms lack consistency and would probably require lengthy instructions for data extraction. How do you do quality control?