skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My dad lives far enough out that even the cable companies fear to go there - there just plain isn't enough money to run all those miles of wire. (If it weren't for rural electrification and good ol' socialism, I would have grown up by candlelight.)

He's got Verizon GPRS broad(ish)band now. Pushing for broadband penetration is missing the point; it might have made sense fifteen years ago, but now, wireless has leapfrogged it - just as it did for voice throughout the Third World, and for the same reasons.

If you're not from a rural area, I think it's difficult to comprehend just how many miles there are out there, and how few paying customers to foot the bill.

A more realistic goal for rural communications would be to have Congress re-subsidize daily postal delivery, to be honest.
Purple text for unvisited links (which are normally for visited links), and brighter red text for visited links (which should be less noticeable than unvisited links)?

No clear distinction between recent news, and more static, long-term content?

15 links which are completely undifferentiated, uncategorized, and have no visual cues as to how they are related, or their relative importance?

No links to the rest of the site from any content pages, so you're forced to use your back button to go to the home page, in order to go anywhere else?

Miniscule 10-px link descriptions? Badly designed small caps in the title? I could go on.

I share an appreciation for minimalist sites, but this site is horrendously designed. It is not designed well for its purpose at all -- in fact, an initial glance at it gives no indication whatsoever as to its purpose.

What you call "decoration" can go overboard, or simply be bad, but much of what non-designers naively assume is mere "decoration" is actually quite functional.
It seems pretty natural to me; lower-color-temp lighting has been the standard for nighttime use for a least tens of thousands of years, possibly hundreds of thousands, depending on when exactly fire came into widespread use.
Good! As young as you are you are still a huge inspiration for the rest of us would be entrepreneurs. Get out there and make cool shit!
I have to use XCode for iOS development, but hate may not be strong enough a word for what I feel toward it.

Autocomplete works correctly MAYBE 50% of the time. It works 0% of the time on brand new files. Takes maybe an hour or two to get up to that vaunted 50% success rate.

I'd imagine it may have something to do with XCode's horrendous parsing of preprocessor macros.

Also It either crashes or balloons up above 4GB of ram usage at least once or twice a day.

Can't wait for Jetbrains to get their stuff to stable.
I was using the Amazon patent as an example of the status quo, not as an opinion for how things are supposed to be.
Thanks! We are under extremely heavy load and are bringing up more hardware as fast as we can. If they don't show up in a little while let me know!
I believe writing an essay is the same as writing a program: you are trying to express an idea, and organize your thoughts in a way others can comprehend.
Not unless you are explicitly told that it is composed entirely of 7-bit ASCII characters.

The UTF standard used to allow non-conformant representations of ASCII characters. As http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0008.html notes, this lead to security problems. Now the standard says that you can't allow non-conformant representations of ASCII characters. And if you look at http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/ch03.pdf and scroll to page 94 you'll find that you can't be said to be conformant unless you explicitly reject non-conforming input.

Therefore UTF-8 decoders cannot be considered conformant unless they actually examine each and every byte to verify that there is nothing dodgy.
Complete guess: they paid her to shut up (with some sort of NDA)
7 Social Sites for Music Lovers
Hiking and Running Data Visualization Posters
Sandbox Industries is looking for a Lead Developer / CTO for two of our startups: Lab42 (http://www.lab42.com) and doggyloot (http://www.doggyloot.com). Both have existing, well-working platforms built in-house on Ruby/Rails, have recently received venture funding, are generating revenue, and are growing rapidly.

Details are here:

http://sbx.tw/doggylootdeveloper

http://sbx.tw/lab42developer

Compensation will include salary + equity. Both positions would be on-site (or mostly on-site) in Chicago.

Sandbox is a pretty sweet place to work, if I do say so myself.

Millie - millie@sandboxindustries.com
Unless they're literally building out a new data-center from scratch, or hire-aquring the competition (which you'd think would be anticompetitive) I can't see how they can spend that kind of money on anything worthwhile.

Dropbox is great, but there are a lot of very compelling competitors. That's not to say it's not going to be the best service, but it's by no way the only player in the game, and getting a round of this magnitude (if it's true) at this stage in the company's progression seems, for want of a better word, mental.
Any recommendations? Book list is at http://pragprog.com/titles

I have a copy of http://pragprog.com/book/rdbcd/behind-closed-doors -- it was very helpful while I was managing people for the first time a while ago.
I have tons of tabs open mostly because I hate the back button. Every time I open any new page it goes in a new tab. Any time a page will be relevant for more than the next five minutes, it gets moved to the front or back of my list (depending if it's for business or pleasure). If it might be interesting, it floats in the middle, otherwise it gets closed.

Admittedly this is probably a strange way of working with the web, but I like to be able to easily find things that I've been working on recently. Only at the end of the day do I fully scan through my tabs and bookmark anything I'll need to reference later.
Good thoughts -- I did and do realize it, in fact! Some price stocks in currency, some value currency in stocks. Some price oil in currency, some "currency" in "oil". Some price gold in currency, others value currency in how much gold it buys (oil producers, for example!)

That said, by "physical wealth" indeed I didn't really mean paper currency or receipts for commerce and I mentioned this mistakenly to "soften my message" for those purely and fully entangled in the paper world of yesteryear.
I think that it's a de-facto monopoly in that if you set up your own bond rating agency, nobody would be compelled by law to only invest in things that your rating agency considered "investment grade".
>When the folks making the laws are criminals, breaking the law is still criminal. By definition.

some other definition:

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. "
New version of iOS to have voice control
Futures make for an interesting 'batch' RPC API - queue up a bunch of RPC calls by returning Futures instead of values, and when one is forced send them all across the wire.

This is a great way to add batch functionality to an API that didn't have it originally. Need to frob a set of zibs? store the futures of the zib frobbings in a new set, and then force them. (wow, bad faux verbs and nouns)
Is mydict.items() also lazy?
How to write the perfect subject line
Yup, exactly so. To quote a slightly different bit of it:

... banal comments, old material being recycled,
and general lack of interesting stuff.

In short, the vast majority of repeated material is drivel. Fluff. Content-free. I'm trying to restore the balance a little with more technical, challenging and deep material.

This is probably controversial, but it's my last ditch effort to actually get some technical material back into Hacker News.

I honestly don't expect it will succeed, but then I can finally depart with a completely clear conscience that I tried my best and found that the so-called "Hacker News" no longer contains much I care about.

I hope I'm wrong, but I had to try the experiment.

PS: And FWIW - I've upvoted you.
You have to define what printing money means? The term doesn't apply to modern fiat money. And naturally I should define what modern fiat money is. But in a broad sense the government should continue issuing currency( by increasing spending -preferably on infrastructure- or reducing taxes) which increases aggregate demand until spare capacity ( which includes unemployment) is exhausted in the economy.
Broadband over powerline? Do you each have your own step down transformers from a common high tension line in your community?
The Times takes a page out of Google's book.
OpenGL 4.2 Specification Released
Out of quarters? Bike it up.
Put a warning up at least!!!

I was just about to eat lunch! Not no more...,
Given that all of computer science is based off of math at some level, i'd say math is more important than you think.

Anyone can glue some APIs together[1] and make some kind of application, but it takes some math skill to design and implement strong algorithms. Computer science is not about syntax and semantics, it's about about algorithms and data structures-- and if you're not good at algorithms and data structures, it doesn't matter how good you are at memorizing Python syntax.

This is anecdotal, but every good programmer i know of has a strong math background, or at least knows how vitally[2] important math is to being a good programmer. Incidentally, most bad programmers i've met put much more weight on memorizing APIs and language semantics (e.g. Why do i need to know the big-O running time of bubblesort? python has sort() built in!) than learning math.

[1] And they do. You can find them on odesk and elance charging $10/hr and blowing past deadlines, producing unworkable code.

[2] Seriously. I cannot stress this enough.
There are a ton of good books in their store, so a lot of it will depend on what you're interested in and what your level is. I have quite a few books from them and have been happy with every one.
Agamemnon 0.3.0.0: A graph database built on top of cassandra
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_cur...
They should include a photo that shows owners what a meth pipe actually looks like.
Yes, but based on the 1.62m avg volume, that is ~20% changing per day on average. So on average 100% of the free float changes hands every 5 sessions. And now it did that in 3 sessions.. But that doesn't indicate to me everyone suddenly dumped it today. It's been churning over 20% every day. If you look at P or Z there is nothing much going on there. LNKD is just crazy active to begin with, only amplified by recent events.
I don't think it's as simple as that. Wealth is a product of society and population. Billionaires need people to have decent incomes to buy their products or there isn't any money to hoard. Best to keep those folks pacified so you are reasonably safe walking around in life as a billionaire or you become a prisoner of your wealth. It seems to me the masses don't need billionaires in order to exist but billionaires need the masses in order to exist. Henry Ford stated he wanted his factory workers to all be able to afford a car so there was a consumer market available. If billionaires are too draconian, it can come back to bite them. Even presidents get assassinated. Piss off enough people badly enough and it stops being safe to be you, no matter who you are.

PS -- There are riots in London currently going on:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2861840

http://news.yahoo.com/london-rioters-battle-police-shooting-...

PPS -- I've seen a couple of comments on HN indicating the rioters are staying ahead of the police using Blackberries. I find this funny given your remarks about how technology has changed things.
My point is that you're talking about investments as if they are instantly gone and that this is some special case. "Was money lost? Sure -- but not last week or today -- rather, on the day the individual investor bought into these markets." This is incorrect, or at least it's not very meaningful. There's nothing special about stocks that make wealth disappear instantly. If your wealth is gone the second you invest in stocks, then it's also gone the instant you purchase oil futures, buy dollars/euros/your-favorite-currency, purchase gold, put it in the bank, or pretty much anything else. Any asset you obtain today really has only the value that someone else will assign to it when you wish to unload the asset at some point in the future.
Of course. Pity they did it a month too late.
I wish they'd do something better on the ebook and paperback combo. I really think Manning gets this right. If you give me the ebook as a reward for buying directly from you, I'll buy directly from you. Otherwise I'm apt to just get it from Amazon.
While Firefox does appear to render the page faster, it also seems to wait longer to start, so its page-loading experience is something like "......show."

Chrome starts rendering sooner but takes longer to do it (probably as it waits for pieces of the page to load) so its experience for me is more like "...shoooow."

I don't think it really matters either way, although Chrome 13's pre-rendering stuff often tips the balance that way.
grep could be fine. I wouldn't trust backtracking regex engines, though.
However, it has not only become questionable whether Washington will be able to make the necessary changes in the foreseeable future, the corruption that underlies this inability is very hard to get rid of and may cripple the government even further.

The issue in the US is that there is a genuine ideological split between the two parties about what the US government should look like. The Democrats want a big government, which takes in a lot of taxes and provides a lot of services to everybody. The Republicans want a small government, which takes in minimalist taxes and provides minimalist services. (I'm not interested in debating the relative merits of these two ideologies today.) And this isn't just the parties' ideologues, either -- the same ideological split genuinely exists in the US public (contrast to many other countries where the "big government" types seem to have largely won the argument).

Either party could easily balance the budget on its own, given unlimited power. However, because of the way the US political system just happens to work, it's very hard to do anything without getting at least some of the other guys on board.

The Republicans have for many years had a "starve the beast" strategy, figuring that if you keep on cutting taxes then eventually the Democrats will have to agree to cut spending as well. In recent years the Democrats have invented the opposite "gorge the beast" strategy, in which you figure that if you keep on increasing spending then eventually you'll be able to pressure the Republicans into agreeing to tax increases. And the poor beast being starved at one and and gorged at the other starts to... wait, no, this analogy is breaking down.

What's the solution? There really isn't one. The ideological split in the American public is real and it isn't going away any time soon, and folks need to stop proposing "solutions" which basically just come down to "all we need is for the other side to come over and agree with us and it'll all be rosy." That's not gonna happen.

But perhaps the first step is to acknowledge that this ideological split is genuine, and real, and does actually reflect the ideological split within the US population. Perhaps we can compromise, but first we have to acknowledge precisely what it is we're compromising about.

edit: Wow, I can't believe this got modded down. I guess the true believers in the "No really, it's the other guys' fault" die hard.
For anyone trying this at home: per-compartment memory reporting is a new feature of about:memory in Firefox 7. You'll need a build from the Aurora channel to try it out right now: http://firefox.com/channel
Okla gets $16.5M in funding
I'm glad they are deemphasizing Facebook profiles for established users. I don't feel comfortable sharing details of my life with Airbnb hosts.
It depends how you view reddit. If you want jokes, try Fark or Digg. If you want more technical news, try Slashdot, in addition to HN. If you want a ton of memes, try 4chan.

But those aren't all the topics discussed on Reddit. Reddit seems to be unique in that its very large community is fractured; its system of subreddits leads to niche topics being covered better than they would be on other sites. You don't have to set up an entire phpBB forum for your interest in antique nesting dolls, just go and create /r/antique_nesting_dolls . It's simple, fast, and because adding a subreddit to your frontpage is so easy, you can get a lot of eyeballs coming back to your subreddit over and over again. That's the part of reddit I don't see happening elsewhere.
Million Dollar Idea
You can't buy that kind of publicity.
@jashkenas I think your example just happened to not have problems. Underscore.js still has problems (https://github.com/documentcloud/underscore/issues/7) with Prototype.js. I have made a small test (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/513327/underscore_prototype_compat.h...) to show some of the potential issues.
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning is a book I think everyone should check out. Beyond that it is mostly technology dependent for what you want.
Which is also somewhat silly because most of the Elder Scrolls games are commonly known by their subtitles (e.g. Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, etc.)
Rural Web Site CONTENT Guidelines

1. Use simple words of no more that seven letters.

2. Try to frame your points in terms of livestock and planting seasons.

3. A photo of an attractive sheep will help retain the user's interest.

4. Ask visitors to wipe their feet before entering your website.
is this an open source project? not much to be found other than a launch page...some screenshots and minimal code "examples".
At university we defined dynamic programming as reducing a problem to finding paths in directed acyclic grahp. By that definition, there's a simple way to map the problem to dynamic programming. And yes, it's sloppy, if you don't mention the `stages' or equivalently, how you'd (lazily) construct the graph.
In theory, no, but buffet being moody's largest shareholder along with his comments about S&P downgrade being in error sure is tempting fodder for conspiracy theory :)
Yeah, sounds a bit over-sensationalized.

Microsoft is probably silent because they're not sure what technology the final project will use. Some exec could've ignorantly opened their mouth about "html5+js" and left the Win8 engineers groaning.

It'd pretty clear to me that .NET/Silverlight/WPF aren't going away. They are too popular and there's too much activity around those technologies.
Thanks. I enjoyed reading this and found it sufficiently detailed that I could understand it despite being previously unfamiliar with some of it.

I don't quite understand why this solution is preferable to a solution which simply evaluates S(P_j) for each j and returns the minimum in O(n^2) time. I'm also not sure why I would prefer it to a solution that is faster.

One O(n lg n) solution requires that we convert the "Minimum sum of distances at a house for houses on lattice points in 2-space under the square metric" problem to an equivalent "Minimum sum of distances at a house for houses on lattice points in 2-space under the taxicab metric" problem, at which point we can consider the two dimensions independently. With some trickery we can find the sum of distances to other houses for all houses in the 1-dimensional version of the problem in linear time plus the amount of time required to sort the houses.

To do this, we begin at the house with the lowest coordinate and calculate its sum of distances. From the the sum of distances for one house, we can calculate the sum of distances for the next house in constant time: S(P_j) = S(P_j-1) + |P_j - P_j-1|(j) - |P_j - P_j-1|(n-j). This is not the most compact form and is an abuse of the notation considering that it refers only to the 1-dimensional problem, but I think it conveys its meaning well: Once the houses are sorted, the sum of distances for a house other than the first is the sum of distances for the previous house plus the distance between them for each house with a lower coordinate than this house, minus the distance between them for each house with a higher coordinate than this house. The phrasing of that is not quite right for houses that have the same coordinate, but that doesn't particularly matter since the distance between them will be 0.

After that we can calculate S(P_j) as the the sum of distances for P_j along one dimension and along the other. Finally, since we've calculated the sum of distances for each house, we can just print the least of these. We could also solve the problem in linear time if we were willing to use radix sort, but we probably wouldn't want to do that.
Oh get over yourself.

b : the human race : humankind

http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/man
Ah, now I understand, thanks. Anyone can rate bonds, but the ratings issued by the "blessed" agencies have legal significance and mine don't.
Masked rioters attacking HMV store Pictures…
Saturday's savagery in North London, which has led to more than 100 arrests, caused £100million damage...
http://tinyurl.com/4292tv8
> interviewees are already more aware of Glassdoor than interviewers

My first amusing thought when reading this was to assume a correlation; ie. that interviewees who lean heavily on Glassdoor prior to interviewing do not eventually become intervewers.
"Which can be fixed either by increasing revenue or decreasing spending."

That's actually not quite true. A truer statement would be that for a given constant level of spending deficit, it can be closed by either increasing revenue or decreasing spending. But you can't assume a constant level of deficit, because time progresses and politicians adjust based on their income and outflows. (Not necessarily in a good way, but they are looking.)

Try to put yourself more in a physics frame of mind than a political one. It's the difference between statics and dynamics. Solving the budget problem with a static snapshot of a dynamic process isn't going to work. With the track record that our politicians have, just handing them more money isn't going to solve the problem if they're just going to spend even more of it. A static-forces model of the political appropriations process fails to predict reality, the model where politicians dynamically increase their spending even more than revenue does historically fares better.

(... yes, I know it is odd to approach politics from the point of view of building models to predict reality and seeing which ones successfully, no sarcasm at all, I see hardly anyone take this approach. But there are in fact enough hard facts out there to have some success with this approach, if you can learn to take your science-trained sensibilities and look at the political world. Political science need not be an oxymoron, though I suspect an actual study of political science wouldn't look much like what is currently called that.)
http://www.rcdevs.com/products/openotp/compare.php

https://tiqr.org/
As an informatics student a lot of my math skills are within logics and discreet mathematics. The last thing people see at high school is calculus, which makes them assume that that's what I'm good at. Truth be told I couldn't integrate for the life of me. Give me a nice complex logical sentence any day and you'll watch me drawing up venn diagrams like I've done nothing else all my life.
Your point is spot-on, except that it really isn't foggy in London much. It's a US misconception that's a hangover from Victorian smog, Jack-the-Ripper movies, and various songs.

More apt would be if the weather forecaster wouldn't be paid for forecasting 'dreary, drab, grey, occasional pathetic rain, etc'. Which would be most of the UK summer...