skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or the even greater value of ctypes:
http://docs.python.org/library/ctypes.html
>If you force a bank to charge prime rates to Bill and Mary Ne'er-do-well, then the banks will simply drop the credit lines.

Why not? They'll just be bailed out by the taxpayer when the Ne'er-do-wells default.
The reference to Gen M shouldn't be there... that table is not the Wikipedia canonical order of generations. This one is better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generations Feel free to switch the tables if you're feeling so motivated.
I was proud to defend the Generation Y article when it was up for deletion on Wikipedia. Any other names for my generation annoy me. The reason is because if the singularity occurs in the near future, it will be incredibly cool if Generation Z isthe last generation of humanity before the first generation of post-humans (Generation Alpha?).
I've watched 2 news reports today already (its 10:00 now) no reports.

I first heard about this on HN (I live in Melbourne). My girlfriend hasn't heard of this (I asked) & I haven't had any conversations about this with anyone. Strange. When earlier this year there was a nude child photography (non pornographic) scandal, the Prime Minister made multiple statements as did senior police & it was on the news for over a week. Anything child porn related tends to get coverage here.

I'm not convinced that it's not a coincidence, but it seems like this is being done on the sneaky. I'm not happy.
> I'm not convinced that it's not a coincidence, but it seems like this is being done on the sneaky. I'm not happy.

Ironically, the government trying to censor someone speaking out against this (the Internode employee on Whirlpool) has got more news that the mass censorship in the first place...
Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism
Much as I find it interesting, I would rather avoid economics altogether, as it often ends up being a clash between people who fervently believe in "Austrian" economics, and people who are more inclined towards mainstream economics of various stripes. This almost inevitably leads to lots of heat and little light.
It was a joke, man.
I don't see how that matters. You can and maybe should just invest in SPDRs.
A lot of times what makes these lines be drawn is generation gaps. They supposedly make lines possible. Bob Dylan's generations' message to the preceding . The Clash to Dylan's. I don't think us Ys have a clear line with the previous generation. Maybe we'll find it at some point, but the pattern hasn't changed so much.

I imagine a lot of that is written as history is written, not based entirely in reality.

Anyway, I get this feeling that these 'generations' that can be characterised are not inevitable & constant. There were just a few that were.
He's missing dividends. The average S&P 500 dividend yield is 1.37% according to something I just found on Motley Fool. If that's accurate, that's pretty substantial.

Too bad they didn't have SPDRs in 1950, he could have been much more accurate with the same amount of effort.
A Recession Will Be Good for Craigslist
Kinds of Natural Fertilizers
Learn different kinds of natural fertilizers and its benefits. Explore this informational website on natural fertilizers.
...and for the Patrouille de France (http://www.patrouilledefrance.com). Nice gallery btw.
Tarnished tech firms to adopt code of conduct
Well, my point was more like not having to think a lot about syntax. What about trying some work in the field of automatic tag generation? That would get rid of the problem, if successfully possible, right? ;)
Find a niche which is new - so no one has years of experience doing it - and appealing enough that there's a strong demand for skilled coders. Right now, iPhone and Android are two examples of such fields, there's probably some more.

Build a small app in it, and put it online for people to download. This will both teach you the skills and show you can produce results. That should be enough - no one will care about your experience/education/etc if you can show past work in an in-demand field.
Or just work for yourself? I guess that kind of requires the whole knowing what's best for you mentality as well, though.
Multitasking Can Make You Lose ... Um ... Focus
There are lots of interesting things to consider here. Thanks for putting this together, it set me thinking.

The analysis doesn't consider investment over time - as far as I can tell, this graph shows the probability distribution of returns on a one-time investment after a period of years. The goal of investing long-term is to dampen the effect of investing at a (in retrospect) very good or very bad time. (In addition, of course, you need to put your money somewhere to get returns at all).

Random oscillations can be dampened further by investing at regular intervals, disregarding what the stock price is at the moment: for instance, investing a smaller amount every month for five years (or even every month, period). It would be interesting to see how the probabilities of such an investment scheme fares against a savings account.

You could even make two probability distributions: one for stock market returns and one for savings account returns, considering taxes where they apply. (In my part of the world, income from savings accounts is taxed annually while returns on stock is only taxed when the gains are realized, which affects returns over time substantially). Inflation affects all investments equally, and could be disregarded.

Now that I think of it, maybe I should do this myself. This is exactly the kind of investment scheme I am betting on for the next 20 years, so it seems a bit irresponsible not to do this kind of thing beforehand.
Man Sued For Leaving Negative Feedback on ebay
A man is being threatened with legal action after leaving negative feedback on an ebay seller's account.
Unlikely that such a complex system does not have any bugs or improvements. Documentation for the project is also _very_ sparse.
brlewis has a point.

If I earn $6.75mm, then pay tax on it, I have $5mm.

Then I have $5mm in the bank and go get a job and earn another $100k, I'm only taxed (via income tax) on that $100k.

Similarly, if I have $5mm in the bank and it earns me $100k, I'm only taxed (via capital gains) on that $100k.

They are parallel taxes... not taxing the same money. The $100k is either earned income or investment income, and the $6.75mm was only ever earned income.

With dividends, it's easy to see that they are double taxed, but is that wrong? Your regular paycheck is double taxed too... first with income tax and then (in most states) with sales tax. There is nothing inherently amoral about double taxation, although it is kind of annoying how it hides your total tax rate.

To me, the annoyance of capital gains taxes is that it creates an entirely parallel tax rate structure, adding complexity (like everything Congress does with the tax code). If capital gains were treated like normal income, and capital losses (up to a certain amount) were treated like normal deductions, then taxes would be a lot easier for most people to file.

Same goes with sales tax. The fact that the government has turned every retail business in the country into a tax collector was an enormous coup. The system is impractical and a pain for businesses, placing the burden on them to raise funds for the states. It's also a massively regressive tax. Due to the impractical implementation, you can't even try to fix the regressive nature. States really need to find a better way to fund themselves.
I'd recommend doing a startup and/or side project involving interesting functions of massive datasets.

Technology-wise, at least consider...

- learning SML or OCaml or Erlang

- learning Python

- going deeper into Python. It's a fantastic way to express oneself. It beautifully offers (generators, coroutines, multithreading, subprocesses, and networking) for piping and distributing your computation, a flexible blend of functional and imperative, and its syntax is the most conducive to elegance, simplicity, and rereadability of anything I've tried.

...then building the core algorithms in C/C++ with SWIG wrappers, the tip of the iceberg with Django, and everything else in pure Python.

A must-read: "Generator Tricks For Systems Programmers"

http://www.dabeaz.com/generators/Generators.pdf
#29 - nice.
...and the happy news is that this stuff is within the possibilities of current technology: make a computer-controlled array of LEDs, each LED producing a narrow frequency band. Given sufficiently powerful and narrow-banded LEDs, this kind of light source could simulate any spectrum.

Natural medicine freaks often complain that artificial lightning doesn't produce the same sensory response (and thus psychological well-being) as sunlight. Our fictional light-source could simulate any light condition, and even change during the day. We would be able to prove them right or wrong.

I've been bitching about this for quite some time, because I really want something like this. I'm glad others are thinking the same thought.
s/enough/too much/ ?

5 minutes of PHP is too much.
Sydney here. I feel the exact same way. The first I heard of this was on reddit. I'm thinking of building a website dedicated to making this issue heard. I have a fairly influential scope that could generate TV/print media regarding the issue, what do you guys think?

This whole thing is hugely sneaky. Clearly the proposed plan was initiated as an opt-out, however after heads began nodding it was changed to mandatory. And now the thing doesn't even bloody work, while fucking up the internet.

On top of all this, I don't think this Conroy chap actually understands the internet. He doesn't understand the scope, the open nature, and how it constantly changes in a way that is impossible to regulate. Hell, Google is only what it is because it was the first company that was able to create any sense of order out of the internet.

Most illegal stuff is transferred via bittorrent. This will do nothing.

The worst child pornography abusers will find their fix elsewhere, to the extent of creating new and secret websites to share their shit. Does he honestly think putting in this kind of regime will make these guys step back from their computers and say, "Well, fuck it, I guess I can't look at a 6-year-old flat chest anymore. Time to move on!" All this bloody thing will do is create more clandestine measures of subverting authorities.

This whole thing is like the war in Iraq, and why the US has failed. There is no enemy. There is no "Terrorist Central" that they can nuke, wash their hands of and say, "Well, that was a jolly good shot! They are all gone, problem solved". When one insurgent falls, more stand up to take their place. And in the meantime, thousands of innocents are adversely affected by the whole shit storm created by the situation. This is like DRM. It does nothing to stem the problem, and it fucks shit up for everyone.

The only people who stand to gain anything from this, assuming the media believes the babble and society is not informed of the ineffectiveness of this plan, is Conroy.
no, yes, yes, yes, no, yes
> I'm thinking of building a website dedicated to making this issue heard.

Such a website already exists:
http://www.netalarmed.com/
I would have said 500-1000. There's only so much you can convey in 3 sentences.
Why Are Hedge Funds Not Blowing Up All Over the Place?
That was my point, yes :)

You can remove yourself from the site and deactivate the account, but once you sign up that data will always remain, even if not displayed.
Yep, same here. Been doing that for about 3 years now.

I explain it as Bruce Wayne vs Batman. When people ask me what I do, it comes down to "...but at night, my real work begins!"
Apple Fights for Same Sex Marriages | TechJaws
Your brand is not your logo
You misunderstand the meaning of the term "marginal" in this context: it means not "mediocre" but rather "on the margin".
<apology>

Sometimes it's hard to tell in writing.

Or maybe you struck a nerve.

</apology>
Wow... This reminds me the freshman and the sophomore year of my college. I spent four consecutive semesters to take calculus classes. Calc 1, calc 2, vector calc and diff eq.

I don't think I found usefulness of calculus as much as expected. I would rather say linear algebra is more useful for a computer science student like myself. Even though, I still have a feeling that I'm gonna end up facing a situation that I need calculus skills.

By the way, I'm a junior lol
What I do to fight the boredom is build my own framework.

Excellent idea. I have done this myself several times.

My dilemma: At what point do you realize that your code is so cool that you don't want to develop it on someone else's machine (and dime)? I often find myself saying, "This is WAY more than they're paying for and will be worthless to me since they will own it."
http://www.crossingwallstreet.com/archives/2006/03/sp_500_to... has a chart of the total return.

Or you can make your own at http://www.economagic.com/em-cgi/charter.exe/fedstl/trsp500

By the way more modern indices like the German DAX are already performance ones.
There was a link to an article posted yesterday or the day before on HN that attempted to interpret the original article. Here's the link:

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/10/24/RESTAPIDesignIn...

I have to admit it's still a bit confusing to me. However, look at this snippet extracted from a comment by the author of the article you provided:

"A truly RESTful API looks like hypertext. Every addressable unit of information carries an address, either explicitly (e.g., link and id attributes) or implicitly (e.g., derived from the media type definition and representation structure). Query results are represented by a list of links with summary information, not by arrays of object representations (query is not a substitute for identification of resources)."

And this snippet from the second:

"The latest drafts of the OpenSocial specification have a great example of how a service can use existing technologies such as URI templates to make even complicated URL structures to be flexible and discoverable without having to force every client and service to hardcode a specific URL structure."

This, to me, states that a restful api should implement api discoverability and give people a method to generate URI for any api call without hard-coding URIs into your code. A snippet from the article I linked-to that defines a URI template:

<os:URI-Template>http://api.example.org/groups/{guid}</os:URI-Template>

It's easy to imagine an api client transforming that template into a URI to retrieve group information without knowing about or caring about the specifics of the URI format -- it's a black box with the exception of '{guid}.' When provided with that information, a client can look at that template, substitute {guid} with an actual guid value, execute the URI, and get the desired results. This enables, amongst other things, the API to evolve without breaking the clients. The api clients must know how to interpret the set of template variable names used by the api ( guid, appid, selector, etc. in the example provided in the article), but that's it.

I'm sure there's more to it than that, but that's the part that resonated with me.
Still, it's good to have a decent "first name" rather than an ugly one so that people can easily remember and call you.
The people using Python are they using scipy+matplotlib or MatLab for the numerical stuff?
I doubt that any great business or invention started with a discussion or even a consideration of what the current or projected income or capital gains tax was or would be.

In the beginning, this is the whole point. It's not about the money. It's about doing the thing that you just have to do.

0% of nothing is a lot less than x% of something. I still prefer the latter, whatever that may be.
Ubuntu 8.10 Release Candidate Screenshot Tour
Queue space travel.
Hypnosis Lets Regular People See Numbers as Colors
I generally like this blog and his style, but I think he's cranking out too much content - last series have felt a little too diluted.
My Facebook Interview
Is Twitter the next Netscape?
Unsolved Brain Mysteries
What is Cloud Networking?
Yes but... With the exception of games, there's really not much you can do on a 2008 PC that you can't on the 2000 PC that I am typing this on now. Email, web browsing, word processing/spreadsheets, IM, music/movies, etc, the bread-and-butter stuff that most people do most of the time hasn't changed over that period.

Things are the-same-but-better now. HDs are bigger, broadband is, err, broader, screens have more pixels. There have been no major shifts of the magnitude of "the web being invented". You could have linearly projected 2008 from 2000, I reckon, even in the tech sector which is the fastest moving of all. It would have been much harder to forecast 1998 from 1990.
Yeah.. I think this is making it much to complex.

REST (for me) should simply be XML that you POST/GET/DELETE/PUT to/from a specific location - that specific location (i.e. the URI) is a specific resource.

Hence it should be http://example.com/cd/radiohead/okcomputer to read (GET) or write (PUT) that particular album entry... So basically you constrain the "nouns" to GET/PUT/POST/DELETE and make each URI a "verb" (CD, order, customer, Amazon product, whatever).

If you start breaking away from that, you quickly get back to the Web Services world, which is much more orientated around a transactional view than REST. (Web Services are better for these kinds of interactions imho).

So a funds transfer, or some kind of transactional processing probably isn't the best use of REST. The problem arises when people try to shoe-horn these kinds of things in regardless. It's quite difficult to do neatly with the nouns available.

Not that you can't break any of these rules and do it anyway... People do all the time. Hence (I think) why this author is so annoyed.

Either way, in my view, if you're going to use REST you might as well get the power of it's simplicity and avoid this type of shoehorning entirely. I'm a big advocate of using both REST and Web Services - use the appropriate technology for the given case.
Need true random numbers?  A lot of them?
Prometheus: 2000 year old programming code
That's debatable. Buzzwords or vapor words are usually not useful. Most of the time other legacy words exist to express yourself. Buzzwords (not to be confused with technical terms) are created to sell books or consulting services. It appears to be working.

"clowd", purple cow, meatball sundae, ideavirus, his wrong usage of the word competent (the article I think you submitted), the dip, lens, etc

Just because "we think with language" doesn't mean we should make up superfluous words on the fly. I'll admit, it's necessary sometimes, but certainly not at the rate people do it at. The point of language is to communicate. And like I said, it's not like I hate the guy, some of his stuff is great. The rest... He seems to resonate a lot more with you than me, and if his work has helped you do something better all the power to him (and you).
How you deal with it is called character
Networking porn?
Anyone know how they fill the vacancy? Is it advertised just like any other professorship, or do they invite people?

Not, I should add, that I'm planning on applying.
I have a feeling that the collective hackers of the world will easily outsmart the government contractors who implement this.
This was absolutely hilarious. It's outtakes from 80's Siskel & Ebert where they rip each other endlessly.
Right, I just meant it would have been nice to see that incorporated into the variance.
That's true, but I think we can both agree that the author can do a lot better than spending 60% of his time to "copy-and-paste chunk of code, then tweak for new field names, then make sure to update the correct database fields, add validation, ad nauseum."
As a Australian, how can I protest this?
An important change that you left out is the plunge in the cost of web startups, which has been enabled by the plunge in cost of computer hardware and network services and the availability of free web application frameworks and infrastructure software. The activities of most of the people that use this service could not have existed in 2000.
The internet is perfect for big-brother surveillance. It's inevitable; but let's delay it while we can.

Grassroots awareness is probably the best beginning - just let people know about it.

Anyone know of any official releases about it? I've read a few stories about it, but not seen links to official confirmation. There must be Acts passed in parliament or something. I'm sure it would require new laws.

EDIT

Sept 21, 2007: Communications Legislation Amendment (Crime or Terrorism Related Internet Content) Bill 2007 http://news.cnet.com/Australia-pushes-further-Web-censorship...

Dec 31, 2007: telecommunications minister Stephen Conroy said more needed to be done to protect children.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7165987.stm

Strange, all news stories seem to be from outside Australia... that reminds me of some other countries, where they need to listen to the BBC to find out what is happening at home... Not a good sign...!

The stockmarket crash is a convenient cover for pushing ahead unpopular schemes...
Most of the the side-projects I started were definitely interesting to me in some way. They were a way for me to explore how something could be made easier, how it should be done, and how it could help me get more done.

For my company/startup (http://greaterscope.com) I'm also building online storefront software, which has plenty of interesting problems. It can involve massive datasets (for me), clever algorithms, etc. It has been the perfect opportunity for me to harden and field-test my tools. This is written in PHP, because it's the language I know best, and I feel like the problem isn't "solved" for PHP yet.

But those are beside the point because I've started to think more about "what I really want to do" and how to "not get stuck doing something I don't want to do". So I defintely feel the need to find something I like doing even more than storefront software in PHP.

Thanks for the technology recommendations. Python is high on my list at the moment. I'm on the lookout.
Precious essay or not, his larger point stands: we are more on our own than our parents or grandparents. The Republican party and the ultra-conservative movement of the past 25 years has created a new wild west; it's every man for himself.

BTW this is not just for Matt's "Nintendo" generation (Y, I presume). It goes for aging generation X, as well.
Arc: Where are we going?
Prototyping with JavaScript
I might be a bit ashamed ... it's a big shock to find yourself on the path to nowhere when you feel you have so much more potential, hence the article.

I'm definitely on the lookout for something I might like more.
Rule #34, my friend, rule #34.

Speaking of which, what's this octopus doing to my car?
You're right. It's just not for me. I'm a big self-motivator, and am learning more of what makes me happy and unhappy.
I just posted this to ask people here if it makes sense to talk about programming anything other than computers and if not what kind of science investigates this subjects. Thanks.
That's not the actual cover-- it's just a photoshop job by the author, of what he would like the cover to be.
You can learn a lot about a person'a character by their ability to take and dish out a good ribbing.
The superorganism isn't just wired-up computers; computers are merely tools, input machines of humans.

The superorganism as it is headed today is the collection of _people_ coordinated in a far faster and more informed manner than every before. It's nothing new; the State (a pretty old idea) represents a superorganism already. Glance at the cover of Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan".