skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?...
Like all other Japanese corporate enterprises, the yakuza are facing dwindling revenues, worthless investments and even layoffs for mobsters unable to bring in assigned monthly payments.

Even more dispiriting and harmful to their carefully nurtured image of lovable bad boys, many Japanese are pointing at yakuza involvement with the banks and loan companies, the avalanche of unpaid mortgages and are blaming the hoods for Japan's entire economic woes.

There was another NYTimes article on how "long time" members of the Yakuza, with an emphasis pre-crash on financial revenue sources, faced severe layoffs (I can't find it, google quality search problems).
Coco: An interesting fork of Coffeescript
Right, but that's not the message. The message is about the craft, not a job. :)

You may not like it at XYZ Widgets, LLC., which is fine, shit happens; but you move onto ABC Things, Inc., which you may find more to your liking.
Flashing back to the stock rom/kernel in Samsung phones takes about 10 minutes with a tool called odin.
Not necessarily contradictory. Not enough context to conclude anything.

As far as I know, if this was Google, for sure everyone would argue "they patent this tracking system just to avoid other less reliable companies to do so".

(I still think that facebook is malign, though)
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I agree that this is a disturbing article. It obviously reads like something written by someone who is currently hypomanic. If overcoming bipolar disease was really so straightforward, there wouldn't be millions of people suffering from it and debilitated from it. If the solution was as straightforward as the author implies, everyone would have tried it, and it would be pretty obvious that it works.

The truth is, it doesn't. I wish the author the best, but he doesn't sound cured to me. He will very likely relapse.
An interesting experience from last evening. Attending my most recent high school reunion, I mainly showed up to see a couple of old friends. Upon arrival, I looked around and realized two things -- I didn't recognize most of the people there; and those that I did I didn't have an interest in chatting with.

Then, a funny thing happened, I realized a number of people were in the same boat, scratching their heads at who these people were. I had a couple of very good conversations with an Accenture Consultant who had travelled to some of the same countries as I have recently; as well as someone I did recognize but never spoke much with who has a startup doing pretty well in the mobile space.

My takeaway -- when thrown into a big group, especially one with certain baggage attached, it is best to just let go and take the time to chat. A simple hello, how are you, what do you do/what have you been up to, only takes a few minutes. In most cases, it might be considered a "waste of time" but there will be moments where something unexpected comes about.

Furthermore, if you are like me -- someone who tends to prefer the intimate/known to vast wilderness -- it might do you some good to branch out.
It's certainly not strange to argue in favor of the most efficient system. If something cannot be made to be more profitable compared to its alternatives, assuming they are all priced fairly in order to to cover external costs equally, then it is not the most efficient. What economist would argue in favor of that?

It's quite a consistent argument when I say that I am in favor of taxing gas and automobiles. In fact, I think they should be taxed at much higher rates, to internalize the costs that are currently being externalized. Ideally, the costs of roads and bridges are covered by those taxes. Thus they're usage-based and not subsidized by those not using them.

I'm not sure why you think the best way to internalize the costs of car usage is to subsidize public transportation. That's just backwards thinking.

As car usage becomes more expensive due to taxation, cities will become more dense. This is the point where we can start talking about building infrastructure for public transportation, that will then make economic sense thanks to population density. It makes no sense to have a bus meander around the suburbs for hours to pick up a few riders, all traveling to different parts of town. It's an impossible idea. You have to have density first. Tax cars and gas so that they pay for their own infrastructure and environmental consequences, and density will be a natural outgrowth, at which point public transportation will be more viable.
PayPal: Mass Adoption Of NFC Is Years Away
I don't think the situation in Japan is really comparable to the situation in India. The huge problem with bribes in India is that the use of bribes is required not when caught up with organized crime groups, but when interacting with the government and local officials to do totally normal things like registering the birth of your child and getting a passport.
On a similar note, I have productive things I can do no matter what mood I am. I always have a list of videos, books, blog posts, programs to write, things to plan, and puzzles to do so that no matter how I am feeling there is always something productive I can do.
the consulting/banking industries create such a high opportunity cost that doing something else seems senseless. it's unfortunate that recent grads are stuck in this high level corporate rat race, with promises of high bonuses but mostly pretty boring careers.

I think one solution would be to limit the access these firms have with students, and to curb their "predatory" hiring. But alas, these firms are large donors to universities, and their executives are as well.

Alas, American politics AND education are birds of the same feather. Both sing the same tune of ethics, ideals and values; and both are preyed on by the same corporations.
Endless are the arguments of the Rabbi's.

In all seriousness though, this passage was a big point of discussion in the middle ages. Many were uncomfortable with the midwives apparently being rewarded for lying. One solution was although they were rewarded they were not rewarded as much as they would have been if they had not lied.

My interpretation: The midwives lied in the service of life; the God of this passage rewarded them. Therefore, the God of this passage is a God of life. He does not support needless destruction and is willing to allow his servants to lie if life increases as a result.

> "The case you are building is not rock solid :)"

Unfortunately, with Biblical Studies it is impossible to build a rock solid case. There is always another persuasive argument just around the corner!
I'm reminded of that scene in a later season of The Sopranos where a couple of Tony's flunkies pay a visit to the new Starbucks opening on the block for a shakedown and a kid stocking merchandise blows them off saying every last bean is accounted for by corporate and it's out of his hands. The thugs wander out in a daze.

Great scene, especially if you wanted to make a case for the benevolent influence of corporations on society. Power to the bean counters!
Most Japanese families have a coat of arms. Yamaguchi is the strongest yakuza group (according to wikipedia, it would be around 55000 members), and has a specific daimon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yamabishi.svg.　hishigata means diamond shape.
I guess a procrastinator would have a hard time thinking about what are the important tasks what not .. Mr Professor might deem that he is a procrastinator, but I think he really is not ..
Then clearly, "Elite" is a great name for a programming language.
i was in consulting too. i played a lot of ping pong and was grossly underpaid. but life was pretty good.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/aom-elite/
Apple's mice have had right-click for a good number of years.
韩式改脸型
it could also be racket, which is still prevalent I believe. At least several foreign bar owners told me they had to give money to them.
Online Python Tutor: Execute the code step by step
http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php

Using simple math Nissan Computers had to spend 2.9 million defending themselves and got recuped 2% of that. $1 million wouldn't even cover the rest of their court costs. Nissan Motors doesn't deserve to benefit from nissan.com in any way. And personally I won't consider a Nissan product ever again.
One spoke Emacs Lisp like it was a native tongue. I could not visually follow the shuffling of Emacs buffers nor the random evaluations of Lisp that modified his instance on the fly in very pointed, task-specific ways. Additionally, he had perfect recall of every Emacs Lisp function that he had ever written (or so it seemed).

Poor wretch.

(Avoided that fate, way back. Mediocrity for the win.)
Aisle50 (YC S11) seeks a back-end thumper in Chicago
Aisle50 is disrupting the way grocery coupons are disseminated, tracked, marketed and redeemed. We integrate with grocery store loyalty cards and we give food manufacturers the ability to target, track and follow up on their deals. In short, the business of marketing food is a big one ($35b+) and we do it better than anybody else.

We launched in August. We are well-funded (Series A in the bank; elite Valley investors). We’re looking for a back-end developer who can help our website evolve along with our core offerings to food manufacturers and consumers.

We pay well and offer a full slate of benefits, including a tapped keg of Anchor Steam.

We want to plug our employees into the YC community. We welcome entrepreneurial types; we'd enjoy nothing more if we were the LAST company you ever worked for.

This job is in Chicago; we're open to relocating the right person. Bottom line, we need somebody who gets shit done and has a hunger to hone things until they're done correctly.

Skills / realms we're looking for (rough list):

Skills
Rails 3 (one to two years minimum RoR)
Heroku
AWS (ec2,s3)
Git / Github
Postgres
MongoDB
Work in an Agile Environment

To apply, please email your resume and the sites you’ve worked on and your roles at each one: chris AT aisle50.com

Word.
I wish I could parse everything I've been asked to parse with 64 lines of Python.

FWIW, I find it ironic that the author is complaining about whitespace-implied structure in his source data, yet uses Python.
A response to Node.js is cancer - The Diagnosis
I think that's an interesting take on the problem.

I don't think there is an equivalent law in the U.S. against paying for "protection", but it might make sense.

My dad ran the racket for Boston's Chinatown/Combat Zone in the 70's-80's and it was definitely more acceptable at the time to pay up (as the police weren't interested in what happened there).
Credit check
Employment Credit report report can be used for employment purposes only, and protects the privacy and security of the applicant by eliminating account numbers of credit cards and other credit accounts.
The big thing that sticks out here, and makes all the science hard to prove or disprove, is that no-one actually sticks to the diet they are assigned in a trial!

Almost everyone agrees that you shouldn't eat the processed crap - but after that, the results become harder to get out of trials.
Survey on Music Data Mining
The "Fail Fast" motto would had left Silicon Valley in total dark.
Hire a lawyer on contingency and get the biggest payout you can, for goodness sake. Then set up a new domain for yourself and count your blessings...winning the lottery is very rare.
How do we even know that's true? First, I've never really believed in the idea of a child prodigy, (partially a consequence to my subscription to the "10,000 hour expert" rule) and second in a hypercompetitive world what once looked like a Touch from God now looks like every other kid in their class.
Python is better than Perl6
It's around 40%.
Zuckerberg: “I Really Do Use Facebook All Day Long”
Nice. I just wrote a followup to Ted's post myself: http://blog.brianbeck.com/post/node-js-cures-cancer

I couldn't believe when folks on Twitter seemed to be buying his "argument."

(Apologies for the self-promotion. I had literally just published mine when I saw this.)
Flexviews: materialized views implementation for MySQL
Why developers should learn the economics of code
This is some great research paper overview. Perfect for someone doing a literature review on that subject. With there were similar listings for other research areas.
What this article doesn't mention is the burgeoning Yale Entrepreneurial community, which has been experience a great boom as of late.
I can't count the number of times a policeman has stopped me during the late evening to check that my bicycle wasn't stolen...

But frankly, in Kyoto at least, the problem wasn't stolen bicycle, the problem was that there are no parkings anywhere in the city and so every year you had to expect to have your bike impounded...
Don’t Let Emotions to Mess Up Your Purchase or Sale of Real Estate
Node.js cures cancer
Baby Shower Invitations for Great Souvenirs
This sort of has a 'straw-man' feel to me. I've never heard the "Elite Programming Language" term before I saw it deconstructed in this essay.

Most discussion around programming languages I see these days is centered around assessment of developer skills. This is understandable -- we're going through a period of massive technical talent shortage. Almost all tips we read through places like HN, including PG's notes, revolved around shorthand ways to screen developers, not pushing a one-true-language approach (unless Yahoo Store programming skills are at stake, apparently..)

Unlike, say, the mid 1970s, when IBM could take its sweet time training you to program, startups don't have a lot of time to make something happen. Thus, they need a language (and application framework) that will work well, and they need developers that they are reasonably sure will be able to succeed. And they cannot wait six months to find out if they were correct about said developers.

One shorthand way to look for these developers is to find ones who have demonstrable skills in new-ish, hard-ish languages. These are the developers that you know for sure

1) Like new things

2) Aren't afraid to experiment

3) Enjoy a challenge

You have no idea if they're any good to work with, understand software architecture, have foul personal habits, or any number of other reasonable concerns for some other company. As a startup company, you don't care about most of that list (at first). This is why it's a smart move to look for people who have just coded up some crazy Arduino-Haskell-auto-shooting-usb-missile program. Those people will not be unduly dismayed when they need to reverse engineer a wireline protocol one day, and 'pick up couchbase' the next.

All this to say, sure, there's no such thing as an elite language. But, right now, there are a few languages that indicate strongly that you might wish to recruit a programmer for a stint at your startup. Clojure, Scala, Haskell are on my list.
Under certain circumstances, Yes.

Would it be moral, do you think, for a parent in Nazi German to lie when asked if their child was half Jewish in order to prevent the child from being taken away to the concentration camps? In my mind, it would -- and it would be a good lesson for the child: that truth is LESS important than saving a human life.

Now suppose that the situation were more starkly clear-cut than it is here. Suppose that the jack-booted thugs knocked on the door and demanded to know whether your child was A or B. If A, then the child would get an excellent education and have an opportunity to demonstrate their potential in life. If B, then the child would receive no education beyond 5th grade and would be prohibited for the remainder of their life from making a living in any profession other than drug dealer. I don't know about you, but in this case too I would think it moral to lie and claim A when the child was actually B. This lie hurts no one, and it saves a human's potential, if not technically their life. I even think it would make a good life lesson for the child.

What about this case? The extremists may think that the choice of urban or suburban school IS a case of "chance in life" vs "drug dealer", but the reality is much less clear cut. Some people who attend poor urban schools DO succeed in spite of the disadvantages. But many more of them do not. The lie may not be justified in this case. But if you agreed with me on one or both of the hypothetical cases above, then you should see that it is a matter of degree, NOT a stark absolute -- a decision that requires careful consideration of the degree of institutional injustice that your lie serves to combat, and a decision that persons of wisdom and ethics may disagree on.
Man, I could write volumes regarding meeting people. I made a study of it because I was very interested. Now I should put it into practice. I was just too disorganized/lazy to take my own advice.

First of all, organizing things that others will enjoy is certainly a great way. But you also have to motivate people to bring their friends, otherwise you'll always be seeing the same people. People bring their friends when there is something they really want them to experience, so that's what you should focus on.

Also, meeting people is a great way to realize that you can outsource responsibilities to others, something that can actually "scale". Often this allows you to network to the right people. The key here is not to be perfect, and not to put too much responsibility on yourself. For example, you want to bring together two groups of people (men and women, say, or investors and entrepreneurs) that would really like to meet each other. You want to cultivate an aura of quality (i.e. the men and women are exceptionally attractive for whatever reason) and selectiveness in order to inspire people to perpetuate this selectiveness and recommend it to their friends. Suddenly the experience is created not just by you, but by this self perpetuating aura of exclusivity.

Being the facilitator and helping people meet each other actually gets you a lot of points, which you can use later when you need a favor yourself.

If you're coming as a guest, though, there is a real economics that starts happening, and a currency. Perhaps it is unfortunate from an idealistic point of view, but that's the way it works in many conferences, nightclubs, etc.

In general, though, if you want to come to events as a guest, you probably want to be invited either by the organizer or by a regular. If it's the organizer, you'd ideally like to bring some "high quality" friends to the event (such as fellow smart engineers) and introduce them to the organizer, so the organizer will want to invite you again.

Additionally you can form a little "group" that tells each other about events and invites each other. At these events, when you talk to someone important, you can tout the other people in the group instead of bragging about yourself, and they would do the same for you. As a result, you are able to meet many more people through your "network" who is out there meeting people in 10 different places and filtering them for you, because you yourself can be in only one place at a time.

How to start motivating people you know to start networking wherever they are and mentioning you when the opportunity comes up? You have to start doing it for them first. Ask for their business cards. You have to hook people up with opportunities and then ask them to go out and do the same for you. Give them your business cards.
> People have to show a government ID to buy alcohol, stating your age on a website is much less of a verification.

And yet it's worth enough that it's a law that you must attempt to trick the children.

> Plus, there are few kids out there who haven't had the idea to lie about being 21

Of course not. Because it's not a secret restriction. So anyone any everyone can dream of bypassing it. And it's easy - you can get a drunk to buy booze for you anywhere.

But instead of tricking people we still say it outright. We know some will be driven to crime but it's worth it that the law-abiding get to choose their path.

Lying makes the law just an annoying obstacle to be bypassed instead of a healthy warning and in doing so starts to erode any trust its victims might have had in a just and reasonable government.
I think regardless of who you borrowed money from, collection by death threat should probably be illegal.
I agree with you. I just recently quit my consulting gig and I would tell my 21 year old self to work for a company that creates "real value."

But the experience I gained during my 2 1/2 years exposed me to multiple industries and I starting thinking much more "strategically" when analyzing businesses. Also, I worked with probably some of the smartest people you could assemble (less a few "odd" ones).

Also, the expense account was nice and fed me well.
I'm confused by this. I was never under the impression people were paying protection money voluntarily -- I thought it was always so that groups like Yakuza wouldn't come back and break your legs or kill your family. This threat probably won't go away, so the local shopowner is still left with that decision to make...which will he be more afraid of? Yakuza or police? Seeing as how there's only 100 officers to enforce this new law, I'd still be more afraid of the Yakuza.
I was a graduate student for seven years and a postdoc for three. I still count many academics among my friends. I sometimes entertain the thought of once again working for a university. So I'm afraid I'm not very shy about potentially insulting my own social class. ;)

And I'm sorry the subject makes me angry. But it makes me angry! For example, the fact that most of my own published work is trapped behind expensive paywalls makes me very unhappy.

And I use the phrase ivory tower not as a mere gratuitous insult, but because it's the metaphor that seems to fit. Every time this subject comes up, a few people pop up to say that they just can't see the problem: Everyone who goes to school or works in science has one-click access to the whole literature, right? And if I happen to not be a college student or a scientist, can't I just physically travel to the nearest well-funded, publicly accessible university library? Doesn't anyone who matters have such a library at hand, and the time to visit it?

There was a time when printed journals in university libraries were the best we could do. But now it is 2011, and many people no longer read physical books or magazines. In less than a decade the idea of having to leave the house to retrieve written material will be as quaint as having to talk to a human telephone operator to place a long-distance call. In this era, if the attitude I described above isn't "ivory-tower", what is? What should I be reserving the ivory-tower metaphor for?
"So why does the term “elite” become attached to certain languages over others?"

Because the causality flows the other way. At any given point in time, there are certain languages that the elite programmers tend to flock to, because they spend more time looking out for new, good things that the average person (part of what got them to "elite" in the first place), and therefore finding someone who knows that language is evidence (though not proof) that they are elite.

That's not a logical fallacy; in Aristotelian logic, (A -> B) !-> (B -> A), but you can use probabilistic logic to combine "A -> B" and "B" to update the probability of A (when combined with a couple of other values). And that's how you get certain languages associated with elite programmers, even though the languages itself does not confer eliteness. It's actually all-but-inevitable that such processes occur in any community of sufficient size that has any sort of skill ramp. There's going to be at least one identifiable group that is the "cutting edge", and they are going to have certain characteristics or tastes or whatever that will tend to separate them from the not-cutting-edge folk.