skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The tax cuts of the last 30 years have been accompanied by massive deregulation and cuts to social services. Society has taken a huge right-ward tilt, conservatives have gotten everything they wanted.

Sigh. We just got the biggest increase in entitlement programs in more than two generations. The government claims it's cutting spending, but actually it won't be any smaller, they've only decelerate slightly. In the meantime, the regulatory state is thriving. I challenge you to name an industry that one could safely enter without needing to learn myriad details of what the government demands of businesses in that industry. This is not an age of deregulation, and GWB was no friend of small government nor of the free market.

NOT A SINGLE BANKER WAS FIRED OR PROSECUTED, ... The government is in their back pocket, they do as they want.

The banking meltdown was due to the banking industry taking some unconscionable risks, but it was also due to the regulators themselves pushing the banking industry to take risks. Industry is also in the back pocket of the government, as business leaders vie for the advantages that government bequeaths. Yet how many politicians and bureaucrats have been held accountable for the debacle?

We are living in your vision of the world.

You have no idea how wrong you are. You seem to be drawing a mental picture of the political world that follows the narrative told by the main stream media, but that's so gross an oversimplification as to be useless. The political spectrum is not one of Liberals versus Conservatives. So when you assume that, because I'm arguing against your Liberal stance, I must be a Conservative, is just plain wrong.

There are many ways to look at the political world. Taking the simplistic view is not going to help you solve any problems, any more than you'll be able to debug your software if you don't understand how the machine, your compiler, the network protocols, etc., work.

First, you should understand that the vast majority of the people in politics and in the business world are not evil. They are just people like you and I, responding to the problems and incentives in front of them, trying to make a life for themselves and their families. The size and complexity of the system makes it less clear where the line between right and wrong is, and easy to fudge for any particular action. While the structure of the system today makes it all too compelling to make the wrong choice.

Your insistence that so many of your neighbors are evil -- when they know that they're not, and just doing their best -- is going to make anyone you disagree with defensive. That'll prevent you from changing any minds, and instead just widen the political chasm that we suffer from today. I beg you, take a step back from the incrimination, and try to understand what's going on as the collective work of many individuals, each responding to situations put in front of them.
Kubler-Ross (i.e. 5 Stages of Grief model) and OccupyWallStreet
I'm assuming as President of IGN, Roy Bahat already has his hands full managing day-to-day operations. I'm sure he's intelligent enough to take up a task like "learning to code", but can he really put in the time to be a proficient programmer? It takes a full time CS student about a year before they really understand the logic of writing program...and then an additional 5-10 years (at least) to become the excellent programmer that a place like IGN would employ to engineer video games...

My question is, what's his end goal? I doubt he'll be able to balance his job as President AND devote the time it takes to become a great programmer.
I love apple, and I am an apple investor. Their stock will do fine for at least a few years. Though, no one knows if apple will stay "cool" and their products will still sell 4,000,000 units (iphone 4S) in a weekend. Many people thought nothing would happen to Sony when they were hot and innovative. Same thing with Microsoft.

It is slightly different because Apple has more vertical integration and horizontal integration as well, so people buy into the Apple ecosystem. For example, I have a mac and an Android phone, but I like the way the iPhone syncs seamlessly with my mac, so I might get an iPhone when my contract is up.

Ultimately, sales/revenues and profits GROWTH determine the stock price. At their current P/E it is hard to say they are overvalued. A multiple of 16.63 (close on 10/17) is very low for a high growth tech company. In fact, McDonald's, which is considered a value stock, has a higher multiple (almost 18). And as a more relevant example, Amazon's is over 100. Apple clearly is not overvalued at this point (in my opinion at least).

Random thoughts: Apple has roughly 1 billion shares outstanding and Microsoft has 8 billion. If Apple did an 8 for 1 stock split, the price would be at $50, and no one would ask this question.
I saw that when when it was announced on HN. However downloading a map "for a 10-mile radius" is not useful when you don't know what 10-mile radius you might need ahead of time. Compare with Nokia maps where I can download a map of New Hampshire and Vermont ahead of time and know that when I'm unexpectedly out of cell coverage, I'll still be able to route (or re-route) with my phone GPS. This is an area where GMaps is still playing catchup.
No, if they were then you wouldn't have to type extra numbers into your browser.

That seems kind of like a 'nit', I know, but if we learned anything from Steve Jobs it is that there is a difference between providing an answer and providing a solution.

The elements that will be present in a solution include;

1) You won't have to type anything else, a program will have an API which can definitively tell it you are making this request or you are not.

2) The 'key' won't be anything else, it won't be an app on your phone or a plug-in to your browser.

3) It will work with any service you care to use it with and if it has not been implemented there will be no legal/enumberance/techincal barriers to doing so.

4) It will not degrade your privacy options.

Google's two factor authentication fails on a number of these, not the least of which that it requires that you own a 'smart phone' which is something my father in law will never do before he dies.

So no, Google doesn't do this yet.
Seconding hippich -- gambling, for one thing. All gambling sites require you to ship currency on and offline. Normally the site swallows a 5-7% fee for that each way, which is why it takes so long -- to prevent you from doing it too often. With Bitcoin you can deposit, win, withdraw in an hour and you'll get better odds because the casino's got 10% more money to throw at the games.

Sorry to hear betco.in's going down -- StrikeSapphire.com will stick around no matter what the price goes to, because it's just a good, efficient way to take bets, process payments, and pay people out.
Every bitcoin opposer repeats, that the money will artificially start going up and that is why it will crash.

Right now, it is going down, for a long time. So that is not why it will fail.

It will fail because noone actually needs it. It has no real value over other means of electronically exchanging money - paypal, for example, is much faster, easier to use and, dwhile it is not free, thanks to the wild exchange rate of bitcoin, one will probably still have more money from paypal than bitcoin money exchange.

There is no place to spend bitcoin, because most of the people don't CARE that it's centralized and someone can watch it, because it is infinitely easier to use paypal to just PAY STUFF, instead of going through the pains to exchange bitcoins through shady sites, wait DAYS to get it on your wallet, then wait hours until the blockchain is downloaded, then wait another hours since the block is 6 times confirmed.

Maybe it will work in the end, it's nicely designed and all. But I don't see anyone using it right now. There is no real reason to do so.
This is exactly what I was asking for. Issues with B&A aside, I'll gladly pay $1/month for this.
http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/29/why-im-putting-all-my-saving...

"the currency has increased in value one-thousandfold against the US dollar in fourteen months. Yes. Read that again: one-thousandfold, fourteen months. There is currently no indication it would stop or has saturated; quite the opposite."
Ask HN: In a liquidity event, how long are founders expected to stay onboard?
This is a technology company with technical founders. What is the industry norm, if one exists?
I think this would add a lot of noise to upvotes. Imagine an HN script that auto-upvoted all the posts just to show the points.
You can most certainly upgrade the SSD in an Air, as my first-generation 11" Airbook with the 256Gb SSD (that I installed in it myself) can attest.

It's the RAM on the mobo that's non-upgradable.
You can almost always sue. But given that MS is probably holding an actual patent granted by the USPTO (and haven't just made one up and said it's real), it's a guaranteed loser.
What's wrong with different ways of explaining the same lessons? What if you don't know what text-objects are in the first place?
Paypal is a bank over here in Europe.
While this might be true "by volume", I would be very surprised if it were true "by weight". The first thing I do when I'm looking at a new library, daemon, service, company, or really almost anything at this point, is go to Hacker News to see if anyone has mentioned it in the past, and what their take on it was during that discussion.

As an example, when I got interested in GitHub last year (note: I mean as "what are they doing in this space and where are they going", not "what does it do"), I seriously went to searchyc and went through the Hacker News archives chronologically, skimming every single thread that has ever talked about it; it took days, but it was incredibly worth the time.

This has become such a resource for this sort of thing, that I've been trying to "get to know" the people I interact with here, building a tagging framework (browser extensions) that I can use to add little notes to users, allowing me to get a better feel for who they are, rather than some anonymous user: if nothing else, it helps me remember at all times that these are real people whom I am interacting with ;P.

So yeah, I guess I'm rambling now, but what I'm trying to say is: the archives are important. They may not be something you use every day, but when you do find a reason to use them it is one of the most valuable resources I currently know of, and I have to see it labeled as something that there is no point in improving due to "lack of use".
It's also worth noting that there's a long history of IP fights in the mobile especially over 2G/3G technologies yet we still have an assortment of fantastic modern SmartPhones to choose from. What Microsoft is doing is really nothing new and the handset makers were pretty quick to strike deals probably because it's nothing new to them. When Samsung makes a television they are paying a variety of companies license fees on various parts/technologies for example. Why would SmartPhones be any different?
I've started using two-factor authentication with my Google account and it isn't that bad. The mild pain of having to type in my authentiation number occasionally is offset by my increase peace of mind. It does require you to use an authenticator app on your smartphone though, so for some it might not be an option.
i actually make a living buying and selling magic cards, and i can attest that ABU Games is legitimate. I sell cards to them often, and I was unaware they took BitCoin!
He taught a class at UC Berkeley this past spring. The course was excellent, and he brought in some amazing industry speakers. I wondered the same thing about how he balances.
Crowd funding acceptable for startup?
I wished I lived in the authors world. A world where you don't have to maintain the code you wrote- or worse yet, someone else wrote. Where you could declare a program "done" and walk away and never have to revisit it. A world where "mostly works" is good enough- secure in the knowledge that you're not going to be rousted out bed at 2 in the morning on a weekend because some server in outer Mongolia hit that corner case you never thought to test. A world where all programs are small enough to fit into my head, completely, in all details. So I could simply know, if I change this, that will break.

That is not, unfortunately, the world I live in. If it is the world you live in, more power to you. Count your blessing and live happily. But the rest of us need all the help we can get.
I think Samsung is a great company. However, I think they really need to innovate and compete fairly.
I just don't know what Google is thinking- If App Engine is supposed to be a tool to make developers bitter at Google, it is a success.
If you have a front controller, you don't even need to repeat that single include in any file. Why repeat the same include in 100 different files if you can avoid it? Also, what if you realize after a while that you need to change the location of the single include file because you carelessly placed it in a publicly accessible directory (bad for security) ? Now you have to edit 100 files.

Another reason: What would your templates look like if your app had 100 different entry points? It would seem silly to have 100 template files in addition to 100 PHP scripts. So the developer is most likely to mix business logic with templates in the same file(s). Not good.

Of course, if you're a good enough developer to know that you should avoid problems like this, it doesn't really matter how you organize your site. But I think that the front controller pattern helps to push developers (especially novices) toward the right direction.
Office 11: Well, giving money to the Beast of Redmond goes against the grain a little, and in any event publishing tends to run on Office 97/2000/2003 .doc files, not .docx. Publishing is conservative for structural reasons. (I'd rather hand in markdown files or even LaTeX or similar, but unfortunately they've standardized on Office documents, dammit. Because "that's what everyone uses".)

The 27" ... well, I upgraded my wife's side of the office to one earlier this year (pre-Thunderbolt) and there's a limit to the depth of my pockets. Besides which, my desk is already dwarfed by the 23" panel (and said desk is an obscure 1970's Swedish designer item, not something I'm likely to replace in a hurry).

Backups: Time Capsule for on-site, 1Tb pocket hard disk for on the road, and Dropbox as a sync solution and if-all-else-burns-to-the-ground fallback.
My understanding is that the real risk is taken by the buyer. The seller can anonymously receive payment, then drop the drug envelope into a random postbox. On the buying end, regardless of Tor and Bitcoin, they still need to have it shipped to a real physical location.
I've come to the conclusion that large frameworks like this are meant for people that use the framework on a regular basis and can therefore keep it in their head.

I do web dev daily, so rails is great for me, but whenever I have to deal with someone's chef deployment setup my head starts to hurt. But they do devops everyday and chef makes their life easier so they get a lot of value out of it.
He's probably trying to claim that the 10x increase in the price of gold over the past ten years is a 10x decrease in the value of the USD rather than a speculative bubble in gold. (And even if it were, it wouldn't be remotely comparable to the 10x decrease in the value of Bitcoin over the past three months.)

As a sidenote, that's a terrible graph(as are most graphs of this nature). There's a wonderful technology called a logarithmic plot for that sort of thing.
Zestimates: Just How Bad Are Zillow's Home Price Estimates?
I don't understand how it would be safe at all for the recipient. If the "smell prevention" failed couldn't the police just arrest whomever it was shipped to? I can understand that the shipper is pretty safe dropping the package off but if it's flagged as black-market goods it seems like the buyer is totally busted.
The First Glitch Developer Meetup
Charity Show "Step with Fashion", Tokyo
Macsales sells SSD upgrades for the Air (they're not particularly hard to do either) here:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Express
Designing a Data Structure
Comments like this make me wish I could occasionally grant more than a +1 upvote ...

It's so true. Sometimes we need more power to make a given job possible, but as often as not we could accomplish it with far less and all that throwing extra hardware at a software problem achieves is to allow sloppy coding to proliferate.
We present ourselves differently in different contexts,
and that's key to our creativity and self-expression.
"It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'"
Poole told us. "Identity is prismatic."

moot just kinda blew my mind. And it makes total sense. I'd go so far as to say it's almost painfully obvious once it's pointed out to you. I hope someone's got it on video and posts it somewhere.
I don't think I've voted for a parent level comment since the point were hidden, with the possible exception of downvoting a few trolls. Not having points displayed probably does help prevent fighting and pandering, but it also makes the ordering of comments instinctively feel arbitrary. It's quite possible that the pros outweigh the cons.
Suppose I am a company that makes a technology. I then decide it's in my interest to patent it. In creating this patent, it's in my best interest to make it as broad as possible, because

- It allows me to get licensing revenue from more companies who may not have implementations that are exactly like mine.

- It hides some of the details of my implementation, keeping some of the "special sauce" secret, while still protecting it.

It is thus my goal to make my patented as broad and obfuscated as possible, but still valid. The incentive structure is lined up wrong. It should be set up so that the easier it is to turn the patent into an implementation, the more worth it should have. Of course, that's a difficult problem to solve.
But it's so hard to. Really. Most people aren't willing to spend the time (I know I'm not). It takes more memorization (unless you use exploitable tricks) and most people think they're mostly safe, so "what's the point?", they think.
Like it or not, Zuckerberg is a better presenter than Steve Jobs.
Reweighting a graph for faster shortest paths
I like bitcoin.

It bought me an iPad 2 when I cashed out my 3 weeks worth of mining at the height of the bubble.
The Pond
I love the Snickers bar ad placement, as if it's trying to cover up the fact that that screenshot is fake.

But seriously, why do companies have to do this? Aren't they proud of the products they create? Why can't Samsung grab a screenshot of Android's own Maps app? Or is this a slash at Apple because of their lawsuit?
Two-factor authentication is nice. I know many of my different logins are vulnerable, but they're also for sites that aren't very important, even if comprimised.

Gmail is a different story. Anyone with access to that gets access to most other things. So the inconvenience of inputing a text message code once a month pales in comparison to the hurdle it adds to accessing my account.
I've been spending time learning Haskell lately, as part of an investigation into tools which are amenable to static analysis at work.

To learn about the situation, I've put together similar programs in Lisp, OCaml, and Haskell, as well as installed compilers for Haskell & Ocaml on the PPC.

Well -

I've coded for over a decade, and I've never encountered such a difficult to use language and jargony community & documentation (including AWK & SED). The only reasons I have been able to do anything are Real World Haskell, Learn You A Haskell, and Stack Overflow.

I'm not going to say Haskell is useless, or has no libraries, etc. Those aren't true. It's also not a bad language because it's weirder than my Blub (Common Lisp). It's a really sweet language, and I think in the hands of an expert, Haskell can dance.

But, I'm going to say Haskell is nearly impossible for an experienced procedural programmer to pick up and go with on the fly. There are a few reasons for my opinion:

* Special operators out the wazzoo. >>= ` ++ :: etc. The wrong 'dialect' of Haskell leads you to believe it's Perl and APL's love child. It's just not clear what something does until you find a reference book. Google doesn't help here - I don't even know the verbal names for some of them. :)

* Monads & in particular, the IO Monad. The number of tutorials and explanations (and the number of new ones) suggest that this is not the most obvious concept in the land. It seems to be very simple if you know what you're doing (and what operators to use), though.

* The REPL is not identical to the compiler. This means that you can't trust the REPL. Coming from Python and Lisp, that is a pain.

* Type messages that are quite unclear, and probably require referring to the Haskell98 report to fully understand.

Regardless, the above are surmountable problems and reasonable when moving to a new paradigm (very frustrating, though).

However, there are two key issues that are close to deal-breakers, with a third more minor one.

* Time to put a small program together. Easily 3x-10x my time working on Ocaml, a language which I am less experienced in (in both languages, I am amazingly inexperienced).

* Building the compiler on PPC (business reasons why I would need to do this). Ocaml builds with the traditional ./configure && make. Very straightforward. GHC requires a cross compile with some funky source tweaks, or possibly a binary package (but the bin package dependency tree required replacing libc++, at which point I stopped). This is a dealbreaker unless I can straightforwardly guarantee my boss a good ROI with Haskell vs. (OCaml or other statically typed language).

* Human costs for my code. It's not professional to have a codebase only I can use in a team. Yes, the team could learn Haskell, but would it be a good ROI? If OCaml gets us there faster...

So Haskell is probably not going to work for me at work. :-( We'll see though.
I'm kinda shocked that of all the "experts" the reporter talked to, nobody used more than a dozen passwords. I'm no crypto geek, I don't force SSL everywhere, I've never used TOR or anonymous VPNs or anything - but I have a few different password systems that allow me to use and remember semi-unique, word-free passwords on any site I care about. If you were targeting me personally, and you obtained the plaintext of a few dozen passwords, you could probably figure one of them out; if you're running a typical automated attack, you're going to miss me.

I can't possibly be the fastest runner from this bear.
I think you just stated this wrong. Read this:

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/olson/archives/003331.sht...

Just a different take on why IP is a natural right.

The author gives a suggestion that we in software may want to heed: "stop calling it intellectual property". Maybe "intellectual discovery" instead?
Information retrieval and information extraction is evolving, thanks to statistical machine learning theories.

Successful applications of statistical pattern recognition models improve user experience (speech recognition, face tracking, sentiment analysis, and other countless examples). Other parts of Artificial Intelligence have just benign effect.
What, you don't use the command line tools?
Iris Is (Sort Of) Siri For Android
Pastry: A substrate for peer-to-peer applications
The stupidest thing about this is that the maps on Android are genuinely better than the maps on iOS.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/US_Histor...

If you look at this, you can see that gold is more volatile and spiky.
So this wouldn't be considered "patent trolling"? I know Microsoft has had quite a history with Android and I always assumed it was just them using their patents to make some quick money.

Great answer, by the way. Definitely cleared up a lot of questions I had.
Campaign monitor used this effect quite some time ago...
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/hiring/