skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Use interactive infographics to visualize the effects of various legal algorithms. Let people drag allocation around, tweak parameters, etc. Combine all the data, including expected satisfaction of the various interested parties, with expert statements from all perspectives. Display the results of regression tests (e.g. display how this change in the algorithmic law would affect reality now if it had been made 5, 10, or 20 years ago). Thus, you allow non-experts to make informed decisions (exactly how congresspeople are supposed to work now).

In the resource allocation example, each interested party would state the amount of the resource they currently receive, the minimum amount they need to survive, and the maximum amount they could use efficiently, and their expected revenue in all cases (if they are a commercial resource user). They could also indicate their relative satisfaction with the various allocation algorithms proposed by engineers and others. Independent audits could determine how essential a given resource or resource user's product is to the economy, and how efficient the various resource users are.

I'd expect this would require less supporting staff than our current legislative system. Right now, each representative has his or her own complete advisory staff. If the same data is shared by everyone, you'd only need enough people to audit the data, algorithms, and visualization systems to avoid manipulation of outcomes, freeing up current staffers to contribute directly to the economy.
How I used Reddit, Hackernews and My Product to Promote MailSlayer
Baltimore Ravens vs San Diego Chargers live.
Open Data: U.S. House Will Make Legislative Docs More Accessible To Public
If you're pitching to a VC who refuses to work with Harvard grads because he/she went to Yale, you're probably pitching the wrong VC...
It sounds like you want to be hiring ex kernel-hackers as your web dev team :)
Guys, thanks so much for all the tips and best wishes, you are amazing. If you have any more tips on accommodation and startup circles on top of the awesome ones mentioned, please let me know below or ping me leo at bufferapp.com.
I think another great question is: Can you describe to me what my first day, week, month will look like? This helps to really crystalize what they see you doing and being responsible for from the get-go.
I mentioned Rails because Django and Rails are extremely similar as they try to solve the same problem with similar approaches. The differences in how the two work come down to philosophy. Rails trades a lot more simplicity for ease of use with its "convention over configuration" approach. Django chooses more simplicity over ease of use.

If I were to diagram those two and Node.js, I'd say it looks like this:

Easy <---------------------------> Simple

Rails <-------> Django <------> Node.js
Fred Shapiro’s “Top Quotes of 2011″ List Released
How to thwart the high priests of IT
i completely agree with the fact that you should never take a job just solely because of the money...sometimes its hard because if you share your pay with other, they would say, but why?? only you yourself can feel good about it
He's a US citizen. He gets habeas corpus.

edit: why the heck would anyone down vote an accurate, factual, relevant statement?
Android Facebook app now more popular than iPhone version
SOPA and the oblivious
It's pretty slow. Alternatives that take advantage of hardware counters (like OProfile and Intel VTune) don't get in the way so much. With long-running simulations, or when trying to simulate performance in light of real-world loads you really don't want the VM overhead you get with Valgrind/Cachegrind if you can avoid it.
Yes ending flagrant abuses is the stated goal of the bill, but the methods it uses toward that end leave lots of unintended consequences which will be very, very damaging. Those in support of the bill either haven't taken the time to understand those consequences or simply don't care.

The conspiracy theory is that the unintended consequences are in fact intended by the MPAA/RIAA. Given their past and present behavior, it's not a stretch.
It would probably be better served to just keep track of how many drinks you have. I would be more likely to use it if I wanted to quickly calculate calories, drinks, estimated BAC, etc. The estimated BAC could be pretty cool - it could do calculations based on weight and alcohol processing based on when you click a +1 or something.
In the traditional Unix network environment, printing and billing is a famously hard problem.
It's a data point on public opinion. Remember that all the lobbying money spent in the US is there only to swing public opinion ~10% on an election.

In the truth-vacuum of DC, it's pretty relevant.
It's more architecture than stack, IMO. If you focus on minimizing shared state, use caching well, and have a performant database backend, you can make pretty much any stack scale by just throwing more nodes on the front-end. Understanding load balancing and how to partition your app so that you can scale horizontally are crucial.

There's a pretty good article here: http://blog.nickbelhomme.com/php/scalable-web-applications_1...

that has some good stuff in it. Also, if you read over the material at http://highscalability.com you'll find a ton of into on this stuff.
Yes, some of those lock-free structures are amazing.

However, if you read the fine print it turns out that they are quite often slower than lock-based exclusion on top of one of Knuth's structures. The atomic primitive operations still require cross-core communication which only gets more expensive with more cores.

Most applications simply don't parallelize perfectly. We're going to have to face the fact that not only is the free lunch over, the lunch we have to pay for isn't always as satisfying.
One shining note to remember before everyone turns doom and gloom, in the States (if I remember what the citizenship pamphlet said when I got my green card), it's not really "law" until it stands up to a test case in a court of law.

Since the congress critters are lining their pockets left and right from the lobbyists for this bill, it's not in their personal interest to turn it down, even if they know it won't stand up in court.

And if it passes, it's almost guaranteed to be tested (and overturned) in court - as it's been mentioned many many times, Youtube, Google, Bing, etc etc have way too much to lose to let it go unchallenged.

Seems like it's just status quo here in the States with the new "pay-n-pass" government.
Where you might see conspiracy theory, I just see the power of human stupidity. It's far more reliable.
"We don’t suffer from too much governance, we suffer from too little".

It's funny that someone who was an illegal immigrant would support more governance when that's exactly the sort of thing that would have kicked him out of the country and led to him not having much interest in how the US is governed!

Perhaps he means "his sort of governance" is what's needed because I'm fairly sure he wouldn't like the consequences of ramping up regulation of everything. See all the SOPA posts for details.
And looking at Lessig's appearance on Daily Show (about his new book), congress uses ridiculous things like this to extort money out of businesses to keep themselves in office.
It's a statement akin to "Yeah, he may driving drunk, but I don't think he intends to kill anybody." People rarely intend the ill consequences of their risky behavior, but closing your eyes and humming doesn't make it safer. The legislators who passed child pornography laws probably didn't intend to cause 13-year-olds to get prosecuted under the law, but that's what ended up happening. Passing a law that allows terrible things to happen and just trusting that nobody will ever actually do those terrible things is naive at best.

So any question that starts with "Do you really think they intend…" is a red herring.
His Hour Upon the Stage
Had me baffled too. Explanation here: http://revealingerrors.com/akamai_ssl

Scary stuff - I never heard of this Akamai entity before.
I've found a lot of companies don't like giving feedback of negative outcomes for fear of opening themselves up to some sort of liability around discrimination.

Realistically it shouldn't be a problem if they handled the interview correctly, but some prefer not to take the risk.
Usually you just pad the rows a bit.
SOPA and Piracy: Right Answer, Wrong Question
It's being downvoted because the governments intentions are somewhat irrelevant.

The law - as it is written - can be used to shutdown sites like Reddit. There is nothing stopping someone using it in that way, even if it isn't the governments intention.
I was on a conference call w/ Zoe Lofgren (CA congress woman who is on the Judiciary fighting the hell out of this bill) and a bunch of NYC tech companies last weekend and she said petitions are essentially ignored, and instead to make phone calls to your reps and directly into the capital.

This isn't to say don't sign this, but if you are really concerned, the absolute bottom line is phone calls. Anything you can do to funnel phone calls in is what counts.

Edit: Let me add this, which makes it absurdly easy: http://fightforthefuture.org/
OTOH, a site could go out of business before SOPA is overturned.
Considering Windows 8 isn't really out and the iPad is nothing like a laptop, I think Linux is actually ahead of the ball.
Absolutely agree. Clarity of thought and a plan are key to look for as startups without a clear view on these things may be indicative of fuzziness on other important fronts, i.e., where is this company really going, how we are going to make money?

To this, I'd add another question if interviewing at a non-revenue generating startup -- "How will the company make money?" And you should assess how realistic this sounds. You don't need to be a VC here but it should pass your own innate b.s. filter.

But if they do answer, "We're going to have millions of users (one day in the future) and will monetize through advertising", my recommendation would be to run the other way (quickly).
Congress deals with many deep and complicated issues. It is simply not possible for most citizens to competently decide how to vote on most bills. They have neither the background nor the time.

It sounds like you're describing exactly what we have now, only without abstracted accountability through representatives. Sure, most citizens cannot competently decide how to vote on most bills, but clearly many congresspeople can't either. That's not only a problem of competence, but also of the unnecessary complexity of legislation. Using something like unified diffs alone would reduce the length of many bills significantly.

Under your system it would basically come down to a popularity contest among the proponents and opponents of a particular bill. People would simply look at who is for and against it, and go with which group fits in better with them.

Citizens and their representatives already do that now. People look to their party to decide how to vote, and representatives look to the lobbyists with the most persuasive voice. It's easy to appear persuasive when your entire industry is built around convincing people to watch your advertisements.

Advertising would also play a large amount in determining the outcome.

It already does, and not just in initiatives. Direct democracy is not a panacea, but it would remove one of the significant roadblocks to addressing the problem of corruption and undue influence in politics.
As far as I can tell this might just be false. If you go to github.com (a random site which happens to include query 1.7.1 -- the latest version), open the console in either firebug or webkit inspector, and run the author's example:

var foo = $("body");
foo.data("mykey", "1.410");
foo.data("mykey");

...you get your original "1.410", not 1.41 as the author reports.

Secondly, he says there are "several bug reports on the jQuery website, where people are also confused by this behavior and all of them get closed with a wontfix" but links to none of them. Linking to them should be trivial and they'd help his case (or at least make it easy for me to figure out why he sees a bug and I don't). I searched and couldn't find any.

Finally, you shouldn't use .attr() to store arbitrary data as he recommends. Hanging javascript data off of DOM nodes will cause serious memory leaks if you're not careful. That's the reason .data() exists in the first place. See the "Cicular References" section of Understanding and Solving Internet Explorer Leak Patterns: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Bb250448
Nothing in the SSL certificate returned identifies www.reddit.com hence the warning. The common name of the cert (typically used to identify the website) is actually a248.e.akamai.net. I think akamai are a service that many websites use but their generic SSL cert can cause problems. You can view the cert using: http://certlogik.com/sslchecker/www.reddit.com/
And now I feel silly for not having thought of that :)
No, by that logic, life is a human right, because I say the death penalty for stealing $1 worth of stuff is too large a punishment.
> If they use the .es TLD, then shouldn't anyone with access to a name server that accurately mirrors the zones for that domain have access? I don't see how it's in the US's power to prevent that.

I think ICANN still has the power to censor .es domains. Can anyone please either confirm or correct me?

> Perhaps there'd be a transition period where international name servers stop trusting US mirrors of international TLDs and US root name servers, but if you stop using those it should still work. Right?

BlockAid DNS and Telecomix DNS don't remove domains taken down by ICE. But how long until port 53 to BlockAid and Telecomix is blocked in the US?

Anyway, most people won't change their nameservers and Reddit would loose most of its revenue if the domain reddit.com was taken down, and to prevent it they would need to monitor/censor the user-generated content, and they can't afford it.

Bottom line: SOPA would make Reddit too expensive to run to be profitable.
Under SOPA, a name server that accurately mirrors the zones for that domain is illegal. http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2011/12/15/stopping-s...
This reminds me of a story about the first atomic bomb test. Not too long before the first detonation was to occur, some scientists voiced a concern that there was a slim chance that the blast would be strong enough to ignite the atmosphere and pretty much destroy the world. These voices were in the minority, and disproved through calculation and common sense -- but the official paper disproving it did not arrive until a year later. So the first atomic bomb was detonated with a few lingering doubts about whether it would instantly destroy the world.

This is what the SOPA debate feels like to me, except there are no reasoned arguments disproving its opponents' worst fears, just pat dismissals of the opposition.
This looks really awesome. I could see this being immensely useful on something like the Asus Transformer--if you don't have the keyboard, it's a great touch UI; if you do, you can fire up Emacs and be instantly productive.
As caf said, and as Johannes Kepler first correctly deduced, stable periodic orbits in a two-body gravitationally bound system are ellipses with an eccentricity (deviation from a perfect circle) dependent on the system. A perfectly circular orbit (eccentricity 0) is of course theoretically possible, but would require careful fine-tuning. Earth's orbit is rather close to a circle, as is Venus's, but Mercury, Mars, and especially Pluto have notably eccentric orbits.

The case of a system of more than two bodies is of course trickier. One cannot analytically solve the orbits even in a three-body system, not to mention a real planetary system. The orbits are chaotic and everything perturbs everything else in complex ways. This does not mean that the orbits are intrinsically unstable or that their evolution cannot be numerically predicted, however. For reasons presented below, for most practical purposes the orbit of any planet in the Solar System can be approximated as an ellipse.

There's a selection effect present: in areas of the protoplanetary disc where a nearby growing planet caused major disturbations, another planet couldn't form in the first place, and those planetesimals that did form, would eventually collide and merge with their more massive neighbor, or in extreme cases, be ejected from the Solar System altogether. This is the "cleaning the neighborhood" effect that is now used in the definition of a planet.

Also, if two planets have orbital periods close to a simple integer ratio, such as 3:2, the resonance magnifies their mutual perturbations over time. Unsurprisingly, there are no such simple ratios in the Solar System.

Every contemporary planetary body has thus been selected for having an orbit stable over a timescale of at least billions of years. The asteroid belt consists of remnants of the original disc: a fifth rocky planet could have formed there if not for the effect of Jupiter, preventing the coalescence of anything larger than Ceres. The belt was also originally much denser than currently; over the eons Jupiter has pruned every rock unfortunate enough to have an orbit just a bit too unstable.

Based on observations of other planetary systems, we now know that a giant planet could form or otherwise end up in a very eccentric orbit and thus prevent other stable orbits in a large part of its planetary system. This was surprising, given the nearly-circular orbits of the giants in our system. In retrospect, it is clear why we observe our system to be so well-behaved - otherwise, Earth wouldn't have formed and we would not be here making these observations in the first place! This is an instance of the so-called Weak Anthropic Principle.
I created an account in order to sign this, but when I try to sign in I get a 404 -- using Chrome. Anyone else get that?
Interestingly, for the first version of Accept

> Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8,application/json

it's perfectly valid to return `application/json` (even if a `text/html` representation is available) as (as far as I can tell from the RFC) the default quality is always 1 and ordering is irrelevant, so the relative ordering between `text/html`, `application/xhtml+xml` and `application/json` is left to the server.

Of course further tests show that the server code is in far broken, but still...

(and don't use the PHP code in the comment, it won't work for arbitrary accept extensions and does not return those extensions to the caller)
Scala, Patterns, and The Perl Effect
From what I've been reading, the bill grants the DoJ power to combat sites outside of US jurisdiction.

See title I sec 102. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c112:1:./temp/~c1124uh...:

Is this only a piece of the larger picture?

edit: On further inspection, it appears as though title 2 does in fact grant powers for combatting domestic sites as well.

Or at least the language isn't explicitly speaking to foreign websites.
Sorry, I shouldn't have had quotes around the 1.410

http://jsfiddle.net/kgp2H/

Think of it this way, say you have a template that is putting some data into an element like this:

<button id="fooButton" data-key="1.400">Click me to edit something</button>

Now, using .data() to select the information out, will always return 1.4 instead of what you want, which is 1.400.
... and 80s ... and 70s.
I wasn't aware of this. This looks like a bad design choice indeed. I hate when libraries convert stuff implicitly for you. html5's localStorage has a similar problem. Only, it converts whatever you are trying to store into a string. Would be better if it accepted only strings and threw an error if you tried to store something else, imho.
On The Cloud: It's state today, and the future.
I don't really see a problem here.

The entire document could be laid out as if the page length was infinite, and then -- depending on desired page length -- the page breaks could be inserted between the appropriate lines.

In any case, in a typical document the overwhelming majority of paragraphs won't be affected by page breaks. So their layout could be parallelized regardless of where the page breaks wind up occurring.
Ok, so it could be considered illegal in the US -- but it's not in the US, nor has anything to do with the US. If someone is running an accurate name server outside the US, with no ties to the US, that does no business with the US, the US can say it's "illegal" all they want but it's still there.
If I'm making an API that speaks only JSON, I'm not going to bother with Accept. There is the case where certain resources have a different media type (eg "application/vnd.mycompany.user+json") which is something I'd probably just parse out as JSON. That's not to say I'm not looking at "Accept," but I really only care if there's JSON somewhere in there or not. Also, forcing clients to pick the correct media type for the Accept header, while it may be "proper" REST, seems a bit cruel for the average developer.

I don't assume building a REST API means that clients will be REST clients. Some people just can't wrap their heads around the concept, and I try to build for both.
How much would a driverless taxi cost?
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
You are not being serious, right?

1.410 === 1.41
In Safari every time I try to sign in, it just redirects me to the page I was already on without signing me in.
> If someone is running an accurate name server outside the US, with no ties to the US, that does no business with the US, the US can say it's "illegal" all they want but it's still there.

Yes.
As far as I understand it, they can force every DNS provider under US-jurisdiction (usually the ISP, for instance Comcast, but also OpenDNS and Google) to remove or alter DNS records. This works for .com the same as for .es, but of course it doesn't prevent you from using a name server outside the US.

At least that is how the "Zugangserschwerungsgesetz" in Germany works and I think SOPA will be similar in this respect, but I might be wrong..
Also, Megamind and Metroman went to the same school, but learned different lessons.
Hm, now I guess you better just delete your article. 1.410 IS 1.41, isn't it. Or am I missing something.
Our government showed us many times that they don't give a shit about these petitions.
Then what's the problem? You stored float 1.410 and got back float 1.41. They're equal. That's not jQuery, it's javascript: http://jsfiddle.net/kgp2H/1/

Edit, after the parent was edited to include the data attribute example:

You should update your post to clarify that you're talking about data attributes. That's a significant detail and shouldn't have been left out.

Now that you've clarified, jQuery does behave as you've stated, but it's not a bug. I can see how it could be unexpected behavior to some, but it's explicitly stated in the .data() documentation:

Every attempt is made to convert the string to a
JavaScript value (this includes booleans, numbers,
objects, arrays, and null) otherwise it is left as a
string. To retrieve the value's attribute as a string
without any attempt to convert it, use the attr() method.

http://api.jquery.com/data/#data2
it's because OP linked to the HTTPS version of reddit, which doesn't exist. akamai will serve an HTTPS version of any page that they cache, and if the customer has not configured HTTPS they will serve it up with their certificate.

reddit uses akamai for page content but not for any authentication, there are no security benefits to using https://reddit instead of http://reddit
Every time I've voted on a whitehouse.gov petition, I've gotten an email 6 months later saying why the petition will be completely ignored, answering none of the points the petition brought up.

The petition system is an ineffectual smokescreen.