skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Coming from a Java and Grails background, I debuted as a Rails developer this year and was very impressed by Ruby and the framework too. Also tried some basic Clojure, solved most of the Clojure koans and solved 48 problems (so far) on 4Clojure.com ... I'd love to learn more and build something with it on 2012.
You sort of answered your own question -- in both examples you specifically pointed out work that you have to do in order to calculate a price -- you need to sift through Craigslist items, keep track of what you find, apply a calculation, and come up with an estimate. Same for eBay.

The work you're doing there takes time and has value, and Pricenomics is trying to capture that. I'm not intimately familiar with the company nor do I know if they'll figure out a viable business model, but I do see the intrinsic value in what they're proposing.
Put scientists, developers, & supercomputers in one room - throw away the key
I see two problems with estimating price off craigslist.

1. List price is not the same as selling price
2. The averaging is being moved by "accessory items" i.e. http://priceonomics.com/computers/apple/macbook-air/ shows a lot of things that aren't MacBook Airs in the low price bracket. Maybe tossing out anything that is a few SD away from the average would fix that.
and 7.5 years I still think it's not that useful anyway.

you could always go to a specific line (edit>go to line, or Ctrl+L), which is over 9000% more useful from anyway you look at it.

you also could have seem the line number on the statusbar.
I planned for such a thing, as I intended to drive through that area during my holiday travel to see family. I ended up taking a different route because most roads in New Mexico were closed, but I still brought an ample supply of water, a couple days worth of food, a snow shovel, a zero degree sleeping bag, and I had my cell phone reporting my location every minute or so when I had cell service. I also drove a very capable 4x4 vehicle, but that's a more difficult detail to change just for a winter trip. :)

All of that planning is a good idea, but better than that would be to monitor the weather and road conditions closely, and stay home if it looks bad. NMDOT and CDOT publish state road conditions on easy to use sites like nmroads.com and cotrip.org. They're absolutely necessary information for travel in this area during winter. If there's a blizzard warning posted for the area (and there was), its a VERY BAD IDEA to try to travel in remote areas like north eastern New Mexico. The distance between towns is quite large, and that area is pretty prone to blowing snow.
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763570
Other metrics can be added to detect a spammer. If one account never posts but then suddenly starts posting like crazy, that is a red flag.
Indeed. I know lots of people who signed up for G+ to check it out, I only know two people who still actively post to it. I just checked my news feed, and it's entirely filled with posts by celebs (famous photographers, web celebs, Google folks I follow, etc), and two posts by my actual friends.

If this is at all representative, I suspect the percentage of active users to total users is pretty abysmal.
The Express versions are not designed for multilanguage projects. For example, in the paid versions of VS, you can add C# and C++ projects to the same solution. You cannot add a C++ project to a Visual C# Express solution.
> The article itself concentrates on intra-system conflicts

Neptune is more than 4 light-hours away, and the Oort cloud (discussed as a possible source of projectiles) a full light-year further. So I don't see how anything short of general purpose AI can be tele-operated for intra-system conflicts.
Arbitrage is technically a set of simultaneous transactions where you buy and sell at the same time. Purchasing something and reselling it later for a higher price is not arbitrage.

It is usually used to describe a riskless transaction.
I think you missed it. Mike said he ran PAX, the guy didn't recognize the name and started tying to name drop and claiming he'd get a booth if he wanted one. When the penny dropped that mike == gabe, and there's no way they'll be at PAX if he doesn't want them there, the penny drops and his tone changes
I was recently forced to create a Google+ account, which I have no intention of using for now. So I simply typed "follow me on twitter at <adr>" in my description. So people who bump into my profile know where to find me.
What's the male/female split?
Next on the long-awaited feature list: word wrap in Eclipse.

I can't say I even noticed line numbers on the page source in Chrome either. The formatting of source on a rendered page can be a bit messed up when the request is served, with tabbing and whitespace ended up all over the place, especially with loops. Then there's minified source if you're using someone else's code.

Most of the time it's easier to note the error, try and identify where it occurred, then find it in your editor. And with things like Chrome's developer console, sometimes using view-source is redundant when you have a DOM inspector and a number of ways to traverse it.

And even then, with a good linter you can avoid making basic mistakes like typos or missing parentheses or whatever, and in some cases even have undeclared variables or functions highlighted (Sublime Text 2 has one that in some places can appear quite fascist in how strict it enforces its policies, particularly with Python). At that point, usage of the browser for debugging code is most useful for capturing errors you couldn't reproduce elsewhere, and errors that only appear in minified code.

Not that I'm saying the browser tools aren't a great productivity boost. Because they obviously are. Just that I rarely find myself using the view source feature, really.
Absolutely. In fact, Starting Strength was the next book I picked up after the 4-Hour Body, and it was immensely useful and motivating. If I could still edit my comment to mention Starting Strength, I would.
>Did you really think arbitrage of used goods could be a business?

Isn't that basically the business model for antique dealers and pawn shops?
State craft is complex and messy business, agreed. The government of Assad is currently facing "militias" in Homs and has the same precise pov as you. (It's reasonable; I'm not, repeat, blind to the burden of just rule.)

But I myself, as an American citizen, strongly object to the continued attacks on my natural rights and these "solutions" that consistently erode the limits placed on the State powers.

We had a revolution in this country precisely to determine the balance between natural "rights" and collective "laws". The United States of America has precisely ZERO input on what is "allowed" as far as Natural Rights are concerned. USA may provide privileges.

I myself, for example, was "sold" the following story before I elected to become a naturalized citizen of USA: "Inalienable Rights". That sounded (and still does) just right for me -- I happen to agree very strongly with the idea. But now, n years into this contract, and the USA (and some citizens such as yourself) are now telling me that I have no rights unless that it is "allowed" by the USA.

So, was I scammed (in your eminent "legal" opinion)?
Ask HN: How do you learn emacs?
I'm a Vim user, but I use Haskell a lot and it's not uncommon for me to find myself using clojure or scheme/racket. Vim is kind of the new hip thing so there are plenty of free resources online for learning it, and that's how I learned it about a year ago. Unfortunately, emacs seems to be less mainstream right now so there aren't as many resources, and what is available tends to be the very basics, that are found in emacs's built in tutorial.

In vim you usually don't learn about new setups by learning everything possible in the editor and coming up with a new way to use it, you take pieces from other people's setups and make your own. I assume it's similar in emacs which is an even more monolithic beast. Where can you go to find people sharing their setups?
Isn't there a binary storage option? I don't wanna Base64 encode everything... Seems ridiculous.
Korean charset KPS-9566 has special characters for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il
Funny or Die mines laughs, profits on Web and TV
If you want to get more precise, the benefit of simultaneous or near simultaneous transactions is reduced risk that prices will fluctuate. Arb is just an exploitation of different prices in different markets.
JRuby outperforms most other Ruby implementations today by a large ratio from all my testing of non-trivial code. That isn't the point though. This is still a comparison with either immature JIT implementations or pure interpreters so I don't think it really means much.

I will say that he is right to be annoyed that anyone would claim JRuby is slower since it isn't in all cases I've tested.
Indeed. What do you people think business is? Plenty of people operate perfectly reasonable used-goods businesses of the same nature at flea markets and the like. The question for Hacker News types is whether the business is scalable (depends on the local supplies of used goods, among other things) and whether there are more interesting businesses for you to be in.

Business needs to be demystified. Look at Princess Kate. Her family's business (worth millions, or billions, I forget) basically started with assembling party supplies into convenient boxes. If that's a business, anything can be a business.
You'd said "NEVER", which wasn't correct.

I'm generally only renewing a few at a time. They've given me a coupon to renew just one, and they were doing that before I had more than 50 with them.

While there are cheaper options, I like Namecheap's bulk management tools, free DNS hosting with records management for all types of records, etc.

After leaving Internic, I stayed with DirectNIC for years because of their reliability (even during Katrina!), no hassle interface, and pro customer practices, but after crossing the hundred domains mark, that started to feel expensive even with their bulk wallet discount system. I'm still using DirectNIC for a few, but Namecheap for most.
It's interesting to view how Google works in this light:

- the micro-kitchens are restocked once or twice a day and have all manner of drinks and snacks;

- micro-kitchens are only so far from every desk (they're in every building in MTV and on every floor in NYC);

- stationery cabinets are also in close proximity. Take whatever pens, whiteboard markers, etc ou need;

- tech stops are a little further away generally but have self-service for many things (power bricks, cables, mice, keyboards) although I wish the self-service was open out-of-hours;

- you can file tickets for things and it just turns up at your desk;

- you have a credit card you can expense things with (nobody likes keeping and submitting receipts for small items);

- if you need a book just expense it;

- all of the conference rooms have display adapters and power bricks (although there could be more of these);

- whenever there is a mass desk move (it happens a lot) your labelled boxes and equipment gets moved on the weekend and at your new location there'll often be a triage station with cables, power bricks and the like; and

- whiteboards are plentiful.

I'd always viewed this as not penny-pinching, which I guess it is (apart from the micro-kitchens, which I'm sure are a significant cost) but its interesting to view this in terms of reset and transit costs.

Another important part of this (IMHO) is not making people make decisions about stuff they don't care about, which has a cognitive cost.

Imagine if a company gave you a book budget of $X per year. Even if it's more than you would likely spend the very fact that you have a limit makes you think about what else ou might need later rather than just "do I need this now?"
I was waiting for that feature for Eclipse too. But I switched to Sublime Text (http://www.sublimetext.com/2) and shudder when I think how many hours I wasted waiting for Eclipse to keep up with me.
Not important, but there is a mildly amusing error on judiciary.house.gov:
If you go here, you see the list without GoDaddy:
http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rogue%20Websites/List%20of...
If you go to the original misspelled URL that some people are still passing around, you see the list with GoDaddy on it:
http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rouge%20Websites/List%20of...
Remotely monitor any Haskell application
You are right. There are indeed various entities whose advocacy of their own self-interests and belief systems tends to promote the traditional failed American drug policy. Drug makers, religious zealots, etc... even individuals, small businesses, and schools (such as, say, those located where aggressive or even thuggish levels of law enforcement make that particular place safer on a local, short-term basis).

For-profit prisons, however, are the most direct beneficiaries of the (completely fucking insane) "war on drugs". For-profit prisons are one of the best examples of how an otherwise fairly functional democratic society can end up with a system of profoundly deranged incentives that visits grievous harm upon a staggering number of people.

These institutions conduct a program of systematic, industrialized dehumanization of millions of people -- including millions of people who have never harmed another person. In my view, this makes them evil, profoundly evil.

Although this sounds extreme to some people (especially those who have never paused to think it through), I put America's industrial prisons in the same league with the Nazi extermination camps. America doesn't actually starve people to death or gas them in ovens, but that's a matter of degrees. America does separate children from parents and force nonviolent human beings to live out their lives as caged animals. Millions and millions and millions of them.

There is not much about America so disgusting and disgraceful.
> companies that sell your email address

What monetary damages can you prove you suffered?
Here's a thought I've had in the past after encountering a document of this type: Stealth in space is trivial is what you are trying to keep hidden doesn't need to accelerate, support human life or do anything much that generates significant heat, especially if it can stay far away from what it is hiding from. Space is big and hard to hide things in, but it is full of all kinds of smallish debris in the vicinity of a solar system. If you have something of about the right size, orbit, albedo, radar reflectivity and temperature, it ought to be hard to distinguish it from a stray bit of rock or ice too small for anyone to have paid attention to it in the past.

Bearing this in mind, suppose that you built a small, camouflaged satellite which would just sit there at ambient temperature until it received instructions, upon which it would point itself at a given patch of sky, do the finest bits of the aiming using its own passive sensors and then fire a nuclear bomb-pumped x-ray laser at whatever has the misfortune to be there. With something like this, one could probably swat any reasonable craft out of the sky before it had time to respond. You could perhaps also use such things offensively by putting them on orbits that will take them within their effective range of whatever you want them to shoot, though they would stand out a bit more that way.

The only real countermeasure to these I can think of would be to move your spacecraft rapidly back and forth at all times, which is probably infeasible given the amount of reaction mass it would take.

I'm not sure what the implications of all of this are, but I suspect they would be interesting.
It's an interesting read, but that scenario could only occur due to imperfect information. With nearly-perfect information (like what would be available in space), the German defenders would have been mobilized ahead of time, and it would have been a straightforward battle.
SOPA - The old vanguard supports
>Hopefully they will learn life's harsh lessons.

I don't think that's really fair. Are you familiar with the effects of gambling in poor communities? Every pokie machine can have a sign on it that says 'Gambling ruins you and your family' and it doesn't help. Enabling a community to flourish in it's own right is what stops gambling.

Anyway, what I was pointing out is that the online gambling industry has so far worked well to get money out of two types of people: those who can afford to lose, and those who can't. I'd like to see anyone going into this industry really focusing on the first group and not being predatory in attracting the second. How? I don't know but I'll support whoever manages it with my own poker-chip purchases.

An example: be a good gambling franchise and put 30% of your profit into addiction awareness and support (something like this is mandatory in Australia for example I believe).
Alternatively, you can set up Vim to play more nicely with Haskell and clojure. I assure you that you don't need to use <editor X> to program in <language Y>.
we like trees, so we kill all the birds (etc) who live in the trees.
I don't think godaddy really understands that, at this point, none of this matters.

They supported this bill. Don't they think that that gives us some insight into their corporate culture?

Let's get this straight: you supported a bill which would destroy the internet; something that the tech community is vehemently against and, only when we absolutely dragged you kicking and screaming did you eventually retract your support?

No thanks.

This is like holding a gun to somebody's head and telling them to say that they like your cooking. It's nonsense.
Should Wikipedia run ads that ask for money, or ads that make money?
Yeah, but that suggests that the success condition is running a pawn shop. Probably not what you're after if you are a software startup that's just taken seed investment.
Police? Police don't handle these matters. And the reason these companies locate in Antigua and other places is due to lax laws and enforcement.

By Antigua's standards, they have done no wrong. If there is no law on the books that protects players, then they broke no law. If they choose to limit withdrawals to $1 per week, what law are they breaking? There will be no justice here. The best one can hope for is that they somehow survive long enough to get back on secure financial footing.

There are other examples from other small island countries. Look at Microgaming and companies that ran 'skin' sites on their network. Years have gone by and there has been zero progress, and what information is available is sparse and contradictory.

I was affected by one of these sites, and you think that calling the Malta police on Eurolinx will accomplish anything? The money is gone having disappeared into the pockets of the owners, and the owners are gone. Any investors, creditors, or customers will see no money. And in some cases, any money that exists will go to creditors before the players.
Follow your passion with persistence
Amor de perdição - Camilo Castelo Branco
Remote monitoring of Haskell apps now part of GHC
You forgot the "imho"
I have not seen WYSIWYG editors as powerful since <table> editors.

Control is empowered and beautifully shown: http://youtube.com/watch?v=u2fc-1mDlLE

Is it real? CSS friendly? Somewhat compliant? Iff it is, open sourcing is honorable.
What I don't like about Google+ is that they already have a spam problem.
It's definitely way more barren on G+ than Facebook, but I think that part of this is because on G+, users are more likely to make posts that can only be seen by a small subset of the total number of users in their circles. On Facebook, most users still make posts visible to everyone on their friends list. I personally have a "close friends" circle of about 15 people and we typically just share content with each other; at the same time I'm seeing posts from people outside of this circle talking no one ever posts to G+.

Although G+ still has way fewer posts than Facebook, I suspect that it would need a much higher post rate than Facebook to appear as "active" to users.
And? If you are 10 light seconds away from a battle your round trip control delay is 20s. Also, if weapons are zipping around at 2,000 km/s then 10 light seconds is only 25 minutes flight time. We certainly won't have 2,000 km/s projectiles in 20 years but in 100 we might.
Hostgator: SOPA must die
Yes.

I've created apps in the Android market. Sell them for money. This is a profitable enterprise.

It is absolutely stupid to build a non-profitable company.
Or maybe they just aren't posting to you? A few months back I read the claim that there's twice as much private sharing as public.
I use Google+ and I find it much better than Facebook for my use cases. I actually get a decent number of comments on my posts (comparable to those on Facebook). They come from a smaller and more specific set of people, but they're also generally of higher quality.
Sonnet of fidelity
I haven't even noticed the move. It's always been Ctrl+U for me.
"Always" and "never" are particularly strong marketing words when uttered by word of mouth. Non-technical people can easily remember never to use GoDaddy, much more than "use any of these X registrars depending on what you need."
You acknowledge the principle/agent problem, yet you pretend it doesn't exist in your QED; your demonstrandum was not convincingly demonstrated.

What if company A has a monopoly owing to being cheaper than any possible competition that does not use child labour? Would your argument for introducing a law against it not be an ethical argument governing the permissible actions of companies?

We want to hold corporations responsible [is] according to our system of ethics [ought]." In other words, stripped of all camouflage, it is a naked grab for power

Well yes, I do rather prefer government to anarchy. I'm sorry to say that if you see this as a "naked grab for power", I have little more to add, and am unwilling to continue a conversation with you. This is because, unless I'm mistaken, you are denying the very basis of democratic government ("we", the majority) in defense of something much more dangerous (the oligopoly of wealth and executive power). Someone who would do that is not someone I would trust; it is someone I'd rather shun.
err, yes, and I suppose used cars too. Maybe I should have been more specific.

But pawn shops don't get into YC and I doubt Cal Worthington ever raised a series C round on Sand Hill Road. Those types raise money via bank loans (if at all) and most people in the valley would call them "lifestyle businesses".

My point wasn't if such businesses exist but rather if Priceonomics really thought they could form a scalable business doing this. My guess is that they didn't (again, I don't know them and I'm often wrong). Rather, I think it was more of an experiment that would expose real business problems, validate ideas, create a case study, and/or make a little extra cash.
FnordMetric - beautiful real-time metrics dashboard powered by Redis
This sounds more or less like a consignment store and pretty much what the amazon marketplace does, but with the work done by a middle man instead. The question is, would people be willing to put up with the higher price or reduced profit required by adding a middleman, or would someone always undercut you because they were willing to go straight to the consumer? It reminds me of all those "ebay shops" that popped up 5 years ago and just as quickly disappeared, though this could be as much about ebay changing their focus as any business pressures, I don't know enough about it to say.

With a consignment store the model works because you are willing to take the reduced profit to not have to put in the actual leg work it would require. People are also willing to pay the slightly higher prices because consignment tends to be in things like clothes that are difficult to buy online.