skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why don't they regulate away poverty, while they're at it?

I look forward to the future, when citizens realize their government is the biggest barrier between themselves and prosperity.
Admit it - you have no evidence other than anecdotes to prove that signs cause material harm, and therefore externalities.

This is government red tape that hurts the economy in that city.
AppSumo MacBook Air 13'Giveaway
After reading your comment, I could easily support banning you from having children (joking)

But really, why do people resort to controlling others this way? It's a real shame. Freedom and property rights are important, no matter what the visual flavor of the day.
I agree, neither phone numbers nor social insurance numbers are unique.

But the issue is with storing them in numeric datatypes. They aren't guaranteed to be unique forever (and indeed, are alphanumeric in many jurisdictions) and the leading zero problem is a killer when you go to reconstitute them, both for performance and for logic reasons. Same goes for US ZipCodes.

This is why I have to have a very strong technical reason to make a non-math column numeric, especially with externally set data (like SSNs, SINs, Account codes, etc.) The people who set them could just start adding letters or symbols...and this isn't rare.
> demographics

Canada scores in the top 10 in all PISA categories, not far off from Finland, and shares much more demographically and geographically with the United States than with Finland.

The provinces of Canada with higher ethnic diversity and immigration (the more prosperous ones) tend to score higher within Canada than the ethnically homogeneous provinces.
Barry Cooper, a former narcotics officer, explains in pretty great detail how they train with alert dogs:

http://youtu.be/F9pGylTSDj0

A lot of the video isn't particularly relevant, but he does discuss how the officers are trained to incite the dog to alert and how the desire for the ball is a prey drive.
All these rationalization still can't change Roboto as a whole is not well put together and has severe identity crisis. When your team look disjointed and at odds with each other, really there is no win in technicalities.

Besides, fonts are art with utilities, you can try to repaint Starry night again and again (each time more modern and technically advanced), Van Gogh is not perfect should not be the reason. I find Glenn Fleishman faulting Apple for not having an episode of Not Invented Here Syndrome rather baffling.
Xcode 4 does a nice job of pointing out objects you may have forgotten to wire-up in IB. Prior to that, I struggled with IB. I realize now there is a cadence to it. Declare, synthesize, wire-up, implement delegate methods. Forget a step and your on StackOverflow face-palming.

I tried to get into iOS about 3.5 years ago. I failed miserably. IB was a big part of that...

Trying to get two objects to line-up horizontally with the designer in Eclipse... Well, it makes me want to punch something.
Plans for Windows just announced in the 2012 roadmap: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/jan/02/major-mapbox-inv...

"Just two months ago, after Node.js added native Windows support, we started testing and porting TileMill to a native Windows application. We plan to release a beta version this quarter"
"My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don't know."
Canada scores in the top 10 of all PISA categories and has a higher proportion of its population that are immigrants than the USA.
In a similar vein, my grandfather was born in 1888. At that time, there weren't any cars in use. There were no airplanes. In 1950, he flew, for the first time, as a passenger on a commercial airplane to Toronto for a convention.

Agriculture in his lifetime due to technological improvements, saw two-orders of magnitude improvement in productivity.

In my opinion, we are seeing a slowing of the impact of technological change from that period.
I enjoyed reading this. I've been using www.getskeleton.com for an ecommerce project that will be launching early feb.

I decided to use a responsive template as we want as many people as possible to be able to see the content and buy the products. Responsive templates were the quickest way to achieve this.

There were still a few difficult problems to overcome, like how to represent long category navigation on mobiles and in an ideal world we would have a mobile specific version of the site which would better allow us to solve such problems.

However for now, responsive templates seem to have really worked for us.

EDIT: also the client loves it that there site 'works' on a range of devices without having to incur the costs associated with 'mobile specific' versions or 'apps'
To what extent can utilities like DTrace make proprietary software free? I know this is kind of a broad question, but can we detect hidden functionality in proprietary software without fully reverse-engineering it?
Here's Singapore as another example.

http://asiasociety.org/education/learning-world/how-singapor...
I think you mean promotion, not marketing. I'd say he experimented heavily with his marketing. I'd even say he experimented with his promotion by doing things like answering questions on Reddit. Even the novelty of the experiment is part of the promotion; he knew that the novelty would likely garner attention that he would not otherwise receive.
"GNU ed is an 8-bit clean, more or less POSIX-compliant implementation of the standard Unix line editor."

If the main implementation of ed isn't even POSIX compliant these days, I'd say POSIX is officially pointless.
From the "Right to Read" 1997-02...

"Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing." -> Streaming content, DMCA tech

"It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a modified system kernel." -> Jailbreaking

"But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that." -> trusted computing

"But ordinary users started using [free debugging tools] to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison." -> DeCSS, Sony

----

From "The Dangers of Software Patents" 2004-05-24...

"Copyright covers a work of authorship. A patent covers an idea. ...... But a patent is an absolute monopoly on the use of an idea. Even if you could prove that you had the idea yourself, that would be irrelevant: you're still not allowed to use it." ->

Apple filed U.S. application Ser. No. 10/842,862 entitled “Multipoint Touchscreen,” filed on 2004-05-04 and published as U.S. Published Application No. 2006/0097991 on 2006-05-11.

---

From "Copyright and Globalization" 2001-04-19... (Selected bits that were interesting to me)

"In the ancient world, books were written by hand with a pen, …… you could copy a part of a book, then write some new words, copy some more and write some new words and on and on. This was called “writing a commentary” — that was a common thing to do — and these commentaries were appreciated. …… Now copyright was developed along with the use of the printing press and given the technology of the printing press, it had the effect of an industrial regulation. It didn't restrict what readers could do; it restricted what publishers and authors could do. …… copyright law no longer acts as an industrial regulation; it is now a Draconian restriction on a general public. It used to be a restriction on publishers for the sake of authors. Now, for practical purposes, it's a restriction on a public for the sake of publishers. …… To enforce it requires surveillance — an intrusion — and harsh punishments, and we are seeing these being enacted into law in the U.S. and other countries." -> NAFTA which is mentioned in the talk, SOPA, Protect IP, etc
This one is free: http://ipsur.org/

I haven't really looked into it though, so read at your own risk!
This seems very un-Googley to me.

This doesn't mean the article is not correct, but I just can't believe Google would do this kind of grey-hat SEO... mostly, companies do this to outsmart Google. Why would Google be trying to outsmart its own search engine?
Fan out fiber optic pigtails SC/PC x4
Fan out fiber optic pigtails are usually 1XN structure, at the N end of the fan out fiber pigtail, it can be terminated with different kinds of connectors, typical connectors used are SC/ST/FC/LC, single mode or multimode
we just posted 2012 TileMill + MapBox major investment priorities today: http://ds.io/mapbox-2012. In short, big push for:

- TileMill on Windows,

- Live map rendering for dynamic data via TileMill + direct uploads to MapBox for hosting,

- Beautiful new OpenStreetMap base maps as an alternative for Google Maps w/ its new usage fees,

- Shipping fast hardware (which we are still designing :) http://www.flickr.com/photos/developmentseed/5812414817/).
I could relate to a lot of his painstaking efforts after building the maps for Stormpulse "by hand" albeit digitally. Hundreds of little decisions all along the way.
I think it is easy to confuse market research and product research with the MVP. I don't even quite know the difference according to Eric's definition.

What seems to make sense to me is to simply follow the name. It is the minimum work for a viable product. A splash screen is not a product. A video is not a product. A wireframe is not the product (unless it contains the minimum form of the product). Thus, all of these are not MVPs.

Determining if something is a product should be easy. Determining what is minimum but still viable is much harder.
Finland has schools. So do we. Finland does all these things to make their schools better. So should we?

You ask about take-aways that might apply to other countries from the PISA findings about Finland. One way to get a reality check on how Finland's experience might guide policy in the United States is to look at countries with similarities to and differences from both. Seeing the flood of comments here that consist of people expressing their opinions (which is everyone's right on the Internet), I thought it might be helpful to go back to the PISA website to see how the PISA scholars themselves have been analyzing the data. One interesting brief write-up I found on the PISA site

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf

explores the issue of "resilient" students--students who do better than you would expect from their disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. It is no surprise to me, because I have lived in more than one country, that countries vary in how well their school systems help even students from disadvantaged background succeed in school. The data chart about different countries at the link shows that Finland (and also Korea, Singapore, Canada, and Taiwan) overperform in raising the academic achievement of disadvantaged students. I can well believe this about Singapore, having studied a lot about the school system there

http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf

and knowing people from there. By looking at multiple countries for meaningful commonalities like this, we in the diverse United States could learn a thing or two about how to improve schools here.
It's a type of junk-economics which has been forced into public consciousness over the last 30-40 years, and which originated in the '30s with philosophers such as von Mises and von Hayek.

Read David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harv...) for a stunning exposition of the social and economic crises that have developed around the world as a result of governments attempting to apply this philosophy.
Nice use of bootstrap.
<snark> Your winnings, sir. </snark>
I am not surprised considering how newspapers are dying a slow death as well. The evil internet!

The irony is there were 7 ads on the page powered by Google...
TileMill is a lot of fun; you can download it and be making custom maps in just a few minutes. There's a lot of very sophisticated open source cartography hiding under the covers, not to mention nodejs wizardry. They've done a great job of packaging it all and making an easy to use tool for map-makers without requiring a lot of GIS or OSGeo expertise.

One particularly nice option is the ability to "print" your pre-rendered map to an MBTiles bundle for serving in a slippy map on the web.
I don't really think it's limited to high school and college. The average Joe Sixpack American is likely more concerned with his nearest professional football team's performance than any other singular element of his life. I was born and raised in the northeast US, played sports in high school and college, but still have not come to terms with how obsessed most people seem to be with sports (both their kids' sports and professional sports). I did receive social benefits from sports for quite some time, but I was never able to understand it.
Do you live in the city?
Web Beep : text to tones and back again
Learning How To Say No Isn't The Answer
When I was in high school I worked with k9 dogs a lot as an assistant trainer. This reminds me of a dog we had in that was deaf, but we had no idea until they hit the street.

We had trained the dog for 2-3 months just like any other k9 and everything seemed normal. The officer came for their week long training period and get to know the dog period everything was okay and any of the issues seemed minor and they were dismissed as just the dog and human learning to get to know each other.

Then the dog hit the streets and had tons of issues and we couldn't figure it out. Finally, after a bunch of trouble shooting we had the dogs hearing checked out. The dog was deaf, but how could it know the commands when it was in front of the officer or trainer? We're not 100% sure, but we noticed that based on the commands given and the person giving the commands often times they would assume a certain stance. Other times we found the trainer would bounce/not bounce the ball based the command given. The dog could feel the ball bouncing and tell the trainer had taken up a different stance based on the command.
If you assume you'll never need the 8th bit of any given character (which you wouldn't, if you only ever handle pure 7-bit ASCII) you can safely use it for storing a single bit of per-character metadata to avoid consuming excess memory.
It wouldn't just be easier to spot, it would be immediately known, and thus no one would use it, which is why no government will (almost certainly) ever try. Plus, the code could just be hosted in another country (there are already tons of mirrors of the major FOSS projects).

The security that open source provides is like installing a camera security system in your business. You don't actually expect to catch people in the act of stealing, since they know it's there too. 95% of what it does is deterrence.
We used it all the time (Emacs/SSH/tmux) at my last gig since the engineering team was 100% remote. It worked fantastically well.
This seems to be a general problem with anonymous posting venues. The amount of spam is often inversely proportional to the effort required to distribute the spam.

I wonder if the app's user community can fight against it by using a simple karma/points rule like on HN or Reddit. Too many down-votes and the post doesn't show up.
In Roboto's defense (If there ever was one) it really is not fitted to be displayed on desktop OSes. Of course that kinda goes against Fleishman's argument that it is designed to be versatile across dpi configurations.
Is anyone else have the opinion that Responsive Web Design is a fad?

It seems that you are better served if you design your mobile site in the style of an App, and your website the traditional 960px grid. Tablets handle the desktop site okay for the most part.
Yo dawg, I heard you like drones...
This kind of thing has been done for decades but not over the web. Really, do people not know this or are you all too young?

Consider Ani Difranco and go read the article about her from The Economist from 1998 : http://www.economist.com/node/174267

Small 'indie' labels did something similar starting in the 1970s at least and probably earlier.

Louis CK doing it is interesting, but people have been able to build up their own distribution before the net existed. It's easier now but piracy is also much easier too.

Loads of people do it on the net now, one of my current fave bands Amiina which is the string section from Sigur Ros, has their music available for a few bucks out there direct too sans DRM.
Government regulation is not necessarily the dictating of behaviour to strangers.

Every collective has it's own rules which are mostly designed to facilitate better running of the collective. This is true from the couple, the family, the business, the church, right on up to the planet as a whole.

It is imperfect to assume that everyone will agree to get along and abide by the same rules. Therefore, you need a level of collective creation and agreeance of rules in order to try and optimise behaviours.

Once you decide that there needs to be rules, you've got to decide on who makes the rules. There are many choices, from outright dictatorship to various levels of democracy.

So in a sense, we surrender ourselves to certain rules in the understanding that we consider the cost to be greater than the benefit. This will always involve compromises - but in a truly free society freedom to stick up massive advertising hoardings conflicts with the freedom to walk down the street without having to see such things.

The middle road, the compromise, is a representative government whereby we agree to rules in the understanding that, if the rules aren't working out in the way we want, we collectively change the rulemakers.

Of course, in practice, there is plenty of evidence that this is problematic. For the most part, there is far too much government regulation over matters which the government has no part in agreeing to.

In the case of the advertising hoardings - well, presumably whomever enacted the ban would be free to be challenged in an election and the decision overturned if people felt the cost exceeded the benefit. In this case, I don't really think it's a case of violating free speech, as the advertisers are still free to speak in many forms, just that there are restrictions in a certain form.

But a dogmatic sticking to an approach where nobody has any say over anybody elses business just invites ridicule, just as communists and socialists of varying stripes invite their own ridicule with ridiculous 'property is theft' comments.
Sherlock was a private detective. Note the private bit.
People come together, through the government, to stop unwanted advertising. The law works, and the people are happy. Ericingram bitches about how the government is the biggest barrier to prosperity. -_-
I look foreward to a future in which humanity has evolved beyond simpleminded black & white thinking.
Free-market austrian school is generally "hands-off, believe the price system".

I've generally seen the "not enough" argument in conjunction with Keynesian "government stimulus" (e.g., google "not enough stimulus" and the first half-dozen articles arguing that the recent $700B + stimulus was not big enough).

I haven't seen a similar corpus of arguments that the freenmarkets haven't worked because they weren't free enough. I think the chinese experiment opening up to capitalism is a great endorsement of additional freeing of markets "at the margin" increasing economic benefit.
> Luckily, I had an offsite backup (unencrypted)

Don't call that luck. You should be proud of yourself.
It's always good for systems administrators to be able to do things with one (or both) hands tied behind their backs. Murphy always seems to conspire to create a situation where those skills are necessary....
> Advertising is what gives cities their unique visual culture.

No it doesn't. Architecture, etc, does that.

More to the point, cities are where people live, not works of art. Seeing all the advertisements in Manhattan might be fun for tourists, but they're straining for people who live there.
> It seems that you are better served if you design your mobile site in the style of an App

I think this is true but it is also much more expensive to do. So to answer your question no I dont think it is a fad but is good at bridging the gap between the two.
I think this would have been a closer analogue to Louis C.K.'s experiment if the songs had not been available for download without payment. This is just busking -- playing the music whether or not people pay, but hoping they do.

Obviously, Louis C.K. could require payment first because people had some expectation of the quality of his content already, and that won't work for an unknown musician.

That doesn't mean this is a bad idea, but it's not really the same idea.
Very cool robotics project. Were you aware of FANN (http://leenissen.dk/fann/wp) before you started your neural network implementation? Also have you tried any other machine learning techniques on that data, comparison results would be interesting.
It's possible that you could have a company that has 1% paying users that's MORE profitable than a company with 50% paying users. The size of the profit is more important than ratio of paying to non-paying, generally speaking. (And of course, in either case you pay real close attention to the conversion rate and try to get it up higher.)
To be honest, I fail to understand why Google needs to do this. Chrome is gaining market-share at a very high pace already. Are they targeting a specific group of people in this case, or is this some misdirected effort by a third party advertiser?
You're a nutter.
There are plenty of things I've done in my life that didn't make a lot of sense, but I did them just because I could. I'll happily put js.js in the same bucket and give props for creativity over usefulness.
Reflections on Trusting Trust - Ken Thompson