skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, of course free users cost more money than paying users: they aren't paying!

You're twisting his words. While it's obvious that free users will inherently incur a net cost, it's not obvious that the actual per-user cost of a free user is higher than that of a paying user. The latter is still a very interesting observation.
I don't think the author is trying to say paper maps are better overall than interactive, just that there are aspects (some of them aesthetic) that paper maps do better, and it's good to be mindful --- not up-in-arms, just mindful --- of what we're losing.

The only clear claim of superiority I got from this article was that large paper maps are better at conveying the gestalt of their subject, which seems like a straightforward enough argument. Not a novel argument; Tufte made a cottage industry out of it.
Ruby did us a big favor and made it possible to implement something like Rails in a way that switched between Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 at runtime. There are no changes to the 1.9 parser that cause it to puke on 1.8 syntax.

My understanding is that in Python, you need to use the 2to3 tool for a program of any non-trivial size to have a single codebase that targets both. Please correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm only picking this up by osmosis with the Python community.

Ruby 1.9 is also significantly more runtime compatible with Ruby 1.8 than Python 3 is with Python 2. For example, the object model and semantics for creating classes and object is entirely unchanged between Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9. The Unicode change took great pains to remain compatible with programs using BINARY data for ASCII-only characters, for instance (I personally believe that this was a mistake going forward, but it results in better-than-expected backwards compatibility with Ruby 1.8 programs mixing source code and external ASCII-only data).

As a result, even though Python 3 was released around the same time as Ruby 1.9.1 (the first stable Ruby 1.9 release), the Ruby community is much further along the adoption curve than Python is.
Rupert Murdoch follows 4 people on Twitter: Are you one of them?
This is awesome. Now if the site just supported faceted search..
Let The Race Begin: Google Launches Elections Hub
I live in a suburb of Minneapolis now, and I don't recall there being a city in this area with the phenomenon you mention, so I'd be glad if you would kindly let me know which city you have in mind. I'll try to look for some businesses there and see what the experience is like.
If folks could pay 0,50 with a click for this, I think many would.
As I read I jumped ahead to look at the pictures and was all impressed about the attention to detail on the map on the right - look at how "Kettering" is curved so it fits. The labels are clear and not fuzzy.

I was impressed with his map.

And then to my surprise I discover that his map is the one on the left!

Maybe in a large printed version his is better? I don't know. All I can tell from the photos is that the computer generated one is better.
If you register your IP with AOL, they send you individual notices when each user marks your mail as spam.

http://postmaster.aol.com/Postmaster.FeedbackLoop.php
Brand new NYC-based startup looking for lead developers
funding/conceptualization process has been in works for past three months. am in hiring/execution phase now, either on contractual basis or equity. NYC-based and recent college gras always a plus! need creatively-minded and flexible individuals with excellent development acumen.

mum on details - happy to fill you in per request - thanks!

reach me at ali.shafei@gmail.com
The article contains numerous inaccuracies.

Statistics that Spain has a special problem of piracy are known to be fabricated by RIAA's cousin.

BTW, the formed head of that organization is on trial for massive corruption.

The complain is not about a judge closing a website. That was always possible. Instead the law allows an administrative comission to close a web without a judge approving it, thus the outrage.

P2P as such, without profit, is simply legal. On the other hand, in Spain until today, an illegal "tax" (forbidden by EU Supreme Court recently) was applied to any hardware with the excuse that it can store protected works.
Gmail is not my primary email, and I access Gmail via IMAP only. In any event I don't think what they see would be that useful. My Google Reader usage is more closely aligned with my interests, but I rarely star anything so they won't know the difference between feeds/articles that are genuinely interesting to me, and those that I use just to ensure I am up to date.

The manufacturer of my car has never displayed an ad trying to get me to take it in for a service, or sing the merits of the newest model that hits home for an existing owner. The various credit related ads seem to think I don't know money is fungible, or that I can't count. The various health and beauty products are extremely misguided. The food related ads are beyond stupid. The cell related ones assume that ETFs don't exist. I can go on, and on ....
I want to be able to manage other config files that aren't in my home directory at all. Some of them are even owned by root: httpd-vhosts.conf, /etc/hosts, php.ini... any good solution for that? I'm willing for it to be complex if it works.
Whites in America test higher than Finns in Finland.

No. You should read the blog post I linked to. American whites scores 524 (tied with Belgium for #6-#7 in the white world), Finland is #1 at 546.

Immigrants in both the US and Finland score roughly the same, about 500 pts. Finland has a larger gap, since their non-immigrants score considerably higher.

Make no mistake - the inequality is caused by Finns scoring very high, not by their immigrants scoring very low.
Gordon Brown's Downing Street emails 'hacked'
Why ask me? The original Russian text talks about civil offence.
4 Big Moves Google Should Make in 2012
I'm from Belarus myself, moved to United States when I was 13 with my family.

Be careful though, to immigrate to the United States on an H1 (work visa), you need a university degree. I'd suggest either trying to immigrate to Europe (any EU country) and getting a degree there, getting a degree in Belarus, or perhaps going to the United States as a foreign student.

[Edit: s/college/university/ -- college is an American term. My fifth grade English teacher in Belarus must be angry at me for forgetting Queen's English that I was taught :-)]
I can't imagine why someone downmodded you. And I'm equally surprised at how large he made the label for Roebling bridge.

One bridge gets as much space as a city? I looked it up on wikipedia - the bridge has lots of historical value sure - but more than an entire city?
I use mobile Safari.
When I looked at Finlands school system awhile back, I also wondered how their lack of immigrants play into it, but also if it could really scale to US size.
The timing is not tied to our move off of Rackspace and on to our own hardware, or our move to multiple providers. Noah and JD finally had time to work on making this data public and so we did. The fact that it happened at the end of the year is coincidence.

Re multiple sites, we're working on it.
maybe they relaxed that part recently! I'm pretty sure they told us about the 500 employee part at the time, but that was a couple of years ago.
While the article may be accurate in "theory" - I can say that my iPhone 4 got significantly better battery life when I was careful to kill all but the currently running application. I think the issue is that some of the apps that I was running may have been abusing the "background" feature, and so switching to home didn't kill them - as evidenced by how hot my iPhone would get while on the home screen - which results in a pretty trivial stimuli/response strategy: If you have been on the home screen for 15+ minutes, and your iPhone is hot - either Reboot it or simply close down the "background/running" apps. Note - that lacking the built-in tools that the droid has to track things like CPU/Memory usage (and, in ICS - Battery Usage) - we have to resort to things like "Is my iPhone acting Slow? Is it Hot? "

If I've been using my iPhone for a few days, and there are a zillion apps in the "Recently Used" bar, I simply reboot the iPhone - may take a couple minutes, but requires no effort as compared to playing whack-a-mole with the Launch Bar.
I’ve been saying this for a while now and it’s only getting truer: the SOPA war is being lost because the people fighting against it have let hatred for their intellectual opponents compromise their case.

Rather than treat the other side as misguided everyone insists on treating them as evil. Using force as the only tool rather than trying to convince people.

Look at all the people who are STILL attacking GoDaddy! The point of a boycott is to give the company a chance to be in good standing again if they do what you want. If you then continue to attack after they’ve given in you remove any incentive for other companies to bend to your demands. This is very basic logic.

While on the other side the Media Companies are offering nothing but incentives. Read the last couple of paragraphs of the article. The Media Companies are rewarding Spain with all kinds of investments that they were holding up until the law gets passed.

I honestly think the media companies are going to give up on SOPA but only for PR reasons. They’ll then slip each individual component into other legislation so it goes virtually unnoticed. That’s what they did in Spain in that the SEL was a general law aimed at stimulus to maintain the economy not specifically about media (translate the “critics” section of this page: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_de_Econom%C3%ADa_Sostenible).

But that’s the problem with forcing people rather than convincing them. Eventually you have to look away and that’s when they go back to doing exactly what you tried to stop.
A fair question for sure but it wasn't the case in São Paulo.
Looks really nice. How many people actually carpool? Where I live in relation to where I work it's not really a possibility for me, and even if it were I'm not sure I'd like the constraints, i.e. I can't work late even if I'm really in a groove on something, I can't run any errands, etc.
New year brings new laws and regulations for small businesses
If we're saying for "for software devs", I think that http://dice.com has to be mentioned.

It's the top or a top board for contract programming.

While hn talks about start-ups a lot, we should certainly consider that a start-up is not for everyone, not even for everyone who's a good programmer.
2011 INFOGRAPHIC on the social media strategy blog stats
Taxis in high barnet
Dial 020 8449 0000 and get 50% off compare to other Taxi Minicab Car companies Airport Heathrow Barnet Gatwick Luton Stansted City London Transfer Local Transfer Surrey Executive Cars
The Chill of Disillusion: Leonardo da Vinci
I was thinking more about having optional type annotations to facilitate better optimization in (JIT) compiler based implementations of Python, like PyPy, Jython, IronPython or others. Type annotations may also be useful for doing some static sanity checking.
Sure it supports splitting dotfiles among multiple repositories. Just create multiple repositories and change the path in the post-commit hook. Deleting symlinks would be nice, but I'm not sure it's worth the complexity implementing it would add.

vcsh sounds like a neat system if you need to have multiple repositories with the same working directory, but I don't understand the advantages of this for managing your dotfiles. My eyes glazed over when reading about the proposed system in section 3.2 of the README.
Rabobank has a similar system.

Account access requires a keypad widget, an account number, the widget's serial number, a pin and the generated one-time pass.

Any transactions require a second one-time pass derived from a different algo.
Would it be almost fair to compare the EU to the United States?
Clearly that doesn't stop the mail being delivered to these businesses. Using their address as a navigational aid would seem to suffice.

That does not address the business concern of capturing new business via signage, but the whole point here is that urban dwellers also have legitimate concerns and that private business interest should yield when reasonable collective concerns are being addressed.

[edit: in fact, there is startup opportunity here that can address both concerns, and it would seem to be a win-win. I don't have a car myself, but last time I rode one shutgun, the nav device (Lexus) had option to pepper the map with fast food, etc. icons. Hang your billboard there and spare the rest of us who object to being subjected to visual/textual noise that we have no means to avoid otherwise.]
I think a lot of what current traditional schools do is merely an echo or inertial continuance of practices that at best made sense hundreds of years ago. They developed in a time where the technology landscape was more limited, there were fewer alternative methods, and the economic competitive context was less global and more local. Now we have the technology to record the best video/audio lectures on a given subject once and mass distribute them for free. We can create software that automatically grades massive amounts of test and homework submissions. We can push essay submissions into systems that automatically check for potential plagiarism against large databases of previously written papers. Instead of dead paper resumes we can have online portfolios of actual work products and videos showing people directly exercising particular skills in real time, in order to convey legitimacy and make purported abilities tangible. With Google we can quickly lookup trivial facts on the go as needed rather than having to memorize them. All of the above frees up humans to spend more time learning fundamental ideas and concentrating on their own health, wealth and happiness and less on mindlessly carrying out superficial traditions, doing makework or bowing to arbitrary external authority. We can be more real. And do more, faster and better.
Agreed. We did a little PR experiment for the holidays where we offered to analyze your Email data for 2011 and the response was enormous: http://yearinreview.toutapp.com.

Big Data is great and all, but the companies that can make meaning out of data are the ones that will win.
After watching that, I could easily support banning 3rd party advertising.

But removing the ads for the business just under the ad does not strike me as better. It makes the business district look sleepy and quiet, rather than active and bustling.

And as a resident I don't mind ads telling me what I can do/get/buy at a location - that's sort of what I want when I visit a business district.
So out of 17 studies, you focused and criticized ones?

The way this works is you have to show even one study that contradicts the 17 other studies.

Oh there is one - except it was funded by the Atkins Co.
I was born and live in Sao Paulo, and this law (Lei Cidade Limpa) really helped to reduce the visual pollution here.

Here are some links for pictures of before/after. For more images, you can search for images of Lei Cidade Limpa SP or Lei Cidade Limpa São Paulo (we use the tilde here, you can remove it if you prefer)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonydemarco/sets/72157600075508...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sueluzfotos/page4/

http://ftorquato.wordpress.com/2008/08/26/gilberto-kassab-de...

And here's a link with a article in Sao Paulo prefecture about this law (google-translated to English).

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pt&tl...

Cheers, -B
I think more important than obsession over column sizes (in most databases, varchar columns only use the space necessary, not the maximum, more or less) is using correct datatypes. E.g. using varchar for a column that you know will only have numbers. Or using int for timestamps (e.g. using the unix epoch offset) and then having to do a lot of converting. Or sticking serialized objects from your application domain into blob columns.

Most databases have a lot of built in safety and functionality if you are using the correct datatypes, but that is something you can't benefit from if you are treating everything like a blob or a string.
It is now illegal to access any foreign website in the Republic of Belarus
Free Science Fiction Books for Kindle: Linked List of SciFi Classics
> I'm willing to believe (as I have never specifically tested this) that suspended third-party from-the-App-Store ("User") applications are immediately killed without this first stage (although then it would seem weird that they participate in the cross-application memory warning system at all)

According to the iOS Application Programming Guide[0],

> Suspended apps are not notified of termination but f your app is currently running in the background state (and not suspended), the system calls the applicationWillTerminate: method of your app delegate.

(this is the iOS5 doc, but the iOS 4 version essentially said the same thing)

So a suspended app is killed immediately, a running (backgrounded) app gets the standard applicationWillTerminate: message.

[0] http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/iPhone...
If we had any web skills we could build our own site :-)
In my part of the world positions are mostly filled by word of mouth but I guess that's true everywhere.
However I'm looking to relocate to another country and I wouldn't mind working in a small shop again.
Terrible article

1. Extreme weight loss
2. No control
3. Recipients re-gain some weight with no more oversight.

Shocking!
Pope wears skullcap to symbolize "jew" ownership of catholic church.
Another great (modern) Vim colorscheme
Is there a tool that lets you trigger some of these state changes (Suspended -> Killed, for example) for debugging/testing purposes? Trying to get the OS to forcibly kill an app due to memory pressure is something I've had trouble doing on Android and seems like it could be a problem on iOS also.
By sending out unsolicited bulk mail, the owner caused most of his own headaches.

Since when is offering a free services an excuse to steal from your clients afterwards?
> This was much worse on my 3G.

Which is why Apple did not enable it on the 3G in the first place. (did you jailbreak it, or are you talking about the 3GS?)
To speed up the process, you can just click and hit enter twice. You do have a point though. They also make email notifications a pain to change: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=notifications
I don't always comment on HN, but when I do, I just read the submission title.

Apologize my laziness.
It's worth noting that Obama, upon signing, issued a signing statement that said that he was against the indefinite detention provision, and importantly, that he would not indefinitely hold Americans without trial:

"Moreover, I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation. My Administration will interpret section 1021 in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law."
Challenges Associated With Sciatic Nerve Pain | Sciatic Nerve Pain
fair points for sure. obviously we're hoping the answer is "with this app, more people than normal".
Are other countries really doing that much better than the United States? It seems like most of the worlds top Universities are in the US and filled with students mostly from, the US.

Sure, they may score better on the tests for comparing students across the world, but it seems like the same people saying this are the same ones complaining about standardized testing in the US.
It might help if you were to explain where "there" is, because what you're saying sounds like it might have been an interesting, albeit annoying, parallel universe.

However, Fraser's article is correct in all the key areas, and your claims to the contrary are not.
The 5A stops at Herndon and often at Tysons/Westpark as well. I don't mean this as a nitpick; it's relevant because a direct trip from Rosslyn to Dulles could take the airport lanes on the toll road all the way from the 66/267 split, but the additional stops mean the bus can't take advantage of the airport lanes, making for a painfully slow trip. I've done it a few times, and it's just not practical if one is travelling for business and at all pressed for time.

National on the other hand is a downright pleasure to fly out of. I go through National once every week or two and Dulles every month or so. Parking, security lines, and everything else are so much better at National.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
Make habits, not resolutions
Ask HN: Got space to sublease in Palo Alto or MV?
Are there any startups out there in Palo Alto or Mountain View that have spare work space they'd like to sublease?

I'm looking for some, and the 'AirBnB for office space' startups don't have local inventory. How would you find space?
Tom Dale and Yehuda Katz's Pairing Setup
Statistics that Spain has a special problem of piracy are known to be fabricated by RIAA's cousin.

But are also supported by a 15 minute conversation with anyone who lives here - piracy is utterly rampant to a degree I've never seen anywhere else. I was shocked when I came here.
Whenever a successful act is presented to Americans they tend to throw out the same generic defense we used to see on technology forums all the time: "That's good for them, but that won't scale for us!"
No, the geniuses are definitely not right on this score. Maybe this technique works sometimes, but if it does then it's due to other reasons or pure luck.
The cost of this is a loss of jobs for sign makers (and their suppliers), marketing agencies, and a loss of income for new businesses (and their suppliers) that want to make their presence known. Basically, the economy in that city is worse off overall as a result, and there are fewer jobs to go around.
my company doesn't have 500 employees either. I didn't know about the Dun and Bradstreet number though.
Balancing the two sides of a marketplace is one of the toughest tasks for an early two-sided platform. Great work!
So the guy misleads his users by offering a free service and then spamming his users, and then proceeds to blame the freemium model for the consequences of his own inappropriate (and in many countries illegal) actions?

Am I supposed to take this seriously?
I'm sorry, but this "accurate in theory" junk needs to stop, it's this sort of meaningless reliance on inaccurate anecdotal accounts that allows the misinformation that the article talks about to spread.

The article specifically points out that iOS doesn't allow apps to "abuse" background processing; you get 10 minutes and then the OS forces your app to standby. If an app uses the indefinite background processing for something other than what's permitted, then the app is rejected from the App Store, and they're very strict on this one.

The Android/ICS model you talk about is exactly the kind of process management that Apple specifically avoided in iOS, and for good reason. IMO, that's the exact sort of thing that I'd never want to do on my smartphone.

Your routine may keep you happy, but please don't respond to a well-researched and accurate article with the exact opposite of the truth; you're basically just plugging your ears and shouting "NUH-UH!" here.
How Ernest Dichter, an acolyte of Sigmund Freud, revolutionised marketing
They have a few products that haven't had any forward momentum in a while (stagnant) -- go look at entp and lighthouse if you want more of an example
Writing HTML5 Web Apps using Backbone.js and GAE
I agree. While pilots have to be very cautious, being a passenger going into and out of that airport is a lot of fun!