skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't help that Bell has sent us 3 disconnection notices, stating that if the bill for (IIRC one said) August 23rd (which has to be paid at the latest by September 23rd or they'll send out a disconnection notice) isn't paid by August 18th we'll be disconnected.

Bell is run by inbred morons. They don't even know how to bill someone, they sent out disconnection notices to everyone we know who is with them. We're currently waiting to be switched over to Cogeco Cable, because we might actually get decent phone and internet service.

For a month we had crappy internet and Bell wouldn't send out a technician. I'm from the UK and when we've had problems, there's a guy out before anyone calls because they're afraid of OfCom punishing them. Here they fucking run themselves, we were told by Bell that the problem was in our house and that we'd have to pay $70 fee to fix it (this is before they even came out), this is even though we pay $10 a month so that we don't need to pay $70 when there's a problem in the house yet Mr Speaks No English can't read that on his computer screen.

Here's the punch line, when the Technician came out he said it wasn't a problem in our house. He walked to the connection box and came back, "I think I found your problem, there's a cooked rat in there. I'll switch you over to a different line." I asked about the connection speed, because it outright sucks and he said "Well I'm not supposed to do this, but I'll put your download speed as high as I can and I'll max out the upload." It's still only 1.5 meg down (we're paying for 3) and it's god damn 1 meg upload.

I love Canada, but I have to say I've moved to a fucking third world country in terms of technology. Bell is advertising it's NEW DVR service for like $200, I had a DVR like 6 years ago provided for free by Sky when we resubscribed.
Quality Alternative to the Silk Icon Set (CC 3.0)
As the parent comment illustrates, change.gov is already under version control. It's just being maintained by an army of semi-independent volunteers using ad hoc tools.

If you build a website with a substantial audience, every change of every word is being tracked, by Google and the Wayback Machine if nothing else. That's just the facts of life in the 21st century.
I posted this because the theory has been making the rounds among neuroscientists. It came up in one of our lab meetings. And the context was provocative - brain activation patterns in neuroimaging studies of the two reflecting mirror images.

Still, I agree it's simplistic. Problem is, in order to be comprehensible to mere humans, theories can only be a tad complicated. Take two main effects with an interaction. That's hard enough. A three-way interaction is near impossible to talk about.
The writer makes some good points. OOP sometimes encourages a mindset that certain problems (maintainability, modularity, etc.) can be ignored simply because a developer is composing objects. But without proper design up-front and close attention paid to the quality of the code being written, refactoring can double when things go awry.

That being said, most of the complaints are related to undisciplined/unskilled developers for whom advanced OOP design is a minefield.
I had actually googled that at 4am before posting, and left it intentionally vague (it was not necessarily the first time he met Woz, or the only benefit Jobs found in college). But you are correct and precise.

Interestingly enough, Paul Allen and Gates also met in high school.

This means that in their case, Bill and Paul thought going to college was a good idea, up until it wasn't.

Woz ran up a huge computing bill in school. It seems Jobs wanted to continue attending college, but on his own terms, taking classes he wanted to take (there are now many colleges that allow one to create their own concentration, and two year colleges are more popular, prevalent, and accepted.) They dropped out for different reasons than Paul and Bill, but were making connections and projects by that time. Similar to Paul and Bill, Jobs and Steve already knew each other and had worked together.
OK, pretty, but what does it mean? If I were doing this, I would group similar colors together and render a pie slice for each color group, sized proportionally to the frequency of that color group's occurrence. That's what I assume this is doing, but it doesn't look like it -- there are no large color groups, only a weird gradient for each movie.

Also, the black-and-white movies have colors, which confuses me.
http://hackety.org/
Info on the Ruby equivalent, rubyllvm:

http://www.rubyinside.com/llvmruby-a-compiler-toolkit-availa...
I'd love to plug my blog here - I've touched on coding a few times but it's generally tech with a dabbling of what's up with my startup here and there and problems we have/how i get around them.

http://paulstamatiou.com
Dropping out to save money seems like such a waste to me.

Money is such an imaginary good. The difference between having 10k debt and 100k debt is marginal. Both situations you have to make monthly payments and need a source of income.

Ignore the financial part of the equation, and consider you only have X more years left to live. How would you spend your time? I would definitely stay in school, it was a great life experience. After you graduate you can worry about work and startups. Would you rather work 35 years instead of 33? Make the most of your time at school.
Tools for Accelerating Python
I love this site. Last year I posted an idea on my blog that was a collection of extremely simple sites where you get instant answers to questions like this. Is it raining, did the Cubs win today, is the stock market up or down, etc... Cool to see this one in action.

http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/startup-32-is-i...
If you've got $6.5 million to give away I'm fairly sure you can pay some lawyer $10k to set up a trust. (Heck, just give him a slice of the interest on the trust -- half a percent should cover his expenses nicely.)
Wonderful. Well thought, researched and valuable for large and small companies alike. http://wildwildeastdailies.blogspot.com
This is cool and everything, but I think it serves as a good reminder on how important libraries are. He has created a lot of software in pure C with his OS as the base, but it's barely 1980s-quality. I think any kid could create something similar with pygame or cl-sdl in many fewer lines of code.

Also, C as the language for a new OS? Why?
Some Wicke[dt] Scala
While the author makes several good points, I think he/she has been too heavily influenced by C++'s brand of OO to be making broad generalizations about the entire paradigm.
If you're really interested in this stuff you should contact a visa lawyer, email me and I can give you the name of a good one who will probably discuss your options with you for free. The following is just my experience, and not legal advice:

You don't have to hold any sort of visa to own a part of a company in the US. However, you cannot get paid legally (there are probably some exceptions with liquidity events) in the US without a visa and a social security number.

Some tricks involve setting up a foreign subsidiary that wholly owns or is wholly owned by the US company, then paying yourself as a consultant of the foreign company. This can work with UK companies, I can't speak for other countries though. Also, if you have such a foreign company that you can prove you worked for for a year in managerial capacity you can possibly qualify for an L-1 intra-company transferee visa.

The best route to a US visa is probably to stay in school. Don't worry about grades too much, but try to do things that get you recognition within the scientific community, maybe do some research and publish a paper or two. Basically, this is padding your resume for application for an O-1 (Alien of Extraordinary Ability) visa later.

One of the best options if you don't think you can qualify for that is to get a J-1 training visa. It is a very easy visa to get after you graduate and is good for 12-18 months depending on your prior work experience. You can then use this time to do things that push you closer to O-1 status so you can apply for that at the end of your J-1 or you can try and get lucky with the H1-B.

All of these things (except the L-1) require a US citizen co-founder who will fill out most of these forms and apply on behalf of you. In our company I'm that guy, so thats how I know all this stuff. Good luck!
IPhone hackers achieve a milestone: Linux boot
I could be wrong, but I feel the same could be said for rails (until very recently). It seemed to me that rail's primary target (and maybe ruby at large) is mysql and postgres support was just an afterthought (until the latest 2.2.2 release for rails)

the only places that I don't feel treat mysql as the main premiere db is python and java

in mysql's defense, they have come a long way. they finally added stuff like stored procedures and triggers
The main is the barriers to entry. Although both the Liberals and Conservatives have said they plan to pass a bill enabling the entry of foreign companies. Virgin Mobile is in Canada

As soon as companies like T-Mobile can enter the country I have little doubt Telus will go bankrupt, or near to it, as it's solely cellphone. Telus does seem to try and innovate, but it's trapped on the CDMA network but is releasing a HSPA in 2010. Rogers already has the HDSPA and has for a while, Bell has the CDMA high-speed mobile, which barely any handset manufacturers actually provide new phones in CDMA.

I actually wish I could move near the Falls so that I could steal T-Mobile USA off my old T-Mobile UK phone. The ironic thing is that international text is cheaper than going with Telus or Bell.
Pain in the eye of the beholder
Hmm, can this be used for only javascript? As in, I write my own html but use pyjamas to generate my js (which can manipulate the dom of my html).

I'm down with abstracting javascript (good riddance), but I like to be picky about html.
Is GA a common acronym that I completely missed in acronym class? What does it mean?
I did a computer engineering undergrad, I dropped out half way through and only returned years later when I learned I was about to become a father. At that point I had a small business and mortgage, it was much harder to study with all that going on, but I was also much more motivated.

Ultimately the most helpful things I learned came from
a) the co-op/internship jobs that I got through uni, and
b) technical things I learned during the last 2 semesters (ai, distributed, security), which I would not have known if I left early.
mattmazur.com, updated every now and then :)
thx, appreciate it.
So far, the wayback machine has nothing on change.gov.

My ad-hoc mechanism of tracking changes was the following: I remembered a conversation on the internet, during which the website was modified (1). I then managed to google this conversation, and find quotes on the original language.

I managed to track precisely one change, but I'm reasonably web savvy (read: I've written webapps, probably putting me in the top 1% of web users). Do you think the average citizen could manage to do even that?

(1) In fact, after it was modified, several Obamatons accused the conservative posters of lying about the contents of the website. This is another hazard of unmarked modifications.
Well, I can touch my toes with my elbows. So I reckon I'm unique.

... oh, that wasn't what you meant?
Interesting blog, reading it from the beginning for the compiler tutorial.
Thing is - global warming is indubitably happening, and, although the mix of causes is unclear, human fossil fuel usage is one of them. Getting off fossil fuels is also the economically sensible thing to do.
I agree they have a very elegant design.

I built a MVC framework for my project using their style and ended up learning a lot from them.

Also, about it being a new framework; the last I checked they were making a big change to the routing methods and folder structure.
Yeah, but as I posted above. Its a good idea to look at the other frameworks and learn from them.

But I do agree, it is better to right one for yourself and it is not that hard.
http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/5646/picture1rs7.png
The heuristic I use when choosing between them is: What is the server supporting?

If it's legacy PHP apps (like SquirrelMail, or SugarCRM) that need specific versions of PHP and mysql to be happy; then debian.

If it's more modern apps, or things that are currently in development Ubuntu. Ubuntu's python and postgresql support are excellent.
The reason I posted this is because the article reflects some of the doubts I'm beginning to have about the OOP paradigm. I've gotten more productive output in C++ coding over the last 3 years than Java, which I worked on for 6 years before that.

And I'm starting to discover that I am more productive in C than C++ which started me wondering about OOPs and what I believed to be established wisdom. This article sort of reflects the doubts I have so any specific criticisms would be great.

I mean, isn't the point of OOPS that it isn't supposed to be a minefield?
Ahh, you're the source of the "German keyboard" Apple repair story. Saw that linked on the Consumerist the other week.
Say person A is unique. If everyone else is identical to each other, then that's unique compared to person A and vice versa. So two uniques is the lower-bound, right?
"When do you institute the rule?"

When you realise you have a (potential) problem. It stops it getting worse.

"What is the quantum of a 'check'?"

More tricky, certainly. That's a potential big problem.

"Does the limit apply department-by-department or company-wide?"

Whatever makes sense.

The idea of the exercise would be basically to:

- build an appreciation throught the organisation that checks have a cost

- provide a (albeit imperfect) mechanism for exercising some control over it

Something doesn't have to be perfect to be of use.

"The last thing you want to do is encourage teams of lawyerly meta-checkers to run around enforcing rules about rules. That's costly, squared."

That's just ISO9001, isn't it? :-)
In what way do you feel like rails support for postgresql is an afterthought?

I've noticed some books / documentation assume mysql, but that's usually limited to the "and now setup your database" section.

I've been using rails + postgresql for a long time now (almost 2 years in production) and I can't think of a single problem that was due to not using mysql. Of course, I don't use every plugin or feature, so there may be something out there...
I would think the _latter_ serves more to clarify the former than the other way around. Generally that's the way it works. Surely, in a lifetime of communication you have at one point or another misspoken or been misunderstood and had to clarify your meaning. Would it be fair for listeners to disregard your later statements entirely simply because they came later?

Your casting a volunteer program as "forced labor" strongly indicates that you have a political opinion on what the interpretation _ought_ to be. It would be _convenient_ for you if that interpretation would be correct, but it would not be _accurate_.

Not only is the latter in line with the plan (to require service in exchange for the tax credit) outlined well before the election, but it also has the advantage of actually making sense in context. Why would a page describing expansion of established volunteer services suddenly shift to mean mandatory service? And for students only? And then go right back to talking about voluntary services? It would make little sense to have the meaning of an entire page hinge on a single word in a middle paragraph, and even if it were an accurate representation of intent, the sentence itself is utterly bungled. Calling it obfuscation is senseless, too, given how freely the site expresses other plans that many find disagreeable.

You want people to believe that the President-Elect is only willing to express major, substantial changes in policy via one word on one page of one site at one time, now past? Please.
Apple, thanks for the small details
I'm not an Apple fanboy, but I will say one thing: Apple really emphasizes the small details.

Case in point, when you set any Apple laptop down on a table and use one finger to open the lid, the amount of tension is just enough so that the entire laptop does not lift up with the lid.

So many laptop manufacturers don't pay attention to this small detail.

Agree, disagree?
Also, Dell price-match RAM to crucial for me which might be useful for the servers you need.
Steve Yegge's essays are a great read: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/
My blog (a combination of tarsnap, FreeBSD, and general computer security): http://www.daemonology.net/blog/
I'm insanely busy, but I still find myself visiting twice a day. Definitely hooked.
I favour ubuntu on servers mainly because it's what I use on my desktop, and it's handy to be able to write & test scripts on your desktop and deploy to the servers only once everything works.
Tesla Motors on Detroit Bailout
These icons are 16x16 - not good for iPhone or modern web design where large icons rule. Any ideas on large cheap icons?
Bezos is a remarkably good PR bot, his speech at Startup School last year was a 30 minute long worthy PR spiel for AWS and probably the least informative talk ever given at Startup School.
This would make a perfect Iphone app. If you aren't going to make it, would you mind if I did?
Ask HN: Your experience with Arch Linux on a production box.
I am currently evaluating Ubuntu and Arch Linux for our server. Which one is the easiest to manage? Which one is better in terms of security? Does having a large organisation like Canonical backing Ubuntu an advantage over Arch Linux?
The link he posted also talks about the referenced articles. McLean maintains that these peer-reviewed articles are primarily generated on the basis of funding from previous IPCC reports, and the majority of research referenced is done from the presupposition of human caused global warming. Both factors mean that dissenting voices are unlikely to be heard.
I'd say people are better informed if they get to hear the best of both sides instead of only one. Have the global warming skeptics been able to put something out that gets the publicity of "An Inconvenient Truth?"

Even in the case where one side is clearly correct, I think its position can only be strengthened in the public eye if its arguments are compared to the best opposing arguments. Only if people assume the opposite can I see a good case for one sided propaganda, but I don't know of a good reason to assume this.
Upvoter, did you read it? What did you think?
Looks like a giant spider.
How to make your site carbon-neutral with CO2Stats (YC 08)
That's really nice. I'd love to see the code, even if there are other "something similar"s in Ruby. Did you actually implement the entire x86 instruction set, or just the parts of it you have used so far?
I used http://icondrawer.com (their sets are less than $100, but not free if that's what you're looking for)
Fermat's Last Theorem [video]
Ask HN: rules of thumb for titling more difficult HN submissions?
I know many have been complaining about the lack of depth in our current HN articles. While this is partially a problem of what people post, it is also a problem of how links are titled. Many quite good articles do get submitted, but they just don't catch the eye of your average HN reader.

If you look at my submission history, you'll see that the better, and more technical articles barely get a vote, whereas a couple more mainstream articles easily hit the front page. While the mainstream articles are good, I would rather generate interest in the more technical articles and help build up the HN community.

Has anyone been successful in promoting these more beneficial links on HN? If so, what methods do you think work best? What kills an article off the bat?
No, their version had a bugger where zero in the denominator came back as "infinity."
I like Arch, but it seems not so geared toward server use as Ubuntu is. That is not to say that it could not be done properly, but Ubuntu Server would lend itself better out of the box.

In terms of security, they will be about equal under proper administration practices.

Canonical backing Ubuntu is probably an advantage for a production server environment.
If the stock market doesn't create real wealth, then why is it so successful? Is it merely siphoning real wealth away to the pockets of parasites?

The stock market is about giving money to those who will use it most effectively, so, when done right, it can be seen as very efficient resource allocation.
Someone should scrape all the blog URLs from our news.yc profiles.
No we aren't.

(this is to keep the non users guessing)
bug labs is doing awesome stuff, people should go work here. I would (try) if I wasn't caught up with this whole YC thing.
It's a somewhat hard life being a financier because your pay is so variable. You might mock the I-banker who got "only" a 5-figure bonus, but what if he took out a mortgage in 2004 with his new wife on the premise that he would be making six figures? Variation is a cost of the lifestyle, and a stressful one at that. It is hard to make any long-term plans. On that note, it's rare to find bankers without family trouble, due to both the work hours and the financial issues.
You should title them here with what they are titled there. If a title doesn't exist, give them one that is objective and not sensational.

There is no real way to get people interested in an article you think they should be.
The latter version only tells you the goal. The former version told you the mechanism by which Obama will achieve this goal, namely force. That's information which has been removed. The new information in the latter version is that college students will be paid for their work.

We will find out soon enough whether Obama really does support forced labor. I don't think it's an outlandish idea, however. Forced labor has quite a few supporters on the left (Rangel, Clark and McDermott, for instance http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:H.R.393:).

Anyway, this isn't really the place to discuss the merits of Obama's possible policy proposals. My point is this: at one time, change.gov advocated forced labor. The American people deserve to be able to easily look this up for themselves, and see what other changes were made.
If standing on a bunch of peoples' heads makes me smart, sign me up for cheerleading!
That supposed "design flaw" did not render your computer inoperable. You did. By your own admission it was operating normally until you "upgraded" it, breaking it in the process. Don't complain about anybody else until you can take responsibility for your own mistakes.

I don't see how the store was unhelpful, given what you've already described. What nerve they have--when you walk in with a broken out-of-warranty laptop--to suggest replacing it with a new, functioning, under-warranty one. How rude and unhelpful it is to suggest a solution with a 100% chance of enabling you to have a functioning machine again! Instead, you wanted free out-of-warranty repair, which is not a service they offer. Their "attitude" has nothing to do with it: they can't give you what you want, and you didn't want what they offered.

And again with the non-Apple shops, you're being completely obtuse.
Apple does not own those shops or set their rates. Being "authorized" only means that they can do repairs under warranty and receive service manuals and parts directly from Apple. Every other laptop vendor has a similar program. If a shop ripped you off, you can take it up with them. The OEM has nothing to do with it.

Finally, as I said before, you're not speaking at all to the original subject. Instead, you're bitching about how much money you spent fixing your mistake.
I'll add mine here, I try not to participate in blog noise and only write about things I've actually, so it might not be so interesting for memetracking:

http://blog.kiwitobes.com/
Except that green activists often encourage individual action.