skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I bank at a small Japanese bank in the middle of nowhere. One day, I visited a small hospital, also in the middle of nowhere. As it happened, I did not have cash on me to pay the fee. I told the nurse to please wait for a moment while I went next door to use the ATM.

Next door is a gambling establishment, with an ATM outside of it. I tried getting cash and the ATM refused my card.

So I ended up walking three blocks (small town, luckily) and found myself a bank branch, which took my card. I returned to the hospital, paid the bill, and went on with my day.

Some time later I mentioned to my bank manager "By the way, I think my card is bugged -- it got rejected by a reader the other day." And I told him the circumstances.

"Sir, do you remember when we gave you your credit card that you promised not to gamble with it?"

"Yes, of course. I don't gamble, ever."

"We appreciate that, sir. Neither does the bank. Nor will we permit our customers to hurt themselves by gambling. Accordingly, we do not site any of our ATMs by gambling establishments."

"Oh, I can respect that. Of course, your competitors do, and that makes them money."

"Our real competitors do not. We have an understanding with them on this issue: no honorable bank in $SMALL_TOWN_JAPAN will countenance our customers losing their livelihoods while our eyes are still white. [Japanese idiom, means "while we still draw breath"]"

"But there really is an ATM in front of it?"

"It is from a Tokyo bank, and a disreputable Tokyo bank at that. And let them put an ATM there. They have no branch in this town, nor will they ever."

"But they don't need a branch, do they?"

"No. Bank A, Bank B, Bank C, and ourselves have enough branches to have 98% share of deposit accounts in this town. A, B, and C share our understanding of the importance of protecting this community."

"Wait, so NOBODY can use that ATM?"

"Maybe they can soak some tourists. wry smile Its a free market, you know."

I've got to say, the capitalist in me thinks "Oh crikey, cartelization". The rest of me really, really likes my bank.

[Edit: I just looked in my dictionary and it says that the actual idiom is "While my eyes are still black". I guess that means my memory is faulty. Wouldn't be the first time. Take note, students of the language.]
Yes, even though Ramsey apparently advises debit card users to opt for "credit" rather than "debit", his hardline stance might create a problem if you're accustomed to using credit cards for major purchases.
YouTube Uglifies Embedded Videos With A Search Bar
I think you could argue that part of capitalism is guaranteeing quality service, and that cartelization in this case is an effort to treat you with more respect. That's a fascinating story.
parsedatetime (http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/) is a fantastic Python library for parsing natural language date / time strings.
$3B would be a pretty good value for Facebook given that 2008 revenues were projected at roughly $300m (no idea if they'll hit that). Twitter has raised $20m in funding, so I'd guess, this early on, that their investors wouldn't be super excited about cashing out at $100m in hand-wavey stock values.
Romantic Anniversary Ideas
Are you unable to think of any romantic anniversary ideas this year? Do you feel like you've tried everything under the sun? Here are few tips that will help you get started, and let you leave your frustrations behind. Have a look at these suggestions, and improvise or add to them wherever you like. They will certainly be a nice break from the common "dinner and a movie" outing.
Seriously? This is going to get voted up? Don't even try passing that- he should "practice what he preaches" crap on me to justify why he should do this.

For the record, I'm personally against credit cards too. I only keep an AMEX, for emergency use, which has a zero balance every month.

We're all usability fanatics here, and adding friction like this is asinine. If anything, give people a discount for not using a credit card or use this as an opportunity to preach to them.

I'd also be able to at least empathize with this nutjob if he said it was because of the fees. These fees are why some small businesses are still cash only or credit card above a certain amount.
OK, I get the "debt is bad" angle here.

But just so you know - the $50 limit on fraud that you're protected by if someone steals your credit card? It's not there if you use a check card. If you want to shop online, use a real credit card. If you want to shop offline, use a regular ATM card + PIN identification.

http://www.pirg.org/consumer/banks/debit/fact.htm
You know, those of us who travel internationally find it much more convenient to carry a CC then a debit card.

Also, putting business expenses on a CC is just plain common sense, especially if you work for someone else. Why should I lose interest waiting for reimbursement?
uber_nerd++
If you travel internationally, or spend money in places you don't trust 100%, or want 1-5% cashback, or in any way want the protection that comes from calling your credit card company and saying the magic words "That is a fraudulent charge" and not spending 6 weeks proving it, then you're an idiot for using a debit card.
Nokia 6101 Local Test Mode
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Matt, buddy.. If that's what you need to tell yourself ;-)
It may be fascinating, but it is also entirely anecdotal and says nothing about the country as a whole.

In the middle of Kyoto, and in downtown Tokyo I have repeatedly seen branches of major japanese banks that have lottery ticket vending booths built into their exterior walls. Talk about "disreputable"!
What other understandings do they have? Gamblers can also walk 3 blocks, this attitude might end up doing more harm than good. I've heard a few things about Japan.
How do you do the clustering? Open source tool/software? Nice site!
Not a problem at all, if it's because few people are deploying on Linux. No-one runs an OS for its own sake, it's just part of the infrastructure for getting real work done.
+1 sounds about right. My offers were 80k to 120k. (I'd say I went to a pretty decent university, but I wasn't too amazing.) There is massive massive variance based on the kind of position you are talking about.

I would say your numbers seem about right, though with the caveat that CS graduates can end up doing all sorts of things from IT-gruntwork-level tasks to rank and file software engineers, all the way to, yes, quants who are offered lots and lots of money.
I'm ambivalent about changing so many functions to return iterators. It's cleaner for experienced coders, but harder to understand for beginners.
I agree. In fact, this is a point that many people forget about Japan:

Just like the US is big enough to accommodate both a sub-prime crisis and Dave Ramsey, Japan is big enough to both accommodate cosmopolitan financial centers like Tokyo and small farming towns where "a bank from Tokyo" is understood as an insult.
There is only one Google, but there are many crumbling behemoths. A few years ago I read a statistic about the percentage of the workforce employed by large traditional corporations, and it had continually dropped; but like a lot of statistics, it was not clear how it accounted for the trend in hiring temp or contract workers through third party front firms.

While the stability of large organizations over time, and the relative importance of all large organizations, are separate concepts, both are dropping. While Mormonism or other religions may grow and shift, in general the trend is toward the less centrally organized sects, and the big centrally organized, heirarchical ones are becoming less so, and becoming more run by the lower levels of the organizational pyramid.

Of course the Pentagon is not just an office building. Any reasonable person would believe that one of the hijacked airplanes could have been piloted into a NORAD installation if that had suited Al Qeada's purposes, but NORAD is only useful against other dying behemoths of giant organizations, such as the soviets, and thus isn't nearly as important as it used to be, and would never be bothered with by Al Qeada.

I think the reasons that we did not catch or kill Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora are exemplary of the ways that giant organizations fail. We believed we were strong enough to pursue other goals at the same time (Iraq, various shifts in policy under the cover of the Patriot Act, etc) and thus tolerated various internal groups siphoning off resources to persue those goals, and when things did not go as expected, we could not move fast enough to get back on track, and the internal groups had grown too powerful to stop. If we ever catch Osama it will probably be because we pay someone else to do it for us; I think that is loosely analogous to how IBM had to pay Bill Gates to write DOS for them, because their own internal politics and bureaucracy made it impossible for them to themselves.

One bullet point I left out of my list above, is higher educational institutions. I remember in the early days of slashdot, the education career questions were all of the type "should I go for a Phd. or settle for a Masters" or "the place I want to attend had Computer Engineering instead of Computer Science, does that matter" and stuff like that. Look at the educational career dicision questions on slashdot or here these days -- it is all variations on "should I drop out" "how hard is it to get a job with no degree" and so on.
The premise is a little bit off I think. We didn't "take 20% and do whatever we wanted" as he suggested. We just mis-allocated. We got overly interested in houses.

We have to produce before we can consume. Many of the brightest minds and much of our productive workforce became involved in building over-sized houses. There was much money/paper shuffling that basically boiled down to pretending lots of stuff about over-sized houses. We didn't need so many houses. Unfortunately, we borrowed that production capacity from ourselves in other areas. Now we're short on all sorts of the things we should have been producing instead of too many houses. We have to work extra hard now to get caught up on those things. Oh and all of the businesses that basically existed in order to make pretend money based on too many houses are hosed.

There. Mine's shorter.
market saturation is not unique to technology sectors.

apple should stop working on features and start working on reducing manufacturing costs.
Wasn't there a research done by Ford, which has shown, that long periods of overtime decrease productivity?

Mentioned in:
http://lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presenta...
Horizon Gold Credit Card
Horizon Gold Credit Card - The Truth Revealed
$100 million seems like a more fair valuation of Twitter to me. I feel like people around here ("here" meaning Silicon Valley, etc) overvalue Twitter.
Even if only 100 people click through (a small number I would say...) and you only convert 50% into regular readers then that doesn't sound great.

But.

They are readers interested in what you have to say - and interested in your subject matter. 100 DNC click throughs probably has the same effect as 500 google click throughs :)

I would click on from DNC :)
YouTube adds a search bar to every embedded video
If Britain does trash it's civil liberties, where would people consider emigrating to? A friend is considering Ireland...
Strictly, strictly, strictly speaking, you're right: 1.8.7 is the current "production" version of Ruby.

However, Ruby 1.9 has been around for about a year now (considered a "development" release) but Ruby 1.9.1 will become the "production" version of Ruby when it's released in the next month (yeah, I know that makes no sense). The current preview releases are pretty spot on though - so we're in a transitional phase. Ruby 1.9's performance is also somewhat better than that of 1.8.

On the 1.8 front, Ruby 1.8 has had what's called KCODE for years now, which enables Unicode support for various bits and pieces (primarily regular expressions). More info on this here: http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/the_kcode_variable_...
ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-514.pdf
why did he freakout? surely the idea of distance = ping time and there being some sort of timeout going on is one of the simplest explanations?
Digital Education: Mapping Innovation
Dell Mini 9 - Practical Developer's Review
I think he's been a manager for too long. I can see the same reasoning coming from my father (who owns an architecture firm).

With business you're spending a lot of time in meetings, travelling for business or in various phone calls. To be sure, these things are taxing, but I get the feeling that one can do many more hours of these things in a week than one can with something like programming.

From that (business) perspective it seems natural that everyone else should work more. And I think that it's here where a wise manager will work longer (if it is in his or her interest, of course), but will not require the same of people whose jobs cannot support such a routine.

And I agree, Jason's advice is, in general, very sound.
I've never used Loopt. I thought it existed to tell you when people you knew were nearby.
Ha, classic. I'm married though, so I need to tell myself a lot more than that.
I too was in Japan recently, and was amazed at how much time they spent at work. Yeah, not the same thing as productivity.
Step away from the keyboard, kid. You're too stupid to own a computer.
$100 million in cash maybe, though that would allegedly be about their valuation as of last funding round.

$100m in Facebook stock I'd turn down too, if I were them.
GAAAHHHH!!! Enough with this credit cards are bad BS.

Cons with CCs: If you don't manage your funds well, you git hit with a 20%+ interest rate and will never likely climb out of that hole. Solution: learn to manage debt. Seriously, most CC companies now allow direct account transfers. If you are that scared, whenever you make a purchase, go home, log in to your bank's website (every major bank has one, if yours doesn't, open an account with one that does), and pay off the card immediately. Its not rocket science, just basic financial management.

Pros with CCs: Fraud protection. Easily one of the biggest plus points of CCs. Concerned that there is a charge on you statement that you didn't approve? Just call the company and tell them that it is a fraudulent charge and then its their problem. If nothing else, this easily makes credit cards worth the time it takes to manage them. After this, we have the easy record of all transactions, cash back, convenience, safety from the fact that you don't have a giant wad of cash with you, and last but not least, a credit history which can be used to reduce interest rates on long term loans.

Seriously, this anti-debt attitude is in general ridiculous. Is excessive and badly-managed debt bad? Absolutely, its one of the worst situations to be in but there is a simple way to avoid it: manage your finances. Swearing off all debt is foolish and inefficient.
Initially I was excited about 3.0 but as you pointed out it will take some time for modules to get converted over. I think this is very important. For me, one of the big selling points of Python is the large number of libraries written for it. With my luck I will need to use an obscure library that won't be updated any time soon by the author. So I'll have to stick with 2.5 or 2.6 because I need to get my job done rather than migrate a library.

It's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem because without widespread use of 3.0 no one will feel pressure to upgrade their library. I'm hoping, out of the goodness of their own hearts, that everyone will upgrade their libraries (for no immediate benefit but the gratitude of 3.0 users!). Maybe a website badge should be created for this accomplishment!
lol i cant believe you numskulls didnt get his joke. unless the OP was a tard too? :/
I'm confused, can I use my debit card as credit? Whenever I try to use it, people ask "debit or credit" and it'll work as credit.
That hits close to home, I'm afraid.
Flash Bestiary: A compendium of actionscript code
The total effective tax-rate (national+municipal) in Japan for entry-level workers is under 20% unless you work a ridiculous amount of overtime, and even then it wont be much more. Unlike US jobs, most salaried positions in Japan pay overtime after the 40th hour.
A better approach would be to teach people how to use a credit card properly.

I've setup my credit card to be paid off in full on the due date each month so I pay no interest. My savings account is offset against my mortgage, so it's generally better to pay by credit card as that defers savings account withdrawals (thus saving mortgage interest) by up to 45 days.

The card fee is paid by reward points on the card and there's enough extra points per year for between $200 & $400 in store vouchers.

So combining the mortgage interest savings, the rewards payouts and the fact I pay no interest or annual fees, I'd guess the card saves me ~$1000 a year.

As a debit card is just as easy to use as a credit card, the argument that I'm likely to spend more with a credit card is bogus as well.

I suspect the fees Dave Ramsey would have to pay on credit card transactions may be higher than on debit cards though...
Apple has already anticipated this problem by releasing the iphone and Apple tv.
The End of Wikipedia
Thanks. If I read your comment right, poor to average programmers in big cities will get $40k~/year after taxes, etc. Hmm... I guess it's not so different after all, I was thinking fresh programmers're getting $70k/year after taxes.

In my experience (I'm still in univ. but got some offers from companies), we will get base salary: $2k ~ 2.5k/month after taxes etc, plus apartment(simple one) and transport fee. The yearly bonus is 5 times of base salary, but usually we get only 4 times. This is from fairly big Japanese company, slightly lower than SONY or HONDA.
The job being talked is core software development at company's main business. Too bad we don't have 401k plan like in other countries.

I went to Deutsche Bank last year, and it's alot different.
We'll get $64k/year after tax, almost no yearly bonus
and small allowance for apartment. The job being talked is the usual software development for desktop products.
Sure, but you're still helping someone do something by taking part in the network. If that someone is doing something illegal, you're well on your way to getting in trouble. Especially if most of the activity in the network is illegal, then it'll be hard to argue that you didn't know what could happen. It's pretty much what killed Napster, although in that case it was the company that ran the network that got shut down.

I suppose it'll have to be a serious problem for someone to make the effort of finding and decoding the data, but I don't doubt that sooner or later someone will decide that it's worth it.

If there's going to be processing of the data, and not just storage, the local node will need to have access to the encryption keys. That should make the work of the investigator easier. With enough cunning trickery it'll probably be hard to find them, but with access to the hardware I have no doubt that it's doable.

Hm. So the work needs to be done in a virtual machine that is given access to a local file storage and the freeserve (let's call it that, sounds nice) network. The vm needs to query the network for tasks to be performed, download the data for the task, process it, and upload the result.. Should be a fun project to design it.

Fairly simple. Except for all the technical and legal problems :)
Employers / recruiters can use the bad economic news (Adobe layoffs, etc) in conjunction with the "exploding offer" to drive down wages of new graduates.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/11/26.html
Marketing? Private list to create appearance of exclusivity.

"Republishing: PLEASE DO NOT REPRINT WITHOUT PERMISSION

Forwarding: PLEASE DO FORWARD TO SMART PEOPLE"
That's a very good insight. I couldn't say it better myself.
Marc Salem: How the mind creates reality and meaning
And messaging complete strangers trying to get laid isn't?
"Technology sales are down 20%! ... I know 'cause I talked to my buddy who works at a computer store and he said he normally sells 5 laptops a day, but yesterday when we met for a beer he said he only sold 4."

That would be about as worthwhile of a generalization.

That said, I'd be surprised if wages weren't down across the board, with more emphasis on fresh graduates. This is hardly a surprise with lots of layoffs and a depressed economy.
Any elaboration on where the 10% performance hit comes from?

I read over the "What's New" and Guido's announcement, but I didn't find any mention of it.
Does Dave Ramsey's company pay all of its suppliers with cash, debit card or equivalent? That would really be practicing what you preach.
If you can't manage your own spending habits, use a debit card. If you treat your credit card spending like you would a debit card and pay off the balance in full, there are slew of benefits.

Here's a great credit card offer I recently found:
http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/banking_lending/credit_c...

2% CASH BACK ON EVERY PURCHASE, automatically deposited into an interest bearing account at the end of the month, which has an optional checking option providing free checks and full ATM reimbursements, no fees.

If instead you used a lousy BOA debit card, you'd have no cash back, a bunch of fees, and a hell of time fighting any illegitimate charges.
I think the problem there is with Conals artistic skills, rather than his software. Pancito (http://www.acooke.org/pancito-code/index.html), which works more or less the same way as Pan, has some more compelling examples.
BTW, for those interested in finding out how long your emacs has been running, I wrote an emacs uptime package a while back:

http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/files/uptime.el
V. I. Lenin: To The All-Russia May Day Subbotnik

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/may/02.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subbotnik

History has made a full circle.
Lessig: Can Obama Create a Transformational Presidency?
Miles O'Brien To Leave CNN as the network shutters its science, space and tech unit
I agree with one redditor who blames perl6 for this state. Indeed, who would start a new project in perl5, when the language becomes obsolete by perl6, but on the other side, you have to wait and wait again for perl6 to be actually delivered.

I think they had to either deliver perl6 a few years ago, or not doing it at all and continue to improve perl5. But in this situation, many people are just not willing to invest into perl and are looking for the greener pastures.
Wait, but the article didn't make up the numbers, they are just reproducing the rather well-known "TIOBE index". Of course, we can discuss correctness of its methodology, but either way it's not the fault of the article author.
I run a stable CherryPy app on 2.6 . It was a bit painful for about a week after 2.6 came out, but became stable pretty fast.

There are a whole lot of possibilities for a "webapp stack" in python. What are you running your sites on top of?
So did I, and it didn't make any sense. Wages don't adapt to changing market conditions that easily in France.
Most likely the biggest cause is the removal of special-casing for small integers.

http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html#performance

I'm anticipating a more thorough discussion of this on python-list or python-dev in the near future.
Why so many haters? We're entrepreneurs. Let's study what Guy did well and learn from it. If he's willing to be open with his numbers, I want to learn as much as I can from it, don't you? And if the big lesson is that building a personal brand helps launch a site, let's do it.
Moonlight 1.0 Beta Available
How about: The End of Sensationalist Headlines?