skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the article has it right, the car dealers and manufacturers are complaining that making the market more transparent and open will kill the industry. These companies seem to believe the basic laws of economics don't apply to them.

If you assume a simplified, econ 101 model, a competitive and transparent market will drive prices down to the point where most firms are making a low but sustainable profit. It should never drive prices down to the point where most firms are losing money in the long run.

Now, the real world is more complex than econ 101. But even so, I can't imagine a scenario where transparency and competition would have the long-run effect of putting an industry out of business. If all car dealerships were totally transparent about their pricing, and buyers could easily view pricing data from every dealership, how would that force dealerships to price cars below cost? A race to the bottom does not assume a bottom of zero, or even a bottom that's below sustainable levels. Rather, it should imply a bottom where companies make a small, but reasonable profit.
Exactly. Passionate people running subreddits. Its a community within a community and you can find a wide variety of information on almost anything you are interested in.
Zen and the Art of iOS
I would argue that the lack of caching is the biggest drawback, though you could workaround that by using offline storage and caching yourself.
If the startup is on the Internet that should help a bit (working from home sometimes).
But I don't know exactly, I don't have kids yet.
Google has a hidden author search. Here's proof. [with video)
Simple example: For one of my projects, I needed to host 16+TB worth of satellite imagery and elevation. I put a machine together with 24GB Ram, raid5, and 8 cores for around 3800. I pay $200 a month for unlimited bandwith (and I still have 2Us that I am not using). I got pricing from rackspace, amazon, go grid, etc. Nobody came remotely close to that price.

For most of my other projects, I always use Amazon. But for this use case, there was no challenge by any other cloud/hybrid cloud service.
I second this. I just skimmed the whole page and I have no idea what spaceship is besides a "tool for designers". After looking at the wall of text on your landing page I had no desire to even start the video. The image for the video is not super compelling either. Good luck!

Oh... and... what is it that spaceship does?
WP isn't really considered a credible metric in the basketball stat community. It overvalues rebounding; players such as Danny Fortson and Reggie Evans have been ranked in top 5 for WP.
Ditto.

The first paragraph needs to be specific. I read all the way to the tl;dr mark and still don't know what's brewing.
I want to be able to grab my laptop and not even have to think about battery life. 5 hours is still much to short for that. Going anywhere for an extended period of time means carrying a power cable around and being tied to an outlet.
Try Al Jazeera English: http://www.aljazeera.com/

AJE fills a void, which is a focus on developing countries (not only middle-east, but also Latin America and East Asia), together with an "old school" kind of journalism (factual, in-depth) which is hard to find today. The production-quality is outstanding, at BBC level -- In fact, many AJE professionals come from BBC.

Unfortunately AJE is not broadly available, but you can still watch it live on YouTube, as well as all archived documentaries and reports.

EDIT: "focus on developing countries" does not mean that they do not report on developed countries as well. For example "Fault Lines" is a fantastic show about the US with subjects that US-based media never go deep or even report at all.
So ... could you post here, what it is in summary?
I'm waiting for Bitwig to come out. It will support Linux.

http://bitwig.com

My understanding is that several former Ableton engineers became frustrated with the direction management wanted to take the software, so they left to hack on what they would have built for themselves. The result is Bitwig.
As someone who has never written an application to be ran in a cloud environment, I've been wondering for a while now: what sort of extra complexity is introduced in your code to handle the unreliability of any given server, the network, and latency in general? What techniques are used to deal with it?

I'm approaching this more from the viewpoint of a webapp that might only need ~10 dedicated servers to handle peak load with redundancy rather than ~150, so our colo solution doesn't have servers constantly breaking on us.
Ask HN: Opening a bank account in the US remotely
Hi all,

I'm planning to do the following:

- Is it possible to open a business and a bank account to the US remotely?

Details:
- I'm European
- Co-founders (2) are foreigners as well

After reading, I know I can easily set up a company using services such as BizFilings.

However getting the EIN for the bank account and finally opening one, is still a mystery for me.

Please help!!
Around 200 protesters gathered in central London outside the offices of several major rights holders.

mhhh.. in munich were around 16000 protesters.. why only 200 in london!?

Berlin: 6000-10000

http://video.golem.de/internet/7210/demonstration-gegen-acta...
Sorry but the bait and switch is disappointing. If you want to rag on the Genius Bar, then perhaps that should be a second blog post.
I'm the Creative Director at CarWoo! Just wanted to focus in on a few things Tommy said above, as I think it will provide some good input to the discussion going on here.

2nd paragraph - "What we see on CarWoo! are dealers offering market competitive prices then competing with each other on things outside vehicle price. Things like professionalism and responsiveness become extremely important when all other things are equal (price and vehicle)"

CarWoo! has a dealer rating and ranking system. In the same way, for example, Amazon or eBay has seller ratings. When buyers go through the CarWoo! product they choose which dealers they want to work with based on ratings and reviews (among other things).

Let's say you go to Amazon and are looking to buy some headphones. You find these headphones for the about same price. One is $10 cheaper. However, one seller has a 2 star rating and the other has a 5 star rating. Which one are you going to buy from?

Now, let's say you go to Amazon and you're looking for those same sweet headphones BUT there are no ratings. All you can see is there are two sellers. One is $10 cheaper than the other. Which one are you going to buy from?

The same thing is at play here in the Automotive space. This is why above Tommy said "A race to the bottom only exists if the only dimension visible to the consumer is price".
I just got that 2 times in a row, I wonder if they just don't have budget to improve the site?
Looks like it's using SSL to me, however how can I trust a random site asking for my card details, could be an attempt to gain credit card details.....

Maybe a third party, e.g. Paypal, some sort of demo of the application as well.
It's not really that difficult to get a good deal on a car. The key is knowing which car you want ahead of time: make, model, color, and accessory packages.

Then, all you have to do is call all the local dealers in your area and ask for the "fleet manager." Tell the fleet manager your requirements, and ask for a selling price. (I've never had a fleet manager renege on the deal.)

As you call around, tell the fleet manager the lowest price you've been offered (don't lie) and see if they'll make a better deal. Continue this process until you've exhausted your options. Then walk in, complete the sales paperwork, go to the finance office, refuse all extras politely, and you're done.
You forgot mutable default arguments!

def fn(ls=[]):
ls += [1]
return len(ls)

(My syntax might be a little off, but you get the idea.)

This will return an ever-increasing number if called repeatedly with no arguments.

Also, the reliance on tuples, particularly tuples of one item always gets me because (1) and (1,) are different.

Also, the scoping for list comprehensions doesn't make sense:

x = 11
[x for x in [1,2,3]]
print x # 3!

This has also gotten me in the past.
> more or less every error should be expressible as a type error.
Am not sure i agree.. i would like to believe it's true though....
>Haskell
have just begun to poke around, like the currying + function composition.. will keep poking...
Deeply nested code is usually a symptom of not thinking the problem in advance and solving it with data structures, instead relying on ad-hoc conditionals to solve it.

When I find myself testing against too many conditions, I usually refactor code to use a map between values and behaviour (e.g., a dict mapping regexs to function objects). This way you remove business logic from code, and are free to make it more algorithmic, like a simple mapping problem.
Python 2 to Python 3 is a big jump once in a lifetime. what about ruby 1.9 to ruby 2.0?
This speaks to me against Peter Thiel's "20 under 20" program as it all seems to come down to lack of maturity and experience (and inflated ego).
Maybe I edited out too much while proofreading - rag on Genius Bar was clearly secondary.
I was hoping to hear confirmation whether what "Trained Apple Employees" were saying, or whether my own understanding is correct.
Thanks for your comment! Gumroad recently raised $1.1M, and my site is available at skimling.com. If you have any questions feel free to email me at jack@skimling.com. If you don't like the codebase after buying it, I'll be happy to return your money to you via PayPal!
I found a screensaver a couple of years ago that did basically the same thing (http://i.document.m05.de/?page_id=438), and I improved on it some (quadrupled the outputs).

Shameless plug: I don't know if it still works, but if you have a Mac you could try: http://lost-found.se/projects/surveillance-saver-quad/
The submission from 5 months ago with more than 80 comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2895474
As the author points out, a huge standard library. Sure, Ruby has everything you need if you pull in this gem and that gem, but you better hope the gem you need is working that week or you're going to waste a lot of time reading Github logs and back-tracking revisions.
How to avoid sounding dumb when you write about Apple
Thanks for mentioning sets - this is another thing that I would like to be built-in in Ruby. But "list(set(mylist))" seems like kind of a hack.

> you can import the rational class via a simple from fractions import Fraction

Sure, you can write a library for anything and by now Python has libraries for most everything. But it still makes a difference to have things in the core language, plus a nice syntax for them.

> why would you want to use lambdas if you have generator expressions?

This is a case of making up for odd semantic choices with special syntax, which then becomes an unnecessarily fixed-in-stone part of the language. Range objects in Ruby are actually like slice objects in Python. But Ruby separates the syntax for ranges from the get-item method, since there are plenty of other places where you would want to use ranges (then you can iterate and map over them, etc.).

Ruby uses blocks to implement things like an each method that fulfills the same function as Python's for statement. (Ruby has a for statement but it is hardly ever used.) In Ruby your example would be

countries.split(',').map &:strip

which is obviously more concise and no less readable. Compare with

countries.split(',').each &:foo

where foo is some side-effectful method.

IMO such a small change in behavior should result in a similarly small change in how the program is written.
> Isn't that rather an argument for Java or Perl?

No, because then you'd have to stand either Java or Perl. If you are looking for a language to learn beyond a quick hack, then the language matters more than its libraries. I know Perl, and everybody knows what a boon CPAN is, but still for scripting tasks I have switched to Python. It would have made me feel sick to keep programming in Perl.

As I had to choose between Python and Ruby too, besides the library thing, I picked Python because Ruby seemed like it was trying too hard to be powerful and expressive, to the detriment of clarity. I didn't want to invest too much time in learning a scripting language. It's just for scripting, you know, it's not meant to accomplish much. If I need a powerful and expressive language, then I just reach for the big guns.
Hi! Thanks for your comment! I bought an SSL certificate off of http://www.cheapssls.com/, and it should be working on the payment page.
I don't think it's public. In any case, its argument basically boiled down to "Python doesn't have static types, without static types it's too hard to communicate API information between programmers, Google has thousands of programmers that need to communicate, so please don't use Python."
Pengobatan sakit tumor rahang
Cara tepat dan aman pengobatan sakit tumor rahang tanpa operasi denganjelly gamat luxor (ekstrak teripang) yang memiliki kemampuan untuk melemahkan, mematikan dan merontokan tumor.
This is really a great idea. As an iOS developer I'd find it more useful to have PDF or PNG files instead of PSD. Or even better, Opacity (see http://likethought.com/opacity/) project files so I could build factories as needed.
Ruby/Rails seems to have a more developer-friendly approach to the web development stack than Python/Django. (I am but an egg, more comfortable in Python/Django but learning Ruby/Rails, I wouldn't argue with more experienced folks about any of the following.)

Ruby/Rails seems easier to develop and test the full stack application, from client JavaScript to server Ruby response and back. It supports Ajax through injection of injection of JavaScript into HTTP responses served up, based on specifications in server side code. The test architectures seem to reach across the client/server divide, for example checking server side responses to triggering client-side JavaScript.

Python/Django are trying, with like lettuce and splinter, but these don't yet seem to be quite to the same standard.

Also, because RoR has a lead on web development, new developments in that space seem generally better integrated. For example, Backbone is a young JavaScript MVC style framework for client side development. I've just been fooling with using it with Django, and discovered that its stringification of Json objects for POST doesn't work with Django's parsing of the client request. Maybe more experienced developers spotted and fixed this easily -- my fix is only a couple of lines -- but it's the sort of thing that makes me wonder just how many folks have tried to integrate Django w/ Backbone. I'm guessing that the Backbone community has already spotted and fixed any such issues with RoR.

Now I'm not sure how I feel about RoR, it often feels like magic and I'm a little suspicious of stuff like super-convenient JavaScript injection. Maybe when I understand it better it will seems less magical and more convenient. But it isn't hard to see why the web development community likes it.
I stopped when i found "Lack of braces" in your list.
If you don't like it.. fine.. but it's in my opinion a major plus for python.
Also "everything is a reference" is 1) not true for everything and 2) a smart thing to do. Many languages do that.
I think about it all the time. Especially at the supermarket when I see the automated checkout line.

Then I head directly for the automated checkout line and tell my wife that the main reason I use those is because I like the idea of computers putting unskilled labor out of work, because I'm a bastard like that.

All the more reason we need to support education from an early age and more importantly get back to supporting journeyman and trade education -- so we have less unskilled labor.
That's why you use delegation and traits instead of inheritance. sometimes the alternative to a bad idea isn't the even stupider thing you did before you found out about it.
You may be interested to know that it takes energy to remove salt from water.

There are proposals to mix freshwater from the mouth of streams with seawater and capture the energy released.
I posted the same link over there: http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/Home this is a great resource for learning how the UX can be used to manipulate users.
Sure, you need to carry a power cable. But tied to an outlet? No. Where do you go for "an extended period of time" that doesn't have a power outlet to charge after you're done working away from one?

I can understand such a need for, say, photojournalists, or war correspondents, nature professionals and the like, but what is the use case for the ordinary guy?

Or do you consider working on the laptop on the beach or in the woods for stretches > 5 hours?
I think this says more about entrepreneurs in the education space than it does about the program. For whatever reason this space seems to consistently attract shady and/or underqualified people. I think the reason is that education is an area where you can't really contribute anything of value unless you are well versed in the science. Because of this it's really easy to snow virtually everyone, from investors and the media to school administrators and teachers. So you consistently see lots of ideas that have zero chance of producing good results that still get lots of funding and even some initial traction.
I'm not trying to say that it isn't very effective, its just that when looking at it you are presented with a lot of information simultaneously, I'm sure that after learning it, using it won't be as difficult.

But with that said, being able to reduce the amount of data confronting you would most likely be an invaluable asset. I'm no musician, nor do I have much experience with DAWs, but the ideal environment, and this is true for many things, would be one that is both expressive and easy to use. I just can't see how exploding all the components in such a manner is reaching those said goals. Why can't you just explode them when need be?

Also, why is the quality of immersion important to you? Immersion as it is well known does not make for effective or powerful interfaces. Its simply a further unnecessary abstraction between a user and the data. Correct me if I am wrong, but it doesn't seem that things like BumpTop have really caught on.
This worldview presupposes that there is and will remain enough skilled-work jobs to employ the entire working age population now and in the future. Whether that is safe to assume is what nags at me from time to time.

If for every 4 cashiers replaced by self-checkout, the self-checkout companies only create 1 job, what's the end game? Will we figure it out before millions get aged out of the workforce in their 40s and 50s, too soon to have accumulated a means to retire?
New picture uploaded! Try a couple hard refreshes before seeing it. Thanks again.
It's rather interesting how the word battery came to mean chemical storage of electricity, since the original meaning of the word has to do with beating. (For example with military weapons, or with a hammer to make forged metal.)
Yes, but iirc array lookup was not constant time.
Whitney Houston, dies
I suspect this might have at least a little to do with the Google+ rebranding. Remember how they removed the + operator from search?
Working for a 19 year old would be a very tough sell. You learn so much about real life in your early 20's and answering to someone who hasn't gone through that "seasoning" process would not be something to look forward to. Yes, Zuckerburg pulled it off but he is definitely the exception.
You are perfect correct that Apple will know what music you possess. If that bothers you than iTunes Match isn't for you. Neither is the Genius Mix feature. And frankly neither is iTunes Store, Amazon shopping or the Internet (when you get right down to it).

For me, I don't see actionable information from this. What is Apple going to do? Turn me over to the RIAA? Obviously not. At the very worst as far as I can guess, they could great a recommendation engine and try to upsell me more music that I might like. Sort of how a radio station works (inefficiently) or how a home town record store owner used to work ("Hey man did you check out Dylan's latest?") If they shove recommendations at me through email, ping or a "suggestions" feature in iTunes, I can ignore it. And it causes me less hassle than junk postal mail.

Seriously, what can they do with it?
Go syntax makes me cringe. example:

> for i := range e {

> var e = make([]E, 1000)

It's confusing and against mainstream conventions for no good reason.
Why I'm Blogging
"...once you can ignore all of these distractions you will have the time to start a business and get rich..."

This is my take away. This goes for all forms of distraction, be it main stream media, World of Warcraft, or How I Met Your Mother. If you're having trouble getting things done, stop consuming and start creating.
The only place I get my economic news from nowadays is the Planet Money podcast. They vastly more interesting and insightful than the mainstream financial news, they approach everything in an investigative manner, and they don't try to force a story into existence.

http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=944...
Their proxy is also a market distortion. By not pricing RAM at closer to its marginal cost, they encourage people to burn CPU instead of RAM in algorithm design, which in turn increases power usage and creates cooling problems.
what type of paper, Google's coding policy?
there is a mail-list post,
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/unladen-s...
RDS also saves a lot of time if you're using MySQL with replication and snapshotting. It makes a nontrivial amount of work trivial.
I'm convinced the internet we know today is very quickly going to get fragmented into distinct regions (china-style). This worldwide plan "known by many names" (SOPA/PIPA/ACTA) has obviously already been decided during the last G8 summit. These clampdowns of the internet are going through, one way or another. The G8 governments are scared to death of the Internet. They've been watching the Arab spring movement in absolute horror at how quickly citizens can organize over a free internet and overthrow their government, which is obviously quite threatening if you're in a position of power, and you're pilfering your citizens wealth with draconian economic actions.
Handling your base load with AWS is ludicrously expensive compared to the alternatives.

Yes but the cost is tiny compared to paying some engineers to do all the hard work replicating what AWS offers on top of some alternative like Linode or whatever.

If your hosting costs are huge part of your costs, you're doing it wrong (or are very very successful, Google/Facebook scale).
Hmm, I think the potential for low power usage is much better with current chips. Pentium 4's and M's were quite power hungry no matter what speed they ran at, while Core 2 Duo, Sandy Bridge and especially Ivy Bridge chips can be both power hungry (at the highest multiplier/clock) and low power (if locked at the lowest multiplier), so you get the best of both worlds. That's why ULV chips are only used for special cases these days.

In fact, a ULV Core 2 Duo is nothing more than a factory undervolted Core 2 Duo - you can significantly increase your battery life and reduce heat by undervolting (sadly, that's not possible anymore with Sandy and Ivy)...