skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The right balance between technical and pragmatic is project specific. Here are a couple of heuristics I use to find it.

1) Minimize the overall time investment required to have an acceptable solution to the problem. Time investment includes maintenance and debugging.

2) Make sure the marginal benefit to additional time spent in one area of the project exceeds the opportunity cost of focusing on other areas. E.g. It's good to spend a lot of time on getting the overall architecture right but it matters far less to optimize the business logic (for one thing it tends to change more often and for another it's hardly ever the performance bottleneck).
Feds seize $50 million in Megaupload assets, lodge new charges
Unfortunately, trustwave produces some of the the smallest resulting certs (I forget if its for EV or for general), which really helps for mobile. (they're also the biggest PCI auditor by far)
I use and highly recommend these two:

#1 = http://www.gandi.net/ - in France - with a lot of integrity. See https://www.gandi.net/no-bullshit Their domain management tools are great.

#2 = http://www.domaindiscount24.net/ - in Germany - the registrar for thepiratebay.org - that didn't shut it down despite many threats. Their domain management tools are ugly and cluttered, but work well once you get used to it.

... also ...

#3 = http://www.hover.com/ - in Canada - the retail front-end to OpenSRS/Tucows - a great reputable company around since 1994.
I realize this is just a comic, but it's one of the reasons that we try to be as compatible with C and Fortran libraries as possible — that's where the vast bulk of high-quality scientific computing work has been done, and we want to be as compatible with it as possible. The goal here is not to duplicate all the work that's already been done, but to allow existing high-quality libraries to be smoothly and easily used together in one environment. That's very much the same philosophy that NumPy and SciPy have, and indeed, it much the same goal. The biggest issue with NumPy, IMO, is that Python arrays aren't designed with linear algebra and interoperability with libraries like BLAS and LAPACK in mind. This leads to the somewhat maddening distinction between Python arrays and NumPy vectors and matrices — and lots of conversion back and forth between them.
Four Things to Make You More Productive
I don't think that's accurate. Lenin and Stalin were pretty anti-religious. So was Mussolini. But I can't think of any other authoritarian regimes that were specifically anti-religious.

Franco wasn't anti-religious. Neither was Hitler. Nor Castro. Nor any of the dictators in the African countries. We've had lots and lots of dictators and totalitarian regimes, few of which were anti-religious.
"On the one hand, if you exploit your users too much or too invasively, you'll see a huge uproar and pushback. On the other, if you can't produce results for customers (retailers, etc.), then the perceived value of your product goes down significantly."

I was thinking about this recently, in the context of Target and its use of statistics to get ads for baby products to people who they calculate are pregnant, and in the more general context of gmail et al. and ads based on email content.

There's probably a Laffer Curve kind of relationship between number of ads served (taxes) and the amount of views/visit/use (work). Serve more ads and your revenue goes up, to a point. Serve to many ads, and your revenue goes down, because people view/use/work less.

Still trying to work out how the Trickle Down theory manifests online.
Hacking Geopolitics
John Gabriel's greater internet fuckwad theory is a joke about people playing video games online, it's not really relevant to the general internet.
While chatroulette arguably offers anonymity but the very instant a website requires registration it's not anonymity anymore, it's pseudonymity, a totally different thing.
Not using your real world identity but an online identity which according to context holds a certain value to users preventing them to behave as total fuckwad.

If you look at the famous example of the month of eternal september [1], the problem at hand showed a totally different picture, an artificially high number of newcomers overcharging the capacity of the community to properly teach them how to behave [2]. In short when your user base grows organically you have minimal bad behaviour.

Then again if you look at facebook itself you'll find more than the regular share of inane bs and bad behaviour.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
[2]: http://www.albion.com/netiquette/book/index.html
This is a good case for providing state-funded public computer centers, but not such a good case for continuing to fund large collections of books.
Just want to say thanks for your great link (the video)!

Having been in similar meetings it almost hurts how close to home this hits. All the way down to the charismatic narrator and his carefully crafted speech.

Truth is, advertising agencies work with 0,1% psychology and 99,9% bullshit. And most of the psychology is focussed on squeezing the maximum campaign budget out of the customer...
I agree 100%. It makes no sense other than internal positioning. Great point.
can this live side by side the existing xcode system?
The funny part is that for a long time they just did it without informing you and no one complained. cough zynga cough
You can use the protocol buffer schema language to define your ASTs if you want, but I think that addresses only a relatively small part of the problem.

There are two larger problems in adding Lisp-style macros to non-Lisp languages, one social and one technical.

The social problem is that language designers must be persuaded to publish a specification of the internal representation of the AST of their language. This makes the AST a public interface, one which they are committed to and can't easily change. People don't like to do this without a good reason.

The technical problem is more difficult, though. To make a non-Lisp language as extensible as Lisp would require making the parser itself extensible. This is not too hard to implement, but perhaps not so easy to use. If you've ever tried to add productions to a grammar written by someone else, you know it can be nontrivial. You have to understand the grammar before you can modify it.

And if you overcome the difficulties of having one user in isolation add productions to the grammar, what happens when you try to load multiple subsystems written by different people using different syntax extensions which, together, make the grammar ambiguous?

I don't know that these problems are insurmountable, but a few people have taken a crack at them, and AFAIK no one has produced a system that any significant number of people want to use.

It's worth taking a look at how Lisp gets around these problems. Lisp has not so much a syntax as a simple, general metasyntax. Along with the well-known syntax rules for s-expressions, it adds the rule that a form is a list, and the meaning of the form is determined by the car of the list -- and if it's a macro, even the syntax of the form is determined thereby.

Add a package system like CL's, and you get pretty good composability of subsystems containing macros. You can get conflicts, but only when you explicitly create a new package and attempt to import macros from two or more existing packages into it.

Applying these ideas to a conventional language gives us, I think, the following:

() While the grammar is extensible, all user-added productions must be "left-marked": they must begin with an "extension keyword" that appears nowhere else in the grammar.

() Furthermore, those extension keywords are scoped: they are active only within certain namespaces; elsewhere they are just ordinary names. This requires parsing itself to be namespace-relative, which is a bit weird, but probably workable.

I think that by working along these lines it might be possible to add extensible syntax to a conventional language in a way that avoids both the grammatical difficulty and the composition problem. And if you do that, maybe you can then get the relevant committees or whoever to standardize the AST representation for the language.

I've never taken a crack at all this myself, though, because I'm happy writing Lisp :-)
Sounds interesting. One thing to consider is that part of groupons pitch is that they will drive customers that don't know about the business to the business. Don't give up, but do think of a way to get that function as part of your value prop.
Anyone have other experiences with Buffer where you picked up on some really novel interactions?
I know why they vote Democrat: Because they want to get free stuff from the government.
اجمل واسرع هدف في العالم علي كوكب الشرق
>2. I think the Facebook hate is miss-placed. Do you really hate Facebook (provider of a tool) or those who spam you via Facebook (users of the tool)? If you're so worried about Facebook tracking you offsite, why have an account at all?

I think it is right on. Both because the tool shapes the usage (if your only tool is hammer, all problems look like nails). I don't have one.
I had a look at contributing to KA's exercises, but found the documentation quite hard to follow (it's more of an assortment of articles rather than a coherent guide), it would be good if someone put together a step-by-step guide to development.
Your comment reminded me of when I used to work at Circuit City. One week, they decided to run a promotion: you would go to the Circuit City website, pick out and customize a computer. Then, you would print out a sheet with your order number on it, and go to the store to pay for it.

It was painfully obvious to me at the time that this was probably the brainchild of some young gun marketer at HQ. "Here's the deal," I imagine him saying. "People that shop at our on-line store don't go home with as many accessories and don't purchase extended warrantees as often as our in store customers. So, we'll make sure they have to go in the store. Then we can up-sell the crap out of them! It's flawless!"

Later on, I worked at the Apple Store. I once had a customer come in who was trying to decide between a MacBook and some low-end model of HP. I went through everything that she would get with the MacBook that she wouldn't get with the HP, and one after the other she informed me that she wasn't all that enticed by the difference. When we finished she told me, "I think I should get the HP."

"Yeah," I replied, "that's probably the right choice for you at this point. If you need another computer in the future, though, don't forget about us." The customer was stunned. She wanted to know why I wasn't pushing her toward the Mac. "Simple," I said, "we want you to buy an Apple because it's the best product for you, not because some pushy sales-person badgered you into a sale."

One of those companies is gone, one is the most valuable company in the world. Marketing on Facebook, to me, has always felt much more like Circuit City's strategy, and almost never like Apple's.
Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.
That can only account for half the increase, since the countries with the next highest cost for health care spend roughly 50% per capita compared to the US......

I would instead say the problem is:

1: Monopolies and oligopolies (patents, letting the AMA control medical school accredation, etc). Solution is to charter mini-AMA's to provide competition, and to enact compulsatory licensing of patents in medical fields.

2: The fact that the health care and health insurance markets are both entirely consumer opaque. Consumers don't have any control over their money in these markets and the common-sense protections are missing. For example, when I go to get my car worked on, I have a right to a written estimate before repairs are begun. Why don't I have a right to a written estimate before non-emergency medical care is provided?

The first thing you have to recognize is that when Democrats and Republicans both talk about reforming our medical system to address these, they believe that more corporate power, and less consumer power will correct this problem. Unfortunately, pricing is a coercive negotiation, and so that will only accelerate the problem.

Empower consumers. Disempower corporations. Bring prices down.
Hockey stick: Jellyfish Art Traffic up 2000%
That's not what atheism means. Do us all a favour and stop calling yourself one.
If your ISP is manipulating DNS like that, it's also possible that they're blocking UDP/53 to any host other than their own DNS servers as well.

Though it's certainly worth a shot, and I suppose Chrome could probably do a test query to 8.8.8.8 before recommending the switch.
My startup operates in this space (http://venpop.com) and we see this kind of thing all the time. One of the biggest problems is that the hype of Social Commerce has driven large, big-name players to make large, big-dollar bets on the space. They'll wind up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a fancy storefront, and they have no chance of making their money back.

So, they shut them down... and it's giving the whole industry a bad name (via articles like this) because of over-execution against unjustifiable expectations.

Stores are making money on direct sales, but they're not raking it in. They're doing a lot more by staying in touch with their customers, offering them deals, and ensuring they stay top-of-mind throughout the year with their likely holiday buyers. But, some retailers were determined to turn Facebook into a Point of Sale destination... and they're so insistent on seeing returns on the social "channel" that they'll actually start putting up links and promotions to drive people to Facebook instead of their own website. It's pretty irrational.

A few months ago our CEO also did an interview where he talked about what a bad idea this was as well: http://allthingsd.com/20110822/venpop-makes-a-case-against-a...
Not actually true. From the comments on the linked page:

It’s available for Linux, just have a typo in the release URL on their website.

See: http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/2.0.0/vlc-2.0....

Took 2 minutes to figure that one out (If you look at the nightly snapshots, you’ll see they are all .xz).
Submit a patch, (or pay someone to develop it)
> Andrew Wells from the Council of University Librarians believes Elsevier is being unfairly singled out. "The practices that Elsevier has both in dealing with authors and in selling scholarly content to libraries are very similar to those used by many other scholarly publishers such as Wiley-Blackwell and Taylor & Francis and Springer," he says.

Quite right. The Elsevier boycott gives us a way to make our voice heard against the worst of the publishers. It lends urgency to the drive to change the system, and it will hit Elsevier hard in the pocketbook, demonstrating to publishers that we (academics) are going to stop providing them with their free lunch.

Once we further get our act together, believe me, we will be coming after Wiley and any other publisher who engages in exploitative, rent-seeking behavior.
Drone proponents say the privacy concerns are overblown.
Randy McDaniel, chief deputy of the Montgomery County
Sheriff’s Department in Conroe, Tex., near Houston, whose
agency bought a drone to use for various law enforcement
operations, dismissed worries about surveillance, saying
everyone everywhere can be photographed with cellphone
cameras anyway. “We don’t spy on people,” he said. “We
worry about criminal elements.”

The density of the double-speak in this paragraph is breathtaking.
Why are we giving this cyber-terrorism group attention?
Yeah, it's hard to attack libraries. They're one of the best examples of a truly equitable program I can think of. I'd much rather cut even university funding: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3608264
Yep, and longtime HNer
Donkey Kong Wii
Thanks for those links (wes-exp as well). But I meant a non-lisp implementation of lisp macros. Obviously common lisp and racket qualify, but I'd love to see an implementation that's as simple as possible without needing to be production-quality.
Same here and sometimes I wonder if those who provide facebook only login would consider answering the phone 1 out of 10 times by saying "fuck off" and hanging up a good business practice, because that's basically what they are doing.

"hey we have this fantastic service offering this and that, but we don't want you to use it (unless you register to a third party whose sole purpose is to collect as much personal data on you as possible and has a long history of privacy issues)". Best sales pitch ever.
I'm aware that it's not particularly easy to read, but a solution (there are many) is actually the path found by following the red dashed arrows (starting at the top node) in the second graph of my latest post.
Stalin managed to kill quite a few million people, so that's one important anti-religious figure if you're using (crass) "kill-count" as a statistic.

Also, Mao Zedong was anti-religious, and is estimated to have killed between 40M and 70M.

> Nor any of the dictators in the African countries.

Well, yes, there are horrific genocides and mass murders and atrocities in Africa supposedly in the name of religion.

I agree that evil is done by both atheists and believers.
Want (the startup I work for) is just like Pinterest and we are allowing a community discover and share things that want or like. The difference is that we are solely products. We just rolled out a feature this week that auto-generates store fronts for merchants based upon things that community likes from that store.

http://wanttt.com/

http://wanttt.com/w/merchant/store/298/?products
While there's a resurgence of interest in ADA recently, the general sense is that it's WAY overdesigned and heavy.

I came across this bit of humor a while back that communicates the general feeling well:

http://bit.csc.lsu.edu/~gb/csc4101/Reading/gigo-1997-04.html

If the problem IS that it's huge and inelegant, then the solution isn't to try to improve it, but to start from a clean slate. Julia looks like a reasonable attempt.
on my core duo, intel crap gpu, winxp it did consume much more.

test : old, low quality 480p divx

version | cpu usage | comm.
vlc 2.0.0f | ~ 15% | half of it being system calls.
vlc 1.1.11 | > 1% | smaller than one pixel in proc.exp graph

sad since vlc was usually the lightest ( sometimes trading quality for fluidity )
True, I'll confess I didn't know much about the more arcane CSS selectors when I wrote that (still don't). Complicated properties, though, are not too hard, and the important thing is that it starts off in a form that's easy to process.

I don't intend it to be just a data language. What I've been moving toward in my daydreams is a DAG of, for lack of a better word, function calls (some interesting data doesn't really fit in a tree), some of which are generators. If Turing-completeness is a problem in your context, you can reject some or all generators and/or just not evaluate them, i.e. take them as pure data. But I don't want to limit myself. I would have no problem if it turned into a general purpose language with a nice data-oriented subset.
While this post focuses on universities and libraries, and I'm serious about preferring university cuts to library cuts, obviously there are plenty of other things that could probably be cut first.
Maybe an ATM manufacturer trying to add some flair to their standby displays
Chances are it is connected to the other personas and facebook has a more complete than you think profile, heck they don't even need you to be registered to have a profile on you, from being in registered people's addressbook to going to web page featuring a facebook button they can piece together a profile.
With 4 layers to the onion wouldn't it be easier to have 4 width measures? Then you could simply decide which width is most relevant to your application (outer margin, border, padding, or content).

There's different use cases, without listing them all just think how many times you've had to calculate the one you don't have access to
I'm guessing I'm not the only one who has never actually seen a "Facebook store". Here's what appears to be a moderately good list of some "popular" stores:

http://socialcommercetoday.com/top-50-facebook-stores-top-20...

From what I can tell from the first few, it's not really much more than a very basic third-party e-commerce platform squeezed into Facebooks frame.

Am I missing something? Why would a major retail brand want to downgrade the shopping experience to this when they can simply link through to their existing store front with their own brand experience, tracking, metrics, promotions and upsells? It seems baffling that any company would be content to squeeze their store into Facebook's 500 pixel-wide frame.
Ask HN- Wasn't there site for people consuming iTunes U to form ad-hoc groups?
I'm digging into the Harvard Statistics class on iTunes U. The material is compelling, and iTunes U is amazing in general (shout-out to universities with videos on YouTube, and MIT OCW, etc. It's all good.)

But tracking down related URLs, texts... basically putting the pieces together or even deciding which amazing statistics class to download 20 files from... well all this stuff just lends itself to an social site.

I could have sworn there was a site posted on HN that was basically a really nice forum where people browsed ad-hoc groups that had formed around all these disparate classes. I know about OpenLearn, but that is just for OpenLearn classes. I have looked around hnsearch, and am now thinking I imagined this.

Jog my memory?
Article does a great job of setting expectations for the audience and linking to resources for pre-req information. Thanks!
Persia was such a wonderful and open culture at one time. It breaks my heart to see such brutality in the name of religion.

I wish I could appeal to the Persian people and their proud history, and tell them that incidents such as this will go down as dark blotches in their history.
Ah shoot, I got this story mixed up with another. My mistake.
My gut reaction to this is that it might be that overtly trying to sell stuff of Facebook reminds users of the negative vibe that surrounds Facebook. It sort of proves that Facebook is more about gathering profile data to make effective targeted sales, rather then a social network tool.
"Internet Privacy" is an oxymoron.
Safety and freedom are incompatable; you can have one or the other but not both. America says "Safety first"; humanity says "No thanks!".
Maybe what we need is an intercontinental virtual RAID array so that no one country can shut it down?
(Disclaimer: I use Linux, I live in Thailand.)
incidents such as this will go down as dark blotches in their history

Not necessarily. The victors write the history books you know, so if they manage to come out on top it will go down as their crowning moment of glory.
Why haven't scientists started their own not for profit publishing/clearing house website?
I think you are over-analyzing it, Jason.

> The 3 navigation options are “Blog”, “Sign In”, and “Sign Up” - by putting blog first, they direct traffic away from their main site

No, they don't, unless it's a bot traffic. If someone is ready to sign up, he won't go and read the blog instead. Similarly, someone's not ready to sign up, won't be persuaded more to do it if the Blog link would've been moved to the 3rd place.