skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congress has no incentives to work better since voters don't hold them accountable for bad governing. That's because voters aren't held directly accountable for casting votes for politicians who govern badly.

The whole system seems more likely to collapse than it is to fix itself.

The less power these children have, the better. That's why my first principle is "more individual liberty, less government". Liberty has its problems too, but having these know-nothing masterminds control us is just not the answer.

I know that my "less government" rant doesn't resolve the immigration issue directly. But maybe if those DC clowns had less to worry about, they could deal with the few issues (like immigration) that the Constitution enumerates as their powers. Certainly if they did less we could monitor their progress more closely.
Testing my theory is the next step, as no theory is perfect and will certainly change over time. Theories come and go, and may even be true for a time, but I need the ability to effectively test/execute whatever theory that may be.

What is your experience in trading, if you don't mind me asking?
I agree completely. In Sweden "everybody" knows the practice of negative option marketing (or billing) is illegal, and it surprises me after a few minutes of googling that that doesn't seem to be the case in most of US and Canada.
We can already do that with media queries, it doesn't solve the vector anti-alias/detail problem.
"I know that the computer is comparing one value to another"

Actually it isn't.
What - call centers??? R&D? What are they researching - how store 140 characters?
Being blind isn't something to joke about. Mocking those with handicaps is rude and uncalled for.
No - tests define the objectives - they serve as an operational definition. The rest is just description and explanation.

The second two sentences have nothing to do with anything I said.
The Open Source Definition provides a very clear explanation of when the term open source should be used: http://www.opensource.org/osd.html
To be honest, your comment strikes me as far more "religious" than the article, which (since you obviously didn't RTFA) documents optimizing a particular bit of haskell code to be on par with an equivalent implementation in C. The article is not saying that haskell (the language) is faster than C.

If all you have is a hammer...
Thanks for the tip! I'll check him out.
I highly recommend learning dvorak. I've switched the keys on every MacBook since 2007 and the difference is huge (not just speed either, but mostly comfort/ease). It took about two weeks to bring myself up to the same speed as qwerty, and if you TOUCH type then switching back and forth is no problem at all. Bonus: I often find myself typing with one hand while taking notes or paging a book– with qwerty this was doable with some advanced pecking but in dvorak it just feels easy with either hand.

Caveat... it makes other people look computer-illiterate when they try to use my computers... (so maybe not so good if you share a lot– or at least, switch your keys back once you've tackled the dvorak-touch)
Pairing with other experienced programmers works very well for me, and has made me more effective as a programmer. I've also seen our junior developers learn a lot from pairing with each other. In my working environment, with other people who enjoy that style of work, we think it's pretty great.

It obviously doesn't work well for you, so I strongly recommend not doing it.

Why is it so terrible that people are playing with interesting, creative, sometimes crazy new ideas, and sharing their results?
For those looking to learn a new keyboard layout, I would suggest that you take a look at Colemak before diving into Dvorak. It's easier to learn (more common keys with qwerty), doesn't break common keyboard shortcuts, and some would argue it's even more ergonomic than Dvorak.

http://colemak.com/wiki/index.php?title=FAQ#What_is_Colemak....
Reading your reply more carefully I see that, you're enumerating many ways being that extreme would be stupid. Sorry for the misapprehension.
Curiously enough my personal best-ever development experience was with exactly the 90m regular pair switching talked about here where we paired the most/least experienced on particular stories.

It was brilliant. Great fun. Energising. Hugely productive. Especially when I was the most experienced person on the pair.

I don't understand Arlo Belshee's emphasis on the lack of flow in this setup in his original paper. Personally I've found the combination of good pairing + TDD to be a recipe for getting into flow very quickly. It seems designed to produce those little nuggets of problem/reward that suck you in and keep you grinding away.

The practice certainly hasn't worked for everybody (check out Mitch Lacey's try at using it for example http://www.mitchlacey.com/resources/adventures-in-promiscuou...) - but having tried it once I would be keen to try it again and try and figure out the contexts that are causing it to work/fail.
To anyone seeking to switch from QWERTY to some other layout: I highly recommend Colemak over Dvorak. Colemak is supposedly better optimized, and yet it's easier to switch to from QWERTY since many of the key mappings remain the same.

I switched ~2 years ago because while I could always type pretty fast (I think 80 WPM or so) on QWERTY, I could only do so while hunting and pecking. So typing was somewhat tiresome. Now, I type faster because Colemak is specifically designed for touch typing in mind. And I can still hunt and peck on other devices (i.e. friends' iPhones, or library computers), possibly because of my history of hunting and pecking with QWERTY, not to mention the similarities between Colemak and QWERTY.

Not sure if there's an app for it - I just switched my keyboard and that was that. Initially, I was pretty slow, but my speed quickly picked up. For more info, you should check out their website:

http://colemak.com/
Lean DDD for ruby hackers
Paying back your launch debt
Link to previous topic [1] and the booklet [2]

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3212515

[2] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2011/xv6/xv6-rev6.pdf
There's a reason languages with garbage collectors aren't used where speed is important - because they normally get in the way.
> I'd concede that the design of the language, especially in earlier versions, is probably not its biggest selling point.

Keep in mind, the design of the language wasn't to create a new language, but instead, make using various libraries easily usable in a web environment. Hence the reason for the multitude of c or c-like functions. Eventually, the shift moved in a different direction.

I like to think that while PHP wasn't intelligently designed, it did evolve. And for my money, evolution beats out intelligent design.
This doesn't refer to dropbox in general, but I've wanted for a while now to see more products that charge you prices that fit tighter to your actual usage.

My biggest example here is internet bandwidth. Whether I am a grandmother checking my email once a week, or whether I heavily torrent data and use my connection almost constantly, I am going to be paying the same price for a given connection speed.

In many cases, it would not be practical to devise a payment scheme to closely the exact cost of something, but I would like to see more products where at least the most major variables are taken into account.

I think the cell phone industry is a good example of something that does this more accurately. They charge you for a given number of minutes, a given number of text messages, a given amount of data. Why can't this model be followed by TV and internet providers?
How to Find a Great Technical Cofounder
"The image requests are client side, no? The client requests the images, then streams the responses to a zip file."

No - the image requests happen on the server, which then concatenates them together in to a zip file which is served to the client. The client never sees the actual image files, just the resulting zip file.

I'd imagine (well, hope anyway) that the ISP proxies that downscale image files do so based on the HTTP Content-Type header - since the images contained within a zip file would be part of a file with a different Content-Type they should be left alone.
Actually, a 'debug' or 'dry-run' mode that simply prints out the git commands without running them would be useful for all kinds of users. Newbies can learn from it and pros can make sure that the commands are going to do what they expect it to. With git, I know what each command does but my concern with legit (and similar) is that the higher level commands might not do exactly what I think based on their name/description.
Wow, that is one moving piece.

Dennis Ritchie definitely was one of the greats. He died within a week of Steve Jobs and that's typical. Of course nobody times their death but with Ritchie always being the infrastructure guy and Jobs very much being the user experience guy it is no miracle that the press all but missed the passing of this wonderful man.

2011 was a sad year. Way too many big names gone forever.
That's because of a little-known (by the general public, anyway) US Supreme Court ruling in 1971 in the case of Griggs v. Duke Power.

Prior to that case companies were more comfortable hiring people without college degrees because they were able to give IQ tests to prospective employees. The court ruled tests that have a disparate impact on the racial or sexual makeup of new hires are illegal.

Companies were forced to look for some other indicator the person they were about to hire can read and write and is reasonably intelligent, so many of the jobs that used to require only a high school education plus an IQ test now require a college degree.

There are some companies that still give tests to applicants, but they're just asking to get sued.

It's kind of ridiculous people are going tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt as a proxy for a three-hour IQ test, but I don't see any indication things are going to change.
I hope they are real dividends and not the 100M dividend associated with the BATS ipo ... (paid out the day before it tried to go public)
"We want those brains in our country"

This seems like an awfully nationalist perspective. (Can we start using nationalist as a derogatory term like racist or sexist?)

If the United States really has the best universities, I have a hard time imagining a better use for them than spraying highly educated people all over the world.

Of course, startups are a somewhat different issue...
It's very plausible that he really was referring to the present with that comment but its still pretty clear that everyone is reading way too far into it. It seems pretty reasonable to assume he was just making a flip remark without thinking of what would happen next. How could he? I know I wouldn't. How many regular (read: not famous) folks would think a quick tweet would ever get picked up like that even if they did work for the Apples of the world? I'm sure had there been reason to believe bloggers would jump on that one tweet he would've chosen his words more carefully. People like this guy tweet speculative stuff like that all day long and nothing comes of it most days so there was really no reason to expect it this time.
Clean room requires that those creating the implementation don't have access to the original implementation. Having the same person(s) inspect the binaries and create an implementation fails this requirement.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
Maybe they could have the last few inches made of a rubberized/plastic material which would slide over a lip (to ensure a seal for suction). This tip would allow flexibility and would also avoid painful accidental biting on metal.
Interesting. I'd love to hear more about the medical diagnostic applications!
Should you quit your job to work on your startup idea?
Going to college in the us doesn't really cost all that much unless you want it to. For example, I know many people (including myself) that completed our undergrad and masters for around $30k. Add in our pell grants and you can subtract something like half of that.

All of my peer group have fulfilling careers and none of us had any debt after about two or three years. And all of us work positions with people who did pay a lot for school and who are still paying off their debt. In other words going to hum drum community college and state school put us in precisely the same employment positions as people who paid 4 to 5 times as much.
They have nat-free servers and their own automatic nat-traversal methods. Even if every single browser supports VOIP, you won't be able to use it between 2 random people using standard home connection. Until we get out of the lack of IPv4 addresses situation there can be no true peer to peer network.
I love that he has named each member individually, and listed their specialty with how to get in touch with them. It makes the whole process of seeing what talent is available very open, and very appealing for new employers.

More so than that, I think it's great that he has resisted the urge to make this about Seesmic. It doesn't round up with any sort of "We'll be carrying on their great work..." line etc.

The post is just about these people, exactly the way it should be.
The Startup Known as "Mad Men"
As someone who knows a bit of haskell but not a lot I don't see this so much as a series of tricks. Ignoring all the explanatory pieces it comes down to "use the fusible Data.Array.Vector library and unbox your doubles". The unboxing is a given, optimization 101 in haskell, and the fusion stuff is the cool bit.

You can probably make the argument that the tail recursive function is not the "natural" way to write this code but conceptually that's on the same level as loop unrolling in C.

It doesn't take an entire blog post unless you are explaining the compiler tricks working behind the scenes and comparing the assembly produced.

So basically I agree that there is some express concisely vs. low level performance tension here but the takeaway is how little of it there is. This is probably lost if you are also having to try and parse this weird haskell stuff at the same time.
"That's because voters aren't held directly accountable for casting votes for politicians who govern badly."

The above seems more like an argument against democarcy than an argument for "smaller government." More over if we found ourselves under your "smaller government" how will that solve the problem that voters are not held accountable for "votes for politicians who govern badly"?
Actually, the media queries only work for CSS image properties, like background-image, not for HTML img elements. We do need something equivalent to HTML5's handling of video, where you just stick a bunch of different paths to various formats in the video tag, and the browser selects the best one. Something like that for images would be nice; now we have to resort to jQuery hacks.
How many traditional straws do I need to use (and then just throw away, not recycle) before the ecological benefits of a steel straw kick in?
RIT48: Final Presentations Live
Thought Different (How Apple Changed)
Can't be the protocol itself patented?
Pirate Party wins 4 seats in Saarland state elections
But what about the pension funds etc. that finance seniors' retirements? There should be some way for them to get in on the action, otherwise seniors might end up putting even more strain on the social safety net. If pension funds were able to participate, then it would be a good thing. Does the model suggested in this article support such an investor?
No, I'd say it sounds more like someone who had no clue his tweet would be taken to this level back tracking after realizing he probably didn't tweet the most well thought out criticism of the UI.

Former employee of massively famous company makes a flip remark. Wild speculation and over thinking ensues.
yeah, it's quite gloomy, although it's an honest experience of an ordinary engineer learning at an extraordinary place.
Depends on the source of the straws (maybe the material can be sourced from leftovers from some other production) and if you plan to let your grandchild inherit it.
They should move to Cluj and get snatched up by 3PG.
Yeah, deleting a remote branch by "git push remote :branch" is pretty terrible, one colon between heaven and hell.
Monorail.js 0.9.5
We need to send the dimensions with the image request. It's the only way.
I'm in full agreement with the other comments I'm seeing. These kind of additional tack-ons are somewhat pernicious to actual team-based version control, because it promotes abstracting more of the core functionality of Git outside of the user's control. This causes breakdowns in mutual understanding and the ability to communicate at the worst possible time -- when people are trying to figure out why there are weird changes to production code, or what happened to the changes they made. As a technical lead, I would actually tell a developer using this to cut it out and learn the real commands so they know what they're doing.
Everybody knows that US applications are about how good you can memorize SAT words and how well you can look on the paper.

That's what it looks like from outside the USA. For US students, the SAT barely matters at all. Top criteria at elite schools are 1. race (don't be Asian-American), 2. sports (especially elite sports like crew), 3. contacts, recommenders, networking, 4. high grades from a well-known high school, 5. extracurricular activities, 6. objective tests.

Try that gauntlet and you'll be pining for tests of SAT words.
Will that definitely stream from one to the other without buffering the full file in memory? That's the main benefit of the Node.js streaming approach - it doesn't need to hold the whole thing in memory at any time, it just has to use a few KBs of RAM as a buffer.
> issues with maintainability of whatever gets written tend to be much more of a pain than with similar projects in other high-level languages.

I'm not sure I follow this. If you take one of these good developers you are referring to, and write your codebase in PHP, what about PHP makes it difficult to maintain as compared to Python or Ruby?
Reverse engineering has given us so many good things - Samba, OpenOffice, Wine, MAME (and other emulators) the bitkeeper debacle, which gave us git. Then there are all the Linux and UNIX drivers that were written by reverse engineering windows drivers because vendors weren't supporting those operating systems.

The guys who reverse engineered Exchange Server were acquired by Cisco.

I don't understand why the Skype case is 'evil'. distributing the binaries may violate terms of service, but it isn't illegal in large parts of the world.
Disagree, we want the same asset, just a different size.
Biting could be one of it least problems. Consider a scenario of a kid using this in a car going over a speedbump.
TSA Oversight: Tell Us Your TSA Story
What a fantastic pep talk. This beats the 'Don't be a joker' essay for motivation. Sending this to my team this afternoon..
Military To Develop Cyber Warfare Rules Of Engagement
Hello HN!

If anyone's interested in any of the projects, some of us are sitting around. Personally, I'm with bitbox - the guy with the purple button down shirt.
There are quite a few of these already on the market - not sure why it needs kickstarted. http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/kitchen/e59c/?srp=1 or http://www.amazon.com/Endurance-Stainless-Steel-Drink-Staws/... for starters.

Personally, I'd lean for the titanium one. I've got one of the titanium sporks, and it's totally flavorless, which makes it quite a bit better for, e.g., stirring lighter teas. Stainless steel has a bit of a flavor that comes through with anything light.
You're still operating in a fantasy world where the "children" somehow loosen the reins long enough for you to implement your principle of personal liberty.

I'm a lot more optimistic about concrete plans to make things better that folks from all over the political spectrum can support:

http://www.americanselect.org/

If you really think the system is going to collapse, you could make money by buying put options on U.S. Treasury bills. Done at scale, this could potentially affect the system a lot more than complaining on Internet forums...

http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/money

See sections on shorting and options.
The increasing emphasis on the short term prospects of a publicly traded company is a problem. But is there anything here that's specific to software and web-focused companies? Others have been writing about this for years. John Bogle for example has argued that the increasing concentration of shares in a handful of pensions and mutual funds prevents the company's owners from acting like long-term owners.
How will I carry it? Pockets won't work -- between my wallet, knife, phone, and keys, I already have enough things in my pockets. Lint doesn't sound too appetizing either.

If you're really concerned about straws ending up in the ocean, just don't use a straw.
I already have a reusable drinking straw made of metal (http://goo.gl/hkcmp); how is this one different?
Coping with the OSS command line on Windows
I'm sure everyone involved wishes that it didn't have to happen this way, but this is a super nice move of Loic to promote each employee individually on his blog. His personal reach will give these employees a big boost in their ability to find new jobs. I've only met Loic once, but this seems perfectly in line to me with how he operates, he is a good guy.
There is no need to be afraid of the video.
I don't think YC cares at all about how good of a speaker you are, they probably have a million applications and they just want to have a first look at the team.

For example, if you live in the same area but you don't even manage to gather and shoot a one minute matter-of-fact video that explicitly asks to avoid wasting time on it, then it'll be hard to believe that that team will be able to survive the pressure of a startup in its first couple of years.

Also, I think that in a startup environment you have to be ready sometimes to just quickly do things, and the video is a way to show that you don't need to invest three days scripting it and shooting it, but just half an hour making sure your words are audible and such.

What other startups say doesn't really matter. Startups don't have to try to guess how successful 1000 teams may be. YC has to.
this is brilliant :D
Re: There are simply some things that you cannot put a price on.

Debt that will follow you through bankruptcy is not one of
them. I know of people who took exactly that attitude about college and it destroyed their lives.

If you are not paying for college, or not paying much, it is true that it can be a fun 4 years and does not need to be considered a financial decisions. But when you are collecting more debt than an average mortgage you should really consider if the house you are buying is worth it.
Blind to seeing life as more than a series of goals. Blind to seeing the world through the eyes of, say, a medieval christian mystic, a french existentialist, or a crazed 19th century Russian. Blind to seeing how things we've come to view as obvious truths are simply manipulations by the powerful meant to keep them in power.

Now, I realize I may have come across as an arrogant prick in
my previous comment, but it pains me to see that because some aspects of technology have become so easy to pick up, it is programmers, of all people, that start viewing (institutional) education, for all its flaws, as superfluous. I think I wrote a comment on a something Paul Graham said in a conference keynote, that it's become almost obvious that all hackers care mostly about money and "success". I think this is a direct result of looking at the world through "hard data" and "logical conclusions" that's become the norm in this community. Now I see that instead of developing our healthy amount of curiosity, hackers are shutting themselves off from some important avenues of knowledge because they think the have all the "data".