skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Iran's "Halal Internet" evolves into a mere more-ambitious censorship regime
Insects, Innovation and Instagram
"Affirming the Consequent" should be the name of a Culture GSV. (Or maybe an ROU?)
Spotify signs ad deals with McDonalds, AT&T and Coca-Cola
well, Google is correct - your site has little to no original content. So what's your beef with that?
Spain has real structural problems in its labor markets. But those kind of generous policies aren't unique to Spain within Europe. And other European countries have far, far, far lower unemployment. Why?

The answer is that employment policy does not have more to do with unemployment than any other metric. This is a story about a huge housing bubble and an awful currency union.
Well, that may be true, but when you hire a ton of NASA scientists, I would assume they can fill out those blank sheets rather quickly...
What do you specifically even mean for the United States as a society to "save" money? Getting dollar bills and stuffing them into a vault? Are you saying that in an ideal world without feckless politicians, the government should tax more than it disburses, build up a pile of money, and then pay out extra money?

The further you draw the analogy out, the more ridiculous the idea of equating government finances with household finances become. It's just folk economics. And that's ideology-neutral: you can be a Keynesian, monetarist, goldbug, whatever and still should reject that position.
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How do you not love the idea that large institutional investors exploit covert channels to place orders?

As crazy as this sounds, this isn't an HFT thing or a modern markets thing: execution of large block trades is one of the fundamental basic problems in trading. It's just that now we're solving it with a system of dueling robots.
And bankruptcy is much less painful in the US than in Europe, though you won't be able to get any sort of credit for quite a while.
Clojure has been out now for nearly 5 years. I don't expect to see many new language features moving forward. And we can agree to disagree about those features not belonging in user-land. Additions to the core lib are the kinds of things users will demand in all good Clojure implementations - JVM or JS.

That said, two big language things you might see in the future depending on how much effort gets put into them - Pods & Predicate Dispatch.
Banjo App Hits 1M Users In 9 Months (faster than Pinterest, Path, & Foursquare)
How to organize R user group
Former NASA Astronaut Garrett Reisman Plans To Build The World’s...
Even with commercial contracts a lot of government (and especially military) was done on cost+. However much we spent on a development the customer (taxpayer) would pay "+" an agreed margin.
If "501 developer" is being used in a derogatory way, then I am not one. But if we're talking about devs that have "hard stop" point for themselves each day then I am. I like to leave shortly after 5 because I like to have dinner with my family. This is actually an agreement that my wife and I made when I switched jobs and she went back to work (outside the home) after kid #3... we would both do what we could to be home by 6:30 every night. And for the most part we make that happen. Of course stuff happens but we would rather that be the exception than the norm. And neither of us sees a problem with that attitude. I enjoy programming a great deal. I am a problem solver. It bugs me internally when I have to leave a problem unsolved for the next day.

But my take on the whole situation can be summed up like this: I work from home 2 days a week and often times when it is approaching dinner time and I'm still in the office, my wife will come in and ask something like "how much work do you have left?". Well, the most accurate answer is "a lot... weeks" but I obviously can't finish it all tonight. I'll have to stop at some point and there will still be work unfinished. Even if I worked until midnight... there would still be work left. So if I've put in 10 productive hours... why is stopping at 5 any more significant than stopping at 6? or 10?
Cloud Insecurity: Not Enough Tools, Experience or Transparency
Yeah I see that. My mind literally doesn't know which movie to pick first that has created things that aren't possible, and probably will never be. My point is, I'm just not sure the recording part is the amazing bit, or even the creation if it was to be CGI - its the hologram bit - which isn't new, that everyone seems to be hooking onto.

Seeing the impossible is nothing new, making it stand next to a real-life something - thats new.
The quote is in direct reference to a contract that NASA (the government...) has with SpaceX.

So apparently it is possible for the government to agree to contracts that do not leave the taxpayer holding the bag for overruns.
I also enjoy this environment, but it does have a big drawback.

I always felt like I was letting my team down when I was taking time off. So I took a lot less time off.

Ideally I'd prefer an environment that had an open schedule and also expected employees to take a certain amount of time off every year.
And they would've had bigger profits and a solid business model, as well!
I find that many functional programmers, including Haskell programmers, seem convinced that I will completely abandon C++ if only I spent the time to understand Haskell.

After spending quite a bit of time learning Haskell, seeing a number of advantages and disadvantages, and being unconvinced and staying with C++, the assumption is I didn't "do enough".

Of course, I also know a number of lovely functional programmers as well!
I didn't even realize I was squinting at the tiny letters until I read this comment. Thanks for pointing it out, future me's eyes are grateful.
> How about the reality of the situation -- overspending and borrowing have destroyed europe.

How about the reality of the situation: Spain was a paragon of fiscal virtue prior to the crisis:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/insane-in-spain/

Spain had low debt and a large budget surplus.
>who else could you hold responsible?

The contractor who underbid. If Roger's submits a bid for $1m to deliver 50k widgets he shouldn't be able to come back after the fact and demand $4m to complete the project because he underestimated his costs.
煤矿
There's nothing new in this - it has been done before.

Want to build a Mach3 aircraft in the days when most people thought jets were pretty clever?

Want to do it in <2years using materials that had never been used in a plane before - and do it on budget.

And repeat the success with half a a dozen other projects.

And it's described in a book that everyone in technology (or management) should read http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/d...
"I'm the M&A master, bitch!"

I am sure we would all love to be in a position where we can have a straight conversation with another company and after that conversation solely choose to spend $1B on acquiring them.
Raspberry Is Finally Coming To Our Doors
What to Call Your Call to Action
Does anyone know what TBA means?

https://www.coursera.org/courses
> reduced spending should [...] transferring the
> money back to the people

Only if there are tax cuts. If the government cuts spending without cutting taxes, then that does nothing for the people (other than putting a stop to digging the hole they are in). It doesn't put extra money in their pockets.
Oh I hate myself too. I can't distinguish the tabs.
I like programming, but it is far from my passion. My passion is making useful stuff people like to use (and preferably getting paid for it :). I prefer it this way, because it means I can keep my passion when I have to spend a week writing technical documentation or helping the sales team figure out how to turn their laptops on. If it gets us closer to people using the product, I'm good with it.
http://www.cincodias.com/articulo/economia/parados-cobran-ay...

There are 5,27 million of unemployed in Spain. 3 million of them receive unemployment benefits of some sort which leaves 43% without any sort of benefits. The two million that do not receive anything at the moment could become 2.5 million by the end of the year.

Of the 3 million with unemployment benefits, 53% receive 426 euros (557 USD).

N.B. I live in Tenerife, Canary Islands (Spain).
I didn't say Keynesian would cause economy to collapse. I am just saying it does not achieve its goal of smoothing out boom and busts because it requires too much competence from the governors of the economy

Keynesian is saving money during booms and spending money during recessions. Yet during booms the money saved is too little and during recessions the money spent is too much. The debt will get bigger and eventually you either revert back to monetarism and pay down your debt or you default on it by not paying/printing money, the latter latter choice leading to hyperinflation, while the latter former choice means you're reverting back to Monetarism because no one is going to lend you money anymore.

But remember, the purpose of Keynesian approach was to smooth out booms and busts in the economy, yet what we're seeing is making them lasting longer and falling harder.

During a boom, I think the mentality of politicians goes something like "We have money to spend on buying votes but instead, we are saving it? Insanity!?"

When you're forced to spend lots of money for the sake of spending money, the money is likely to be inefficiently allocated, investing in stuff that leads to more spending (like $900 handouts to each citizen) rather than investing in stuff that increases production in the long run (like building a fast railway network between cities, which require years of planning).

Monetarists would balance the budget and make careful measured investments in the economy. Yes there will be boom and busts but even in recessions the economy is still fundamentally sound, and thus will be sure to recover. See Germany for example.
Ask PG: Investors/Incubators hinder YC acceptance?
So, I'm curious to know about two things. Does YC dislike or frown greatly upon a startup that has been through a previous incubator prior to enrolling in YC? i.e. say a company has been accepted into another incubator and they have accepted equity from them at a certain valuation, but the incubator's terms match YC's valuation, would this in any way prevent a company from being accepted?

A parallel question: say a company accepted a minority investment from an angel at the same/similar valuation as YC after accepting the program, would this be frowned upon as well?

Thanks!
ColdFusion on Wheels Framework (inspired by Rails)
B'wood exclusive: Is Poonam Pandey doing film because of Sunny, Paoli Dam?
Also this http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp
If this SpaceX thing takes off, of course other space agencies, including RKA, will be forced to make transparent and comparable offerings in order to stay relevant (or get out from the launch "business").

Competition is actually a good thing sometimes.
Show HN: Groupon for independent music
Apple investors brace for more turbulence
There's nothing wrong with the European welfare state model, just look at Scandinavia. The problem is with sharing a currency with countries that you have large trade deficits with; so not the European model, but the Euro model.

Spain did not run up high public debt.

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/spain-did...

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/spains-qd...
The downside of being better than everyone else is psople tend to assume you're pretentious.

The article used the word "smugness", not "pretention". They don't quite mean the same thing. Being merely better than someone might certainly seem pretentious depending on context.

Telling everyone about it (in a context without relevance or evidence), however, is undeniably smug.
Variety of teaching style or approach to the problem (e.g. theory vs. practice) is a good reason for multiple courses in the same subject to be offered. Even if the approach is broadly the same, some students will just prefer one teacher.
> expected

"required"
高校教师招聘
If you're poor and sick, you get treatment, and you might end up in one of the following situations: 1. You fill out financial hardship paperwork, have most of the cost written off, have a small debt to pay off, 2. You fail to fill out financial hardship paperwork or aren't quite poor enough to get the cost reduced much, you pay it off slowly over time or file bankrupcty.

I've been in both situations when I didn't have insurance. Economically, it would be much better off if we had universal health insurance, so major sickness wasn't so crushing economically, but we don't "just die".

What is true is that people die sometimes because they don't have insurance and can't afford preventative treatment for conditions they don't know about until it is too late.
Rumor: Apple's next iPhone to have glass replaced with Liquidmetal
Please read between the lines. The author wasn't implying that anyone actually said that, just like he doesn't think anyone has ever said this in real life:

>"Design patterns? Hey everyone, look at the muggle try to get the wand to work!"
There are similarities, but it's a very different game. Robocom takes place on a 2D grid, and more resembles a fight between microorganisms. Each bot has its own individual memory banks, but these can be overwritten by other bots. So you might inject an instruction into an enemy to tell it to die, but a more effective strategy might be to instruct the enemy bot to infect others for several turns and then die.
Why does it always have to be one or the other? Why do we feel the need to assign labels to everything?

And why in the holy hell are some programmers so damn single-minded that they can't accept that others who are passionate about programming can also be passionate about other things. I'm passionate about my job and consider myself among the extremely lucky few who gets to do what I love for a living (and, at the moment, in a place I love doing it making for a great combo). But I'm more passionate about my family at home. I'm also passionate about the music, movies, games, and other arts.

Devoting yourself to one thing is not being passionate about it--it's having a single-minded focus and lacking passion about anything else. Can we please stop confusing those points?
Windows Phone is great, so why aren't more people buying them?
But the reasons Nasa had to do it that way - weren't

Space-X has a single goal - lift 1000Kg up 500km cheaply.

The space shuttle had a million competing goals - from the airforce who wanted a certain glide slope, senators that wanted bits built in their home state, Presidents that wanted a launch on the day of a press conference, scientists that wanted a platform for different experiments, Astronauts that wanted justification for crewed vessels. And of course Nasa that needed to find budgets to keep 'N' Apollo era people employed.
common wisdom said that very bad things would happen to them if they did not listen to the "smart" people

That's not true. The "smart people" understand Keynesian economics and said that pretty much any policy was better then austerity.

Unfortunately, there seem to be social pressures that seem to encourage the very thing that will make things worse during a recession. How many times have you heard things like "everyone is suffering and the government must share that pain and tighten its belt too"? In fact, the "smart people" are screaming to do the opposite!
1. The government does not tax GDP.

2. IIRC, GDP includes government spending, which means that those tax dollars also go towards the GDP number (which are also less in the second case).
Hospitals are obligated to provide care that will immediately save your life. They are not obligated - and won't - provide care to sustain your life.

Suppose you have cancer. An operation costs $100,000. If you get it within six weeks, you live, otherwise, it metastasizes and you die. If you haven't got the $100K in the U.S., they won't operate, and are under no obligation to do so. It's not an emergent condition.

Now, 16 weeks later when you're dying, they'll put you in a hospital bed, give you oxygen and morphine, and try to ease you into death - regardless of your ability to pay (though they'll try to get paid from your assets and your family, of course). But that "guaranteed" care is perhaps not as comforting as getting the operation and staying alive would have been.
Ask HN: Website providing VMs similar to Stripe's CTF
I saw a post a couple weeks ago regarding a website that was providing VM's (I believe) so that you could learn about vulnerabilities in linux. I think the site had a gray background. I am losing hair trying to find it!

Thanks in advance
> First, let's show that I can write a job that can produce more data that it inputs. I have a map of user to score, and want to compute pair wise summed scores for every user pair. This is clearly O(n^2) outputs. Computing pair wise scores is a common algorithm for recommender systems (I realize in practice you generally do not compute the entire space because it will be too slow. However your output will be closer to n^2 than n, ie, it will be much larger than your input.)

But that's exactly it - you admit yourself that this is a contrived example! For all but trivial numbers of users N^2 storage requirements would be impractical for any system, no programmer in their right mind would take such an approach.

And this is the point that you seem to be missing: the question is not whether you can come up with some contrived scenario where there is vastly more intermediate data than input data, but when you can come up with a realistic practical example - and apparently you cannot.

> A simpler example is "I want to compute aggregations on all the fields my log file."

In this case the amount of intermediate data is no greater than the amount of output data.

> But again, the point you keep missing and conveniently ignore when you quote my posts is that the point of map reduce on Aws is not about data locality (obviously) but about downstream flexibility. I can run 100 jobs, in parallel, on 10k machines, and output much more data than I input, without running a cluster of my own and I get to pay by the hour. I am isolated from other devs and spin the machines down when finished.

These are benefits of EC2, not of map-reduce. The critique was specific to map-reduce, not of the entire principle of on-demand computing.

> If you buy the argument that this is a useful feature (as any EMR customer would attest too)

Strawman. You're attempting to conflate the general benefits of on-demand computing with the specific benefits of EMR. The author was criticizing EMR in particular, not the entire principle of on-demand computing.

> than this too is a separate more pragmatic reason why the author has no idea what he is taking about when he says all EMR customers are a cargo cult.

And yet you still haven't been able to cite any realistic, non-contrived examples of where EMR is the appropriate tool for the job.
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It may be that you need a certification for each hardware installation separately. However, there are software requirements for FAA certification. This is from X-Plane Professional description: "It provides hardware and frame-rate checks required for FAA certification of the simulator".
Indeed. Here's a 2009 video presenting the same technology:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSICZ_7hpho
> Is an "innovation" that nobody wants really innovation, or merely change-for-changes-sake?

It's not clear, at least to me, that nobody wants Microsoft's innovations. I think it's more that they don't want them from Microsoft. Windows is a tough beast to change. The near ubiquity of the platform in the 90s and 00s means that there's a lot of people out there who "imprinted" on the Windows UI model.

It doesn't just affect Microsoft, though it may affect them disproportionately because of brand association. While OS X is a screaming success now, Apple's transition from OS 9 was anything but. It took 3 major revisions of the software before it was usable and a lot of people hated it at the time.

In contrast, Apple's introduction of iOS received a much warmer reception because there was no incumbent. Changing a major technology platform is hard.
This is almost the definition of religious differences.

Adherents of religion X will tell you how it changed their life, and it can change yours too, if you just believe hard enough.

When you investigate, find problems or just say "it's not for me", it's "your fault" for doing it wrong, or with a bad attitude, or you didn't talk to the right people, or you'll "grow up" later and 'see the light'.
I think Spaniards are a bit like Americans in that it's hard to find multilingual ones. Young Spaniards do emigrate in droves, though.

N.B. I live in Spain.
...if a countries GDP suddenly falls by 5% it isn't because a bunch of people got married.

True, but that's not the only pointless transaction one can make that would raise GDP.

Here is another: taxing some people and using the proceeds to pay others to do valueless work (e.g., digging holes and filling them in). A well designed austerity measure will attempt to reduce such payments. This will reduce GDP, but not welfare.

(That's not to say a poorly designed austerity measure can't be welfare reducing, I'm just pointing out that you need to dig deep into the specifics to make that determination.)

If you want to argue against austerity, explain why it's welfare reducing. Pointing out that it might reduce GDP just doesn't cut it.
The amount of traffic generated by being on the front page is huge compared to not being on the front page. Our launch resulted in 41 website visitors total for the day. So having a hook and catching the HN community's attention with something very interested is key to getting noticed. Not everything is as exciting as founders like to think it is :)
Are you sure of this example? It does look like GDP is 200k in both cases. The first case looks wrong, if he pulls 25k from his savings, there will be -25k in savings (or investments as they are the same) and +25k in spendings. Effect is 0...
If you don't speak the language you won't get a job.
How do the hospitals get payed if people can't pay them? Do people go to jail because they had no money when they were about to die?

This looks as efficient to hospitals as writing a bill to a rock or a tree
I don't think requiring employees to take time off is a bad thing.

If you really don't want to you don't have to.

But the point is to allow employees to take time off without feeling guilty, while still allowing them to control their own schedule.
Just added this update:

EDIT: Also, these changes will take effect for everyone who has already pledged at these levels. Though if you could, please switch - if the old ones have 0 pledges I can delete them.

Unfortunately I can't change the pricing structure in place, but based on the feedback we've gotten so far I've added a set of new rewards - all of which are better than their previous ones. :)

$15 - A license and acknowledgement on the contributor list

$50 - A license and early beta access

$100 - A license, early beta access, and participation in feedback rounds

$200 - Two licenses, pre-beta access, and participation in feedback rounds

All the higher rewards will also of course include participation in the feedback rounds. Ultimately, this should address people's concerns of buying something before it exists, but providing the opportunity to be a part of it at a lower price point.
China's more like 7000 miles away by air:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+beijing+t...

And as far as putting it on a boat, sailing it across the pacific, through panama, and up the atlantic - or dropping it off in Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, or Mexico and putting it on a train... well you do the math :)

Either way, that's a lot of diesel.
No Hibernate Feature in Ubuntu 12.04
A Project Management and Invoicing Tool for Freelancers: A Review of Bunker App