skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The other limitation of JSON is there doesn't appear to be a standard way of representing Unicode code points above 16 bits (such as some Emoji) in strings. One way I've seen it done is to put two escaped UTF-16 surrogate pairs together; another way I've seen it done is having the UTF-8 literal inside the string.
Personally, I'm looking forward to cheaper and cheaper computing, rather than more and more powerful.

Raspberry Pi is just the beginning. Wait until Sandy Bridges are as cheap and plentiful as 555 timers. I'd also like to see some sort of worldwide standardization on a single CPU architecture. Innovation will continue long after Moore's law.
I like the contractual accountability idea.

However, I'd like to point out that term limits is making government less like a business. Imagine you told a CEO 'Well, you're here for 4, maybe 8 years, but no longer." Zuckerberg's term would be over in 2014, Jobs wouldn't have been able to return (or would have stopped in 2005 if you just want to count his return in 1997).

That's not to say that term limits are a bad idea (however, I'm unimpressed with their implementation in California), just that I don't think that people really feel comfortable with having a government, that can make it's own rules, run itself like a business.
Ask HN Foodies: Our first iPhone App - hungry
Hello,

We just launched the app, which is one slide way to eat out with foodie friends; http://hungry.am
Actually, the idea was rejected by YC for S12, but we are building it anyway.

(The product is still buggy. It can't do push notifications and users have to refresh the chat manually to read new messages...oh god Urbanairship!)

Please check the web site at http://hungry.am

We really really love to hear your feedbacks!
Even if you just poked around for a few minutes, I'd love any opinions about what you think, what you think could be improved, etc..
It's a very very new product, so there is a lot to improve, but it is important to me to get your feedback as early as possible.

Bon Appetit :P
Or a VPN within the UK, as long as it's not one of the ISPs mentioned here.
Should a Facebook “Like” be constitutionally protected free speech?
A useful generalization is that tech business are divided into people who talk for a living, and people who think for a living. One side of that divide seems to have a lot of trouble understanding the legitimate needs of the other. The headphone issue is but one of many ways that lack of understanding manifests.
>(1) The tax system is very simple if you're not trying to game the system or minimize your tax burden. Almost all of the complexity arises from the allowance for deductions and the related regulations necessary to prevent abuse of those deductions.

How is taking deductions "gaming the system?" Why on earth would I not try to minimize my tax burden. The US government is not a charity, and it functions far worse than most charities do. If I'm just going to give money away, the government is not going to be my first choice for recipient.
Unfortunately the law isn't so black and white, and depends a lot upon intent. Thinking about the technicalities isn't so important; what matters to the court is whether the individuals involved intended to commit a crime.
> I'll question your mention of your high school and "classes prépa"… M.Sc. from ENS Lyon >>> whatever high school/prep school you went to.

It's France, showing off the elitist school you went to is important, even years after graduating.
I bought this the day it came out and have been using it occasionally for a couple weeks.

It has boosted my engagement because I enjoy browsing questions and tend to find ones I'm able to answer more readily. It's a joy to browse questions while sitting in a comfy chair but I usually switch to a computer to answer them (maybe that was just issues with finding my old account and logging in).

I still don't turn to it if I'm trying to solve a problem I'm facing.
As a motorcyclist, I really hope that all the upcoming variations of autonomous vehicles are heavily tested in all conceivable edge cases. Also, as a motorcyclist, I welcome the well-tested, never-tiring, unimpaired, highly predictable, self-driving AIs! :-)

With all manufacturers pursuing their own AI, though, I wonder if we'll have a future that echoes the past. If, say, Volvo has sub-optimal testing, perhaps 'ovlov' (an old Usenet joke - Volvo in your mirrors) will again become known as the bane of motorcyclists. Will Toyota launch ads bragging about their higher AI safety rating than Volvo?
>The proper corporate tax rate should be zero

I actually suggest you do something that ends double taxation and the capital gain tax tier:

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

This is why:

>Elimination of Tax Incentives
>It is also interesting to note that it was soon realised that the system eliminated to a considerable extent the effectiveness of tax incentives for corporations. If a corporation was given a tax break then its incomes thus released from taxation would not generate franking credits precisely because no tax was paid. In turn, this meant that the shareholders received fewer credits along with their dividends, meaning in turn that they had to pay more tax. The net result is that each tax break a corporation itself got was countered by a matching increase in the tax burden of shareholders, leaving shareholders in exactly the same position had no tax break been received by the corporation. Thus, to the extent that corporate directors acted so as to increase shareholder wealth, tax incentives would not influence corporate behaviour.
What the hell? Aren't there more important things out there to tackle than copyright infringement? Sure it's illegal. But there is a massive campaign against pirates, but seriously -- surely there are bigger problems than this to tackle ....

edit: also, i love this quote
"We should keep blocking them - they are stealing music illegally."

it's clearly ok to steal music legally. Just as long as you're not stealing it in ways the authorities deem appropriate. </tongue-in-cheek>
Nobody told me about the first 1000 hours
Warren Buffett and his secretary would like a word with you.

My income has FICA and Medicare taken out of about 90% of the total, those taxes are capped. If I made more, I'd be paying less as a % of income for entitlements. My income is taxed at the personal income rate as opposed to the silly-low capital gains rate.

Our tax code taxes the poor almost nothing, and the rich at a smaller % of their incomes than the middle class. So the middle class is paying a huge % of the tax burden, relative to their incomes. Then someone goes "Hey, look, the poor pay almost nothing!" and people get mad about the injustice.
If that's true, then it is even better for Microsoft because Amazon would bring no competitive advantages to the fight that they could not replicate.

Not sure why anybody would view that as a plus.
It's not actually everywhere. Countries with imputation based dividend laws have seen strong reductions in corporate tax avoidance.
You are never powerless, until you believe that you are.

You may not be able to change your current company. But you may be able to find something else. It will properly pay less, but there are ways around that (/r/frugal, say). You may be able to get enough self-respect that you dare to stand up to your boss.

My grandparents were as close as you can get to poverty without actually starving -- better not drop this piece of meat, because that is all I have and there isn't enough potatoes to make up for it -- poor.

Grandpa worked his ass of getting crazy overtime to make a bit of money. Yet once when his boss became really mean he told to stop doing that shit or he would quit. He didn't exactly have much of cushion at home, but he knew that he wouldn't stand for abuse either.
I'm leaving the Internet for a year
On the other hand, people complaining about this don't realize it is very much the same in any other language.

Go ahead and just fiddle around in that million loc c codebase. Or that million loc java codebase. (and ignore for a second that that c codebase is a large compiler and that java codebase is an elaborate hello world). Or a hypothetical million line haskell codebase.

In C you have to understand modules, functions working on structures and functions controlling the architecture. In Java you have to understand class hierachies and classes or functions managing the control flow. In haskell, you have to understand abstract data types, type classes and monads and functions managing control flow.
Interesting. I feel like I am always an outsider in this thought process, but I believe that if you are not being paid for your art (regardless of type), you are not producing anything of real value to a large enough group.

The concept of "true art" not being made for hire seems like an excuse for someone to imagine they are successful without actually being so. One of the factors I think is driving this is that everyone in today’s (US) culture needs to be a winner and there are no losers. While it isn’t bad in and of itself, if you truly look at 2 artists as an outsider and one is being paid and the other is not, it seems clear to me who is producing better art for the masses and therefore generating the most economic value.

This same concept can be applied to startups. I read people making excuses for not having VC funding that typically include things like, VCs only like big market sizes which is dumb or VCs only fund businesses with XYZ type of cofounder which is not fair etc. Normally when I read these statements it is obvious to me that the person writing them just doesn’t understand the reality of the game they are involved in.

Similarly, an artist producing music that only .001% of the population will listen to will make excuses about why they don’t have a record deal bc record execs have no taste in good music. That is obviously ridiculous.
> For example, python should be installable on everything from Windows to BSD all using the same "pm install python" command. Packages will be marked as explicitly supporting OSes.

I don't see how that would work. In an abstract sense, I can conceptualize it, but from a practical standpoint, I can't see it ever being implemented well enough to the point where it would be widely adopted (which would be the whole point). If you can think of a way to do it, by all means go for it, but I just don't think it's possible.

> A bash/sh dependency hurts on non-Unix OSes. I'd rather Python than sh. I also admit that, for the most part, I absolutely hate sh and all its derivates and view them all as dirty hacks, so this is probably just innate bias.

I think it's just your bias. At some point, whatever language it's written in would be non-native on most of the OSes, so you'd have to port something one way or the other (Python has a fairly nice port that abstracts away some of the warts, but it's still just serving as a pseudo-agnostic interface). Given that, why not sh? It's already been ported to Windows (I've never used Cygwin, but it seems like it'd be a useful starting point), and virtually every other OS is either Unix-like or supports some native POSIX-like interface for compatibility reasons.

If you're complaining about sh syntax, I'm a bit sympathetic toward that, but it's ingrained enough - and good enough - that I wouldn't go to the effort of replacing it. Also remember that, for shell scripting, you don't want a language as powerful as Python - it needs to be able to do a very small set of simple tasks and do them well.

Also, just think about concurrency. We take pipes for granted, but imagine trying to do that all natively in Python.
..which is pretty much your subjective stance and nothing else.
What's with the lack of periods?
Fundamentally, XML has the wrong information model for most applications -- it is a document markup language often used as a data serialization format. SOAP inherits quite a bit of this complexity, irrelevant to the task of data serialization. Even if all of the necessary features from SOAP are layered on top of JSON, the result would be less complex than SOAP.
Maybe he had to write it on an iPad from the serenity of a first-class flight destined for a vacation.

I refuse to believe this was something that a grown man spent time to write on a laptop or desktop. Or maybe that's what tumblelogging does to people's writing proficiency.
Why Conficker Is Hard To Kill
I always get a chuckle when reading up on prescription-only drugs that are (often significantly) safer than Tylenol. :-)
Agreed, I was a pathogen devotee until I tried vundle. Never going back.
Open-sourcing your genomic data
A way out of Corporate Tax Avoidance
> "The biggest culprits of this, really, are the younger demographic who just haven't been convinced that doing this is somehow morally uncomfortable.

This.

Good luck with that. More probably, when the "younger demographics" grow older and get more voting power, they will likely vote /against/ such corporate tyranny. This means that the music industry has some 20 or so more years of prosperity, at most.
I agree, macros are a nice addition to the language and I would choose scala over java anytime. What bothers me is that scala has so much syntactic sugar one can die of diabetes just by looking at some source code.
Oh wow, that linked story about the origins of the 'dsw' command is really something. Simpler times indeed.
Another recent article about Aspirin:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/20/3481356.ht...

"scientists have now discovered that aspirin also activates an enzyme that burns fat, a finding that could unlock its cancer fighting properties, according to a new study."

(I've read before about aspirin -- or white willow bark -- being a critical element in an Ephedra-Caffeine-Aspirin stack's so-called thermogenic effect)
No, but I know plenty who pay H&R block to help them find all the deductions they're eligible for. This doesn't come out to 10 million, but the income they're sheltering. Its true that large corporations benefit from economies of scale when they try to avoid paying any more taxes than they have to, but I don't see any moral difference between what they're doing and what everyone else does.
I really like the idea of changing over to an imputation system: In an imputation system, you get tax credit, as a shareholder, for taxes paid by the corporation. This means if the corporation avoids tax, you as a person end up paying the tax. Conversely, if the corporation pays a large amount of tax, you as a tax payer and shareholder get a credit for that tax amount.

(Imputation systems usually have no special capital gains rate, or a higher one).
Pepsi Pulse
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3605343

I manage Facebook's Whitehat program (https://www.facebook.com/whitehat). We have taken an incredibly open stance towards security researchers and welcome the contributions they make towards securing the internet. Our policy towards this research is documented quite succinctly:

"If you give us a reasonable time to respond to your report before making any information public and make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations, destruction of data and interruption or degradation of our service during your research, we will not bring any lawsuit against you or ask law enforcement to investigate you."

His attempt to access data was outside our whitehat guidelines, had clear malicious intent, and included extensive and destructive efforts to remain undiscovered and anonymous. In addition, he made no effort to contact Facebook with his discoveries, and even denied involvement when initially questioned. His attempt to claim he intended responsible disclosure only after faced with criminal action is false and insulting to the community of responsible security researchers.

http://gmangham.blogspot.co.uk/

[5] I think the white hat bug bounty programme is a very good idea and that schemes like it are a very useful way for companies, especially the big ones to manage their large attack surfaces. I suspect some people are wondering why I didn’t use it to submit my findings, well the answer to that is that the bug bounty programme DID NOT EXIST when I was working on my audit, therefore it was not an option that I could take. I am willing to bet that it became a higher priority afterwards though.

It's pretty obvious that somebody here is lying, when did the bug bounty programme start?
My weekend project: StepStats - Better Fitbit Statistics
Please forgive my ignorance, but why not? Couldn't the entire JSON response be, for instance, UTF-8 encoded, thus allowing the representation of all possible Unicode code points?
How does this compare to FuzzyFinder? FuF has been far better than other options people espouse like Command-T but still has some warts of its own.
Why not just use Unix time (in milliseconds) for your timestamps? You'll have to convert it to whatever your desired container format is on the other end of the wire, but...you're going to have to do that for all of your other data as well.
Is there a way to easily open a file into a split?
I'm sure there's a name for what you've just done to derail the discussion. "strawman" is not exactly it. But you make an impossible demand.

I've managed a big budget before. There are usually no more than a few items that account for most of the spending (in the US, these are probably defense, health, pensions and education), which you can usually cut 10% easily, and from that point on, the devil is in the details, both for the big items, and for the smaller level items.

And it always looks like there's nothing you can cut, and yet, there is always a lot you can cut, usually in the vicinity of 50%, if you have to, without endangering the viable status of the operation (although the stakeholders - employees / citizens / whatever - will find things are much less convenient than before).

Give me a proper OLAPpable database of government expenses (star scheme with properly categorized fact tables), and I'll show you where to cut. And no, it won't be popular or easy, but it's possible.

Right now, the US government spends ~60% more[0] than it collects in taxes (otherwise stated: taxes account for only ~70% of US government spending. For 2011, there's 2.4T in tax receipts, 1.3T in borrowing, 2012 is looking worse - http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2011USbn_1... ). Saying that you cannot reform down to 50% is equivalent to saying that the US cannot be run sustain-ably. I would guess that's not true -- it just cannot be sustained with the current entitlements and spending.

[0] Depending on how you look at it. This is using government's own numbers, which do not include e.g. backstops against otherwise bankrupt financial institutions like Freddie, Fannie. And it doesn't include IMHO proper treatment of social security. I estimate it actually spends 100% more than it collects.
Apparently the first solution is the correct according to the RFC: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt

To escape an extended character that is not in the Basic Multilingual Plane, the character is represented as a twelve-character sequence, encoding the UTF-16 surrogate pair.

This is regardless of whether the json itself is UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoded.
Why Light Touching Can Double Your Chances of Getting a Date
Could be this one:
http://www.quora.com/How-did-Chris-Putnam-get-hired-at-Faceb...
Sorry, I meant, in your vimrc file.. Having to hit ctrl-d each time is a PITA.
As far as I know, the Peel Sessions are (c) BBC Radio, because they were recorded in the radio studio...
I wish the "recommendations" part would have included, "Give your people a raise" (or "send them home at 5").

In the middle of recession style "your raise this year is the fact that you still have a job", a 5% raise would earn you a lot of loyalty... and a 10% raise is stuff of legend.

A 10% raise for a department is cheap: say the business laid off 10 people in the department over the last 4 years, and 3 people remain to run a formerly (about) dozen person department. So you're spending 1/3rd of an average salary to keep those people on. Compared to the 20% a headhunter would take + the productivity loss of replacing workers... sounds like a deal to me.
All pills can do that? I thought many were designed to dissolve in your stomach like tums. Not sure why they should be exceptionally bad, unless tums cause issues too.
Merchants don't pay for their goods as a proportion of their profit. Unless you mean streaming music and movie services, which for some reason get to be a special case.
"Circles" that aren't circles: shapes of constant width (video)
JungleDisk has too
Posession of child pornography is illegal, possession of music and movies is not.
Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T: which carrier is iPhone 5 ready?
I'm still wet behind the ears when it comes to Unicode, but why can't the character just be transmitted "natively"? (Like you said, UTF-8 inside the string assuming the encoding is set to utf8) {"I'm unicode" : "←"}
Java creator James Gosling: 'Google totally slimed Sun'
Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index
Google: "Galaxy Nexus code is closed just like that of the iPhone"
Looks good. I'll have to pick it up.
Great comment. Am I the only person waiting for someone to provide the regular expression intimated at above?
The right business model for your web app depends on what your competitors or the people you are replacing are already doing. Inertia will cause people to evaluate your web app versus how they are already solving the problem. So if what you are replacing does monthly saas billing, then you too should to monthly saas billing. Of course, going free or super reduced price can cause people to rush over to your web app though they will do so with a grain of salt because they will have already been used to another system.
Load virtualenvwrapper on demand to speed up your shell
Yes, Google Drive for Mac is poorly written. It is taking 2-4% CPU just idling - even when paused. I won't be using it until they get this fixed.
http://johnmarshall4.tumblr.com/post/21864353801/gdrive-suck...
Just because my door is open doesn't mean you can just walk in my house and steal my television.
Definitely sounds like an ousting rather than wanting to step down.
Presumably if he was adding periods manually, he wouldn't have skipped them at the end of paragraphs.
>Really the reason to use kickstarter.com is as an advertising platform. I'm not really sure if having their audience as well as our own would have benefited us in this case or not.

I would also point out that Kickstarter acts as a trusted escrow service that will refund people's money if the project doesn't hit its funding targets.
Wow, I had the exact same idea around a month or two ago, but didn't have time to execute.

Please tell me you are sending out invites today.
I work at a place where a manager has around 20 people, and Google is told to have much bigger departments. But are you meaning people manager or technical manager? If your manager really directs your work, then yes 20 is too much.
Free your mind: the Peano axioms
You might be thinking of a hash. Hashes have a cascading effect where a single bit change in the source file has a "waterfall" effect during the hashing where the output is drastically different from the hash of the unmodified input.

I don't think this is necessarily the case with all encryption mechanisms.
11 Ways To Occupy If You Have to Work on May Day
> I don't think images from hundreds of little cameras are going to be equal the image from the Hubble or its replacement, the Webb.

My expertise in this field extends to reading several Wikipedia pages and sci-fi novels, but:

1. Wouldn't that depend on what they're trying to look at? Can the Hubble even focus on anything closer than Jupiter?

2. Wouldn't they be able to use interferometry to effectively surpass any single-lens telescope?
Microsoft Paying $180M Advance On Nook Win8, $125M For Content,Tech Acquisition
The TRUTH About Database Benchmarks
Unless of course you actually want to transmit structured document content over JSON - which is actually pretty common in AJAX applications.