skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree completely. Unfortunately the outcome is normally very different when the market has to route around it.

Rent control here in SF only affects people in older buildings. One of many unintended consequences of this is the ridiculous state of Tenderloin. Back in Denmark where I own an apartment, rent control forces me to only be able to rent it out as a corporate apartment to foreigners. The official rent would pay less than quarter of the mortgage. No wonder it is hard to find a good apartment in Copenhagen.

An example is the market response to the generations of social engineering started as the New Deal, which eventually led us to the very distorted issues we now see in the financial markets.

Another example are the costs of health care in the US, that were caused directly by the deductions for employers created in the 40s.

Instead of an efficient market, where people picked the most efficient insurance for their situation, it became an arms race of who could offer more benefits together with a bureaucracy to make sure their insured (who don't pay directly) don't abuse the system.

Let Richard Branson or any other smart entrepreneur at the health system without the handicap of social engineering and it would be fixed within a year. Rather than fixing it all signs at the moment point towards further regulation and thus further distortion.

The market will always route around social engineering no matter to what limits the regulators attempt to control it. The outcomes are rarely as good as if the market was just left to do its job. Of course when this happens like it has so obviously in the current crisis, people talk about it being the fault of the market run wild and want to bring in more regulation, when the regulation it self was what caused it to go wild in the first place.
While I like this change, it's more pleasing: it really just looks like a stylesheet change with a very touch and go markup alteration. That's not to say it's a bad thing
Thawte is apparently one of the fuckups in the Sotirov et al report from this morning. Paul Kocher, one of the designers of SSL3/TLS, told the NYTimes that he was astonished that anyone would rely on MD5 in 2008; is it possible that nobody at Thawte really understands how SSL and x509 works? If so, is it really an industry success story that they got included with IE?
From a SvN comment by Jason:

"We’ve advertised here and there, but all things considered the number would round down to zero. We’re currently advertising Highrise on The Deck, for example.

I don’t have anything against advertising, but we’ve found better ways to get our message out than spending money on advertisements.

I like what Amazon.com does: Instead of advertising they give their ad budget back to their customers in the form of free shipping."
Ah yes, I also found this information when I was looking for historical divorce numbers. It indeed seems that there are structural differences considering marriages/coupling in US vs Russia.

From what I read, it looks like in US divorces are a way for people to try to find a better match. People shuffle themselves among marriages.

While in Russia, it looks like there are some men which leave behind them trail of divorced women (with children) that do not remarry. Thus there must be many men that never marry/reproduce. If this is true, it would be rather disturbing, as it would create unstable society.
Introducing PoshTweet - The PowerShell Twitter Script Library
52-- coming up on 53-- years of "you're doing it wrong".
Of course, all the KPMG audit really says is "GeoTrust has a policy about checking the documentation of people who request certificates", and there's part of the problem: there's no way for a CA to make an attestation that they've implemented the technology competantly, because no third party will certify that attestation.
Doesn't Warren Buffet own a stake in Tesco?
Some background: I worked on some Tesco online projects, I have friends who have worked on their data mining. I'm British but I now live in California.

Tesco's data mining is easily the biggest operation I've ever seen. Everything I did at Tesco had a large clubcard component. The clubcard was one of Tesco's major innovations in Britain. It's not dissimilar to a Safeway card. Tesco issue these things in keyfobs as well as card so you always have them.

I've seen people use their clubcard when they buy a newspaper. They don't save money, they don't even get points, it's just habitual.

You can tell Tesco have really nailed data when you see their customer demographic. I saw something in the Guardian (British newspaper) a couple of years back which showed the Tesco customer wealth demographics matching the population norm almost exactly.

When a retail group can organise their stores and retail inventory such that every walk of life uses them they are on the road to success. Most people I know in Britain that don't shop at a Tesco as their primary store have competing store much closer to where they live.
Unfortunately, the algorithms can't catch staged photos.
Downloading your games? Get ready for extra fees
Lego Engineering: From Kindergarten to College
Like 90% of the content on the site.
Also there's no built in payment system for the web. It'd actually make sense for ISPs to launch a payment model, whereby you go to some website, agree to pay X for something, and it just gets added to your ADSL/phone bill.

Then we might see some really cool premium models around on the web.
If you buy free range organic eggs at double the cost of mass produced commercial ones, you've still got a cheap protein source.
The only time I've seen Lua used is programming Warcraft mods. What else is Lua used for today?
One day, energy is going to be nearly free. Then none of this will matter.
I think that was modoc's original point, in response to the 'stella' comment. SSL, even if vulnerable to Sotirov-level impersonation attacks, still protects from other idiot-level attacks.

So you might be tricked into setting up encrypted communication to one of the (small) N groups that have the knowledge/budget to do a Sotirov attack, but at least you still won't have identity details hijacked by (large) M others, because even broken cert-checking protects against them.
good article, it's been bookmarked for future reference.
Christ. I read the title as "Iceland after the fail". I need to take a break from the internets.
FYI from the comments:

"JF: While the lack of a free plan lead to increased paid signups, we decided we’d bring it back because we’d be missing out on a lot of upgrades from free -> pay. That’s a lucrative pay path for us."
I have a vagrant living in my NYC apt building that pays $75 a month in rent and eats out of the garbage. He has no electricity or running water. When he opens the door to his apt in the summer the rest of the building gags. There are two other units that pay $75 dollars; a nice old couple and a loony chain smoker with bad BO.
WebTrust is an accounting entity; it's just a process formalism that allows companies like KPMG to "audit" CAs. I went down that rabbit hole and found the WebTrust standards document:

http://www.cica.ca/download.cfm?ci_id=45239&la_id=1&...

The technical stuff starts on page 34. The intro to the document claims that the WebTrust CA standard is loosely based on RFC2527:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2527.txt

The technical material in these documents is about FIPS compliance for hardware crypto, key size, and backup/restore; in other words, the exact same stuff you'd read in a Common Criteria document, utterly divorced from actual operational or code security. Compare to the new PCI-DSS standard: on paper, it is actually harder to process an individual VISA card than it is to run a CA.

Neither document contains the letters "M-D-5" or requires serial numbers to be randomized. However, the majority of CAs do randomize serial numbers, suggesting a best practice that simply isn't included in the industry's CA certification standard.

The link you provided to the Bugzilla report on adding GeoTrust/RapidSSL is almost offensive; it reads: "we got audited by KPMG, here's our address", "ok, fill out this document", "ok, we'll add you to the next release".
Color Codes [Resistors]
Georg Simon Ohm, a German physicist, demonstrated proportionality between current and voltage, thus defining resistance (this rule was named after him as Ohm's law).
Thawte is unfortunately not the same company anymore. It doesn't surprise me a bit that Verisign let it degrade.

Thawte _was_ a success story for its time. When Shuttleworth created it he severely undercut prices which is why Verisign had to buy them since he was quickly working up the food chain. After Verisign bought them, they carefully controlled the product offering to keep it the low-price step-child that it is today.

I have used Thawte a few times but the last few years I have been dissatisfied. Do you have any recommendations? I would like to give my business to someone other than Verisign if possible.
One barrier many JVM-hosted languages (including JRuby) are quickly coming up against when targeting Dalvik is the incompatible DEX bytecode format. Pure interpreters are fine, since they don't do any runtime bytecode emission, but the faster, more mature implementations tend to compile their source to bytecode at runtime. That won't work on Dalvik, since the Java bytecode->DEX translation tool is only available on a system running the SDK, not the handset itself.

One solution to this would be to create a self-hosting Dalvik DEX translator, so that apps running on an Android device could generate bytecode on the fly; another would be to switch to pre-compilation of your JVM-hosted language, with all runtime code evaluation handled via a simple interpreter.

An interesting example of the second type is Scala -- the Scala compiler generates class files directly, which can then be converted for use in Dalvik on the development host. It won't give you the runtime dynamism of a Scheme or JRuby environment, but it will at least spare you from having to write plain Java.
I think Iceland is a great study of what may occur here.

For those of us that are young and in the US or Europe, you and I have never endured a great failing of the system. Our brains can't contemplate "it" happening. But the reality is -- it can, and is, happening now in Iceland.

Icelandic folks were riding very high until the tightly wound kronas started to unfurl, and I'm guessing many are still in shock and denial. Eventually, it gives way to anger, which is what we see now with the protests.

Prepare for the worst folks, keep hoping for the best. But don't live in a state of denial, it'll only serve to hurt you.
If loving a chance for success is wrong, I don't want to be right.
I don't think that's so. For example, a tax on fossil fuels based on carbon output would be simple and easy to enforce (importer/extracter pays the tax). It would cause all goods to reflect their true carbon cost. Why would that be worse than the original problem?

You could even couple the tax with an offsetting decrease in other taxes, if you're worried about increasing the total tax burden.
> Let Richard Branson or any other smart entrepreneur at the health system without the handicap of social engineering and it would be fixed within a year.

Where "fixed" means that unprofitable/poor people die of or are crippled by easily and cheaply treatable diseases. That's what a pure market solution would do. Once you start including those people, it's "social engineering".
As far as tradtional desktop apps go, over 40% of Adobe's Lightroom was written in Lua. If you read the front matter in the link then you'll see their forward to the book.

Wikipedia has a list of Lua apps as well. It seems fairly incomplete... if I recall, Lua has gone into space on at least one commercial satellite :)

Lua is the scripting language for nmap, wireshark, various embedded processors such as lego mindstorms, and dozens of high-profile games.
CIO strategy: 10 qualities of IT greatness
Rent stabilization in NYC isn't mandatory for new construction, so new buildup being condos is not a response to rent control (unless it's a response to the threat of future rent control). Also, you'll need to explain how "sky high rents + abandoned buildings" corresponds to "Why renovate when you can't charge rents commensurately?" - if landlords can't charge rents commensurately, where are the sky high rents coming from?

The argument that rent control prevents owners from maintaining their buildings is pure bullshit. There's not a rent-control law in existence that doesn't allow annual increases sufficient for maintenance. Buildings aren't maintained because the owner sees the opportunity for dramatically increased profits if the current tenant leaves and lets the building fall to shit in an effort to drive them out.

As for why allowing people to stay in their homes is a good thing (and forgive me for being sentimental, but these are their homes, even if other people own the buildings - they do live there): there a few things that bother me about the free market religion:

1. The belief that all things with value have been priced appropriately.

2. The belief that ownership is the only form of risk that should be rewarded by society.

Neighborhoods don't just magically become expensive to live in. I won't claim that the only reason is because good, noble people moved in when things were cheap and turned things around, but it's ridiculous to suggest that the people living in a place have nothing to do with that place becoming a desirable place for wealthier people to live.

As for whether unskilled workers are somehow more deserving of a house in Manhattan than skilled workers: no, but then again, they don't deserve to be run away from their jobs and families simply because some rich asshole can price them out, either. You're making an emotional appeal for a guy with a family to have a right to be close to his job - that cuts both ways, you know.
Yeah, sell shovels.

And besides services I believe there are already dev tools being sold.
I'm surprised and a bit skeptical that every CA (except for one) randomizes serial numbers without it being published in a standard or guidance document somewhere. Best practice usually has something worse than a (n - 1) distribution.
My previous company used Lua, in a mobile development, to a fair degree of success. Lua is used in some setup boxes, in games, for general scripting.

It is a simple, yet very fast scripting language, and it is usually used on top of something else, more as command and control.

It has full closures, functions as first citizen, so basically you can do functional programing if that is your cup of tea.

Since it's data structure is so lightweight (table is the only complex data structure) It also can be used for data serialization over the air.
Tarrifs are actually a particularly good example of markets routing around government interference. Routing around tariffs is called smuggling, and has been a huge business as long as there have been governments.

I wasn't claiming, incidentally, that markets were totally immune to government interference-- just as networks are not immune to damage. Just that markets will always find whatever room you give them.
Perhaps, but the rerouting has a cost, which often lands on those least able to bear it; in the case of rent control, the cost lands preferentially on poor tenants in the form of higher rents. And even costs that land on the rich make us all poorer in the long run.

Because of the harm done, it's still worth noting that rent control and other "pro-tenant" law is rarely good for tenants, or indeed anyone other than sometimes well-meaning but economically illiterate busybodies.
Facebook, MySpace, Digg, and Ning Discuss Their Architectures
My grandparents lived in rent controlled apartments in NYC that they could not have afforded to stay in

This is selection bias. Suppose the government raised the federal minimum wage to $50/hr. This would cause massive unemployment (and, no doubt, a thriving black market for labor), but some lucky low-income workers would keep their jobs. You could then point to one of those workers and say, "Hey, I know someone who has a high-paying job that wouldn't exist but for the new minimum wage." But this ignores the damage done to everyone else through unemployment and higher prices. And so it goes with your lucky grandparents.

You can avoid these sorts of errors by consistent application of the following rule:

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

-- Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson
http://jim.com/econ/contents.html
I can assure you I had nothing to do with it, or any other one. In fact, I continue to be amazed at people showing me as an example...I'm just a little little company building a little little product!
Also, debuggers are REALLY useful when you're learning a language for the first time.

Yes, they are. I thought we were talking about text editors?
Blogspam.

It would be interesting if HN could reparent/merge votes and comments in the case where two links to the same thing get submitted.
I'm assuming the question was

It'd be neat if there was a web site that you could submit some writing
samples (emails or whatever) and then see everything else that person has
posted online (regardless of whether it was anonymous or not).

to which I agree with tptacek's answer.
was the "one" in those articles? I didn't see. Anyway, who do you trust to buy certs from? I need to get a new one soon and would like recommendations.
whew wipes brow

Exactly! I'm sorry I wasn't communicating clearly enough.
Cato actually has done some studies on the libertarian vote. It went overwhelmingly for George Bush in 2000, but swung about 20 points democratic in 2004. I'm not sure that they've updated the study for 2008, but my gut (and surveys of self-identified well-known libertarians) tell me Obama won the vote.

If you like market economics, don't care if your neighbor is gay, and don't feel like occupying countries on the other side of the world, there is really nobody pandering to you. You tend to move around.

Edit: Here's the paper comparing the 2000 and 2004 elections that I mentioned

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6715

Kerry did 18% better than Gore among libertarian voters, despite not having a libertarian bone in his body. Bush won the demographic in both elections, but lost 13% between 2000 and 2004, for a 31 point net swing.
I see that you disagree with their viewpoint, but I don't think that you "discredit" them.
"OK, I think I get the advantage in terseness and power relative other static languages. Does it, or how does it, give you any of the other advantages of Duck-typing (such test functions that equally use mocks, stubs or the real objects?"

First, having a robust type system (whether simplified for the programmer by the presence of type inference or not) makes a large number of the types of tests performed in scripting language code unnecessary. Return types, errors raised, bounds checks, etc., are all implicit in the type signature of a function, and so do not need to be checked.

Secondly, at least in a pure language like Haskell, stateful code must be delimited via monads. Good program design dictates that you make those stateful components as small as possible, which then allows you to test the remainder of your code without resorting to mocks and stubs at all.

As a basic example, instead of passing a mocked file handle object between multiple methods, you might change your API to use a sequence of strings representing lines in the source file. At test time, you can simply pass any such sequence to your functions rather than mocking or stubbing all the potential behaviors of a "real" file.

That being said, your real question seems to be, "can I substitute X for Y, as I can in Ruby/Python/etc.?" My answer to that would be "yes, as long as there are (potentially trivial) implementations of all the required functions in the typeclass(es) of Y that we care about."

Haskell typing, at least, acts a lot more like an abstract interface than a concrete class, and a single datum is likely to be a member of many different typeclasses. However, each parameter to a function is constrained by a single typeclass, so you need not provide for every possible operation on a piece of data in order to mock it for testing.
They are a lot smarter than Sainsburys. I lived in Belfast when Sainsbury opened their first NI store. Their planning obviously just went Belfast=Capital=London so they stocked exactly the same high-end products they would in Earl's court, so 18 brands of extra-virgin olive oil but no bacon.

Tesco's system is smarter. There are 4 Tesco in Cambridge in different parts of town and all have a different type of stock to fit the local market even in such a small town.
Would anyone be that surprised if iTunes suddenly started distributing Mac software? I wouldn't bat an eye if the latest iLife and iWork suites and Final Cut Express suddenly showed up there, for instance.
Convert PX To EM Easily: PXtoEM.com
What's slightly ironic is trust doesn't matter for the buyer.

As long as you purchase your certificate from a CA well placed in the major browser vendors, you're good to go.

Edit: Here's a list of Mozilla's included certificates: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/certs/included/
Zend vs. CakePHP
Not unusual.

From http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/activity/

Swarms of this nature are relatively common in this part of Yellowstone Park.
I am suprised no one mentioned IPython? (http://ipython.scipy.org/moin/)
IPython + vim is a nice combo for Python programming.
cool.

perhaps i misunderstand things, but it seems that anyone who gets a hold of the url (friends? search engines?) has both viewing and editing power.
Ruby 1.9.1 Release Candidate 1 Released
Drama in NanoLand
A sweeping revocation wouldn't work, as you can only revoke certifcates that have not been tampered with. You must issue a SHA-1 certificate to everyone and then change every piece of software that uses certificates not to trust certificates with an MD5 hash in the trust chain. If someone else has successfully performed this attack, he might posses a CA certificate that is valid until 2038 and you have no way to know about it until he uses it against you.
While I'm sympathetic to the goals of empirical studies of this type, I doubt their utility: if they find that rent control increases rents, the evidence is right; if they find that rent control does not increase rents, the evidence is wrong.

The reasons for this apparent rejection of empiricism are simple:

(1) Empiricism, so successful in the exact sciences, relies on clean evidence and controlled experiments, but evidence in economics is necessarily messy, and controlled experiments rare.

(2) Given extremely reasonable and general assumptions (buyers tend to buy more of something if its price goes down, producers tend to produce more of something if its price goes up), the connection between rent control and rents is a theorem, not a conjecture. (See any introductory economics text for a proof.)

Doing an empirical study to test the statement "Rent controls increase rents" is kind of like measuring the length of ladders leaning against buildings to test the Pythagorean Theorem. You're likely to find that Pythagoras was right, but if you don't it's probably a flaw in your measurements rather than a mistake in the proof.