skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The university is paid upfront by the federal government so it can still cover all of it's costs. The taxation office then collects the repayments, which are just taken out of your income.

There are risks for the government. For example, lots of Australians work overseas and unless they return to Australia to work, they won't pay back the debt.
http://theconversation.edu.au/expat-workers-have-cost-austra... But that's probably not a huge percentage of outstanding debt.
They use a lot of Ruby too.
Why Apple Didn't Introduce an Apple TV App Store at WWDC
I wonder if some of that impression isn't anachronistic projection, though. Today you think of a letter as something that takes time/energy/thought investment. But it was not at all uncommon for frequent letter-writers of previous eras to write many letters in a day, closer to the way we write emails than the way we write letters. Probably not quite as routine as the average email, but people who wrote thousands of letters during their life treated it as just as normal way of communicating. It wasn't that strange for letters to be dashed off in short periods of time, and like with email, the amount of agonizing/revision/thought that was put into a particular letter varied greatly.

On your latter worry, it seems like there's some of that with earlier eras' figures as well. For example, some people's opinion of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre has shifted for the worse since their correspondence was published, since much of it is more like a sordid chatroom log, full of offhanded gossip about other people and such, than like the philosophical works they intended for public consumption.
Did you notice that the guy in the background is missing his sleeves? I think the photog had a "clever" idea.
Snow Crash is quite a classic book. It was actually one of the books that got me interested in coding/hacking. Anyone here who hasn't read it should do so right away.

I'll be interested to see if Joe Cornish is able to pull off the technical aspects of the movie without it appearing too fake.
Talk about hindsight fallacy. "Nowadays" is hardly the point; at the time, depending on what circles you moved in (or perhaps one should say, which classes of human beings you cared about), AIDS was devastating.

The cultural losses were especially incalculable. So many artists at the height of their powers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hGpjsgquqw
Two words: Ball Blaster
I worked at CCP when they hired Eyjólfur. He came in without really knowing a lot about the game world and made it his first job to learn as much as he could about how the world actually worked.

Given that I was a foreigner who was working and living in Iceland, I didn't have much of an evening social life. I was also one of the relatively few employees (sadly) that were really active in the game in the advanced levels of play -- 0.0, empire wars, etc.

Eyjólfur spent a bunch of evenings sitting with me while I played internet spaceships. He asked tons of questions and really got to learn the universe, or at least my corner of it. It was really interesting to work with him and hear him talk about his thoughts as he was putting them together.

CCP used to publish the Quarterly Economic Newsletter, like this:

http://cdn1.eveonline.com/community/QEN/QEN_Q3-2010.pdf

They've since stopped doing that, but you can see from that example that it used to be a fantastic resource. If you wanted to know the nitty-gritty details about the universe of EVE Online, the QEN was hard to beat.
So you want your ability to FUCKING SPEAK to be dependent on whether or not Apple will randomly yank your app from the store?
Skype (not exactly web I suppose), Farecast, Hotmail
Compile to JavaScript? It's dangerous if you don't know what it really does in the blackbox. I just wrote a article discussing this topic several days ago. http://bit.ly/M9CSXj
You don't think its current status has something to do with all the energy put into it early on?

Also, I think you're a little breezy about the threat AIDS poses. It's still killing 2m people a year, down from 3m at its peak.
>>"Hiro Protagonist – that’s the character’s name – a computer hacker/samurai swordsman/pizza delivery driver who investigates and tries to stop the takeover of postmodern civilization."

That is not a complete sentence.
jinkers.. one of the best webapps iv'e seen
That system sounds similar to the one proposed in the article, with a few differences in the way the incentives are structured:

1. If there's a single tax for everybody, then there's no incentive for this education monopoly to improve learning-per-dollar. Or per peso, I suppose, this being Uruguay.

2. As you mention, the lack of coverage for living costs is a problem. This disproportionately puts poorer families at a disadvantage. In a for-profit system, this is an obvious opportunity for an investor to get those students by offering a better deal.

3. If it applies to everybody who goes to college, then people from families wealthy enough to pay for college out of their pockets can't opt out of the tax. This would tend to subsidize poorer students. (I'm not unhappy about this last part.)
There goes their hipster cred.
Vodafone adds signal booster and phone charging to an umbrella
Inspired by Jerry Seinfeld's productivity secret? Looks good. http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...
There are reasonable objections to JavaScript, but this is inane.

He uses an example of someone committing a classic mistake in software design. This error would be the same in JavaScript or Java. I'd like to see how his ActionScript translation magically fixed it.

However, the remedies for the mistake differ in each language.

It is somewhat difficult to fix it in Java's statically typed straightjacket (which I assume is similar in ActionScript). The easiest answer might involve a Feedable interface. I looked this up and it's not clear if ActionScript classes can implement multiple interfaces. So if you want your Toaster to be both Feedable and Heatable, get ready for interfaces extending each other.

In my experience most Java developers don't even do that. They don't think about revising their approach to the problem. They going to write a method that does what they want in the class that they want, come hell or high water. They'll create the BunnyOrToaster class which has methods which all contain if/else clauses testing if this in 'bunny mode' or 'toaster mode'.

In a language like JavaScript, you have other, simpler options, and often more powerful ones. I don't know for sure, but the mere fact that there are fewer tricks to learn might mean that it's better for naive to intermediate programmers. The typical JS way would be to rely on duck typing. If that disturbs you, you could implement a 'getFeeder' method on both kinds of objects that returns a closure, which can be executed later. That's what Java might call a 'Strategy pattern', but it's baked right into the language in JS.
Question, every Apple store I've ever seen is crazy crowded all day, do you frequently re-adjust screens durning the day (I've never seen you do that) or is this just a start of the day trick?
Valve's games put a cap on real prices by selling the items through Valve's store. You can buy a new gun for $2, so the price of the gun in "ebay gold" will never rise above $2.

(Big simplification for TF2 players follows)
Also, in TeamFortress 2 (Valve's biggest virtual economy), it's difficult to farm gold. Logged in players receive 1 gold/hr, capped at a max of 10 gold/week. It's possible to create new accounts, and run all of them concurrently, but the expected gain is fairly low, and you have to pay Valve real money for the privilege of having extra accounts.

The exchange rates are also totally asymmetric. The exchange rate for money into gold is approximately $1 => 81 gold. The exchange rate for gold back into real money is ambiguous. There isn't a liquid market here. It involves finding rare in-game hats that aren't sold in the valve store, and selling them on e-bay for $100-$400.

The hypothetical gun might cost $2 on the valve store, but 1 gold in game (i.e less than 1% of the store price). This strongly incentivizes players to trade in-game.

It's possible to make a profit by trading with humans, but that's labor intensive (because you have to find the player and haggle), and probably seen as a positive for Valve, because the traders are providing liquidity.
The answer is, in part, that Best Buy and other retail stores are addicted to kickbacks from manufacturers. If a product in a retail store is anywhere other than sitting on an obscure shelf, it's because the manufacturer paid the store for more prominent placement. Special displays like the Apple mini-stores and iPhone kiosks in Best Buys only exist because Apple kicks back a lot of money to buy them. Retailers can't experiment with better displays without undermining a lucrative profit center. Apple can structure its stores the way it does because they only exist to sell their own goods.
Well, this is interesting. Our company (Fogbeam Labs) are working on products in this same "Enterprise 2.0" space: social-networks for the enterprise, knowledge management with a social twist, social-search for the enterprise, etc.

So, what - if anything - does this mean for us? Well, it confirms that the area we are working
in has value, and illustrates the potential we're chasing. And this could actually be good if/when
we start trying to raise outside money, as it shows that there are viable exit scenarios in this field.
OTOH, it also means we're competing with Microsoft, and it probably makes us look a little behind
the curve. That's OK though... the adage about the tortoise and the hare still stands.

On a personal level, I'm excited by this. I like the idea of competing with Microsoft. It's easier to see
them as the "evil empire" given their history, and I've never liked Steve Ballmer anyway. These guys I could get fired up about competing with. It's even better that we are a "pure play" Open Source company, where MS has a long history of antipathy for F/OSS.
Show HN: First app The 24 Hours of Le Mans 2012 Live Timing app
Hi guys, I have built my first mobile app, runs on Android maybe Windows Phone 7 tomorrow, no iOS because the race is this weekend so there is no time left ;)

I used PhoneGap now Cordova (?) and i have found it quite good, maybe not as smooth as the real native experience (coding and headaches experience too), but good enough if that allows me deploy apps for the major platforms in a matter of days.

I would love your feedback. Thanks!

URL: http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=minimalapps.lemans2012
Prepaid mobile phone use surges: Die, contracts
They had previously acquired Powerset, for one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_%28company%29
I can't speak for haml, but sass is certainly a welcome tool in dealing with CSS, since it mostly uses CSS syntax, with sensible nesting to keep things orderly. sass takes what you already know and kicks it up one notch (perhaps two, if you want to use variables).
Also the personal information is more limited. At first the only "personal" information was my name and the name and phone numbers of my friends. This information is available (in theory) in a phone book.
PageMaker is for book layout, predecessor to InDesign.
Assange to Be Extradited to Sweden After UK Supreme Court Refuses Final Appeal
What's really worse? A bunch of emails or thousands of dollars of legal fees? Does anyone really care that this lawyer was on a receiving end of an attack that isn't part of his profession? Maybe he should keep a PR guy on retainer and pay per hour to help out his reputation.
It doesn't poll, actually.
> If you're a talented student with reason to expect high future income (and your education isn't already paid for with merit aid), why would you choose equity over very cheap debt?

How much equity? How much debt? The amount of equity depends on the student's expected future income as well as the cost of school; the amount of debt depends only on the cost of school and the risk of default.

An equity stake in such a student has a higher value than an equity stake in a mediocre student, so if an investor can tell what students look most promising, they'd have an incentive to offer education money in exchange for a smaller amount of equity. If the equity stake is small enough, then the lower risk (to the student) relative to loans may well cause the student to choose to sell equity rather than take out a loan.
Clickable link: http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=minimalapps.lem...
Capital gains.
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Vestidos de novia
Blizzard sure could use someone like him right about now.

Diablo 3 has crazy gold hyperinflation due to bots and the real money auction is causing further havoc. It is pretty obvious that this was not well thought out prior to release.
Many games add "Gold sinks" to tackle this. Just ways for players to use gold that completely removes it from the economy. I believe the trick of this is to scale it with the amount of gold in the system.

Complete conjecture, but I suspect this is related to things like the increased price to craft gems in Diablo II (bigger gems are more expensive) which was a stark contract to Diablo 2's simple method of "3 small gems make a big gem".

Diablo 2 felt like it had an economy that happened almost by accident whereas DiabloIII feels like they put a lot of effort into the economy and trying to have enough ways to remove gold from the economy.
Microsoft Set to Unveil Something ‘Major’ on Monday
I just finished snow crash a week ago, I found it pretty mediocre.
That's a cop-out. It's not that our government is too dumb to implement a system that works just fine in another first-world country, it's that our politicians are too ideological to adopt such a system and our business sector is too anti-social to allow such a system.
Miami Heat leads series 2-0 against New York Knicks
Congrats to Yammer team. On a side note, we are seeing lot of acquisitions that are > $500M. Buddy Media, Instagram and now Yammer (during last couple of months itself).
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I disagree. I think it was well thought out, I just think it's hard to know what will happen until afterward. As for some of the values of items in Diablo III currently... I think there will be a settling period before prices reflect their true value. Supply will increase until some equilibrium is reached. When we hit some equilibrium we'll know if Blizz needs to tweak things. The gold AH, for instance, has had the overall item price tank pretty quickly over the last few weeks reaching what is now much more sane numbers IMO.
That takes us to the status quo ante: only people whose parents can pay get to go to college. Nobody is giving unsecured loans to college students, even for "good" degrees.
What and then sued him $20,000 after downloading? What exactly is your point?
Will Windows 8 win you over?
there's always http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora for those seeking an alternative
I'd rather compete with Microsoft than Yammer in this space; be happy.

Remember, Yammer itself was competing with Microsoft.
Tend to do general tidying all throughout the day. Its normally if you walk past and nobody is using it/requires attention then just straighten it up a little bit. There is no set time during the day where everyone adjusts the display though.
Isn't this actually libel: "I really did not expect that [The Oatmeal] would marshal an army of people who would besiege my website and send me a string of obscene e-mails,"
For iphones:

http://allthingsd.com/20120323/best-buy-is-selling-nearly-as...

As far as laptops and computers go I don't know why it'd be cheaper for Apple to sell them through Best Buy. The prices are rigidly controlled and so their margin has to be lower for other retailers then when they sell direct.
Do you know that apple kicks back? I'd think that apples own retail presence would give them the ability to say, "You sell our products this way on this table or you don't get to sell our products". Apple's strong retail presence has to give them more negotiating power than most other CE companies.
Yes, structuring personal finance around equity rather than debt is a great idea.

Or we could go back to actually putting state funding into our public universities, thus rendering tuition itself so cheap that you can pay for it by working over the summer and never need an investor at all.
Of course, I forgot that somehow, I've been living in Apple world too long. In that case though, doesn't the same still apply to the other OEMs who seem to want their products presented this way?
Yay, I enjoy being a systems integrator for my mobile phone.

Not.
It's equivalent to giving students entering college a choice of three ways to pay for it:

1. Give the school money, possibly aided by scholarships, grants, et cetera. This works if you've got the money or can get enough financial aid.

2. Take out student loans. These can be a real pain in the ass to pay off, especially for students who discover that an English degree is as unprofitable as everybody says. :-(

3. Opt in to a voluntary tax, and in exchange, get free or highly subsidized college. (This is the option you refer to as "indentured servitude.")

I'm having a hard time seeing how option (3) is a bad thing.
Maybe they're playing the "ironic" card.
> Nice. I just don't relate to this.

You don't relate to this? Mmmm. That's frustrating.
In which case we just need to make tuition cheap enough that people can pay for it up-front. This is doable. In fact, it was the guiding principle of institutions like, say, the entire University of California system.
>Anyone know if the mods are employed/ appointed / community members?

Someone implied that all founders accepted into YC are offered mod privileges although of course many will be too busy to do any moderation.

Also, I sort of got the impression that only founders of YC-backed companies and YC employees are mods.

ADDED. When reading with SHOWDEAD set, in order to get an accurate impression of moderation frequency, please keep in mind that if someone posts the same text twice as a comment, one of the comments is automatically killed (and in fact that is what happened to a dupe of the comment I am replying to). The autokilled dupe shows up as a dead comment.
That's because you read it in the future.
"JavaScript is the browser’s assembly language."

This reminds me of a blog post by @izs

http://blog.izs.me/post/10213512387/javascript-is-not-web-as...

Yes, I love Haskell and I do some CoffeeScript but JS is a fairly decent language to me : )
Well, for a start, when you've got a fully developed API.
We recently built a project that used a Backbone SPA for _some_ views, but was primarily server side.

Now we're building a mobile version, and having built the API in the first phase, we've got enough to go on to do it all via Backbone.

Additionally, when developing for mobile you're much more aware of bandwidth restrictions, so the ability to load only what you need becomes useful. When you're flicking through a bunch of pages that use the same view but with different data, an SPA lets you load only what you need.
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My med school broadcasted all of our lectures online within minutes of the lecture being done. Although some students(20% or so) enjoyed being there the rest of us watched them online at speeds of 1.5 to 2x. I still have my freshman class shirt that reads "I watched it in Double Speed".
"If a product in a retail store is anywhere other than sitting on an obscure shelf, it's because the manufacturer paid the store for more prominent placement. "

I don't doubt this is true for most commodity pcs but I wonder if Apple isn't the exception here. I'm sure they do pay setup and material costs on the special displays themselves but I doubt they are paying special kickbacks above that for better placement.

For one thing they don't have to pay special kickbacks they could just sell their gear to best buy for less. We know that isn't the case because we can confirm that the margins for Apple stuff at Best Buy is pretty terrible because the commission staff there always steer you towards something else.
Sorry, what I meant is that when the application rerenders (digesting changes that have been made) it will re-evaluate the function to check if the result has changed.

Polling the function for changes, contrast with how e.g. knockout.js pushes changes. (I could be wrong, please let me know if my understanding's not reality)
I remember laughing at them when they launched at and won TC50. "Twitter for the enterprise! What a dumb idea." I'm laughing all the way to their bank now.
I think Apple moves a lot of product through their own stores, but no idea what fraction compared to online or 3rd party. In contrast to Apple stores, where I've regularly seen people buy big ticket items like Macbook Pro, I've never seen anyone actually purchase anything from a Sony store. Maybe that's because I've never seen anyone in a Sony store (ha!).
Welcome to the internet generation, where we can look into someone's private conversation and comment "citation needed."
But... how often does that happen? And would one not think that they might - maybe, possibly, just might - sell a few more by having usable computers people can test drive before shelling out $799? The increase in sales might - again, crazy I know - just might help absorb the cost from the occasional spilled soda on a laptop.
Read the comic of the kid in the high chair as the panels being oriented like:

1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8

rather than:

1 2 1 2
3 4 3 4

It's much more surreal that way.
No, it's not. People fought hard for women to be treated equal. You can't pick and choose what you want to be treated equal on and what you want special treatment on. Either everyone is fair game for jokes or nobody is. Which is it?

edit: also, misogyny is about a hate or dislike of women (which would imply all women... or it would have said a woman). So while it does exist in ways that some assholes have a messed up view against all women... a cartoon depicting a fat woman chasing a bear is not making any sort of statement of hate of women... or even just hate of fat women. This cartoon is a fat woman chasing a bear. If it was a fat man chasing a bear... then it would be a cartoon of a fat man chasing a bear. If it was a skinny man with a mohawk chasing a purple bear on roller skates then it would be a cartoon about a skinny man with a mohawk chasing a purple bear on roller skates. But the second there is a woman involved... holy crap that cartoonist is being misogynistic? I don't buy it.
Joget Workflow v3 - Part 2 - Form Design Tutorial
Algebraic data type

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_data_type
If you have a child that you have never found to be frustrating or infuriating then you are a indeed very lucky.
Marquee reminds me of scrollkit.com
Funny you compare with Sony. Sony has a store in New York (on Madison I think) that I tried to check out a couple times. Except it closes at like 5pm. In New York. A few blocks away there's an Apple store that never closes. As they put, the city that never sleeps needs a store that never sleeps.

Sony stores are not quite Best Buy, but they've only captured about 10% of the experience that makes Apple stores different.
Listen up, wireless carriers. Here’s the perfect wireless plan
> And it totally made sense that hyperinflation would occur since the creation of virtual gold was limitless and effortless

The creation of the US dollar is also limitless and effortless.
Throwaway Commits on Heroku
Flash Stats of the Week—Rich Internet Application Usage
Interesting news - one wonders who they'll get for Hiro.
Which two economies were being merged?