skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having NGOs conduct killing on behalf of the government is a tried-and-true method of counterinsurgence (South American paramilitary death squads for example). The plausible deniability introduced by working through a proxy allows the government to conduct more politically risky operations (including false flag attacks if public support is waning). Criticizing the government becomes riskier. And, if not held in check, the paramilitary elements will inevitably use their power for their own objectives.
> People haven't changed one bit since the beginning of time. People have the same exact emotions that they had 2000 years ago, and they react in the same exact way. This is why history repeats, because the way people react to emotions never changes.

Not true. We are becoming less and less violent. You can see it by observing numbers of wars fought, war casualties, crime punishment, crime rates, entertainment over the last hundreds of years. Some artile about this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/22/world-less-violent-... There was also TED talk about this. You can find more.
I don't know about hand size having anything to do with it, but I do know that Wilt Chamberlain used to dunk his free throws in college before a rule change disallowed it.
Does anyone else feel that the decision to implement of a URL shortener shouldn't be taken so lightly? I mean, when you decide to take your URL shortening service down, all those links your service generated are effectively dead. There's no way to figure out where they pointed at.
Google's Sparrow acquisition - a competitor's perspective
ann arbor michigan, from a friend's perspective.

http://a2geeks.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=18481175
Maybe I've missed something here but how is this question relevent to hacker news?
Can you be more specific about how LiveScript is nothing like Haskell?

Granted that LiveScript isn't Haskell, how are the syntactic features that are derived from Haskell not at all like Haskell?
I've been doing data analysis in Python for the past 2ish years and I think it's a great choice. Before Python I worked in Matlab, which simplifies matrix operations at the expense of making everything else terrible.

The main other contenders here are R and Mathematica, both of which will fail you when you need do something that isn't strictly statistical/mathematical. Python gives you predictable decent performance and the NumPy ecosystem is awesome for numerical libraries. I've never come across a machine learning library nearly as well designed as scikit-learn and pandas dataframes are a lot snappier than R's equivalents. My only gripe is the paucity of good plotting libraries (matplotlib is impoverished and ugly compared with R's sexy plotting routines).

Now, I haven't said a word about the faster statically compiled languages: C, C++, Java, C#, F#, OCaml, Haskell, etc...

The trouble with static languages is that they either lack essential libraries or don't allow for rapid prototyping (or in some cases, both).

Now, if you're implementing the heart of a numerically intensive algorithm and your code can't be decomposed into a few already implemented primitives, it makes sense to write it in C. The first thing to do, though, is to wrap that native code with a Python interface and test it from python.
Sadly, this project is going to fail - it won't even be funded. I understand the concept behind it, but for me app.net is like socialism - in theory it's great but in reality it just won't work. App.net is not created based on what people think and how they act, but rather on frustration with being a 3rd party developer. Onboarding the developer community to this shouldn't be difficult, and has already worked. But that's not what's important - what's important is how it looks to some random person. Let's simulate.

---------------------------------------------

'Hey, you should try app.net'

'Oh yeah? What is it?'

'It's the same thing as twitter, except you have to pay $50 to get on it, and it's nowhere near as popular as twitter, yet. But it has no ads, and they don't screw over third party devs.'

'Sounds questionable to me. I don't care about 3rd party developers, and not having an occasional ad pop up in my stream is not worth $50 to me. Especially if twitter is way more popular and useful anyway.'

'Well, shit.'

---------------------------------------------

This is not going to take off with the support of the dev community alone - it needs to appeal to normal people. And right now, everything about it does not. The name, the website, the pitch, the fees - none of it makes any sense to anyone but a dev.
Typo. Belongs on whacker news.
Ask HN: How do you value a domain name?
I've found a domain that I really like for my next project. It's owned by a premium domain name seller, and after contacting them they gave me a quote of $3,000+

I'm going to negotiate the price down but I'm not sure how to go about doing it. How do you value a domain? I don't think it's worth the quote they gave me but are there tools or techniques I can use in my counter offer to bring the price down?
It's an easier motion for most people who've become accustomed to shooting that way, though.
This mis-characterizes the article. "Correlation is not causation" can be said about anything. The article has a number of specific findings which weaken the original finding.

Just about every strong and weak scientific finding involves correlation. "Correlation is not causation" comes into play most strongly when a correlation seems assign causation to something with no clear underlying physical mechanism - leap years and stock market behavior, etc. But one could imagine a number of plausible physical mechanism whereby sitting could be back bad for one. That still doesn't prove it but it different lines of reasoning could appropriate.
Flight/hotel booking REST API
Is there a REST API available from any travel aggregator (such as travelocity) or hotel/airline, that allows me to do booking via API (or is scraping the only choice)?
See the guidelines [1]. One could argue that it "gratifies intellectual curiosity", and it is certainly "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" (for varying values of new; it is nevertheless interesting new evidence).

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Facebook breaks its lobbying record in Q2 2012
Yes as long as you profile and make sure that the bottleneck is a blas / atlas call (when doing numpy vector operation) or a compiled extension of your own (e.g. a piece of Cython or c code) if you need a for loop that cannot be vectorized easily with numpy.

cython is very nice for numerical computation because it offers a nice syntax for dealing with array operations very efficiently (e.g. see typed memory views: http://docs.cython.org/src/userguide/memoryviews.html) and has good integration with numpy datastructures and C-API.
What's nearby on your Android phone v1
Conventions for modifier keys in keyboard shortcuts
A blanket ban will (a) have a miserable compliance rate, (b) dramatically increase the value of firearms, and (c) help ensure that law-abiding citizens are defenseless against criminals (who generally don't care if they're already breaking the law).

In the 1990s, California attempted mandatory registration of "assault rifles." Compliance was about 10 percent, and was officially acknowledged a failure.

I can't imagine what a total ban would look like. House to house patrols? With whom, the army? I'm guessing that nobody would want that job. I conjecture it'd be unconstitutional, or appear that way to enough soldiers and policemen that they wouldn't enforce it.

There are 300+ million guns in private hands in the US, in 50M+ households. This is a "wicked problem" if you're looking at a gun ban as the solution. Estimates I've read put the time to effectively zero guns in private hands in the 200-250 year range. A ban just isn't going to be pleasant; it might result in /worse/ violence, both immediately (in reactions and protest) and over time (through creation of victims) -- of course this is not testable, so it'll have to remain rhetoric.

I'm going to guess that arming lots of citizens isn't the answer, either. States with concealed carry permits /appear/ to be safer than those without, but a rational deterrent is not going to stop someone who's irrational.

In an ideal world we don't need guns, and everybody has a pony. We don't live in an ideal world.

tl;dl; Firearms bans in the US are really really hard.
"... to assume some collective responsibility as a massively productive society to take care of our individuals who are no longer productive".

It's called "social security" and "welfare". It's the safety net for those without "competence" and "prescience" (or unlucky ... whatever). 401Ks, Roths, IRA, pensions are for those who do have "competence" and "prescience".
Actually, people often underestimate the power of a "slippery slope" argument.

To me, it looks more like reductio ad absurdum. If we accept curtailing the 4th, 5th, or 8th amendment as an absurd outcome, and a parallel argument to token's supports that absurd outcome, then there must be a flaw in token's argument.
>Oxford and Cambridge are certainly exceptions. In general, if an institution offers both a BS and BA in the same subject (at least in the sciences), the BS tends to be more technical.

Are you sure? In my case the difference between a BA and a BS was taking two biology courses and one English course, versus taking two of English and one of biology.

The mathematics requirements for my degree in mathematics were no different.
>And as a proud owner of (what is widely considered the most supported linux
laptop) lenovo laptop, I can say that many things just dont work. E.g.
Suspend.

Suspend worked out of the box for me on my X220t. I am running Arch Linux.
I had a pretty intense full-time job (managing an academic library's digital services) and going to school part-time to earn my BS in CS. It was incredibly difficult to manage my time.

Every semester I would work 9-5, take classes from 6-10, go home, fall asleep, rinse and repeat. I had no time to study, but when I did, I often did other things because I had no energy or motivation. I did this for four years (and I already had 2 years of college prior to this!). It was exhausting.

My only suggestion would be to take a light workload and aim to master the subject. I breezed through most of my classes because I already knew the material. For tougher subjects (e.g. statistics, compilers) I struggled. The material wasn't that hard, but because I didn't take it too seriously at the start (when it was easy) I fell behind due to weak understanding of core concepts. Never fall into that trap. Commit to studying consistently, seriously, and keeping at pace with the class.

I only did this because I wanted a degree. I think it's a piece of trash, but I wanted a little bit of security in life (I was in my early 20s and just getting started). Since you want to learn for learning's sake, commit to that. Don't try and cut corners.
js minifiers not only remove whitespace, they reorder execution paths, eliminate useless declarations, identify unreachable code [1]. Reformatting a minified js file is not going to produce a much better result than disassembling a distributed binary file would.

[1] https://developers.google.com/closure
> It produces readable javascript that is reasonably debuggable

The examples on the page don't seem readable and reasonably debuggable to me. The simple square definition:

square x = x * x

Compiles into:

var square = function($_a) {
return new $(function() {
var x = $_a;
return _(x) * _(x);
});
};

Which, in turn, has all the "$" and "_" indirections.

This is basically why i think that trans-compilation to JS from a semantically very different language is not a good idea, unless a way of debugging _in the source language_ is provided. The success of CoffeeScript, i think, comes from it not differing too much from JS semantically; yes, it adds things like classes or everything-is-an-expression semantics, but the step of trans-compiling those things into JS is pretty trivial.

I hope the advent of source maps will help in the ease of use of these languages.
Hi, if you would like to provide constructive feedback on this, please email me, or write a blogpost, or talk to us on github here: https://github.com/appdotnet/api-spec
Then move. Living somewhere that costs that much is a luxury good.
> One developer refusing to file for patents on their work is not going to make any difference and will only put them at a competitive disadvantage.

That is precisely the prisoners dilemma

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

and is a classic example of short-term thinking (for a better story, see "iterated prisoner's dilemma"). Specifically here, if one developer refuses to file for patents and influences his fellow developers to do so as well, they can eventually change society. And such influence is much more possible when not only talking about how bad patents are but when actually refusing to file such patents.
So, we should all stop outsourcing and do our own dirty-work.
JavaScript is very relevant because there is tons of legacy code that has to run equally as fast in this new bytecode VM as it runs today under the various engines. The choice of VM comes down to how well it works with dynamic languages. JVM and CLR are both modeled after statically typed languages. Microsoft spent quite a bit of money trying to put JavaScript on top of .NET but finally gave up, and today it places it's IE platform on equal footing with .NET.
Twitter in its early days made zero sense to end-users, and it was only through the effort of third party developers that it went mainstream.

I am getting tired of arguing with people about this. We will just have to agree to disagree. I am willing to take the risk of failure because I saw this exact developer-centric approach work before.

UPDATE: Regarding the comments below, if you read my original announcement post, I made the point that this is architected by be financially sustainable on a critical mass, small user-base: http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal

I cited this Paul Graham post discussing the strength of a core geeky userbase: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

Let's say that someone followed PGs advice on that proposal. Wouldn't the same criticisms about not appealing to normies also apply?
Not Ninjas - A finite tale of infinite mazes
The technicalities aren't nearly as important as making sure you have a very frank conversation with them about the risks. Something scary like:

"There's a 40% chance you will never see this money again, a 30% chance you will only get your money back, and a 30% chance you'll get something extra back. Even if things go well it will still likely take 5 years before you see your money again. During that time I probably won't be able to give you very informative updates, because even I won't be able to predict how things will play out."

You have to genuinely try to scare them off. Say it to them verbally and then write it in an email, so that in the worst case they can be reminded of exactly what you told them. You can prove to them that you didn't mislead them. Consider this resentment insurance for people with bad memories/character.

Even then only take money from people who can easily afford to lose it. Taking $20k from someone who has $300k in savings isn't going to hurt them. Taking $20k from someone who has $30k savings is a no-no.

Really, unless you have a friend/family member that's rich you probably shouldn't be doing this. Maybe a few thousand dollars, but not tens of thousands. Risking your credit is better than risking your relationships. Tread carefully.
I agree we need places where innovation can run wild, but also places where there are accepted standards.

The web is pretty much our only complete platform that is standards-based. Fragmenting it risks killing it. Remember when sites were "best viewed in IE" and people without Windows basically could not browse the web?

> If the only progress that occurs are incremental improvements to existing platforms, then the web is in "maintenance mode".

How about WebGL, 10x faster JS than just a few years ago, typed arrays, video and audio tags, WebRTC, etc. etc. ..?
The book on Blackwater written by the journalist Jeremy Scahill has a lot of interesting background on Prado. Also, "American Desperado" (great book, also by Evan Wright) talks about some of Prado's interesting involvement in drug importation into Florida in the 1980s.

Sounds like an interesting guy, but probably not someone you want to meet in a dark alley.

Edit:

The Scahill book is http://www.amazon.com/Blackwater-Powerful-Mercenary-Revised-...

The Wright book is http://www.amazon.com/American-Desperado-Life---Soldier-Gove...

I've read both and highly recommend them.
Thing is, few seem to choose anything else if they have ready access to firearms. We commemorate Utøya massacre here today, and it is apparent that Breivik focused on explosives and firearms (both are not trivially obtainable in Norway).

The reason for that is obvious, guns, just as you say, are devices specifically designed to kill efficiently. Yes one could kill with a car, a knife, a golf club, a sharply pointed stick etc but there must be something about firearms that makes military, law enforcement, criminals and libertarians stick to them.
>Yes as long as you profile and make sure that the bottleneck is a blas / atlas call

I agree. Where Python really shines, I think, is where you have these sorts of bottlenecks + something extra that MATLAB performs terribly at, either as a consequence of language/VM design or lack of libraries.
Fair point, but it was probably the biggest success story out of the area and as such was the flagship. (Responsibility to give back and all that.)
Great idea! This can be applied to other services as well. I am just afraid my top menu will become full of icons.
While Neo-Nazis are a problem that is not to be understated, getting killed is uncommon in Germany in general. The last matching statistics I could find were for 2003:

In Germany, the rate of successful murders is 1.0 per 100000 inhabitants:
http://www.bka.de/nn_229340/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Publikat... ("vollendete Fälle")

The murder rate in the US is 5.7:
http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/06statab/law.pdf

The rate for Berlin is higher, but thats true for American cities as well. So, getting killed in Germany is much more unlikely than getting killed in the US in general.

Also, while any extremist murder is a horrible thing, the rates in Germany are low in general. There is an exhaustive list of right-extremists murders in germany on Wikipedia:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todesopfer_rechtsextremer_Gewal...

In 2012, there is no noted case, but that might be because those are still in court (This list only lists cases where the Judge determined the motivation to be extremist). Ignoring the number, you will find that if you really want to get killed by Nazis, going to Berlin is the worst plan, rates in other parts of Germany are much higher. There are admittedly places where I wouldn't go with black skin color because of fear of aggression, but Berlin and all larger towns are not among those.
Riot on (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427783/) is not from Silicon Valley, but a fascinating story about the Finish dot-com company Riot-E. "The company was such a spectacular failure that it was the subject of the award winning documentary Riot On!."
If this works, the idea of having no first party clients is on the table. I am having an open discussion to figure this out. I just hope people are constructive.
What commenters never seem to understand is that the "press" are commercial for profit ventures, and to a first approximation get paid for page views (on dead trees or web sites). It is in their interest to publish whatever furthers that goal, up to the point they drive readers away.

If readers punished the press for this then they would stop doing it. But readers don't, and as such the stories in the press reflect on what people want to read. And as much as people claim to be high and mighty, only want good news etc, they actually read all the salacious erroneous stuff.
>"evidence of some interesting new phenomenon"

Accountability hacking perhaps.
Exactly, putting on a good show at the product launch is what creates the media buzz. And advertising through the news is also likely to reach customers in a much more accepting state than if they are watching commercials on TV and have a wall up. You can't buy advertising like that, but Apple gets it for free, mostly because of SJ's showmanship.
Samsung Announcing Upcoming Galaxy Device on August 15
Report said that Samsung is just going to announce new Samsung Galaxy device on August 2012..
This comment really nails it. Employers should have all the flexibility they need with regards to hiring/firing, but it should not mean you wind up in the street. This is part of the reasons (IIUC), that "unions" in many Scand. Countries are quite different than American ones, in that they are more guild-like cooperatives (working along with business and government) rather than largely adversarial. A model that has the right mix of policies to allow dynamism without impoverishment is what's needed (along with a periodic reassessments to make tweaks), and seems like something that's seriously worth looking at here in the US.
shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.

What's with the desperation?

We're about to enter the robot-age, during which most manual workers are going to lose their jobs. That's a lot of people who won't have much else to do other than look after old people like your children and mine.
And here I'm a no-formal-qualification dev with many years of experience, now considering getting a CS degree from a no-name anyone-can-get-in school just because it's a prerequisite to being allowed into the US on an H1B or TN visa (because, as HN discussed yesterday[1], Canada has no tech scene.) You'd skip over me, no?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4275634
That's an interesting expression. What kind of people would you LIKE to meet in a dark alley?
"The administration then awarded Blackwater (which is now called Academi) a $250 million contract to perform unspecified services for the CIA."

Your tax dollars at work.
Unless the domain owner is desperate for cash (i.e. a motivated seller) it will be hard to knock the price down. Firstly by expressing an interest the current domain owner now knows that the domain has some value. And then there's nothing to stop the domain owner from raising the price since you're interested. This isn't like buying a used car since the domain is unique so the idea that you can value a domain and use that to bargain doesn't hold up.
Be kind
I didn't mean to argue with you about this Dalton, just to offer my shot at a reason why it's not taking off like you wanted it to. I am in support of what you're doing and hope it's successful, on a personal note.

Twitter in the beginning: "Post what you are doing & see what people you like are doing in 140 characters or less." This is very tangible and makes plenty of sense to normal people, immediately.

This is just something to think about, hope you don't take it as an attack or an argument. I'm clearly not the only one who has this opinion - it might be worth mulling over humanizing the project even if just a little bit.
I'm honestly not really seeing the fuss here. Doesn't every company want "really really really good programmers"? Don't most companies offer stock options? Am I really supposed to see a lack of info about how hard they work and assume the worst?

If there were some inside knowledge from people who have taken these offers and lived to regret doing so, then maybe this would have some substance. To me, without more info and being willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, it just seems like speculation and pessisism.