skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Incidentally, the problematic public distribution system is solved in parts of India, most notably the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu - http://www.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article2475948.ece. The estimated loss in Tamil Nadu is 4%, as opposed to over 90% in some states.

Tamil Nadu politicians are not any less corrupt than other states. However the PDS has some notable features:

1. It is universal - not restricted to only people below the "poverty line". Thus many people are incentivized to have it work.

2. The PDS "ration" shops are run cooperatively by localities and villages, not private dealers.

3. Simple schemes make it transparent like an SMS that will reply telling you the current stock of a given shop, when new stocks will arrive and so on so that the shop keeper cannot simply cheat you out of your ration.
I was expecting to see the first comment in here complaining about his use of 'cat', as in all of the examples his second argument could've easily taken a filename argument..

sort order.*

is surely more elegant than

cat order.* | sort

which is fair enough, however, as it happens, i generally do end up using 'cat' in the way he's used it.. for such small jobs nobody can be genuinely worried about the overhead, and it comes down to a matter of taste..

personally, i find that using 'cat output | $command' helps to separate out the 'logic' of what i'm doing, if that makes sense..

also, again, purely as a matter of taste

i'd prefer

egrep 'Hardcover|Kindle'

over

grep "\(Kindle\|Hardcover\)"

EDIT: (as alexfoo has pointed out, this isn't a proper AND as it worries about the order.. my bad, still useful though :D )

and as a sidenote, something i only found recently, but which is quite useful, a logical AND with egrep looks like

egrep 'Hardcover.*Kindle'
Adding Alerts to Surveys
I prefer:-

tail -F filename

as most of the logfiles I need to watch tend to wrap at some point and 'tail -f' doesn't check for inode changes.

(-F is a non-standard option, it's there on GNU's [EDIT] tail binary and OS-X but not Solaris for example).
To add to the other reasons, It's a right pain in the ass when automating browsers to test your app as you can't click an anchor (it's a security thing).

So this will cause problems, which MS used to use all the time in their frameworks:

<a href="javascript:CantClickMeWithCode();">thing</a>

MS have even come up with a term for not doing it 'unobtrusive javascript'. It doesn't really seem to be catching on as I've not seen anyone but the ASP.Net team use it.
... because almost every gesture is obvious, with very few if any alternatives? If you have a touch-screen, and you need to scroll or zoom, would you come up with this interface yourself, much less an expert in the field?
Maybe it needs a little more work. I've got a "Unhandled DOMException: SYNTAX_ERR" in jQuery. And "plugins.js" and "main.js" are loaded twice.

Also: I'm on Opera and get a lot of CSS errors. Some are strange: "-o-opacity is an unknown property".
whenever you hit a wsj article that is firewalled, select the first line of text, search for it, and go back to wsj from google. you'll see the whole article.
Feel an overwhelming need to link to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odBDAcOEKuI
I think points 4 and 5 are just premature optimization.... The speed difference is meaningless.

There's no such thing as premature optimization or meaningless speed differences. Would you say the same thing if the code was in Java/C#/Ruby etc?

It may appear to make no difference on a site with hardly any JS interaction, but throw in a few plugins, a decent amount of AJAX and more than a handful of lines of JS and all of a sudden all those milliseconds have led to a delay of a few of seconds while your page finishes rendering.
At the bottom of all pages, you'll see the "Feature Request" link.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
I prefer to think of it as showing that the British public are idiots, fooled by the rich to think that the UK is almost all built over (seriously, it's common for people to come up with values like 50% urbanised, or even more, when they are asked to estimate; it's actually about 10%, and of that around half is gardens and other green spaces) and fed a constant barrage of propaganda about how important it is to borrow as much money as they possibly can to buy over-priced, badly built houses our grandparents would be ashamed of.

I now relinquish my soapbox :p
The Grand Challenges of the Economic And Social Sciences
My boss once told me fix the cause, not the effect.

Free food subsidies are really doomed for failure. This is in part a lack of long term solutions to these problems. Around 12-15 years back in India everybody had something called 'Ration card'. Its there today too, but back then you were eligible for rations at subsidized prices, I remember standing in long queues outside ration shops for wheat, rice, oil, sugar and kerosene. Needless to say these schemes were a legacy of the communist set up that India had for a long time. Realizing that this is not likely to scale. The government now issued new cards called 'BPL cards'(BPL- Below poverty line). That means this wasn't even for the poor, this was for the poorest among the poor. This is failing too. There are also other food schemes, in my state Karnataka, kids in government schools get mid day meals called 'Akshaya Patra'. Which is largely bad food served. Often contracted to some guy who pays the highest bribe. The food is generally unhygienic and lacks nutrition. I think by now everybody must know these free food schemes are a big failure.

The problem is India has huge inefficiencies in agriculture. The farming framework is massively unproductive. There are many reasons for this. Firstly the methods themselves belong to old stone age. Many farmers in villages farm with cows and bulls. Fertilizers/insecticides/pesticides are abused to the core to boost production. Irrigation isn't figured out yet. There are some major dams, but irrigation infrastructure is just totally absent. Droughts and floods are common. We either don't have water when we need it or there is simply too much water and we don't what to do about it. Farming land is subject to division through inheritance.

Apart from this the distribution is broken. Tons of grain rots because its not shipped and transported. Middle men act as a parasites in entire food-supply chain and add no value driving the end consumer prices high.

There are various experiments carried out especially forming communities in villages to encourage building local reservoirs and other efficient farming methods. But this will take a long time.

The political parties are dead opposed to FDI's in retail and farming. There by technology inflow from outside is limited. All this for vote bank politics.

Basically India is reeling under effects of its communist past and is held back because of inefficiencies of its political system combined sum total ignorance among the farmers.

So its not just corruption there are train of issues that result in these sort of problems.
I'm also self-taught but find not all comp. sci. books are dry, particularly those with a Bell Labs background. Something about their writing style perhaps.

You may want to peruse Aho and Ullman's excellent C edition of Foundations of Computer Science. (That's Aho as in awk.) What you need for a good grounding all in one place. You can still pick up a paper edition if you want but they've also made it available as PDFs.

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716782847/mqq-20 http://i.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs.html
ClearSlide, a collaboration platform, gets $28 million in new funds
Doctor Who goes back in time to beat TV pirates
In India, there are several levels of bureaucracy that are involved. The main layer is called the Public Distribution System (PDS), whereby people are issued ration cards and allowed to purchase a certain amount of food at subsidized prices, or in poor families, given it for free. There is a colossal amount of corruption and theft; people simply report grains as sold and sell it on the black market.
Due to the immense number of small traders and grocers who take cash and sell stuff without receipts, there are no taxes paid on this, and so everyone involved makes a profit, except for those whom this is supposed to benefit.
Also, the sole source of storage are government granaries & silos, where a lot of food has either been found to have rotted, or been stolen.
While people on HN are busy reading all the time about various Indian inefficiencies, corruptions and crimes, let us not forget that India's history is a socialist one (and like all socialist economies, the inefficiencies are built into the system - look at Venezuela/Cuba/Argentina/Hungary etc. today), and it is only in the last 20 years that there has been some liberalization and the Indian entrepreneur's spirit has been allowed to flourish. As you can see from all these headlines, there is still a long way to go for free market reforms. There are several sectors like the agricultural sector, energy sector and construction sector, where reforms would help a lot.
Why newspapers need to get to know their readers better
My bike has been re-painted because the old paint was coming off. I guess that counts as another excuse.
Office Supplies Savings Secrets – How to Save on Ink & Toner Cartridges
> All of Apple's products from now through the next year or two was designed and developed when Steve Jobs was alive as was revealed in his biography.

I'm not sure why you think this statement essentially disagrees with grandparent comment. All this says it that there's some backlog. What happens after one year or two?
Indeed, I don't see why people get so upset (or pedantic) about what are, effectively, NOPs in command-lines.

However, things change if you start adding certain options to sort:-

sort -m order.*

and

cat order.* | sort -m

are definitely not the same thing (for most input files at least).
Yes, many programmers would say exactly that in those languages. Code readability is very important.

This is a debate that flares up every year or so, but a lot of programmers generally consider premature optimization to be a complete waste of time and bad for your code. They would tell you to write clear code and use a profiler to find actual bottlenecks, not spend time fixing imagined ones.
SOA Patterns (finally) published
We also work with banks and process huge amount of data, but we don't use those kind of mainframes.

I'm not saying nobody uses them, but rather that there is a trend to use a NoSQL database on a regular Linux system rather than z/OS.

It's easier to find developers, more widespread support, and hopefully they will be more compatible in the future.

Edit: chuckMcM's comment [1] provides more insight on this. I must admit I've never worked with traditional mainframes myself, but I know of many research groups who are trying to develop new high-troughput data channels for commodity hardware (i.e. fibre-channel disks).

The current trend is going towards Intel+Nvidia+Linux. Anything else might be a good investment for some, but generally a bad idea for most.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4447122
A radical tax plan the left and right can agree on
Corruption, above all else, is the biggest thing holding humanity back, but I wonder if it is possible to cleanse corruption from a society where it is so deeply ingrained?

Are there any good examples of a really corrupt society successfully making the transition to an relatively uncorrupted state?
Why pixels anyway? REMs are generally considered convention nowadays anyway?

And what does it matter if it doesn't look the same on every browser? It definitely doesn't change the experience.
try matrix multplication. I mean a real matrices, say 10000x10000. And once you're there, try a LU decomposition of matrix, with proper numerical erro handling. You'll soon get to the point where you fell it's harder than you tought. And BTW, matrix multiplication or LU decomposition are super fundamental stuff when solving equations (which in turn is super fundamental when you want to compute bridges, constructions, aerodynamics, etc...)
My point is why give free food at all?

If we help boost agriculture productivity and work on our economy most people will be able to buy food.

We must avoid giving Freebies. Giving away things for free/subsidy is the root cause of the problem.
Visualization of 150 Years of Hurricanes
How are hackers supposed to hack it off? I don't understand why such news travels to the top of HN. In case no one has a soln. for it, why write big posts? IF you gotta do something go and do it, i am pretty sure, the ones who are most concerned won't be hanging around here. This seems to me OT.
[ EDIT - Two replies as original post had been edited by the time I posted the first. ]

> and as a sidenote, something i only found recently, but which is quite useful, a logical AND with egrep looks like
>
> egrep 'Hardcover.Kindle'

That's not a true logical AND since it won't pick up an entry with the text "Kindle Hardcover". Only entries with the word "Hardcover" eventually followed by "Kindle". To cover both cases you'd need:-

egrep 'Hardcover.*Kindle|Kindle.*Hardcover'

(Of course, someone will now show how this can be done in even fewer characters).
YouTube: How to Create Intro Videos.
Are eBooks Really Books?
Most probably, this is a hoax. Let's hope it's not. :P
where were you till date. World has missed you, so how can you take your opinions further into actions? Or was this a thought bubble which came and went away?
> Market cap means nothing though.

Well, it does. If it didn't, then the stock market would mean nothing.

Market cap reflects the present value of future cashflows (basically future profits). Supermarkets tend to have very low profit margins, and there are physical and regulatory limits to their growth. The stock market is reflecting investors' prediction that Facebook's future profits will be bigger than several supermarket chains' combined. If you have reason to believe that is false, try and short $x worth of Facebook stock while buying $x worth of UK supermarkets stock. (Actually it's a bit more complicated than that in practice due to different currencies etc, so don't do it at home.)
It's interesting to see someone build a web service in Go. I've done a few fairly trivial projects in it to see how it works and really liked it, but web stuff doesn't seem it's natural domain.

Has anyone used it with a nice HTML templating system?
Actually, just:

echo $(shuf -n4 /usr/share/dict/words)

will do the trick. Though it does have some weird words in there. A trimmed "4000 common words" dictionary is what I use.
AFAIK there was a Postgres extension that did something like that. But than it became deprecated and was eventualy removed.
Hey, maybe you are very good at address and data organizing.

I'm serious. It's just so difficult for the majority of us. As relix said, if you find that easy, you'll make a lot of money working as a GPU programmer.

That being said, there are many real world problems where there are so many data dependences that transforming the input into independent vectors is plain impossible. For those cases, letting the CPU optimize the datapath is better than programming a GPU version yourself.
HN is a place people across the world meet.

Its a place to learn and know interesting perspectives. Just as there have been discussion on inefficiencies of agriculture in the US, fights in McDonalds over glasses and other US political stuff things like this get discussed.

It gives a perspective to people on poverty in the world and how things are else where beyond your cubicle and first world countries.
Let's have a moment's silence for our dear departed friend, #fe57a1.
I've been writing in ActionScript 3/Flex for more than 3 years now and I don't really understand your problems. There never was a compiler bug that completely prevented me from doing my work. There always were easy workarounds to everything. The community is huge. I could always find the answer either by reading the documentation or googling.

Sincerely, compared to C++/Qt/WxWidgets, Python/Qt, Swing and even HTML/jQuery Adobe Flex was the most productive environment for frontend and desktop development for me.

It sounds that you did not have a prior experience in Flex otherwise you would know the kinks of the platform. I would say that it was not the choice of Flex that killed your startup but the uniformed choice of a technology that you never had a prior experience with.
Which works nicely alongside Boilerplate: initializr.com
Thanks for the JG link. Just checked it out and it's exactly the kind of modern JS resource I've been trying to find for the last few weeks.
Videos Show Hackers Refining Hotel Lock Trick That Opens Millions Of Rooms
Serious question --

Stories like this come out of India fairly often.

How come the government hasn't been overthrown yet?

Or severe riots, insurrections, etc?

Seems like that would happen elsewhere, no?
How is that possibly the root cause of the problem? Right now, there IS enough food to feed these people; it's being stolen before they get it.

"My point is why give free food at all?"

Because these people are starving? Is that not a good reason?
Aren’t side effects fundamental in complexity analysis?
Ask HN: How would you improve my SoundCloud developer challenge submission?
It wasn't a fixed gear bicycle: you can obviously bring one of those to a halt by preventing the pedals from going around.
It happens in India too. There are massive anti-corruption movements in progress. There are also riots, everything exists as else where.

Its just that people by now are so used to all these problems so many of them sort of just go by it.
The jQuery-related error seems to be an upstream bug - http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=1513672

I don't see plugins.js and main.js loading twice. And that CSS warning can only come from other tabs you had open as we don't include any `-o-` prefixed code in the CSS.
I would love to see this, but as I live in Germany, I'm pretty sure I'll not be greeted by the episode or even a video player but a "not a available in your country" message.

Anyway, BBC probably already knows they could make a fortune if they offered a season for £9 on iTunes (or something like that) with no delay, so I'm not gonna call them about it.
A tool for measuring Java object size in memory
There's probably something buried in the terms of use that they'll claim allows for this very sort of scenario. If these players lived in North America, they might be able to find a legal remedy, but they're in Iran.
http://wordpressfoundation.org/donate/ ?
Relationship Advice From Curiosity
i had a sony p910 some years ago, that had an optional keyboard but i never used it, character recognition (as in one character at a time ocr) actually worked, I was quicker on that than i am with swype etc now, it was awesome.
> I don't give a damn about statistics. I want to be able to live anywhere in the US safely.

That would be a statistic, too.
I'm going to buy a copy because the author is based in the UK and is less likely to have irrelevant information in it for me.
Slightly off topic anecdote:

A colleague of mine has his bike stolen from Ham House in Richmond, but fortunately the police quickly identifed the thief from CCTV footage.

It was a particularly hot day, and they could clearly see where the thief had his name tattooed on his back.
Digital Music Option Spotify Thrives in Shadow of Competitors
But if you want to ride fast, why buy an upright bike at all? (Unless you want to compete in races that require it.)
Free stuff is considered as doing a favor.

Besides India is such a big country that monitoring these things is nearly impossible. With corruption rampant and lack of accountability, these schemes are designed to fail from their very inception.

What these people need is not food, may be they need it at the moment. But what these people need is a way to make a decent living, which nobody shows them how to- And often we come back and talk about hunger.
we would have made 10x or more on airbnb. apple has only gone up about 6.7x since 2009. and i only had a couple hundred thousand at work in apple. we would have invested millions in airbnb.

but we've made plenty of great investments at USV since 2009 including Kickstarter, Foursquare, Stack, SoundCloud, etc, etc

so i doubt Apple would even be in the top five in our 2008 fund when its all said and done.
"process huge amount of data"

What kinds of workloads though? I can see that "supercomputers" might be appropriate for modelling, analysis and reporting but that's a very different kind of scenario to highly available high throughput transaction processing that mainframes have traditionally excelled at.
Always used to be postcodes stamped on an unobstrusive bit of the frame when I was a kid (a looooong time ago).
Or youth on the streets protesting their government, after not being able to escape anymore into a fantasy world
I would be more concerned that the Olympics might call and demand their number back.
You've read through the entire article which indicates huge levels of corruption, and your conclusion is simply "Giving away things for free/subsidy is the root cause of the problem"?
Unlike elsewhere protests are peaceful. People sit for fast, and that allows the govt. to easily pass away. The whole political system is full of such people!
I thought to learn something useful for programing (debugging, program runtime analysis, etc.). But instead the article is just about the generic commands cat, sort, grep, cut, sed, uniq, find and less. It is not really development related.
I was really asking about whether anyone actually used Tab Groups that are built into the Firefox core.

Tabs to me are really window manager territory. I'm fed up of the inconsistancy across applications.

Thanks for the suggestion of Tree Style Tabs, I'll see how I get on with it.
Even though I locked it, my bicycle also was stolen in Barcelona in 15 minutes in middle of city.
OMG! i didn't know that. Thanks for enlightening me. But i along with other fellow geeks would want to see more tech stuff than why people have got used to corruption and talks about protests etc.
No disrespect to the people described in the article, but how is this relevant on HN?
To elaborate further on what saurik has already pointed out: Hickey's "update-in-place" characterization of relational databases places blame in the wrong place. This is more about how people think about the data models; they think of their primary keys as identifying places, and updating rows as modifying those places. The relational model itself does not encourage this mode of thinking, although SQL arguably does, unless you think of UPDATE as shorthand for DELETE followed by INSERT. It's not that uncommon to build data models, or parts of models, that have the characteristic of never deleting facts. It's true that time-based as-of queries in such models are unwieldy, but that's a problem of the query languages that can be addressed by how queries are constructed, without redesigning the entire database system. There is research on "temporal databases" that addresses this, although I'm not up to date on it.

What I could not understand from the talk or from googling for more information on Datomic afterwards, is how it supposedly simplifies anything about the consistency issues that he talks about, with respect to the read/decide/write sequence. You read; time passes; other people make changes; when you write, the real world (modeled in your "transactor" as the single common store and arbiter of what is) will have changed.
It's good to see both the BBC and ABC being level headed about this.

Serving your paying customers and enticing pirates towards being paying customers is how ALL rights holders should behave.

It's been all stick and no carrot for so long.
And yet Apple's legal team suggested that Samsung build smartphones and tablets without rounded corners in order to avoid being sued:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/245493/apple_to_samsung_dont_...

Legal brief here - section 2-40 (p 10): http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/807407/Apple_Reply_Expert_...