skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hardly, noone knows of Alex Jones except for his small group of followers on the internet, and since he is known for exaggerating the crap out of things, noone else takes him seriously...so he can report that a cop executed a 5 year old girl, and people would need video proof before they believe him
Yes, but I am not aware of any program running in it. c.f. XMonad. It seems that the style is for complied code (and thus low-profile) with dynamic recompilation. This is effectively a REPL, but you technically do recompile. So more of a RCPL?
You can certainly make the argument that newspapers were never that good at these things to begin with, or that this type of coverage is mostly gone, but the fact remains that as a side-effect of paid content you end up with somebody covering local stories -- and local stories usually means crime. Having one person becoming an in-house expert on how to gather crime information, collecting informants, knowing how to work the paperwork, making friends with people in the court system, having a large organization with lawyers backing them up -- I don't see that emerging just from technology.

That's no reason to fear the future. We'll figure it out, I'm sure. But it's (to me) a little Pollyannish to assume that because the new media formats are easier to use and disseminate information rapidly, it's all somehow automatically better than older media. Stuff changes, and as you point, out we've got some things to work out.
Paul, very interesting essay, especially seeing that I (and others) are trying to do something similar in Limerick, Ireland to counter the unemployment due partially to the redundancies announced by Dell and the knock-on effect it has on the local economy.
Limerick has a good infra-structure for an effort like this; it has a very good university, an institute of technology, an international airport and is located very centrally. Whats more it has a good innovative and entrepreneurial culture. What's important is not so much the investment by larger funds but rather the very early stage investments. These will enable a good idea to be developed into a product or service tied into a company that has all the right ingredients to grow by raising larger amounts of funding and expanding it's management team. The availability of early stage funding will also create a culture of innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship.
Apart from the money there should also be hands-on support and a culture of networking and sharing of experience as well contacts.
We're trying to create exatly this through the GreenHouse (www.greenhouselimerick.com) and I am amazed by the support that we have received by individuals and the private sector.
Would love to have a chat with you sometime as there are a lot of parrallelels between Ycombinator and our plans here in Limerick.

Evert Bopp.
Actually France is almost doing what you describe. They do an almost full tax exemption on startup during 8 years (provided you fill a lenghty and time consuming application).

They also give easily between 50K to 100K 'no string attached' (provided you use them for R&D)

The drawback is you need to fill a lot of paperworks, meaning it's useful for startup with revenues.

These are some of the reasons why my startup decided to stay in France.

As opposed to what you say, they fund the good and the bad and let the market decides.

Nico
Credit to PG for transparency and also for keeping YNews on the high road.

I did want to browse some of these sites just to see why they might be banned (mapsofindia.com?) and it's a nuisance to have to copy and paste URLs so I parsed that list into one with link tags and put it here:

http://douglassims.org/banned.html
Thanks, but your links are broken - you need to add "http://" before them...
Like I said on reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/814no/lightclou...), the performance seems somewhat lackluster. Especially considering the extremely small test-load.

I'd be more interested and might provide a somewhat less negative attitude if you were to do some real testing on a proper dataset (several hundred megabytes or gigabytes, not 10 bytes) and could show that adding servers actually improves performance.

The current test-data and test-script is simply insufficient to the point of being useless.
got it... thanks. Fixed now.
One problem (of many) is that police abuse disproportionally affects those of lower socio-economic status. So, those who have the power to do something about it have below-average personal motivations. Certainly, Bill Gates isn't at great risk for contracting malaria, and he's still doing something about it. However, the average upper-middle class American probably thinks police misconduct is a much less serious problem than someone living in an inner-city housing project.

As a teenager, I was always shocked at how rude police were to me; they seemed to have no respect for the laws they were supposedly there to enforce. However, as a 30-something, even when getting a speeding ticket, the police are generally polite. Have the police changed, or have they started treating me as someone who might have some power to keep them in check?
> I think one of the most important lessons that developers can take away from Twitter is to make cool or useful technology available to everyone -- lower the technical barrier to entry.

I think that's a lesson we developers should definitely keep in mind more. Frankly, it's hard because we forget just how much we know and things that seem trivially easy to us end up being hurdles to the average user and many of us are simply unaware that it's a hurdle.

In all honesty, it's difficult to be a software developer for a few years and not come out thinking most users are just plain stupid.
We may not be talking about the same St. Louis officer, but the tape that caught the one I am thinking of was illegal. In many places it is illegal to record video and audio of strangers. It is probably an unintended artifact of old wire tapping laws, but law enforcement agents have been more than happy to exploit it to suppress videos of malfeasance.
I have often wondered what the impact would be of assigning some journalism students along with a mentor to cover the politics of a small town in gratuitous detail. Scrutinize every action of the city council. Cull through the police reports. Examine who wins and who loses when zoning policies are changed (one of the main bastions of wealth transfer via politics, IMHO). Would citizens care enough to read about this stuff? Would politicians become more accountable?

This seems like it would be a cheap (< $500K) experiment to conduct in a few towns. Perhaps some foundation interested in government transparency could fund it. However, I don't see how it would scale out without a revenue model behind it.
NJMI
Parov stelar - Google Video
"appleinsider.com"
Because they would be completely indifferent if someone said they didn't like an Apple product.
video and pictures from mobile phones spread by bloggers.

Not a day goes by on Reddit without a video of someone being beaten by the police in the street, and thousands of bloggers pick it up instantly.

If I were a corrupt officer I would fear a horde of a thousand angry bloggers with video as proof more than a single journalist that has the home number of a local judge.
20 hrs now. It's not looking good... So glad I'm on cluster 4. Twitter is full of unhappy campers.

This has been compounded by the outage earlier this week too on the same cluster!
First of all, this seems to be just plagarism of http://www.making-the-web.com/2007/12/09/unofficial-php-6-ch... from December of 2007, bear this in mind when considering the reputation of tuvinh.com. (Unless of course tuvinh is Brendon, which seems unlikely since Brendon said he'd be updating the list and surely he thought of something in the ensuing 14 months, or perhaps "compiled this list" is construed as "copy and pasted")

Second I think the (original) list is a useful 60 second communication. It lets me know that essentially all existing, non-trivial PHP code will break at PHP6 and need to be fixed.
Obama's press conference is national news. This article is arguing about the lack of local coverage.

The Huffington Post doesn't have the desire nor ability to chase up on some local police shooting, unless it really, really stands out as a potentially big, national story.

A local daily newspaper, with a staff of investigative journalists some of whom are dedicated to watching the police, does. None (or almost none) of those stories will make national headlines (and so they're not suitable for national papers), but they most certainly make a huge difference to local life.

Personally, I don't think the solution is to have newspapers watching the police. I think the solution is that all police officers at work should be permanently under watch via a justin.tv kind of system. Maybe with one day of delay (to prevent "the bad guys" from being able to tell that the police are on their way to their place), but no more. And this should most likely be administered by a third party with the power to have police officers docked if they refuse to hand over full recordings (so probably by a sub-department of the DoJ).
While some of the changes like dropping register_globals and introducing UNICODE support were long overdue, the others make me fear they’ll eventually end up rendering PHP a Java look-alike. The essence of PHP is simplicity and getting things done, quickly and not to kiss up to some language paradigm.
It strikes me as extremely ironic that the government, an organization which uses force to fund massively wasteful, unaccountable bureaucracies, should be concerned that Google, a organization which does not charge most of its users, is gouging consumers.
I'm a software developer, of course I'm focusing on the technology, I can't help it. So let me ask you this, how can a developer try and see things from the perspective of not looking at the tech more effectively?
What do you think all those newspaper reporters are going to do after the newspapers are gone? Move online and continue what they have always done without the inconvenience of an editor telling them what to look in to (or not).

Death of newspapers != Death of investigative reporting
Really? I can think of numerous cases where the press uncovered corruption. Investigative reporting is extremely important - and there is no alternative to that.
I wish TechCrunch had more content like this. Then we really wouldn't need the New York Times.
Why is this comment being voted down? Just because it contains the word "4chan"? The notion that the lowly and despised 4chan is actually holding the Government accountable is a perfectly fair point.
My non-essential sites are down (I didn't notice until I read it on HN). Good thing I'm hosting my emails on Gmail or I'd be getting calls from friends I host for free.
I think what we're seeing is a combination of over-leveraging/under-capitalization in addition to the usual resistance to change that happens naturally.

All businesses get accustomed to paying certain costs and acting in certain ways (just like people do) and it takes a cold splash of water for anything to change. It's not necessarily that their businesses are fundamentally flawed. It can simply be that they've built up cruft - like the $5 daily coffee and $150/mo cable bill that many of my friends racked up during fat years. In many cases, getting back to basics would release a lot of the pressure.

But there's also the unique situation of over-leverage. Businesses haven't been conservative with their capital - rather, hoping that they could provide better returns for increased risk and sometimes even just spending money on projects without enough regard to the value of those projects. In fact, management has often been criticized for acting conservatively in recent years since it leads to lower returns (at least in the short-run).

Warren Buffet once wrote, "I've never believed in risking what my family and friends have and need in order to pursue what they don’t have and don’t need." Businesses should make money - they good and services they produce advance our standard of living. However, it's a little clear that they need to concentrate on their foundations a little more so that bad times become lost potential and not lost businesses.
I'd be very curious to know what countries these people are coming from. I just did an analysis of social media spammers on StyleFeeder and would be curious to know how HN compares:

http://blog.tech.stylefeeder.com/2009/02/28/social-media-spa...

If you post the list of IPs that these folks are posting from, I have code ready to make pretty graphs and will share the results.
No, it's about recognizing that online-only organizations are worthy parts of the reporting infrastructure. Some day - and hopefully soon - Mayor Daley will call upon a reporter from the Chi-Town Daily News.

The HuffPo is fascinating - they provide an outlet for 9/11 truthers and their own paid reporters on the same platform. And the President of the United States recognizes such a brand as worthy of engagement. People run for local school boards for a reason - don't underestimate local citizen journalism just yet.

And cops already have cameras in their squad cars; many cities are already awash in CCTVs.

But there's something that David Simon says that's really interesting - he's fighting for a document. A paper document. That's the sort of stuff that EveryBlock and Public.Resource.org are fighting to free. And Carl's trying to get the GPO job: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498610
There are many Browser addons for this.
I like "Text Link" - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1939
What if there is no video?
"Francisco's Money Speech" by Ayn Rand
IPhone: TV.com Brings (Some) Full Episodes to Your iPhone
I think we can do this in Los Angeles.

With the way the broadcasting of television and the availability of content online is evolving I think there is great opportunity to distribute this information more efficiently.

In LA we have the producers, the actors, the funding, the networks, the nice weather, good schools, mobility, the mindset - there are so many angles to pitch this to start ups. Could the available options in this city lower the costs for start ups.

Theres opportunity in the distribution of music, video...all of entertainment. Theater, fashion, - are reality shows still a big hit? How about a website that consolidates a bunch of reality shows - even home grown.....

Maybe this posting will get deleted because i went on a tangent?! - thank you for the inspiration Mr. Graham.
Evan Williams on what's behind Twitter's explosive growth (TEDtalks)
Until they make filming the police illegal, like they have in the UK...
Glad I switched from them. Such an overhyped company. I've been on Slicehost since February 23rd of last year and have absolutely no complains. On (mt) I got shoddy support and a lazy staff (how the hell can you promise svn without ssh support for that long), for an incredibly overpriced hosting service.
Those incidents usually don't get reported. In a situation where its your word against a cop's, the cop is always given preference. I can honestly say that I don't think I can remember reading a single "bad cop" story that didn't have video evidence
Entrepreneurship Forum Student Questions
AppStore for Content: Amazon Digital Text Platform
This is one of my favorite speeches from that book. It doesn't make false assumptions like many of the other speeches and plots do - it stays focused on debunking the idea of money as bad, and as such while a lot of the rest of the book seems slightly ridiculous, this speech remains quite powerful.
I hope you're right! I would love to read interesting blogs about San Francisco (where I live) and it sure seems like if it would happen anywhere, it would happen here. So far I haven't found any SF-focused blogs that I want to read.
OK, but if a video exists, no newspaper is required. YouTube is sufficient.
> a organization which does not charge most of its users

But the problem is, they are gouging (some of) their customers. It's just not the end users, it's the businesses.
"banned" in what sense? If I walk into city hall carrying a bottle of water, can I be arrested?

Or, did they just take water out of the vending machines and cancel water cooler contracts for the peons?
If this is supposed to be a rebuttal to the quote from the new testament, then it's a major strawman. The quote from Timothy 6:10 is "the love of money is the root of all evil." (my italics)
I dispute your notion that people are "called" to vocations. It's not that easy, never that easy. People may move in some directions more quickly than other people, but that doesn't make it some sort of preternatural thing. David Lynch is regarded as possibly the foremost filmmaker of this generation, but he started off as an artist, and he still paints in his free time, and in the meantime he's recorded music and written stories. So is "painter" his calling? Or is it "director", even though that's not what he's most interested in?

I'm biased reading any David Simon article because I use the context of The Wire as sort of an opening to Simon's points in any article. One of the big themes of The Wire was how people don't easily care about things immediately outside of their own frame of reference. That means that cops don't care about anything beyond cophood, politicians only care about relevant political issues, and so on.

The Huffington Post doesn't care about local news. They don't care about issues in Baltimore specifically. They care about big generic things, and as such they miss the point more often than not. They're a pretty poor source even for online reporting. Even the best ones, though, don't focus superlocally like actually local papers do.

Simon's argument isn't that newspapers are wonderful and magical, though. His argument is that newspapers also failed us, after they started chasing sensationalism and yellow journalism. His second point, made here, is that too few bloggers care about things like this. A local blogger doesn't have the instant influence that a journalist for a paper does. As a result, the local stuff gets even more ignored, beyond the basic cheap local news that everybody knows and nobody cares about. That's a major problem, and it's not one that's easily fixed.
Ouch, that's terrible. I'm glad I switched a couple of months ago -- if I didn't this would've affected me. :/

Anyone else notice how all of the sites on (mt)'s (gs) client page happen to be online every time there's a major outage?
He's making the point that newspapers don't do this anymore, either, and that there's very little chance of newspapers starting to do things any better, which is a problem.
Alex Jones? The man who decides his point of view and gathers evidence to prove it, ignoring all evidence to the contrary?

The article isn't about "the government," it's about the impact local newspapers have.
> I can think of numerous cases where the press uncovered corruption.

And I can think of numerous cases where the press "uncovered corruption" that wasn't. I can think of cases where the press helped with/caused corruption.

Never confuse ideals with reality.
Google Argentina? (google.com.ar)
You might want to use nofollow. Most of these sites are spammers who posted to HN to improve their pagerank, which is what you're doing if you link to them without nofollow.
It's worth noting that Apple never makes concept videos, mainly because their creative minds actually make real products.
I agree it makes sense in your case - but I'm thinking about complex tables with data, utilizing things like YUI DataTable and JavaScript date formatting for configurability. In that case things aren't as clear cut: I design my application around YUI widgets and then have to think about how it will degrade.
The tests apparently were not run with simplejson's c extension speedups compiled in. I did so: http://gist.github.com/72412

Simplejson was slightly faster on two out of three tests. Consistently so, when I re-ran the tests.

Test environment: py2.6 on Mac OS X, with simplejson 2.0.9 and python-cjson 1.0.5

Test script: http://gist.github.com/72413

Also, I changed the test script from using time.time() to time.clock(), which according to the python docs should be used for performance testing on unixes.
The "love of money" is also dealt with in the article:

"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it."

To see men perform the most immoral of acts for money, it becomes easy to believe money to be a wretched thing.

Thus, it's not a far leap to consider the love (or insane lust) of money as evil.

Hence, the quote from the bible is there to protect men from performing acts of evil in the search for or in the name of money.
High-Throughput Nanomanufacturing: Assembly (with video)
Thank you. Fixed now.
For me, it comes down to my parents.

My parents are open to trying new technologies, but they aren't particularly technically skilled. They've been around tech all their lives, but they were never the ones that were into it. A large portion of my uncles and on both sides were, so they've had a lot of exposure. But they're unaware of a lot of the details.
Anyway, I've found out that I can learn a lot about how technology interacts with people by talking to them about it. Recently, I've had a few interesting web site ideas, and, after talking to them about it, I've learned what parts of ideas are complicated and what parts are not. Focusing on the simpler aspects means they're more likely to understand (and therefore use) whatever it is I'll eventually build. So, possibly try to think about ideas that way. If you were a user, how would you think about the tech?

Someone recently commented on the fact that even though I was sitting at a computer, I pulled out my phone to tweet about something interesting that just happened. I think this shows Twitter's genius: us young whippersnappers are already addicted to text messaging, and Twitter is the perfect application for texting. Not all services work well through SMS, but Twitter does. Look at its popularity in Japan. This means quite a few people already know how to use it, and some people start their Twitter accounts via phone, and never use it in any other way.
Be An Innovator
Build something and then go find some regular non-technical people and watch them try to use it. Go to starbucks and show it to people. Ask your family and friends to play with it. It'll be painful at first, but you'll learn a lot.

Ultimately, I'm a big fan of finding a design / UI person who really knows their stuff. The difference is incredible.
When Government Funds Business
Would an amateur clip of someone being beaten by the police be inadmissible as evidence in court?
Yep, I didn't say they don't work. But as a watchdog it's a very bad system of influence with the wrong goals and backers.
Sony: PS3 is hard to develop for--on purpose
com.ar, is not google.ar or google.com or google
Looks good. If you want to increase sales by 500% (and the silliness by 1000%), add fart noises.