skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regarding (1), that site is specifically for Android users, not developers. You'd be better of comparing it to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/android
The FACTS are that Lawrence Pogemiller, director of the Minnesota Office of Higher Education is a Democrat. Pogemiller represented Minnesota Senate District 59. District 59 includes the University of Minnesota, the largest University in Minnesota. So yes, party is relevant to this discussion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Pogemiller
Anything near Path (or along those illegal van routes in West New York for that matter) is not cheaper, just slightly nicer (newer and bigger) than comparable lower priced Manhattan apartments. The parent could not have been talking about that though:

Sure, rent is expensive. That's about it, and even then if you're willing to live in the right part of Jersey you can still be 30 minutes from work and have very cheap rent.

Very cheap rent is not available until your commute gets well outside of 1 hour on a good day. Which means an hour and a half on a real day. The bus/non-Path rail system is an abomination. The wait times are unpredictable, the buses regularly miss their scheduled route (meaning you wait an hour for the next one), and the drivers hate and routinely abuse the passengers.

If you want a specific example, I've lived in Teaneck NJ for under a year. People like to say that it's 15 minutes from NYC - which is true, if you have a car and make the drive at 1am on a Tuesday (plus you have to figure in around $30 for parking). At a reasonable hour and no car, it takes an hour and a half, plus the bus wait time. And Teaneck is not cheap, merely cheaper than NYC. But you still won't find much under a $1,500 a month. Of course, you must add the monthly bus pass at ~$150.
Should be lots of hobbyists rebuilding their own battery packs - pick up a dead car with no range left and make it like new.

Except, aren't the battery packs a very significant portion of the value of the car? I don't see how you will be able to replace them cheaply enough to come out on top, unless you use inferior battery technology and settle for two-digit range.
Duality for Haskellers
As others have pointed out, there is little basis for your assertion that "backscatter doesn't pose any health risk to travelers." As my father (a physician) enjoys pointing out: we used to use X-rays to treat acne -- they were thought to not pose any health risk either! More generally, the history of technology is littered with arrogant overshoots where risks were dismissed until evidence became overwhelming; while one cannot conclude that backscatter is at a level to be dangerous, one can certainly not conclude that it "doesn't pose any health risk."

Or to flip it around, I opt out because I happen to know something that the TSA doesn't: I pose no risk to the aircraft, and scanning me in no way makes the aircraft safer. I can therefore assert with absolute certainty that my opting out poses less risk to the travelling public than being scanned poses a risk to me. (Plus, I think I might secretly enjoy TSA agents awkwardly and apologetically rubbing the backs of their hands on my crotch.)
Because: Finland? We have 2 month summer vacation in elementary school (189 work days/year). The school days seem to begin around 8.30 am. And we were long time the best country in PISA rankings (currently ranked 3nd after a city state of Shanghai and South Korea).

What many people who try to model the success of Finnish education system fail to see, is that Finnish society is highly equal. This is true between genders and especially between individuals from different social status and background. We work hard to give high quality education for everybody, no matter the cost.

This is the reason why sometimes I wonder how the projects that aim to export the Finnish school model to the countries like Saudi-Arabia can succeed, if the profound problems with the inequality deep in respective societies is not addressed first.

The PISA measures averages and it is in cutting the lower performing tail of the distribution where Finland excels.
But every conservative you meet is also conservative. That's my point. We're all biased and thus totally unqualified to judge bias. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to, by the way, but we also need to be mindful of our own biases. I think that thought process, more than any change in the press, would go a long way to fixing politics in America.

The other issue is that we assume that stories that are predominately negative means bias, when it doesn't necessarily. Impartiality does not necessarily mean that we think both sides are equally valid. It's sort of like following this abortion/birth control debate. No matter what you're opinion, there is no bias in thinking that Joe Walsh and Todd Akin are full of shit. They are, period. It would be a disservice to say otherwise.
Is this apropos of some discussion I missed, or just a cool “Today I Learned” link?

I actually read this particular article just a week ago (Baader-Meinhof, etc.) when following links for another cataclysmic event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manicouagan_impact_crater

It still amazes me just what an incredible resource Wikipedia is.
Isn't that cute? User ``gnarlyjoe'' trolls HN. (What a loser!)
Young Creatives
I don't think all social issues can be solved the same way.

Can you be more specific about one (or more) social issues?
That is the difference between a protocol and a site/platform. As an operator, you could choose not to carry news groups that you find objectionable. Or you can choose not to visit websites you don't want to support. Reddit is too monolithic for that. It's true that you can not see it our pretend it's not there, but one of the few ways to promote change is to not visit the site at all.
There is a lesson here in not using an obscure programming language like GO on such a small project if you aren't yourself a programmer willing to finish the project if need be.
Spacebox.io - Stripe payments made simple
> It reinforces the idea of Memory Ordering as voodoo

I thought there were some very solid bits in there, like the reminder that memory barriers always come in pairs.

> it conflates compiler optimizations with memory reordering

Well, the code as written is subject to reordering both by the compiler and the CPU. The author is just being honest that this isn't a perfectly crafted example. You could make a version not subject to reordering by the compiler, either by marking variables as volatile or by inserting "compiler barriers" into the code (e.g., empty volatile asm statements). I don't think this is conflation.

> Worse, it's just not true --- while this particular example might not cause problems,

I think what happened is that you interpreted the author's statement as one about memory reordering in general on the x86 architecture, but I think the author is referring to this specific application, which makes the statement true. (The sentence you quoted is bracketed by two sentences which are more explicitly about this demo application, but it's not explicit in the sentence you quoted.)

> memory reordering is still an issue that needs to be dealt with on x86.

The article links to another post by the same author with a similar experiment demonstrating reordering on x86. The example is a lot harder to follow, though, since x86 only allows reordering of stores and loads relative to each other.

http://preshing.com/20120515/memory-reordering-caught-in-the...

> test-driven development is probably not a good approach to writing mutexes

The experiment is to show people how reordering can happen, it has educational purpose. Thermite is a bad way to heat your home, but it's a good experiment to demonstrate exothermic reactions.

Yes, the article could be written better. But there are so few people who write any articles at all on this subject, I'm glad to be able to read it.
What do Romney, Drake, Smart Bras, and Skydiving have in common?
times are a-changin'

seriously though, being geek has become cool

contrast steve urkel with blah blah it's all those shows i don't watch but probably the ones you mentioned.
2x is still 33% less than 3x (in Annapolis).

Was it hard to find enterprise architecture position in Memphis?
That doesn't really happen in reality. Convergence is fast and as long as your datacenters are topologically disparate enough, you won't have random route selection changes outside of failures, in which case, the connection would have failed anyways. :-)

And if you're really tricky, you can sync state between POPs and keep a connection moving if your application is aware of the state change. :-)
Looks really cool, but I was wondering if you could address a point with the pricing. In that context what does an "asset" mean? An editable area on a webpage?
The theory behind the law which requires this is that investing is very exceptionally risky and that non-sophisticated investors are likely to get taken advantage of. Therefore, dealing with them comes with a book of regulations which rivals that of major world religions. There is an escape clause for "accredited investors" : basically, if you are a professional money management institution or hit certain income/assets levels the government allows people to assume you know what you're doing.

If you'd like to buy equity in a startup, I'd candidly advise against it, but the way forward is through a non-public transaction like the kind that happens in friends and family rounds. After professional money is involved most startups would be instructed to not take your money - the risks involved swamp the value of your marginal $1k.
Good work guys, tnx for replying!
'Contradictions do not exist' is nonsense. Contradictions exist all over the place. Any time you get two people together you'll have contradictions due to viewpoint, experience, perspectives. Denying that contradictions exist is a child-like view of the world. Working with the contradictions of life, now that's the fun and the challenge, isn't it?
Adventures in Concurrency
> did you know that a spinning ball weighs more than the same ball when it is stationary?

Did you know that the Earth's rotation itself adds about 2.38 billion metric tons to its mass, and we have the Soviet Union to thank for figuring that out?

http://infranetlab.org/blog/2008/12/harnessing-the-energy-fr...
Halo 4 goes David vs. Goliath
Spammers start using short .gov URLs to trick their victims
I haven't seen or heard one of these calls actually play out, but they might not even be trying to sell something - they could just be scammers out to steal credit card information. (I get one all the time that's a prerecorded message from "Rachel from Cardholder Services")

I'm sure telephone companies could technically stop them if they really wanted to, but telephone companies make a profit from these people. What incentive do they have to stop them? Same with text message spam. If they tracked it (which they surely collect enough money per message to do), they could easily notice one number sending a hundred spam texts and stop it before it sends tens of thousands of them. They don't, though, because each of these messages means anywhere from another 5 to 25 cents in their pocket. Most people don't even contest getting charged for receiving spam texts, because who's going to argue over a quarter?

The biggest issue seems to be that all of this data is ephemeral - even if they had a "more powerful" caller ID (which I believe 911 dispatchers do), you would have to catch them in the act and personally have access to check where the other end of the call is terminating, and you'd have to do it before they hung up. For IP calls, I think it's unlikely they would even be able to fully trace it.
you have a link on the home page that points to http://copybardev.io:3000/examples ...
Hogwash. I've taken quart-size lexan containers through security consistently, and then fill them with water on the secure side.
Pretty sure it's getting overloaded with traffic, because it wasn't like that a few hours ago.
It said it was a North American standard.

Fuck can we please get some international power standards for once ever.
Retail investors did not buy those. The closest they got was either a) houses backed by ARMs made economic by mortgage-backed securities or b) shares in the publicly traded megabanks which held billions of mortgage-backed securities.
Although things that rarely work..

* any solution that makes people feel like they are giving something up

* any solution that doesn't provide some sort of status symbol (especially initial exclusiveness)
My favorite part is that empty bottles are always allowed, regardless of size. So you can have a six-ounce bottle with two ounces of liquid in it, and an empty three-ounce bottle, and that violates the rules, but if you pour the contents if the first bottle into the second, it's suddenly allowed, even though you have all of the same materials as before: bottles, liquids, etc. Totally irrational.
The contrast is Europe and the UK, where they have free health insurance and social safety nets. How many startups do we see there? By definition we should see more startups there and they should be driving forward.

I don't say I don't agree with having national health insurance, just trying to understand why the UK and Europe don't have the same level of startups.

Maybe it is all marketing anyway and maybe it is all access to capital.
The first server side programmable graphics generator
Want a cheap room in Phoenix? Apple cancels competing event
Very impressive. Definitely the best data presentation dashboard I've seen. The depth of information (even if the source of information is so centralized) plus the diversity and clarity in presentation, not to mention the overall cleanness of the whole thing, really is very cool.
Java example: http://ideone.com/HrXrC
I say that after the idea, the investors look at the team

However you start out by saying '[the idea is] where an investor’s evaluation will start and end.' Setting your article up with a hyperbolic position and then gradually backing away with exceptions is a link-bait type article style which makes you look more concerned with attention than reasonable discussion.
How the Soviet Union tried to steal Earth's rotational mass in the 1970s.
Is metal detector a different thing from full body scanner?

In Russia they have installed metal detectors (I believe) on entrance to suburban and subway train stations. Of course, with the huge amount of traffic the police officers simply cannot inspect every person who rings positive, so they just ignore the detector altogether.
Having done lots of this type of work I see it more as a triumph of paperwork and scheduling skills than techincal acumen.
Digging into this turned up this Huffington Post article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2010/11/23/fear_pays...

Rapiscan (the scanner subsidiary of OSI) rebutted the claims: http://www.rapiscansystems.com/en/the-checkpoint/article/the...
While I'm a generalist myself, and I can relate a bit to his advice, I really don't get this recent trend of patronizing everybody to become one man shows. There is a saying that shallow knowledge can be worse than no knowledge at all. For every generalist you need many specialists, and IMO the most important gain of acquiring side skills is being able to share a deeper understanding of other people's work. As an effect - you can surround yourself with the right people and more easily assess their qualifications.

Are non-programming skills helpful? Of course. Do one man bands exist? Sure. Should "every" programmer be one? I don't think so.
Caracas is `-4:30 hours` which is the same as 'Venezuela` in WikiPedia. Just wanted to stick with cities.
This regulation exists for consumer protection. Prior to this regulation, people were conned out of their money by investing in companies that may have been a sham. This does imply that rich people are less prone to hucksters than the poor (or that it is more acceptable for them to lose their investments..) Recent legislation changes this so that anyone can invest up to a percentage of their annual income, while rich people are unbounded in the amount they can invest. Editorializing, I think this is a good compromise.
Thank you for a great quality post. And, folks, please do not fear being called a "flip-flopper"!
GitHub hit by DDoS attack second day in a row
Kickstarter is really starting to ramp up in the money projects raise. Below is the story of woe of one of the early Kickstarter darlings that raised $87k. Two years ago it was second only to Diaspora (another eventual failure) in the amount of money raised

http://hive.slate.com/hive/made-america-how-reinvent-america...

I have backed a dozen projects over the past year for a total of almost $1000 and have received exactly 2 deliveries for a total of $70 of value. My enthusiasm will wain if more of these projects don't pan out.
Thiel in Talks to Invest in Airbnb at $2.5B Valuation
Salt’n Pepper on passwords; spicy enough?
The difference is that CoffeeScript was designed to compile to JavaScript, so it can adopt JavaScript semantics.

Ruby doesn't have the same semantics as JavaScript, so you can't have a 1-to-1 mapping of language constructs.
Amanda Todd blackmailer Kody Maxson outed another pedophile blackmailer
Here's a contradiction for you: Ayn Rand is usually wrong.
Similar to not worrying about scaling because 99% don't get to the point where they need scaling.
Marc Benioff: "Windows 8 is the end of Windows"
Compubooks was an online bookstore way before Amazon's launch. First they sold through BBSs, then on Compuserve and later on the web but didn't resist Amazon's price pressure and folded during the first bubble. I got several books from then and, If I remember correctly, they were based in Texas.
I'd like to believe that we all experience a weak Overview Effect from time to time. It's often a friend of existential nihilism.

But to have your entire life add up to a powerful case of that realization must be an extremely emotional experience.
I don't disagree with you. The clarification between possible and profitable is a subtle and important one.

An organization is only as good as the people behind it and their ability to chart a course forward.

I'm not sure if YC devalues them or values the team more -- I'd certainly want the people beside me to be of a certain caliber regardless of what we faced or came up with.
Great data visualization but the stat widget headers are pretty hard to read due to the complete lack of contrast with the background color.
Too many negatives in this sentence. Trying to parse:
"It may pose a real health risk; but, iirc, for each decade of air travel, the number of deaths by terrorists has been less than the combined impact of these new x-rays."

Did I parse that right?
I have no use for it, but I don't think it is a bad idea by any means. Keep up the good work :)
I'm not fond of these "should" articles. I'd like to acknowledge the programming specialists out there and the 9-5 programmers. The "should" means that if you're not doing these things, then you're doing something wrong. (That's not even the connotation of "should", that's the literal meaning.)

> Also, it's good to have some management and leadership skills.

It's good, but not everyone wants to be a leader, and if everyone led it would be chaos. You're not a failure for not getting promoted into management.

> A programmers aim shouldn't be to simply write good programs, rather it should be developing really great products.

Yes, but programmers can work on teams with great designers. They don't need to do all the jobs.

Every skill on this list is a skill that takes the place of something else in your life. There's simply a finite amount of time in each week, and if I want to get better at design does it mean that -- maybe I give up on guitar or baseball or something?

I encourage programmers to think about what they really want -- not just at work but in their life -- and remember that the loudest folk are also the strangest.
Cofounder here, we did find some inspiration in CopyCopter.
Great Blender skills, even if nothing else! Kudos!!
I'm incredibly skeptical of the weak term sheets that would come out of this process. It looks like the crowd gets dilutable stock with no option for next round priority investing. Best of luck on their success - I hope my initial take is wrong, because this would be exciting at scale.
Cofounder here, thanks for your feedback, great suggestion.
Resource: Norman Matloff's Unix Tutorial Center
Keeping an open mind is a great philosophy, so long as your mind doesn't change so quickly that no one can coordinate actions with you. But I'm having a difficult time inferring the significance of this post.

On the one hand, if I'm constantly changing my mind, and my mind tends to change toward a stable, slow-changing correct solution, by definition, I'll be "right a lot", so long as I've had sufficient time to converge. In any case, I'll be right a lot more than either a person whose mind does not tend to change toward the correct solution, or someone whose mind does not change. This seems true by definition.

On the other hand, if the correct solution changes rapidly and dramatically, and my mind does not change as quickly, I will trivially be wrong a lot.

Likewise, focusing too much on "details that only support one point of view" seems wrong by construction, unless you magically pick the right point of view to begin with.

I'm not trying to be snarky here, seriously. I just feel like I must be missing the significance. I've reread the post several times, but I don't see it. Perhaps someone could enlighten me?
They're different approaches to managing the connection between presentation and the page. Mainly it's whether you're handling changes to the presentation primarily through the CSS or through the HTML.

-Semantic markup stresses using classes on DOM elements that describe what they are rather than how they look. Example: instead of using span class="red", use span class="error", to avoid the ridiculousness of having .red {color:blue;} in your CSS if you want to change it.

- OOCSS is an attempt to use reusable components for presentation to manage the complexity of maintaining large amounts of stylesheets. In the previous example, you'd probably still run into exceptions - if you had one error that you wanted to be blue, but keep the rest red, you'd have to add more specificity to do it: .thisoneexception .error {color: blue;} Now you're dealing with specificity wars (http://numiko.com/labs/2011/css-specificity-wars/) and maintainability issues.

The benefit of OOCSS is in simplifying things to make your life easier by reusing code. For example Nicole Sullivan's media object (http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2010/06/25/the-media-obj...) This is a type of layout that shows up all over the web. Instead of rewriting the css to achieve that layout for every individual semantic element, you just use those classes to get that layout.

A downside to this approach is that presentational info tends to creep into your HTML, which can get awkward. But at the end of the day, you have to tie the presentation with the DOM somehow. There are pluses and minuses to both approaches.
I was disappointed, a pretty inconsequential blog post reaching far for anything worth writing.

"So while the first astronauts to the moon went as technicians, they came back as humanitarians."

meh.
Perspective is a powerful thing. How things looks depends a lot on where you sit.

Makes me wonder how this concept can be applied to more Earthly affairs.
Also, in 1984 one of the major competitors to the Macintosh was the Apple II. The Mac didn't overtake the Apple II series in unit sales until about 1987.

http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/