skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe it's just me but, while I agree with this, I would like our government to focus on gaining a certain level of basic competence. The last few years seem to have brought to light just how impotent and incapable the US legislature is.

The other two branches seem to be doing fine, but I'd like to focus our attention on perhaps changing this ridiculous farce into something that might work, just a little bit.

The big problem is that due to our system of govt any change will be brought of the back of legislation, which, unfortunately, will have to pass thru the broken and disfigured legislature.

That said, I hope this petition succeeds :)
I solve this problem two ways: firstly by being very expensive, charging several hundreds of dollars an hour; secondly by only working on a time and materials basis. This won't work for everyone.

Fixed priced projects only work in a few cases where you know exactly what you are building. They are a lose-lose situation otherwise, with the client usually being the loser.
Hey, interesting post. Thanks for sharing. I had a few questions:

Did you do anything special for Debt Snowball that made it more successful than your other apps, or was it just a good product?

Do you do all the design and code for your apps, or do you outsource graphic design?

Are you worried that developing on 5 platforms will spread yourself too thin?
Well for those you can fall back on your references and high-level descriptions of your work. I have quite a few projects that are private/enterprise applications that will never see the light of day outside of their domain. Unfortunately I have to describe these and rely on references. It's the only way I can legally do it.
There actually is a reason to lower the price if it results in more people who are willing to pay more often. I see your comment as the kneejerk libertarian response to anyone complaining about a price (without actually knowing any details about whatever market is being talked about), and it annoys me.
The federal government has a law that federal funds can not be used to pay for signs with metric measures on them.
I would love this idea, if it was limited to 10-20 lines. The forced conciseness of it would make devs focus on brief concepts and structure, rather than complex methods. It would end up being like Dribble rather than Gist/PasteBin, and be a great place to browse for techniques I hadn't previously encountered. Think about how fun it would be to scan through an Instagram style list of stuff like this:

############~C~#############

if ((1?1:var)/2) {
/* it's floating point */
} else {
/* it's an integer */
}

#######~Objective-C~########

+ (NSString *) append:(id) first, ...
{
NSString * result = @"";
id eachArg;
va_list alist;

if(first)
{
result = [result stringByAppendingString:first];
va_start(alist, first);
while (eachArg = va_arg(alist, id))
result = [result stringByAppendingString:eachArg];
va_end(alist);
}

return result;
}

#########~PHP~##############

$object = new StdClass;
$object->foo = 'bar';
echo json_encode($object);

############################

I know they aren't the best example, but I would love to be able to scan through a list of small code snippets (by language) that demonstrate concepts. On the plus side, it would be an easier way to show some competence in a language (for future employers) than having to do massive contributions to open source projects (don't have that much free time). The thing that makes or breaks this project is a smallish limit on lines. Without it, you are just another Gist/Pastebin, without the benefits of the wide user base and additional features. I have zero desire to chill at night and scan through a bunch of random 100+ line snippets that I have no context for, but I love goofing around on Stackoverflow, looking at fancy code snippets
> So because $SOLUTION can't do both $FEATURE1 and $FEATURE2, you don't use $SOLUTION and thus you don't even have $FEATURE1?

More like I choose $SOLUTION2 that can do $FEATURE{1,2}. Maybe that's adding related tables, maybe it's using a JSON column, maybe it's something else. I think part of good engineering is picking solutions that keep your options open. It seems like your data's structure always gets more complex over time, so hstore is a risky choice.

I'm not saying it's a terrible choice: you could always manage the flatness the way people use Java properties files, with compound key names to simulate fancier data structures, but that's sort of a pain. I could definitely see myself trying out hstore in the future for something like user preferences; I just am hesitant due to its flatness.

> because keys and values are just strings, it's in fact possible to nest hstores

I don't understand this; could you elaborate? Are you saying that an hstore is really a string?
I have all of those things except the drain pipe and a highway sign.

Every socket set i have contains both SAE and metric.
Half of my power tools are in metric (festool).

All plywood that you buy from the hardware store in the US is really metric sized nowadays.

Every screw/fastener on every tool I own is metric or metric sized.
I haven't used my SAE hex keys in eons.
Sounds about right for an initial Google hardware launch.

They tend to ship products in a state that their own departments would consider usable but in the real world have no right being on store shelves.
agree. i go for the audi every time.
Tumblr: David Karp's $800 Million Art Project
> Most or all of which would not be helped by liberal attempts to emulate Europe.

You mean the rest of the industrialized world, not just Europe.

> high child poverty is to be expected in a country that harbors many poor immigrants from Latin America.

You mean unlike a country that harbours many poor immigrants from Northern Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe?

> high rate of incarceration is largely to be blamed on the "War on Drugs"

Yes, and it is the conservative right that most strongly favours continuing the War on Drugs. Those left of centre liberals you don't like generally favour ending the war on drugs and following a more - dare I say - European approach to legalization. (Sadly, Canada's Republican-lite Conservative government has taken a more American approach to the War on Drugs, establishing mandatory minimum sentences and other punitive measures that have already failed in the US.)

> low rate of doctors is largely to be blamed on the fact that medicine is a guild

That's true across all the industrialized countries, but the other countries are much better than the US at achieving a higher rate of doctors and much better overall health outcomes, despite spending only 40-70% of what the USA spends on health care - and running various incarnations of universal health coverage.

> American liberals want a society where everybody gets whatever they demand

That's a lazy straw man attack. American liberals, like liberals in other industrialized countries, want their country to value human rights, pay attention to evidence-based public policy and invest enough in public social and physical infrastructure to ensure everyone has an adequate standard of living and the opportunity to work hard and prosper.

Ironically, the USA has among the worst levels of socioeconomic mobility in the OECD. Poor Americans are more trapped in their poverty than poor people in countries that do more to level the playing field so everyone has a fair chance of escaping poverty.
Google could do a much better job integrating Google Talk video or Hangouts in Android, and VOIP in general, the way Apple has done with Facetime.

But either they don't care that much about it, or they are afraid of the carriers reaction - but they really shouldn't be. The users should always come first.
Show HN: a small weekendish project - JSON Blob
The Beat - Instagram Photos and What's Around Them
Note, however, that it's rail travel in North America that has been static since 1930 -- if you applied the same exercise to Western Europe you'd see dramatic improvements in surface travel times since 1960, with the spread of electrification and in-cab signaling and then the expansion of the TGV, LGV and ICE networks.
Rounding to the likes of 1.5km is good enough for a highway sign.
Day Trading Results For 2012, My First Year As Active Daily Investor
"DCI" in Ruby is completely broken
Please be aware that Celsius is not a SI unit, Kelvin is used in stead as the standard temperature unit. The only reason why many people use Celsius is because it makes sense in their daily lives. The melting and boiling point of water are both important in cooking and the freezing point is also important for the weather. Therefore it makes a lot of practical sense to use Celsius and people have stuck to it even though it is not an SI unit.
Unzipped Bikini screensaver leads to malware
Microsoft’s 9B R&D budget is mostly an accounting convenience. They include all product development in R&D.
I'm a heavy cycle hire user and face this problem all the time.

Solution seems straight-forward to me: if you park at an empty rack, or if you take a bike from a full rack your trip is free (if you are casual user) or you get small amount of credit (50p?) if you are a subscription user.

My experience with cyclehire though is they always choose the most complicated path. As an example they way over engineer their authentication. Besides a password you have to answer several security questions. Feels so disproportionate.
In 1995 - 1999, our speed limit on the Interstate in Montana was "Reasonable and Prudent". The federal government set a national speed limit in 1974, and it was repealed in 1995. When that happened the speed limit reverted to what it was in '74.

I was in high school for a couple of those years. I drove 120 MPH frequently. I probably would have got pulled over for that. I had a friend who got pulled over for going 90 MPH. Ultimately, I think the ambiguity of "reasonable and prudent" led to the state enacting a 75 MPH speed limit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_Stat...
I'm not sure that base 10 is wired into our brains. It's probably the case that we're just used to base 10. The reason why it's can be so hard to read numbers in base 8 or some other base out loud is that you have to convert it to base 10 to say it because we use . . . base 10. (Though you can get around this by reading the numbers as though they were in written base 10---I had a professor who did this with hexadecimal.)
Outside of cars, roughly every power tool, piece of electronics, cabinet (35mm), etc needs metric sockets or hex keys.

I have built plenty of complex machinery. It's actually significantly easier for me to source 50mm flywheels/pulleys, or v-belts, or whatever, than it is to try to get someone to give me reasonable tolerances on imperial.

While it's true machining is done to thousandths of an inch in the US, most of those machining tools are using chucks/collets/etc whose sizes/TIR/etc is all actually metric.

(IE the 1/2" chuck/collet/whatever is really machined to 12.7mm)
SEEKING WORK
Remote based work as a full time freelancer from Croatia.
Strong: web application functional testing, security testing, load testing.
Tools: WATIR, Cucumber, All types of Python web modules.
Punchline: If you think that your web application does not have problems, hire me and I will prove that you are wrong.
"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? " - Brian Kernighan (Sourced from wikipedia)
The only thing I'd predict is that Avis will screw up Zipcar in some way. They'll raise prices or make the service worse or both. The major car rental companies for years have been owned by major car manufacturers and, in part, serve as backdoor dealerships. Ever wonder how the Ford Taurus was the top selling car in America? I wonder if and how Zipcar will be modified to support that model.
I always listen to Jann Tiersen.
Has Portable NaCl arrived on the ARM Chromebook yet? Google promised it by the end of the year:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57534803-93/google-offers-l...
My idea of a nice car is one that starts and still has some of the brake pads remaining
Civil and a lot of Mechanical still use standard. Especially for machining and such. We also used kips (kilopounds) in my Statics class.
Pull Google Analytics source info into email?
I'll grant you that my personal anecdote is a few years old, but...

Maybe 8 or 9 years ago, I talked to the Dean of the University of Colorado Comp Sci department. I could only remember Benjamin Zorn as a faculty member, so I dropped the name. By then, Zorn had gotten hired away to Microsoft R&D. The Dean of the Comp Sci department made a number of references to Microsoft R&D as a "research roach hotel" - researcher's go in, but no papers ever come out.

If Microsoft R&D is a secret, then it's Microsoft's own problem, I assume.
You typically don't need to escape a + inside a character class, either, so /[^0-9+]+/ should work.
maybe $300-400/mo for the car itself.

This is true only if you ever own a car white it is under financing and it loses its full value over the course of the loan.

Edit: unless you were simply dividing the cost of the car over the number of months you'd be driving it and you already factored value retention into that number, in which case either you don't need to worry about money anyway because you are rich or there are much better ways for you to better manage your money!
A few thoughts:

Is it sustainable as a business? Anyone know if Google is subsidizing these or if there is a profit margin, however small? I think it's all about attracting people to Google Apps for Business but if a lot of folks just load Ubuntu on it, Google might have second thoughts on it. I think it is meant as mostly a bundle with Google Apps for Enterprise to attract companies with cheap and/or rented hardware.

Also, being on the Amazon bestseller list is not a very good indicator of popularity. Since Google is very unlikely to release the real numbers we will have to rely on things like StatCounter, Net Applications or even popular web sites run by HN'ers to get more data on sales.

Will RMS consider this more or less free than Windows/Apple machines? On one hand you have multiple OEMs, dev mode to boot alternative OSes, compability with Web etc. but on the other hand you need a Google account to even use it, and it's tied heavily to Google cloud services, no native API, no chance of Firefox for it etc. i.e It can be seen as taking consumers even more away from independent offline usage to being at the mercy of the cloud providers. What happens if your Google account gets locked?
Why this is on the HN home page with only 2 votes I'm not too sure, but it does raise a valid point!
I've heard good things about the Ford Focus. GM and Chrysler are suspicious just because they had to nationalize them to keep them from going bankrupt, and the Ford Explorer went to shit by 2008 or so, so for me, it's not a bias I'm especially interested in revisiting, especially with the quality of the VW's and Audis I've driven.
I think it's worth it for anybody to take a long haul passenger rail trip at least once. I took one that lasted about 80 hours (about 40 each way) and it really was a struggle to keep yourself engaged the entire way.

On a side note, provisioning long haul rail in the age of steam must have been an incredible logistics exercise, on-top of that moving mail and other information around the country. Imagine not knowing that a new law was passed for 6 weeks!
This is ridiculous, if I'm reading it right.

For one thing, the carrier I currently use (AT&T), forces you to buy a data plan if you have a smartphone. I'd be surprised if this wasn't the case for all carriers. So that blows the conclusion out of the water.

But why ask the question in the first place? Because the Android browser market share is so much lower than the Android market share as a whole? I would presume that "browser share" comes from the web, which can be accessed by all sorts of devices, and "mobile market share" comes just from mobile devices. That alone probably makes the question moot. But even if it didn't, there's Opera, Firefox, Chrome and all sorts of other browsers on Android that could make up the gap.

In other words, I doubt the premise (Android users surf the web less) as well as the conclusion (this is due to most Android users being too price averse to use data). I just don't see any evidence of either.
How Corn Syrup Might Be Making Us Hungry and Fat
Top Twitter Conversations of 2012
The Future Of Enterprise IT: 30 Executives Share Their 2013 Predictions
Well, it seems that NASA, at least a few years ago, did not consistently use metric ...
I don't think that some of the commenters here got that... lol
Microsoft is this generation's Xerox PARC if they can't ship whatever is in their R&D labs.
Yeah, thing is though, YA allows people to ask absolutely retarded questions. It's basically a place where teenagers with ultra-religious parents can ask questions about their illegitimate pregnancy. Quora specifically tries to be above such rabble, and thus, misses the meat of this "market." Quora and other Q/A sites are for people who don't know how to use Google if the answer is not on the first page. Unfortunately, Quora thinks it's far above such an assessment, and is therefore nothing to no one.
Small Projects for Mastering Lisp
I'm an intermediate Lisp programmer who's written several 'toy' programs and have a good basic knowledge of Lisp programming, including macro development. I'm still at the point though where I can read Lisp much better than I can write it.

I'm looking to experienced Lispers for project ideas that would provide experience needed for tackling real-world projects.
Does anybody use "hour" in anything other that whole multiples, halfs, and quarters? This divisiblity of 60 seems nothing more than a curiosity; minutes are used for everything else, even 3/4ths ("forty five minutes").
Bandwidth Load Balancer will shave your bandwidth cost - blog post
Sorry, but how is that not a visualization? If you're learning regular expressions that's about the best thing you could possibly 'see', even though it doesn't show matches for specific input. And I do actually think it's beautiful. I pasted in a huge regex and was delighted at the output.
Sorry, but the arguments put forward in this article are terrible and it's full of false, subjective assumptions.
What do you think about folks who haven't had a financially successful year so far, what different should they do ?
Do you have the HTTPS Everywhere extension? It's buggy with Livejournal.
We can most certainly demonize the financial sector.

Making money with money is enough of a lure people will still do it.
'SAE', an experimental Amiga emulator in pure javascript and HTML5
CONSUMER BAROMETER - insights in online & offline purchase behavior
Driver to hide files in Linux OS
Histomap: 4000 years of human history in one visualization
I didn't do anything different per se, but I did have a little bit of luck at launch. I generally send emails to some of the top bloggers to try to get reviews, and by virtue of it being good with a really nice looking design, I got 2 good reviews in the same day. Those sales plus any organic sales pushed it pretty high.

I do all the code and I've done varying levels of outsourcing the design. I've done all the design for some smaller apps, I've hired people using elance.com, and more recently I've been partnering with some top level designers (Debt Snowball+ was partnering with a really good designer).

As for spreading too thin, I hope not. I won't be doing all of my apps as I don't have nearly enough time for that. There is only 1 app at this point that makes sense on desktop, and I only plan on doing the most successful apps on the other platforms for the time being. We'll see how it goes, but I think the diversification will be very much worth some amount of spreading thin.
Is this a joke? Why wouldn't you just post it?
I'll admit that I don't see what the advantage of soloist is. What I would probably do is build the runlist via include_recipe statements in pivotal_workstation::default. Then I would create a Berkfile (http://berkshelf.com/) for it, use 'berks install --path' to bundle pivotal_workstation and all its dependencies, and tar that up and upload it somewhere.

The bootstrap then becomes something like

gem install chef
echo {"run_list": "recipe[pivotal_workstation]"} > node.json
chef-solo -j node.json -r http://example.com/pivotal_workstation.tar.gz

The JSON could of course be customized if you needed to set any attributes.
And what if your development environment is for iOS apps?

How will ubuntu help you out installing xcode? Ubuntu is not the end all of things.

The "fad" of running things in a vm is so that you can validate that you've not forgotten something about your setup and deploy process. If you run it locally on your workstation that you've tweaked umpteen million ways you may have forgotten about some tweak you made and boom your deploy doesn't work. Fully automating a vm build and setup for local use helps work those kinks out. I'm not a web guy but do the same thing for my ec2 setups.

Also some of use prefer not to use Linux or Windows as our workstation. At work now I am typing this on an Arch linux box, but prefer osx for regular use primarily because of the less bs situation. In addition using windows for the base os means things like having to deal with stuff like cygwin/etc.... and their stupid peculiarities and quirks.
It surely is. Do google "culture of honor".
Good to see that the situation is improving. The more the US imports the more stuff will be in metric, it's unavoidable.

But I'll believe it when the construction industry let's go of the foot and the inch.

A 12.7 mm collet is not a metric collet. A metric collet would be a 12 or 13 mm.
2013 Predictions for Telecom (Hint: WebRTC)
RIM makes a comeback.
The problem is they scale down just as quickly. Currently they're sold with valuations that speculate about the potential profits according to their level of engagement. In many cases they'll scale down before they ever deliver on the kinds of profits that would justify their price tag.
Yeah, an article like this is almost useless without being able to see the author's code and see why he came to the conclusions he came to.
Why Some Languages Sound So Much Faster than Others
I'm not sure i agree with his reasons, mostly because what the data really shows is that Android users don't really browse on Wi-Fi [1] (on 3G the discrepancy - device marketshare vs browsing marketshare - is much lower).

My opinion (with anecdotal evidence) is that Android users just stick with their PCs when at home (presumably when they have Wi-Fi), whereas iOS users prefer the small screen, for some reason.

[1] http://blog.cloudfour.com/explaining-the-ios-and-android-mob...
Have you seen the people on Mythbusters flail about while trying to convert using units like inch-pounds and miles per hour and fluid ounces to cubic feet? There's a reason science insists on using the metric system.

The metric system is relatively ancient, dating from the late 1700s.
That is a ridiculous argument for a country that is already so heavily reliant on foreign manufacturing. If anything, at this point, the imperial standard is a barrier to having the US become a manufacturing nation once again - because so much industrial technology has been developed without a thought to the archaic measurements.
So buy it cash, $12,000 figuring a 10 year depreciation. That's still $100/mo, and probably a lower end car than you'll drive with Zipcar. I'm breaking even assuming even a free car, though.
More due to a lack of oversight and an excess of trust.

I'm pretty sure my Canadian accountant would be quite upset at your conclusion. Cash disappearing has nothing at all to do with accounting.
The physics of that ‘kickalicious’ kick
You can implement the functional aspects of lisp in almost any language, however S-expressions are only present in a very limited number of programming languages.