skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's fine. I dropped Time Warner and Comcast years ago. Oddly enough, between Youtube, podcasts, Netflix, iTunes, and bittorrent I have no need to have "channels" any more.

If there's a movie or tv show I want to see, Netflix -> iTunes -> bittorrent.

I've actually been finding I watch Youtube more than anything else. I have a particular set of interests and have found a particular set of regular independent producers on Youtube and subscribe to them.

Minecraft: Etho's Lab
Starcraft: HDStarcraft and Husky
Bread baking: multiple
Telescope mirror making: multiple
Photography: multiple

Beyond that, I listen to a variety of podcasts about tech and photography.

I literally have no need for cable tv and haven't for years. All of the interesting stuff is online.

What I'd really love to see is a popular tv show with a loyal fan base but marginal viewers on cable to just switch over 100% to Youtube. Put the episodes in full HD and run regular Youtube ads. Maybe do some in-show advertisement, product placement, that kind of thing.

Recently, Dirty Jobs was cancelled after 8 years by Discovery. That was a really cool show with a loyal fan base. Its numbers got too low for Discovery so they canned it. It'd be the perfect example to try switching to a pure online model.
The Crowdsourced B-School Loan
Not to mention that it ignores the motives for Gerrymandering. Politicians surely know that Gerrymandered districts are 'bad', if a logical electoral system is your priority.

Politicians Gerrmander because they see an advantage in it, and they don't have compunctions against it.

I suspect good, non-Gerrymandered districts could easily be generated using traditional means as well. But the officials in charge have signalled they aren't interested.
Hiring Content Writers, Cheap
Great tool! I also find the title funny (which referes to following quote by Jamie Zawinski: Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.)
From a lot of what I've read about different NPEs, it sounds like they're already on the cusp of being vulnerable to racketeering / fraud charges. It might not take that much to amend the existing laws to add some language about shell companies and patents that clarifies that this is illegal.

Another thing that could help a lot is minimizing the extent to which patents can be sold. One of the biggest problems with the patent system that I see is that someone can invent something that sounds worthless, sell the patent for $10,000, and then the company that buys the patent can rake in millions in royalties. In general no one should be making money hand over fist for things that they neither invented nor produce.
Don't all mobile OSes now allow C/C++ for games? I know Android 2.3+ does.

The difference appears to be that Android encourages Java for non-games while Ubuntu will use C++/Qt.
It would seem that if a sporting event is held on private property (e.g., Madison Square Garden), the TSA would need to be invited by the property owners before it could operate there.
Actually, no, not if you're using the mysql2 gem. There is an open issue / pull request but it doesn't seem to have much momentum.

https://github.com/brianmario/mysql2/pull/289
An oldie (sort of) but a goodie! I never asked, what tool are you using to manage all these writers?
If you're going to run Android apps, why not just use Android with a custom launcher and skin? Any sort of app compatibility layer is just an admission of defeat.
Love defaultdict. It and dict/set/list compressions are a big part of what makes Python so fast to write in.

Great practice for 2.7 that's probably quashed in 3.0. For large dicts, no need to create a giant set en route when iterating over keys, values, or both. Use "for k in d.iterkeys()", "for v in d.itervals", "for k,v in d.iteritems."

While I'm at it-- if you're ever finding yourself using a huge amount of awfully rigid objects from a single class, use __slots__ to allocate needed variables! Python will otherwise define the object's namespace in a dict (called __dict__) which allocates a whole kilobyte per object. Bad news if you have several hundred thousand... Guessing this is why Guido loves namedtuples so much for basic attributed storage.
You're my hero :) I've been wanting to do just that, but keep putting it off. Maybe now is the time.

Sadly, though, I think the battle for privacy is largely lost. Too much is at stake for both FB and Google to play it nice. They will go as far as it takes to integrate themselves into every bit of our lives.

This is an exciting time to be an advertiser :)
I have a sit/stand desk. I stood for a while after I got it, but haven't recently.

My coworker has been using a stand up workstation for years because of back troubles. The standing desk greatly helps him. He has a high stool for when he needs to sit, as well as a high footrest for proper ergonomics.

Beware, while the standing desk can be had on the cheap, ergonomic stools (i.e. chairs that are much taller than normal) are even pricier than ergonomic chairs. Bar stools are a much cheaper option, but don't have the back support.
All the drivers (for recent hardware) are either binary or so ugly that mainline will probably refuse to merge them.
if you need to be able to identify someone with a single piece of information, it can't be defined by the person being identified; instead it has to be appointed by a globally central authority

Not necessarily; for example, people could generate their own UUIDs as identity tokens.
This is silly. The stinger on this vulnerability is SQL injection, but the vulnerability itself is closer in spirit to code injection. The issue here isn't database hygiene. Parameterized queries would not have helped.

There's a real critique of Rails to be leveled here (there is some fucked up stuff going on with Rails request processing), but yours isn't it.
3D printer with a MacBook Air server at GitHub HQ... I think my hipster detector was just overloaded.
Phones are more important than tablets. You get people to use Ubuntu Phones, and suddenly they'll be using Ubuntu laptops. Some people keep buying Apple products just to be more compatible with their shiny new iPhones...
Doesn't look too bad. It's pretty close to what I'm doing at the moment, except I use Korma and the routes don't have their own folder. It would be pretty cool to see some of the logic behind the decisions you made for those who are first exposed to it. I get the overall logic, but a new person many not.

I most certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from using it, but as you said, it isn't complete yet, but I think its one direction. The only issue is that it still has the minimal, few batteries included attitude that I think may be scary for other people to use. The first thing I'm always asked about Clojure is the frameworks available, and when I say that what is available is ultra-minimal, the immediate reaction is fear of rewriting the wheel over and over again. It's unfortunate that this is the pervasive attitude at the moment as I don't believe Clojure suits this well, but that is my own observation in my limited discussions. In that regard, a Luminus-style framework isn't really what I was talking about.
New York was the commercial and population center of the 13 Colonies and early US, a position it never really ceded, though New York State was surpassed in population by California and then Texas in the 1960s and 1980s. Point-to-point travel from other locations would have been largely similar to

Water travel was the first "highway" system in the US, first along the seacoast, then along rivers, then along canals (notably the Erie Canal, opened in 1825). The Saint Lawrence Seaway, offering deepwater access to Chicago and northern Minnesota, and the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio river systems, offering access to roughly 1/3 of the present conterminious United States, was (and is) hugely important to commerce. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mississippi_watershed_map_...

Rail, then highway, then air travel are faster than ships and barges, but if you want to maximize ton-miles per hour, you bulk-load or container-load a ship or barge. Coal, grain, and other bulk goods simply cannot be moved economically by other means, and issues such as the lack of water flow on the Mississippi River will have huge knock-on effects on commerce.

During the Civil War, the Union focused a great deal of effort on blockading and controlling southern ports, particularly Savannah and New Orleans, through which the bulk of Confederate exports (and revenues) flowed. Chocking off the South's access to finance had a great deal to do with eventual Union victory.
My guess is that you were the second one to answer that question.
The patent system is not for encouraging innovation, it is for encouraging people to share the secrets of their innovation. Without a patent system we would go back to the guild system of the middle ages, in other words, the protection of trade secrets.

You're right of course, we're much better off with a working patent system than with the system that came before it. However I'm personally not convinced that the patent system in its current form (at least in the US thought possibly in some other places too) is either working, or better for innovation than no system at all.
Ask HN: Does Chrome submit URLs you visit to the Google search indexer?
Today I surprisingly found a page in a Google search I was looking through, but I know I'm the only person who could have possibly visited the page.

The page was a debugging URL I was using to monitor some server activity, and I never shared it with anyone or pasted it in any chat interface. It is even running on a non-standard port, so even visiting the root domain wouldn't lead a crawler to it.

Is it possible that Chrome is submitting URLs I visit to be indexed by the Google search bots?
After an event I was at was targeted to be blown up, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Portland_car_bomb_plot) I have changed my views on anti-terrorist teams at events and mass-gatherings.

I do find it silly, however, that these teams are supposedly a devision of the "Transit Security Administration".
Key point: do it in Europe. Also, preferably not alone.

I made the mistake of taking Amtrak Seattle-SF and then a later trip SF-Denver. Outside of a few interesting vistas I wouldn't have seen from a car (Mountains in Colorado, more in the Sierra Nevada area, and a few bridges in WA and OR), it really wasn't worthwhile. This was back in the Sprint 1xRTT/EV-DO days, and I couldn't keep a connection (worse than on the roads), the trains were delayed by 4-8h, and the onboard service was pretty horrible. I wish they'd just let Amtrak die an honorable death, with metro transit services, some privatized services for Acela, and maybe some specialty trains run in cooperation with the freight carriers on other lines (if profitable), probably with less frequency.

In contrast I did the Eurail thing back in 1998-1999, and saw lots of France (literally picking random destinations a long distance away; I didn't have much money, so I had to sleep on the train, so long night trips were preferable), Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Scandinavia, and more.
Can't seem to handle UTF-8. WTF?
They might cover it with a blur filter and require you to register on their site to read it.
The only way to stop them is to stop funding them and that requires both parties to agree. Good luck with that.

Get used to the new TSA overlords. High school dropouts will now be groping you since it's the only job they will be able to get.
Sorry, but you sound like a real wet towel to be around. Shall we take away the coffee makers, too, since those are unnecessary?

Let them have a bit of fun at the office.
Nicely done, sir. Wasn't exactly sure what the true power was for a minute. I really like the json editor, but what really sells it is being able to have mock urls that actually function. Perfect for setting up a data source via the api for use among multiple engineers. You should somehow make that bit of info more prominent in the demo.
Humanity got by for quite a long time without flush toilets. That would be relatively low on my list of concerns.
The sensationalist "* Wars" name certainly is not helping it within the technical community.
Microsoft is 'surprised' by Google's ecosystem warfare? Give me a break
Penny Farthings and velocipedes operated with a direct drive, where pedals were attached directly to wheels. This was the reason for the large wheels of the penny farthing (without a geared chain-driven transmission there was no other way to step the drive ratio), and created the somewhat obvious limitations on braking and inability to freewheel also present on modern-day "fixies".
I'm not going to argue that Google+ doesn't fit some definition of "social network". But what's up with the snarky comments? How about sticking to an argument, instead of making comments like "The only person who thinks otherwise is you", which isn't even true?
Metalurgy and vulcanization. The former for frames and components, the latter for tyres.
It's not impossible that everyone who reads this thread is being assessed for their suitability to be judged a "threat to national security" and thus worth the cost of elimination.
I'm not depressed about it at all. I can now book a direct flight from Seattle to New York for ~$150. Try showing the people of 1970 that - that the middle class can, on a whim, travel all over their own country by air!

In the infancy of a technology it always benefits only the rich. IMO the democratization of amazing technology is a far more worthwhile accomplishment than simply advancing the state of the art exclusively for the rich.
I'd use google plus more if the mobile app wasn't a flaming turd.
Wouldn't that then result in less geographic diversity or representatives who don't represent just your district? Or am I misunderstanding?
5,001,000th post - cool!
...after jailbreaking and modifying. His point was off the bat, legally, or both.
Yes, and on my phone it requires me to login to read a page. This is why I know skip any G+ links here.
For an OSS project, I've been quite disappointed in how difficult it is to find any info on the "ubuntu for android" project. It was announced almost a year ago and I can't find any forum or list for discussion/updates.
> It turns out a lot more money is spent on marketing ...

The cost structure of marketing has diminishing returns with a very long tail. The first $100M might give $1B in revenue, the next $100M might give $400M, then $100M/$150M, then $100M/$105M, then $100M/$101M, and so forth.

The last $100M of the markeing budget only has a miniscule percentage profit, but a miniscule percentage is $1M. So it gets spent. So marketing budgets appear to be gigantic, but is is because most of the customers are marginal and barely need the product, not because R&D is being short-changed. In fact, this approach maximizes absolute R&D funding. Yes, R&D becomes a smaller slice of the pie, but this only matters to people who cannot do math.
Marketing + lobbying expenses are not mutually exclusive with research expenses. Companies maximize revenue, and to do that you need both marketing and research expenses. As it happens, throwing more money at research doesn't work (see Pfizer), and throwing more money at market often does.
(a)(a)(a)(a)(a)(a)(a)(a)(a)(a)\10 incorrectly gets parsed as ... + back reference to group 1 + "0".
>You can even take screenshots of a real, rendered webpage (which is great for debugging).

That is pretty cool.
99dresses (YC W12) is looking for an iOS developer in Sydney, Australia or NYC
ABOUT US
99dresses is creating the easiest way for women to trade clothes online. Women list their unwanted fashion in the 99dresses 'Infinite Closet' and sell them to other girls for a virtual currency called buttons. They can then spend their buttons on anything they want in the Infinite Closet.

We're solving a huge problem in an underserved market, with our big vision being to create a more efficient way for women to consume fashion so they never have to complain about having a closet full of clothes but nothing to wear. We're currently based in Sydney, Australia but will be moving to New York City in April/May. We're looking for someone in Sydney who is ready to make the move to NYC, or someone already in the US who can work remotely for a few months and head out to NYC when we move there. We also have seed funding from some great investors in the valley.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR
We are looking for an experienced iOS developer who is passionate about building awesome products that users love, but is also a great generalist who can work on all different facets of our system when need be. We are currently a small team (3 in Sydney, 1 in San Francisco) so you'll really be joining at the ground level.

Some experience working with most of the following would be preferable:

iOS and Objective C (essential)
Javascript, Ajax, JQuery, CSS3, HTML5
Groovy/Java
Grails, or other web development frameworks such as Rails, Play, Spring, etc.
SQL, ORM
Amazon AWS (S3/RDS/EC2/Beanstalk/MySQL)
Testing frameworks such as JUnit, Mockito, Selenium, etc.

SOUND LIKE FUN?
Shoot a message to nikki at 99dresses.com letting us know why you'd be perfect addition to the 99dresses team. Remember to include some links to your apps in the app store ;-)
That didn't work out for Maemo. Is this time going to be different?
So basically Verdeo was lying to the EPA by claiming it was exporting ethanol rather than biodiesel.

Since the biodiesel in question actually is ethanol, that was properly purchased in the USA, there is no lie.

I am sure that the same situation happens by accident all of the time. When you buy ethanol you do not normally inquire as to whether it is biodiesel, even though a large fraction of it is. And if that ethanol is exported, you report it as ethanol because it is, and you cannot generally be expected to know whether it is biodiesel.

In this specific case Verdeo was presumably aware that they were exporting biodiesel (though there might be a lack of paperwork acknowledging that it was). However they believe that the regulations do not cover this case, and given that they had lawyers examining the regulations first, I see no particular reason to disbelieve them.

You may think it is ridiculous. But it is no more ridiculous than creating a legal distinction with real monetary value between two batches of identical chemicals. Yet that is exactly the distinction between corn ethanol and ethanol made from some other source.
> How does carrying a TV channel cost Time Warner real money?

They're afraid of negative reactions from viewers:

> Cable companies are also worried, said Burman, that they will lose more subscribers than they will gain by granting access to Al Jazeera.

Just having that "Al" in the name makes it sound like a terrorist network to a large fraction of Americans.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/30/al-jazeera-english-...
targeted to be blown up

Mainly by the FBI, based on that wikipedia article.

FBI: Hey, do you want to blow something up?

Terrorist: OK

FBI: Here's a bomb, go blow something up.

Terrorist: OK

[click]

FBI: You're under arrest!

Sure, the guy committed a crime, but was I wouldn't say the event was "targeted to be blown up". It was a sting operation. A small probability threat was amplified by the FBI for the purpose of making a case. Does that justify TSA goons everywhere? The same ones that won't let you bring your bottle of Coke on an airplane?

Governments love to use "larger than life" enemies to justify a disproportionate invasion of liberty. It used to be Communists, now it's Terrorists.
Emacs may be great on desktops, but it probably isn't on hands or smartphones.
At one point all of my transactions were done electronically (for convenience) until I moved to the UK. Since moving to the UK I've actually started using cash a lot more, I love the feel of coins and banknotes and it comes with a freedom.

Having 100% of transactions known by your bank, what you bought and where, it's yet another avenue in which bigger organisations get to know every little thing about you and over which you have no longer have control of. It's just another one of those things where society picks convenience at the dispense of freedom.

And now that virtually everything gets tracked, people are slowly becoming like little rats in a cage, continually monitored and always at the dispense of some faceless organisation. I don't like the implications of going fully electronic. It's just another movement forward to a society in which it's citizens are completely and utterly subordinated and at the whims of people privileged with more control.
I'm sorry but this is the kind of "solution" that gives analytical thinking a bad name. Ignoring the political will to implement this, this solution's biggest problem is its willful ignorance of physical boundaries. A four lane highway can be as stark a dividing line between groups as miles of physical space. This article simply dismisses this reality by saying "well politicians never consistently considered those boundaries either, so there"

Ironically, this ostensibly logical argument ends up going further into anti-intellectual territory than the politicians it derides. The thinkers behind this can't think of any other way that math might be used to accommodate or weight the effect of these different boundaries? Really? Or would the resulting boundaries be so aesthetically unappealing that its just better to go for the elegance of straight lines? That is among the stupidest rationales I've read in the whole gerrymandering debate.

The whole post just smacks of incredible naïveté. No wonder engineers and scientists have a bad reputation in representative politics.
You shouldn't change your assessment of the risks just because you almost got unlucky. It's like suddenly deciding that lottery tickets are a good investment just because you know someone who won.
This is true, but also applies to high speed rail. There are tremendous space requirements applicable to HSR that don't apply to regular rail. Look at HSR developments in China, Taiwan, etc, most of which have stations located well outside densely populated areas (except at points of extreme political/economic importance). Getting to a HSR station will be non-trivial also, not unlike getting to an airport today. HSR directly into a place like Midtown Manhattan is unlikely.
Horses must be bred, raised, trained (as does the rider), fed, watered, stabled, mucked, cleaned, saddled, and shod. Streets traversed by horses must be cleaned (the first urban transport pollution crisis revolved around horse and other draft animal dung, a/k/a "soil"). They're only useful for traveling so far, so coach roads and mail services (such as the Pony Express) needed frequent changing stations where horses could be switched and rested (every 10 miles for the Pony Express). Horses were a major expense and even during times when they were principle land transport were the privilege of the rich, or farmers who relied on horses for productive capacity.

Once built, a bike requires minimal maintenance, is vastly cheaper than a horse, can be ridden with minimal skill (and only the rider, not the bike, requires training), and can be stored in a house or small shed. Bicycle manufacture is highly amenable to mass production techniques (horses, not so much). Other than reinflating tyres and oiling chains, little maintenance is required. On good roads, a bike can easily be ridden 20-40 miles by even a cyclist of moderate skill, and single-day rides of 200-300 miles are attainable. Even loaded with camping gear, a bike can be ridden 60-90 miles per day, continuously, reasonably. Cargo bikes can carry substantial loads locally. Bike jitneys compete with horse-drawn vehicles for human carriage.

Horses or oxen, particularly teamed, can carry much heavier loads. In parts of the world, oxcarts, fitted with modern truck wheels and axles, still compete with automobiles for drayage.