skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"unsubstantiated hand waving about how the system is "bought.""

It is not exactly unsubstantiated: the powerful people within the system have basically admitted it. See, for example, Chris Dodd's comments:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/19/exclusive-hollywo...

How exactly might you interpret a comment like, "Candidly, those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake?" Politicians count on big business for support and the leaders of those businesses make sure those politicians do what benefits them.

It's not just Hollywood. Obama needed the support of the pharmaceutical industry to push the healthcare bill through; the deal was that the Obama administration would fight harder against medical marijuana and imported drugs, and despite the fact that Obama's public statements included talk of depriotizing marijuana, his first two years saw more raids on medical marijuana dispensaries than all eight years of his predecessor. There is little doubt that the defense industry has a comfortable relationship with the government either: we spend as much on buying their weapons and systems as we spend on social security, and no president after Eisenhower has failed to involve the US in some military engagement or war (most of which were entirely unnecessary).

It is not that democracy is discredited, but that we question whether we even have a real democracy anymore. If your only choices are "far right" and "not so far right," does your vote really count? One has to look to the extreme minorities, third parties and independents, to find anything that could be called "left wing" by any reasonable standard.

I place the beginning of valid questions about American democracy in the 1970s. That was when the Democrats began catering to big business just like the Republicans, and it was in that decade that we (probably coincidentally) saw the beginning of paramilitary law enforcement. It was also the decade that saw the beginning of explosive growth in executive branch power (once the dust from the Nixon affair settled, anyway), which at this point has come to mean "when the president has it in for you, you're dead." As an example, it was in the 1970s that the attorney general's office gained the power to declare drugs to be illegal without having to wait for the wheels of democracy, and to arrest and prosecute people for possessing those drugs.

So can you really blame us for questioning the democracy of the United States? It seems like the only democratic processes that matter anymore are those that decide which set of big businesses will receive help from the government.
The Future of OOCSS: A Proposal
Only when you consider that California on the whole is a lot richer than most of the rest of the country.
I haven't been here for very long, but I can't say it's a "common sight" to see flip phones at coffee shops. :)

Yes - everyone has iPhones. Not an Android phone in sight!
Ask HN: Women of HN?
I am just curious who here is female. Past discussions have made it clear that some female members hide or downplay their gender. If you are fine with publicly admitting to being female, please answer here. If it isn't a Secret but you also don't care to call attention to it publicly, you can shoot me an email. (My gmail account is talithamichele.) If it is a Secret, please just keep your secrets.

Thanks in advance.

(I realize this can be a hot button question for the LGBT crowd. There is no intent to be insensitive but I also am hoping to not open up a huge can of worms. For many LGBT folks, discretion is the better part of valor.)
You're almost right... NewsCorp (i.e. Rupert Murdoch) bought them in 2007.
One of the biggest shocks to me when moving to the Bay Area is the difference in social norms and acceptable behavior. I grew up in Texas and went to college on the east coast. For the first few months after moving out here I was in awe by some of the things people would do and thought were acceptable. In fact I'm still in shock by many of these things but used to them by now. From some of the things I've seen managers do in regards to relationships with their employees and behavior at office parties to an entire section at AT&T park cheering when an opposing pitcher gets hurt and pulled.

Furthermore I also found it much harder to communicate appropriately as social cues seem a bit different. I have at many times found myself in a conversation (or lack there of) filled with awkward silence.

edit: grammatical correction
The author is not against small, tough problems, by all means a well designed generic programming question that doesn't tie in to any specific domain knowledge can be a great test.

What the author was against are the riddles, which are proven to be ineffective in determining the general aptitude of the engineers, and that's why the companies that used to use them (MS and Google, for example) have mostly banned those.
Just curious, in your opinion, what should be the net worth target for people making regular tech income in their 30's, 40's and 50's if they want to eek out comfortable living in retirement, inflation-adjusted?
This article was written by a programmer (me) and a psychologist (my wife). If you read up on CBT you'll be shocked at how perfectly it lines up with our way of thinking (rational, pragmatic, testable, data-driven). We tried to write this to specifically relate to programmers, even including code snippets to try to explain concepts. We'd love any feedback.
I definitely look forward to reading this over the weekend. Just purchased. I've already learned quite a bit from pydanny's blog over the years, so hopefully the book follows suit.
So, full disclaimer: I was one of the editors of this book.

This is a really great 'best practices' book for Django developers of all skill levels.

In the Django community, there are a variety of practices that people tend to use: webapp structure, coding conventions, library preferences, etc. As a Django developer, finding out 'which way should I do X' is often harder than it seems: there are tons of articles on Google, but it's difficult to make sense of which recommendations are right.

This book takes a really great approach to the problem by introducing readers to a great deal of information: which way you should do X, why, and how it works. Instead of just getting a solution, you'll understand why things should be done that way, and how it works.

Furthermore, I can tell you that as an editor of this book, both Danny and Audrey (the authors) took quite a lot of feedback, and made a lot of progressive changes to the content. This (in my opinion) is a huge selling point, as you know all the book's content has been reviewed by numerous influential Django developers and users.

Anyhow, this is a really great book, and quite cheap for the asking price. I'd highly recommend you read it, regardless of your skill level.
Hipmunk Launches Flight Deals
Herd Of Secret Drug Goats Discovered At Biotech Ranch
Double jeopardy (the U.S. Constitutional guarantee against being charged with the same crime twice) basically requires that the prosecutors bring every viable charge that they feel they have the evidence to support for a given single crime.

The flip side to this is that sentences are normally given concurrently, or simply based on the most serious charge actually found guilty of during the trial.
Look, I guess you have no reason to believe me, but this is just not how the US government works. There's no staffer in the Administrative Office of the courts who's upset at Aaron and tells the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts to throw the book at him.
> When you're making the basic task of seeing the slides impossible, nobody cares about your pointless turd-polishing.

These are slides for the presenter. Nobody cares if you see them or not. Only the presenter has to care.

> PDF readers [...] embed an ECMAScript interpreter

So you wrote a Go to Javascript compiler? Can the VM running in the PDF reader implement a web server that can interact with the outside world?
No, I think they must mean that was the average rent per month during that quarter.
Have a look at what unbounce, launchrock, kickofflabs, etc. are doing, as it sounds like you're in a similar space.
You're projecting. Most of the comments are about how ridiculous the infographic is with single moms making 250k and looking sad. It's more of a laugh at the elites who read WSJ and think these kind of incomes are NORMAL than about the tax implications.
Google and Microsoft don't ask those kinds of questions. Both of them primarily ask questions related to algorithms and data structures, sometimes with a bit of software design thrown in.

Source: I work for Google and have interned for Microsoft.
I will confirm this. Just had to replace part of my exhaust a few weeks ago because I bottomed out hitting a pot hole at night I couldn't see until too late.
I think it is more about middle management than upper management.
Wow, very cool. They used much nicer cameras than I did and get much nicer results. Not sure I believe the stars in the sky, though. ;)

Not sure how I didn't see this before. Thanks for the links!
San Diego, THE CITY, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver

Yep, I can see how that would work.
SF is a great city - I lived there for 3 or 4 months.

Coming from London, the thing I really missed was the late-night club & music scene.

Trying to find anything happening past 1am, especially on a weeknight, is a non-starter.
Dolores.
The X131e is available for purchase by consumers. I have the AMD model.
The 2006 median family income (MFI) in NYC was $76,800. The data I'm looking at considers the "middle class" 120%-250% of MFI, which is ~$92k-192k.
I'm one of the authors.

Because of the formatting issues of Kindle and ePub, the negative reviews Python books get when formatting breaks in those formats, we're not sure yet it we'll publish it in mobi/epub.

That said, if you have any advice on getting Python to look good in those formats, we would love to hear it. :-)
Carmen Ortiz Releases Bogus Statement Concerning The Aaron Swartz Prosecution
I was getting ready to roll up my sleeves and begin critiquing on how it was wrong (how could a kid who has been here 9 months know anything blah blah blah), but this is actually a very excellent article. He pretty much hits it right on the head, and I've lived in this area for 15 years now.

Great post!
In fairness to the prosecution, pushing for the same exact sentence that the defendant refused to accept on a "gracious" plea bargain is poor economic policy. If the plea bargain sentence is really sufficient then there needs to be incentive to take the plea.

7 years is far less than the maximum sentence so she's still correct in saying they didn't push for the maximum (pending other evidence that might come out).
Mississippi wouldn't be a low tax state if they were unable to tax Californians.
I actually agree with you, but this is exactly the opposite of what the author is saying. Charles Pierce (a long-time Boston politics reporter, not a "tech guy") isn't blaming Ortiz for killing Swartz, he's blaming her and her husband for being disingenuous in their public statements about the prosecution and for the casual way they mention a six-month Federal sentence as if it's nothing.

He also attacks the obviously political motivation behind the prosecution:

I guarantee you, if Aaron Swartz hadn't killed himself, he'd have been in an Ortiz For Governor campaign commercial one day.
That's a bit pedantic. It's pretty clear that the point the author is trying to make is that relative to other cities, a ton of people work in finance or startups so you will encounter a lot more of them. Not that every single person in the city falls into those two categories.
It makes me want to ask an interviewer to code a solution to fizzbuzz or solve a riddle.
Native support for selecting abstract classes via JavaScript would be awesome!
Learn from your Data with Dataclips 2.0
| Tell me it will be a week and it takes two? Red Flag.

The thing that frustrated me the most about dealing with DeviantArt's interview process. No specific timelines, and 'soon' could mean anything from a couple of days to 3-4 weeks (with no response / contact).
The same goes w/ NYC. I have been here for a while now and have met so many young girls following Sex in the City dream, which invariably turned out badly.
"We're not saying its going to happen to you, but these other three businesses have burned to the ground. If you give us 10%, we can make sure it doesn't happen to you."

At no point in this sentence did I say "If you do not pay us 10% we will burn down your business." However prosecutions have successfully argued, and any reasonable person would agree, that the first sentence is a threat, is coercive, and is criminal. Making a statement about what "could" happen can be interpreted (often correctly) as a threat. Making a statement about what could happen when the person making it is instrumental, even a required agent, in the future event, is most certainly evidence of a threat. Making such a statement while offering a lesser harm (or sentence) is most certainly a threat.

You may post as many replies on this thread that "threat" doesn't mean what we think it means but the law, common sense, and understanding of English, proves you wrong.

"I didn't intend to burn down their business, judge. I just pointed out that it could happen. Whether or not I would have intended to do so after they decided not to accept my plea-bargain^H^H^H pay my protection fee is immaterial to the case. You are conflating the two, a statement of intent verses a statement of fact. The fact is I did not burn down their business and you have no record of my saying that I intended to."
Yes, no one from the Bay Area refers to San Francisco as "San Fran". Even worse is when people refer to it as "Frisco". It's either SF or "The City".
It took me a while to get what you were asking.
Given (Syntax may be wonky):

func b(chan x) { time.Sleep(60 seconds); x <- true }
func a() {
x := make(chan bool)
t := timeoutChannelCruft(30 seconds) // don't remember the syntax
go b(x)
select {
case <-x: return;
case <-t: return;
}
}

What happens to goroutine b and channel x? Does goroutine b block for the remainder of the program? Does channel x ever get cleaned up?

I'd guess b() blocks forever so in your timeout case you could probably just do

go func(){ <- x }()

to make sure that the b() eventually returns and is cleaned up.
"Approaching 50%" sounds very misleading to me. The top percentage on that graphic is 30%, for 196.3/650. And before the increases, the top percentage was 27%, for 70.4/260.

From that perspective, those changes look like much ado about nothing to me. 30% is a long, long way from 50%.

Edit: it's also, other than for the retirees, not very graduated at all. 28% for the 230K earner, 30% for the 650K earners. Personally I would like to see a higher marginal rate bracket, as well as a raise on capital gains, which you mention in your edit, if we're trying to balance the budget. (Side question: are capital gains taxes done progressively at all? Would it make sense to have marginal rates and tax smaller capital gains much less than large ones? Why or why not?)

(Further edit on that note: my personal crazy idea of the moment is to have dramatically higher rates on, say, 500K+ marginal income, but not matchingly high rates on capital gains of that same amount; my idea being to try to encourage higher levels of compensation to be given in forms like equity that would require long-term business success, not just short term profits, to pay off. But I'm not tax lawyer or accountant or whatever, so I'm sure there are problems with that idea...)
No chance! MN and WI are so proactive about road maintenance that we get pretty good roads despite the extra hassles caused by cold weather. I've spent a bit of time in Los Angeles and Hawaii, and those roads are easily in worse condition than the roads of Minnesota and Wisconsin.
1. You live somewhere defective. Now, "defective" is relative and can simply mean "inconvenient" (looong commutes) or it can be an area that's kinda uncool, ugly, subject to crime, constantly overcast, devoid of the interesting stores, subject to drive-by mariachi music attacks, etc.

2. Roommates. You live with someone else.

3. You were grandfathered in, either by owning property or by having a lease which (as a result of city law) essentially grants you immunity to rising rents. Lucky you.
Awesome examples. That's what I was looking for The integration with websockets looks amazing. I have been looking to implement that kind of functionality into a trading platform I have been working on and up until now was relegated to having my collector open a ZMQ socket to the client and then do all sorts of message passing to set up any requested streams. Keep up the good work.
Terrible presentation on that page imho, the video needs to be replaced by a quick blurb explaining the service.
> The fact of the matter is, there is nothing proportionate about how much you benefit to how much you pay.

I strongly disagree. I think how much money you make is a very good measure of how much you benefit from the existence of government and civilized society.

Take the family of four. The father sends his kids to public school in Connecticut. But he works at an investment bank. He draws his salary from the economic activities of companies he provides M&A advice to. Those companies benefit from having a work force educated at the public expense. Does the father just benefit from the education his own kids receive, or does he benefit from the educations of the workers at each of his clients?

> The biggest targets are small business owners, startups, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and others of their kind. Can you say for an absolute fact that they owe ~40% of their annual income to the government? I can tell you for a fact that the difference between a freelancer in high demand earning $250k/year vs $100k/year is a matter of the hours you work. If you kill yourself to work around the clock to make more money.... you are rewarded with higher taxes.

No, you are rewarded with more money. If I work more and make $250k instead of $100k, I still have $80-90k extra in my pocket. As someone taxed over 40%, I don't think "man, I'm sick of carrying the weight for all these other people." I think: "all these other people ultimately generate the wealth that allows me to live the way I do." There is a point at which I'd be upset and contemplate moving, but we're not near that point.

The fact is that anywhere else I'd want to live has higher taxes. That's the relevant criterion at the end of the day. My dad, an extremely ambitious man, left Bangladesh (taxes around 8% of GDP) for the U.S. (taxes around 26% of GDP) completely unconcerned about the increased taxes. Do I ever think: "man, it'd be great to go back to Bangladesh and pay low taxes!" Of course not. When I tell my wife "hey honey we should move there" it's never to a low tax place like Botswana. It's France, Germany, Canada, etc. Hell, I could save a lot of money and move to Texas but I'm not willing to do that either. Taxes pay for a pleasant civilized society.

Indeed, it's the doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc, who benefit from that the most. We don't have "fuck you" money. We can't go to a low-tax jurisdiction in the middle east and set up a luxurious bubble for ourselves amid the squalor. We live in cities, use public transit, and have to interact with everyone else. We get to live very well in pleasant surroundings as a result of these taxes.
Like it or not, the democratic party owns technology compared to republicans today.
Now we can look forward to a government getting away with it scot-free. (Is that an objectionable term now?)
Or a (European) football fan on the west coast... Games starting anywhere between 3am and 8 am?

Actually, 8am is pretty nice. Wake up in the morning, pull a couple shots of espresso, watch calcio, get on with my Sunday.
Your increase due to what? Marginal income tax rates only increased for taxable income above $400k single ($450k married). Perhaps you are referring to the Payroll Tax increase, which hits the first $113K of income by 2%? (but then your increase would be the same as someone making $113k payroll income)
I guess the question is, how do you design a programming problem that doesn't tie into specific domain knowledge?

Even fairly general stuff like implementing balanced search trees will likely be biased towards younger candidates who are fresh from university.
A real "interactive graphic" for exploring NYC data: http://envisioningdevelopment.net/map
Tax cuts with an end date really don't seem like "tax hikes" to me. Yes, taxes are going to go back up, but the rates were set up with an end date, people know their taxes are likely to go back up.

Further, griping about the temporary 2% payroll tax expiring? It was done as an aid to a sluggish economy. Things aren't rosy overall, but they are improving a bit.
Make space in your life for the things that matter
If you'd like, say some more about what makes it great in your experience. I've been thinking about getting one...
Random Blog Nails Startup Investing Culture
Bp - Balak Palak Mp3 Songs, Bp - Balak Palak Songs Download at Skillsongs.Com
It gets cold at night not because of fog, but because of lack of humidity. Same reason the desert is like that. Same reason the surface of the moon is 107°C during the day and -153°C at night.
Except that the statement is true. Even the worst case of actual sentencing threats that have come out so far have been in the range of 7 years if the case went to trial, not 35 or 50.
They're monthly rents, sampled in the respective time spans.
Opertaion #Expose
Can we process images and/or video as inputs to this service?
Does it mostly focus on Django on Python 2, or is there a good portion that deals with Django on Python 3 as well?
It doesn't even require "selecting indefinitely." Every time you create a goroutine you need to worry about how it terminates, or you get a memory leak. If it uses channels, you need to make damn sure you perform all the proper operations on it, consume all the values from it eventually, etc. It's like manual memory management, except that the invariants are all implicit and poorly specified, like "Take at least 10 values from this channel, and I will terminate" or "Send me a value on this other channel over here and I will terminate". Sounds like a nightmare to reason about in some cases, which is a shame because Go does so much else Just Right^TM

A concrete example, slide 34 [1] contains this code:

func main() {
c := boring("Joe")
for {
select {
case s := <-c:
fmt.Println(s)
case <-time.After(1 * time.Second):
fmt.Println("You're too slow.")
return
}
}
}

This is code that looks really simple, but it's only correct because the process is known to terminate. You couldn't, for example, have the body of this function as a subroutine somewhere: every time you execute it a boring() goroutine is going to be left hanging, which is a classic memory leak. What's worse, "c" looks like an average variable I don't need to worry about (yay garbage collection!) but it's not because it escapes to a running goroutine.

Correct me if I'm wrong but even if boring() was a much simpler function that returned after generating one value, if the timeout happened first it would be left hanging. In that case the only thing that would make the program correct is that of two racing goroutines, one is expected to return first. That's the kind of thing that keeps me up at night, especially when Go makes it so easy to treat goroutines and channels like every other GC-managed data structure when in fact they are every bit as leaky and difficult as threads.

[1]: http://talks.golang.org/2012/concurrency.slide#34
David Rusenko's 2012 Startup School Talk