skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They have to pay for the rendering of the page for every visit, instead of the author paying for rendering at creation time.

At no time did the problem that somehow the page had to be rendered go away.
> What proportion of your money is being spent on those things compared to, say, education, health or even welfare

While I agree that money is not well spent, its a myth that putting more money into somewhere must leed to better results.

The US allready spends tons of for example education, more then many other countrys but test results are getting worse. The same in healthcare.

The US does not have a money problem, its a institutional problem.
If I were to get all novice programmers to learn something else, it would be some practical anthropology. How to observe. How to interview. How to see and record behaviors, triggers, social interactions, power dynamics. How to discover motivations, attitudes, and they way people understand the world. The one thing all of our software has in common is that it is supposed to make a difference in somebody's life.

If I could demand a second thing, it would be the basics of business. A large portion of software is directly about business, and almost all of it is somehow shaped by how business works. E.g., I'm volunteering at a non-profit this month, but the developer I sit next to is hip deep in a risk management problem.
Use QuickOffice that is integrated then.
Interesting to know how the tax on these bitcoins would work. Would this count as a taxable perk? If so, would that count as the government counting their existence and value?
Task-Based Programming in Windows
The "Abandoned Apartment Building" in one of the first pictures looks very modern and new, are things that bad in St. Louis?
Awesome timelapse video in Google Chromebook spot is made by Tom Lowe.
Why should everyone accept collective blame for decisions they didn't make or support in any way?
But to be fair, a drive down Grand Avenue can be rather heartbreaking.
I'd prefer to be payed in candy, at least I could eat the candy.
They'll still have to pay taxes. The same way that if they paid them in computer parts they'd have to pay taxes on the value of those.
NASA's basement nuclear reactor
Well, thanks for giving me a chance David. Sorry you've been repeatedly disappointed.

If you'd look on my site for about five minutes, you'd see 2 of the last 10 entries I made reference a nonprofit project I'm doing with along with some really great people. I've had some reasonable success contracting, and I'm doing mostly charitable work for the next 2-3 months.

Anyway, I always appreciate feedback. More editing and polish, that's useful. If you'd like feedback in return, I might recommend spending more time on your own writing and doing things that are meaningful to you, instead of worrying about others on the net. Looks like you only wrote one blog post in 2012 -- about a customer in Nigeria -- and that was back in July. Wouldn't you be better served by being an exemplar of good writing than putting together criticism in comments on the internet?
>with the same degree of pithiness and directness?

I think you overestimate the degree of both "pithiness and directness" in this particular use of the phrase.
The Reality of Developer’s Life
It was the same way getting into the Army.

'Telling the truth on security forms is absolutely essential to being granted a security clearance now or in the future.'

Then I'm told to lie about past mistakes, medical history, and anything else that leaves the application untidy.
This article is talking about what I learned as classic Systems Analysis and Design. It is an interdisciplinary intentional practice of seeking to fully understand the business processes involved.

See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_analysis_and_design as a starting point.
Free, quality LaTeX templates for nearly anything
When CBSA searched your car were they doing it as a power trip or were they doing it for some unexplained reason? The latter is just part of the job. I travel quite often to the states and find that the CBSA agents are almost uniformly polite and often friendly. Going the other way, I find CBP agents are generally surly and aggressive.
Still using mine. It's a bit laggy, but perfectly usable. I use it every day, and if it were inadequate in any way, I would go out and replace it tomorrow.

Honestly, the only thing I really miss compared to my girlfriend's newer model is that her backlight gets dimmer than mine.
I totally agree. This should really be changed.

Giving employees the option to take pay in bitcoins is a completely different issue to mandating it, as the title seems to imply.
Photos of a city that spent 25 years underwater
Turning the tables around: perhaps the software (or even physical products) that we use where we think, "this is stupid! why would anyone build it this way?" were similarly built by people with no domain expertise in the product.

Introduce a software engineer with an interest in the subject matter into that environment, and provided it isn't too big (like government), it might be self-correcting.
Science Explains Why the Silent Treatment Works when Dealing with Jerks
Access all your documents: Doo debuts Mac app after 2 years of R&D
I agree with your point about sweden. Also sweden said to the banks, you can either go into our programm or we wont help you, guess what many did not want to be nationalized. Another way to get ride of management would be to let them fail.

The US just gave money to every bank, in order to 'put trust back into the system', so no bank was afaid others would default on there loans.
If you wanted a shortcut you could have tried Chinese.

It would have taken only one or two characters as opposed to 10, and you would be using a living language with more speakers than latin (including people that only know latin quotations and a few generic phrases).
Windows Store Developer Links
Or the beginning of a new one based on volunteerism and non-aggression.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle
A laptop having a touch screen is a bug, not a feature.
Best PHP Blogs to Follow
It's interesting to note that a lot of writers do this - they write about productivity, doing enjoyable work, etc, where their work's just writing about said topics.

It's like how NLP practitioners teach you methods on getting rich, using anecdotes from their business of teaching you methods on how to get rich.

It may be different in Sebastian's case but it just seems like a general trend.
We still have CPU fans and cables everywhere, I still think it's pretty Victorian.
Shanghai JS Meetup
There is also an interesting presentation of the author of the book reviewed. It has some more detailed information on the book market in Great Britain and Germany in 18th Century in regard to copyright.

Conclusion: "Copyright […] harmed the average author."

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46966863/Copyright-and-structure-o...
How about some caching/proxy layer on top of Wordpress that both creates AND serves the static versions of the pages?
It still makes me kind of wistful considering how their headlines today are usually completely anodyne to the point of euphemism, which it sound like the author was in some Valium-induced fugue state.
Microsoft having a patent on a magnetic connector of their own is unrelated to the question of whether that connector infringes Apple's patent.
Browserify 2.0
So? If you _know_ you've done something wrong, and you get caught, then you should own up and accept the consequences.

My experience is people have more respect for people who will admit to a mistake/wrong-doing than for someone who will try to weasel their way out of trouble.
> I never found out why we couldn't let that happen.

Because they frightened everyone with an imminent apocalypses if we were not to save their fraudulent asses.

I believe we should have let them fail. It would not be pretty, but we'd manage. Long term benefits would surpass temporarily hardship. First it would cleanse the system and second set a strong precedent.

Besides, it would be very much in terms with capitalism - failed in competition goes under. Yet funny how the banks that lobby for ever more independence, rely so heavily on social welfare from the government :)
Mine was disappointing, but here's a pretty one:

http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=jashkenas
I can't talk for the IA, but in the UK the situation is absolutely yes, they would be taxed. Any payment of any kind, or any benefit in kind, is taxable (and the tax paid in cash, not bitcoins!), apart from a few specified exemptions.
that was pretty cool when they put the earth up there for scale!
North Korea to launch 3G network
Don't get me wrong, I get that PhantomJS and CasperJS are nice. But isn't it an issue that you're only actually running your tests on one engine? That's the cookie that keeps me with Selenium; although I'm eager to try out Browserling as well :)
Funnily enough, I know someone who was an underwater welder. From the conversation with him, it was a multi-month certification course, so I went ahead and looked it up online.

https://www.commercialdivingacademy.com/underwater-welding.d...

That's just one program, but it appears diving is the first thing you learn.

Edit: If you look at it from the context of a normal welder, they have an understanding and control of their environment before they start welding. You don't realize it because you've been understanding your environment since you were born. To do underwater welding, you'd first have to understand how you operate in that work environment, and then they can teach you how to start welding in it.
It's the eternal september. When only a select few avantgardists are on the internet, you can generally assume that a random stupid comment is, in fact, brilliant (you just don't get it yet) - when everybody and their moms (literally) are there, you have to assume that a stupid comment is just that.

The great thing is that the internet has infinite capacity for people to create and congregate in increasingly smaller communities where the initial assumption still holds - ie. if you're posting on HN, you're already within 4-5 sigmas of someone whose opinion I'd care about than the average person on the net.
What was their reaction when you sent them this feedback? Assuming, of course, you did send them this feedback.
Let me put it this way: the way things are going with personal freedoms, do you think some bill like this wont succeed in 10-15 years?

Sure, minorities were suppressed back in the day (even to the point of slavery) and are still suppressed today.

But, still, it's astonishing to see how free-er the majority was 30-50 years ago and how fewer laws, marketing influences, regulations, etc regulated every part of everyday life.
I think the taxes would be fairly easy to figure out, no different than if you paid in gold or beanie babies or Euros. It doesn't really give bitcoins any special status or legitimacy for the IRS to do this.
I believe this is actually the major problem faced by outsourcing projects. When I was in the cable industry, I saw several projects fail when the "Systems Engineers" (who were in charge of writing the specifications) were unable to convey enough information to the developers.

There's a real limit to the amount of "truth" you can put into a specification, and at some point you have to trust the developer to "do the right thing". If they don't have domain knowledge in the industry they're writing for, they don't stand a chance ... and so your project fails even when everyone works hard and has good intentions.
Google, you forgot about a trackpoint.
I don't think that's a good analogy. Film studios don't make films: directors and producers do.

If you want a more accurate analogy, there are places that fund a load of startups in a similar way to studios... ;-)
In large part it has to do with the level of tech available. Bandwidth in many parts of Africa is very slow, so SMS is preferred as a workable solution for data. M-pesa uses SMS on any low cost feature phone, while Square requires a more expensive smartphone with apps and data plans. People use what is practical in their context.
Well, I'm not for "you have to pay for MY health care".

I'm for: "you have to pay to build a sustainable health care system that encompasses the whole of society, including YOUR health care, and I don't care if you are a rich prick who doesn't care about others".
Permit me to be coarse for the sake of simplicity and tell you that the only LaTeX template you should spend your time and energy on is tufte-latex: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1572530.

It even has a snazzy guide for setting it up on Stack Exchange: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/setting-up-a-lat....

It’s pretty much all you need, and configuring LaTeX can turn into a rabbit hole you will never get out of. Try writing your project in tufte-latex, and I am sure you’ll find that it fits the bill perfectly. I do recall something about having to install an additional package to colour the hyperlinks or something to that extent, though.

I have some old templates—even some boilerplate lying around—so you can drop me a tweet or something, if it isn’t working for you, and I’ll throw something up in a gist.
Selection bias.

The goverments regulation also blocks many diffrent medications for a long time that kill lots of people because they could not be sold.

Also there is the case where drugs got banned because the had bad effects on some people in some conditions, but was still fine for other people again kill or making many people worse off.

All in all goverment regulation of medicine has been horrible. Let people (adived by doctors and other organisations) decide with drugs they want.

Here is a nice interview with Marcia Angell of Harvard Medical School about big farma.
> http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/11/angell_on_big_p.htm...

I would also throw away IP but that another discussion.
Apparently this is what $10m dollars buys you.
I'm not a lawyer but I think it only would be parody if you were parodying the font itself. As the onion guys said, they had to license it.
For some queries, all first 10 results on Google are spam
I would say it is. I don't think you can talk the concept of the data driven world without looking at how Gibson and later cyber-punk authors imagined how it might be.

We may think that the word "cyberspace" is a bit twee now, but it was an investigation about what the future might be. And it was a way to present that investigation to an audience who most likely had little to no frame of reference.
"Richard pointed out that 55.7% of all webpages now use jQuery, and if you exclude from this group pages that don’t use JavaScript then it is used in an astonishing 90.7% of all webpages!"

Really? I find this hard to believe.
I doubt the Chromebook was ever designed for people like us. We demand far more from our technology and multitask in ways the average user simply doesn't. My Android tablet is nice, but I can't even open up 10+ new tabs at once on a whim and let them all load in the background without it dying.

And forget having them all loaded where I left them when I next return to Chrome.
You can also find HP printers through Google. They run a webserver publicly accessible form anywhere by default!

Search for on Google for the following (without quotes)

"inurl:hp/device/this.LCDispatcher?nav=hp.Print"
Copyright […] harmed the average author
In America there are colleges, and there are universities. We usually refer to community colleges and state colleges as, well college. Then the Ivy League and prestigious universities, are, well referred to as universities. But they are pretty much used interchangeably. Don't stress the difference.
If only HP had obtained the rights to BeOS when they picked up WebOS (via Palm). Then they would have a solution to this.

http://www.bebox.nu/bebooks/BeBookR5/The%20Kernel%20Kit/Syst...
Xkcd: Those Not Present
You are absolutely right. Thanks for correcting. Then it seems like a a move in the right direction.
I was amazed when I went to Germany and saw working, clean ticket machines at every tram and bus stop. I'm from the UK and there is no way they would've gone a month here without being smashed or crudely tagged.

Anyway, interesting technology and it looks pretty cool too (although not to everyone's tastes, I'm sure!)
>>Don't be surprize if they won't cooperate to solve the matter ASAP.

You think it's right for for a gov't agency to be uncooperative in retaliation for some perceived insult?
> Yes, reading HN it often seems like programming skill is the only game in town

I always felt most of us on HN were well rounded individuals--interested in most areas of knowledge. Looking at the random articles that get upvoted along with ones on programming, it seems to coincide with that premise. Sure, we talk quite a bit about programming, but it's a just a tool for automating the repetitive work we do and to make ours and other's lifes easier. It's a means to an end and also something that happens to interest us at the same time.
Thank you, but I'd really like others to chime in here. I did look through your site and yes, some of the posts do reference some projects. Again an instance of hinting at doing work instead of talking about it.

I did write "only one" blog post, yes, because I only tend to write when I care about something. That article about the developer in Nigeria is a good example - I suppose there are very few articles like it and I only wrote about it because I found that I learned something that was new to me - and that I wanted to share with others. However, I'm not much of a writer and you will find that I comment very little on HN - maybe a topic or two a day. I decide against posting comments more often than I decide for posting them (closing a comment window after having written something is a frequent occurrence) and actually took about a year off some while ago. Recently, I think a lot about getting rid of my blog altogether since I'm often not sure whether I'm just wasting peoples time.

And thanks for the tip, but I already do spend pretty much all of my time doing things that are meaningful to me - my family, friends and of course my job as a self employed programmer of FOSS.
It reminds me of when people were doing PowerPoint in school. People thought spending three hours in PowerPoint meant you actually did something productive, but all that time got you were some decent-looking presentations. You still had to write the actual content itself.

Keynote is great here, because the default settings are pretty great as it is, so you have fewer ways of deluding yourself into thinking you are being productive, when you are actually just procrastinating by rearranging the furniture on the Titanic.
Essential Websites for Web Developers
Perhaps they should reinstate the "lp0 on fire" error message. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire
> Being nice to a beaurocrat is stupid.

No, being nice to ANYONE (no matter HOW they are spelled) is never "stupid".
This is fantastic! Many Thanks for sharing.
What online ads really cost
If it had been me, I probably would have started singing the bureaucrat song from Futurama:

People,

We didn't choose to be bureaucrats

No that's what our mighty Ja made us

We treat people like swine and make them stand in line

Even if nobody paid us

They say the world looks down on the bureaucrats

They say we're anal, compulsive and weird

But when push comes to shove you gotta do what you love

Even if it's not a good idea
This is really excellent. It's nice even just to use it to compare a few themes I like but could never really tell what the difference was between them, and hence why I liked one over the other.
> My understanding is that it was widely discredited before the financial crisis, back when economists thought they actually understood economy and that economic crisis were a thing of the past.

Keynsiansm thrown away for a reason. Just because we still dont know anything better is no reason to belive that keynsiansm is right.

Thats like saying COBOL is the best language because we have figured out that Java is actually not that good.

> Then reality happened, and it seems that US government spending has kept the economy going to the dogs.

Not sure how you arrive at that.

> . On the other hand, looking around in Europe, I don't manage to find a single country where austerity measures appear to have produced anything than deeper recession.

Its kind of like saing look at these sinking ships fixing parts of the ship is really not working for them.

I main sure you can not reduce goverment spending for some amount of time but not forever. Eventually people will not give you more money. Goverment spending is no solution in greece, anybody can see that, even keynsians, the only thing they want is to wait with buged cuts until the economy is stable but that is not always a option.
"Tesla absolutely will get to Ford's volume production numbers with this strategy"

really? maybe eventually. we are a ways off from mass market all electric vehicles.
In order to create better programming languages we could:

3. Create another EUP paradigm. It's been 34 years since VisiCalc came out, and despite it's success, I don't see a lot of effort to get end-users to program, especially in models, like the spreadsheet, where they don't know that's what they're doing. ;)

If you're interested in that sort of thing, ping me (see profile). My company does R&D in this space.
So have you ever tried what the articles suggest? Ever spent a week working on the 'shop floor'?

In my experience of public sector software projects, the programmers seem to be kept as far away from the end users as possible.
The UK barly did any austerity and they raised taxes. What the UK does has nothing todo with what any economist would think is right.

The are on a good path on the monetary side, I hope so at least.
Interesting, thanks. I didn't realize they were two separate entities.

I remember Gamespy as being one of the first software options to easily facilitate multiplayer gaming back before it was baked in to most games.
I think it's been left for dead. Or maybe they just have stopped publicizing the endeavors.
Silly question, what's holding the rooves up of those big spaces, is it thick concrete - or is it just very thick rock under NY ?
Ask HN: Incompetence at big companies
Frequently I notice people working at Microsoft, Google, IBM, Red Hat, Cisco and Nvidia constantly asking trivial questions on Freenode IRC. How is it possible they got hired in the first place?
> we would be f*ed

Who is we. I dont think that if a big banks fails everybody in that country is fucked. Fucked are the people working there and the people who invested in that companys (this includes people with debit accounts since that not really diffrent from an investment).

The idea that banks are 'to big to fail' has largly been shown to be retoric. Analysis after every bank failure since 50 years has shown that actual failure would not have been as bad as predicited.
Ask HN: Any recommendations for Latin American VPS providers?
I've searched and searched, but I can't find a single HN discussion about hosting providers - specifically VPS providers, shared hosting's no good - in Latin America.

I'm in need of a small server with really good latency to Brazilian cities, but I can't find any highly-rated hosts south of San Diego! Can anyone recommend a good option?
I have a great Blu-ray player at home, but it's unused owing to the ridiculous prices of the media. Sure the detail is great, but it's got to compete with Netflix for home viewing. In addition, Netflix allows me pause and watch this anywhere on my Nexus 4/7.

A Blu-ray copy of John Carter is equivalent to 2 months Netflix subscription, or 3 months in Blu-ray 3D.

Could have watched John Carter 3D in the cinema (ignoring the poor reviews) only to realize I'd never watch it a second time at home in Blu-ray. 1 month's Cineworld subscription is the same cost the Blu-ray 3D.