skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with that cost-benefit analysis is that a lot of the cost is not borne by the telcos. The entire UC Santa Cruz campus (as well as most of the city of Santa Cruz) had no internet or telephone connectivity for a day. What do you think the productivity loss from that is? And how much will AT&T pony up? Answer: zero.

The issue is not with detecting manhole intrusions, even though that's what everyone's talking about. The real issue is who the ---- thought routing all internet, land line, cell phone and 911 traffic for all of Santa Cruz through one fiber was a good idea.

When someone's site goes down due to a hard drive crash and it turns out they had no backup, the kindest response would be something like "that sucks dude, but how the ---- could you not have a backup?" I don't see why the requirement should be anything less for a major telco.

And don't even get me started on the reliability of Santa Cruz power...
Brain-Machine Interface Technology to Control Robots by Human Thought
Is anyone else gritting their teeth and cringing, waiting for someone to say "Atlas Shrugged" ?

:-)
Teach Yourself Fundamentals of Math (Reasoning, Logic, Sets, Induction, Complex Numbers)
There's a few problems with this, people regularly hand their phones to people who aren't themselves and if the phone disables itself every time this happens, I don't think this technology would ever catch on. The solution to avoid this is that you'd have to report the phone stolen... at which point the phone company can just ask you for your IMEI, which is a 15 digit code (usually hidden under your battery, or enter *#06#) you're supposed to write down in your handset manual. With this code and a report that your phone is stolen, the phone company will ban the IMEI number and the phone is useless (unless the person wants to spend $50 getting your handset unlocked and then $10 to get a new sim card and then $10 to put time on a stolen phone, which when you're stealing phones, I doubt you'd go to that trouble).

On CDMA phones it's your MEID number, which if reported will ban the device, but as CDMA's are tied to one network it means the phone is permanently useless.

So honestly, I don't see how this technology is useful in protecting a cell phone from being stolen. My wife's taken my cell for days, I don't really want my phone getting locked because of it, and when I was younger (before I got a cell) my parents always handed me one of theirs if I was going to be out late, which I'm sure many parents still do today. And if you need to report the cell stolen, then it's pointless because there's already well established systems for getting cell phones banned from a network.
The Oxford English Dictionary.

It defines every English word they're going to ever come across outside of technical literature, it's got tons of historical examples, shows the connections between English and other languages, and more.

If we extrapolate the speed with which Google is learning to harvest latent information out of data dumps out just 20 or 30 years, I wouldn't be surprised if aliens smart enough to get here could pull a huge amount of culture and history out of the OED.
Good question, my native tongue doesn't have too many rules by fiat. The one thing that always gets me is when people stick an English word in the middle of a sentence and then modify it with a native prefix or suffix. And it's a natural thing for people to do, grab a word you hear a lot and shim it into your native language.

But if you're fluent in both languages that kind of mixing just sounds soooo wrong!
This is just programming language stockholm syndrome. I like my cell and my kidnappers have my best interest at heart. If I wasn't bound and gagged then I might do something dangerous.
You have to find a limited number of colors that mostly approximates the original, to the human eye. This is how every GIF encoder works. Maybe there is something about your question that I am missing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_quantization

I don't know what you mean by adapting it to Google's infrastructure. I think you meant to say "shared nothing". Tile serving is perfectly suited to such an architecture already. There's no shared state across tiles, for instance.
> understand that the process, the work, is the whole point.

This is true only if you own your work. Doing it for someone else on a salary... is not the whole point. Of anything. Trust me on this one.
I hate headlines like this. Yes, it's down 40%, but from what base? Read the article and the benchmark is Q1 2008. Compared to the previous quarter (Q4 2008) funding is up 23%. What's the better benchmark? It's debatable but I would argue the previous quarter is a better benchmark (are things still deteriorating, stabilized, getting better or unclear)? Looking at 2007 and 2008, Q4 seems to be the seasonal high in terms of fund raising.

I know sensationalism sells and that gets people to click on stories which in turn helps sell advertising, but please...let's break the cycle...
To be fair, a good proportion of those comments were complaining about "+1" comments left on the issue. To an extent where there were more complaints than +1's.
> I am not a programmer

I've got some bad news for you. You're a programmer.
I would. Does that make me easy, or just cheap?
http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.html

The money paragraph quoted below:

By all means, avoid using they with singular antecedents in your own writing and speaking if you feel you cannot bear it. Language Log is not here to tell you how to write or speak. But don't try to tell us that it's grammatically incorrect. Because when a construction is clearly present several times in Shakespeare's rightly admired plays and poems, and occurs in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries, and is systematically present in the unreflecting conversational usage of just about everyone including Sean Lennon, then the claim that it is ungrammatical begins to look utterly unsustainable to us here at Language Log Plaza. This use of they isn't ungrammatical, it isn't a mistake, it's a feature of ordinary English syntax that for some reason attracts the ire of particularly puristic pusillanimous pontificators, and we don't buy what they're selling.
There is Snapz Pro X: http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

It has a free trial, though the app is $69.
"200T in derivatives in banks"

Are derivatives really a form of debt? I understand that derivatives carry risk, and now we've seen they carry much more risk than the financial world thought. But surely some percentage of those 200T in derivatives offset each other?

Still, a sobering analysis.
I'm guessing these aren't the programmer "I was in the office for 60ish hours, but got a lot of surfing and some side-project research, plus a bit of game-playing done" 60-80 hour weeks.
Programming isn't fun. Neither is doing drugs. But when you beat the machine after 10 hours of agony and get the thing to work and dollars flow into your bank account, your brain squirts feel good chemicals into your blood stream, just like drugs.
I agree. What kind of "non-profit" organisation is paying its money managers $35m/yr to push its earnings to 20+%? That's not an educational endowment, that's a hedge fund, and an out-of-control one at that.

Oh well, seems like they've learned their lesson now. Eleven billion lessons, in fact.
It's confusing, even with proper historical context.
This blog post shows an interesting difference between the Perl community and the Ruby community. The Ruby community lives to write long blog posts about why you are writing code wrong. The Perl community just makes a library everyone can use to avoid getting things wrong in the first place.

(http://search.cpan.org/~tlbdk/Privileges-Drop-1.00/lib/Privi...)
I'd probably start with ABCs and those "See Spot Run" books. Oh, and anything by the good Doctor (Seuss, that is.)

After several years (if they are clever and good with languages), perhaps they'd be ready to work on Nancy Drew and Harry Potter.

Why assume they can read? This way they can get the context.
Or more succinctly: "In IE @import behaves the same as using <link> at the bottom of the page, so it's best not to use it." Know and love http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
The Downside of Permanent (links and url shortening)
I saw on McLaughlin Group that the total bailout distrubution in the past year was $5.32 Trillion.

The $9 Trillion in bailouts you have are "pledges" not actually distributed. Also, I am not so sure these bailouts count as debt, much of it will be loans to corporations and printed cash -- which may be worse than debt in the long run.
That's not an educational endowment, that's a hedge fund

Would you prefer if Harvard invested their endowment in a collection of outside hedge funds, the managers of which might easily be making $35m/yr? It's just a question of outsourcing vs. insourcing -- either way, Harvard wants to generate income from their endowment, and compensating the people with the skills to maximize endowment income is a perfectly rational thing to do.

seems like they've learned their lesson now

Not really; they just invested unwisely. The basic principle of trying to maximize endowment income via professional money managers is one that I'm sure Harvard would continue to embrace, as would any university with a large endowment, or any number of pension funds and non-profits with investment portfolios.
The art of Maximum Craigslist Traffic 
Craigslist, we all know it provides us huge amount of traffic, but how do you optimize it? How do you know you are getting the most traffic out of it? And how do you avoid being flagged down every time? This is where I started my journey on searching for traffic. I set up my website with Google Analytic so I can see where the traffic is coming from and where I need to work on.
Personally, the closest I could come up with was the pen/pin distinction (unless I concentrate on it, I pronounce both words the same way.) I'm pretty sure that fiat English is natural English for somebody, because any unnatural rules (like not ending a sentence with a preposition) will disappear eventually.
I think that an applied philosophy text would be more interesting. You know, something like Cosmo, or Weekly World News.
I agree. I think URL shortening is a bad practice. More convenient, but very short term and it adds one more breaking point to the Internet. How many URL shorteners are there and how many of them will bite the dust?

When they do, all the links behind their shortened urls will be gone forever! Regardless of whether or not the link it pointed to still exists.
Or, worse, contrived gender-neutral pronouns like 'hir' and 'ze'
How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code
people currently move from out of state to silicon valley, this will be the logical extension.
People talk about Vendor Lockin with Microsoft, but there are lots of links to AppEngine tools and services, so I'm wondering what is the difference?

Why is Vendor Lock-in okay with Google's proprietary platform, but not with Microsoft's?
The only book anyone, human or alien, really needs to read is -

"On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection"

by Charles Darwin, 1859.

"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins, 1974 is a good appendum there as well but once mastering "Origin" one really has the basics one needs.
PercentMobile - Free Mobile Analytics
Sounds like this guy is just against bad interface design. Although on that note, what does 'put' mean? How does that convey a map in any sense?
This is a paradox only because we are allowing infinite winnings. That's not possible in the real world. The solution is to end the game when the 'casino' can no longer pay the amount on the table.

In this case, the expected value is simply .50 * log 2 C, where C is the total cash available.
Possibly like the average Twitter user then? :) I guess a better line would be "If a page isn't linked to, does it have any significance?".

That makes me wonder how many orphaned pages there are on the web. I guess it's uncalculable (within realistic constraints and without attempting to brute force URIs) as they woudn't be indexed by any search engines (unless they crawl the new domain registration lists).
The hitchiker's guide to galaxy.
I don't know you so I'm not going to call you a liar, but I've discussed religion quite a bit ... and your claim is new to me.

I am certain lots of my opinions are wrong, I have changed them lots of times and I'll change again. What you claim is that there are opinions I have which I can't handle changing. I say "bullshit".

Hell, vi might be more usable than emacs. Microsoft and other criminal monopolists might not be bad for the world. (I seriously doubt both claims, but they might be true.)

If you want credibility here, you need to give some examples, where people don't just shrug and say "my opinion here is a working hypothesis, if I had the energy + time + money I'd test it with X, Y and Z ... and if those tests failed, I'd change opinion".

(Note that, as I wrote, I've already discounted ideologies; same garbage as religion for believers. I've also read enough science to believe in the skeptic viewpoint.)
If "repeating the game ... changes the utility equation" from negative to positive, how can you possibly say "it has nothing to do with how many times you get to play"?
Exactly. It's important to remember that, while in theory you might win a particular game on average, that game does not exist in a vacuum. Suppose you're playing a game wherein the gambling is only a component, and you also have some other use for the currency (say, it's the metric that causes you to win). The player in the lead should typically not bet all his money on any gamble, no matter how good the expected payoff.

edit: Of course, there are exceptions to that last rule of thumb. It's just a common case.
SAT lower bounds
I think "learning and scholarship" is stretching the truth - the primary caretaker in preserving ancient scholarship, yes. But what new research and learning was going on? The really hot stuff was going on in the Arabic world at that time. While the monks were carfully copying old books, Al-Khwārizmī was busy moving forward.
Interesting point, but I think of it as teaching a man how to fish and giving him fish. If you read and understand this blog post,

1. You can write your own lib

2. You can spot bugs in other programs regarding privileges

3. You have an understanding of how privileges work and can transfer that knowledge to other programming languages/problems.

4. When you use a third party lib for, say dropping privileges, you can actually verify that they are doing it right because you actually understand what is going on and what is needed.
Should say Buzzfeed, not Buzzmachine. Got Jarvis on the brain.
Codex Seraphinianus.
Hi HN community,

we just released PercentMobile, a simple analytics tool to help find out the percentage of mobile traffic to desktop websites.

Have a look at the sample report at http://percentmobile.com/percentmobile/report/32

We're still in a public beta, but if you want to start tracking your own website, use 'hackernews' (w/o the quotes) as the invite-code.

Your feedback is very welcome!

Alexis
While I think it's safe to say that we are a planet full of evolved lifeforms; it seems a bit narrow minded to me to suggest that all potential visitors we could meet would also have evolved.

What precludes an "intelligently designed" being from being the first non-terrestrial life-form we encounter?

For all the talk we have here about the Singularity, I would assume that the first signs of life from Earth that any other civilization would meet would probably be something engineered by man. (Assuming we're meeting them somewhere other than our solar system.)
Formatting is so complicated because it is very subjective. People see Python and complain that they can't format it to their "specific" tastes, but it would save so much time if they just were consistent across the project. Things like version control merging and code readability.
I've said that elsewhere on-thread. However, by definition each person only has direct experience with a sample size of one, so the only way to get bigger sample sizes is if people post their experiences. :-)
Making Computers Work Like Brains
You can use @import inside an externally linked style sheet mimicking includes.
"The Little Engine That Could" and "Everybody Poops"
At least he's got enough sense to go braces-stand-alone

Those who hang the opening brace at the end of the line are the ones that drive me nuts.
Anyone here has experience with Quercus? How compatible is it with PHP? Do apps like Wordpress or Drupal run out of the box? Any noticeable performance difference?
In order to be a "good" atheist, is it necessary to be an expert in genetics and evolution? In order to be a "good" Christian, is it necessary to be a expert historian and biblical scholar? In order to be a a free mind, do you have to write your own book?

I don't think "The God Delusion" is going to convert anyone with strongly held beliefs, although it might move some fence-sitters. Like most apologetics, it's not written for the other side. If it were, it would need a less shocking title. But as an long-time Atheist in America(tm), it's nice to see books about atheism in the front shelf in bookstores, and discussion of the topic on television. Finally, it doesn't have to be "my secret shame!"
Canada moves boldly back into 20th century
As of the end of this month, Canadians can no longer submit their passport application online.
Perhaps because they rely on a lot of open source components and open up some of their technologies whereas Microsoft has been slow at coming around to the OS way of thinking.

If you're worried about lock-in with App Engine, check this out: http://code.google.com/p/appscale/ As you can see, Google is one of the supporters of this project, although it's not clear exactly what they have contributed.
Just in case they're all stuffed in a meta keywords tag too.
I think a big source of confusion regarding operator overloading comes from the primary exposure to it being in C++, where it is poorly implemented. Java decided to omit it entirely, as a reaction against C++ -- this sort of "they didn't do it right, so we shouldn't do it at all" behavior is my greatest gripe against Java. The problems with operator overloading in C++ are thus:

* First, C++ severely limits the set of available operators. You can't define () to mean exponentiation, (^^) to mean boolean XOR, etc. This results in contortions to fit various useful operations into inappropriate operators. For example, anybody that's experienced C++'s mis-use of (<<) for stream insertion or (+) for sequence concatenation is a victim of this.

An aside on concatenation: this is one of the few cases where I think PHP has it right. Arithmetic addition and sequence concatenation are entirely separate, and merging them into the same operator is a terrible idea. Think of these cases of concatenation on strings:

(1 + 2) = (2 + 1)

(1 + 1 + 1) = (2 + 1)

("1" + "2") /= ("2" + "1")

("1" + "1" + "1") /= ("2" + "1")

Concatenation behaves quite differently from addition, and shouldn't share the same operator.

* Second, there's no base classes for operator parameters in the C++ standard. Ideally, you'd have a `class Number`, a global procedure: `Number operator+ (Number a, Number b){ return a.Add(b); }`, and no need to define odd non-class procedures everywhere.

* Third, C++ culture encourages poor use of operators. The standard library itself uses bit-shift operators (<<) and (>>) for string formatting operations! Python has many of the same "freedoms" as C++, but community mores prevents these things from working their way into major libraries (excepting grandfathered-in poor choices like (+) concatenation and (%) formatting).

* Fourth, C++'s operators are used as crutches to work around other problems with the language. The most galling problem is a lack of syntax for declaring collections. There would be no need for `ostream<<` if you could have something like `cout.Write("foo = %d, bar = %d\n", vector[foo, bar])`.

Of course, most of the potential changes to C++ involve some level of integration between the language and its standard library. For various reasons, such as poor API of the stdlib itself and a desire to maintain the charade of being suitable for low-level development, the C++ designers refuse to do this.
That looks great, thank you. I love "pure, simple" libraries!

You might want to make a note that the included example (secret copy to port 3333) only works on ruby 1.9.
The sections that describe the measurements say things like:

"This is a fairly crude approximation of popularity, however, it's worth including, because all other things being equal, the more popular a language is, the more pages will exist mentioning it."

"Popular languages are used more in industry, and consequently, people post job listings that seek individuals with experience in those languages. "

"Books are also a lagging indicator, but a good way to eliminate languages that aren't "established"."

Those statements indicate that the measurements are proxies for language popularity. My point is that those statements are not true, that the numbers do not serve as proxies for language popularity. They are not crude proxies, they are not lagging proxies, or any other form of proxy.

Most conclusions you could draw from the numbers would be wrong.
He's misunderstanding. For it to "make sense" for you to pay $9,000 for a 1% shot of winning a million, you don't need to have to be able to make that same wager many times. You have to look at the long term.

Life will present you with many different wagers with positive expectation, but it often won't present you with the same one multiple times. Maybe it will give you that shot, then the next time give you a +EV chance to invest in the startup, then later give you the opportunity to play the St Petersburg game for $2, etc. Keep taking the +EV wagers over your lifetime and you'll end up way ahead, even if you never take the same exact one twice.

You don't need a good sample size for an individual wager to be a good idea, just for all wagers combined. All of that assumes, of course, that taking any one wager doesn't prevent you from many others. Taking the $9k wager if you have $9k to your name will. Taking it if you have $10m to your name won't and therefore is a no-brainer.

*Edited to account for Kelly Criterion. Thanks Aston
Haskell has a neat solution for dealing with operators/infix.

- Anyone can define their own operators and set their precedence.

- Any operator can be made into a normal prefix function by putting parens around it. x + y = (+) x y

- Any function can be made into an infix operator by putting backquotes around it. mod x y = x `mod` y.

Sure you get a lot of people defining goofy operators: |||, .&., >>>, etc, but there are good API search engines ( http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/ , http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/hayoo/hayoo.html ) that will look these things up for you. They're just functions with funny names. A good API will not abuse this ability, but it can come in handy. If you're going to have infix operators at all I think this is the most elegant way to do it. Having just a few special operators is a kludge, better to go whole hog like Haskell or not at all like Lisp.
AWESOME. Because, more than anything, I'd love to wrap ads around links that I send to friends and followers.
The Enquirer, because... inquiring minds want to know.
I think he meant "works where it had previously not worked" as opposed to "works on the first try".