skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Surely it's better to have a subsidised minimum service than to rely on charities?

See, it depends on who you are. If you are a well-connected member of the political class you prever to give charity because it's you who directs the flow of money. If you are part of the unwashed masses you prefer a subsidy, because there is the democratic process involved, and experts in public policy and the general public might have influence what is done with the funds.
Dense graphs, by definition, have close to O(V²) edges already so adjacency matrices aren't wasting space in that case.
A home made periodic table
> That is a different argument from your initial assertion.

No, it is the same - the government failed with less people and now is attempting something with almost all. I then added information about how the US government generally goes about social programs (pilot -> nationwide).

> The IHS's failure is not an indication that the us government can't execute on healthcare.

Yes, it is.

As to the rest of your post, I did not and have not argued that the government doesn't do some decent things in other fields. The FDIC unrolls have happened before 2008 and they have a plan for it that worked in the past.

Once again, they are attempting a lot of stuff with no previous experience, uncertain regulations (even now), and failure in their two previous large scale programs (IHS and VA). Add to this resistance from states and even doubt casting by Senators and Representatives that voted for it, it has very little hope of working.
Yes, fair point. However, some widely known attempts to sell Linux hardware have been based on low price points. Early netbooks (which still seem to be popular with Linux users) and the Wal-Mart machines are examples. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't seen anyone having a go at the Sony Z level...
Those numbers are one year old (WWDC 2012). In the meanwhile, Apple has sold 17 million Macs. Mac install base is closer to 75 million.
You seem to have missed the whole "Features" section. Here's a list of what he said he gains "for free" by developing for Mac (of course, other environments might have similar stuff, but not exactly like OS X's): Undo/Redo with Core Data, PDF export (and "import" into current documents), Multi-touch zoom.
Retail Goose
Retail Goose is a solution currently aimed at the apparel retail world. We aim to help retailers manage the pictures they take at trade shows through our iphone app and later organize them through our online solution, turning them into digital purchase orders. There are 100,000,000 purchase orders hand written each year. We aim to stop the madness!
We started as Clothesline Software creating an online solution that mimicked the competition, but at a lower cost. While being incubated for a short time by Idea Village in New Orleans, LA we pivoted and regraded. As Retail Goose, we aim to put power in the hands of retailers and take down the competition by offering a simple out of the box solution for an outdated and archaic way of doing business. Beyond our ability to help our industry we see further consumer applications as well as the ability to sell our aggregate data to those industries in trend and analysis of the retail world that currently is not being captured in anyway.<p>Last but not least, I am a retailer serving my own pain point - I started the blues jean bar stores which has grown to 15 stores nationwide and has its flagship store in SF. My partner , Steve Fingerman, has been a retail consultant for 16 years. Together we are looking to gain knowledge, direction and funding from Ycombinator as we are not technology folks, but do believe using Lean Startup Principles and listening to our customer base we can succeed in an industry that few understand and in need of a technological revolution.
If the VA and IHS don't represent the pilots for this bill then what does?

Medicare? It's hugely popular and keeps prices down despite serving a population that over-utilizes health care.
Your objection to the answers that science offers is completely incoherent. So because science doesn't have an explanation for the origin of the big bang, you consider it on the same level as intelligent design? This is absurdly muddled thinking on your part. Science does have a very thorough and logical explanation for these "insanely intricate and complex life forms" btw. None of this is particularly mysterious now. There are some details that are still being filled in, but to act like we are in complete ignorance of how these life forms could come about is just flat out wrong.
Words From Thin Air - Gesture Control Seen As Future For Smartphones
Not open source, but you might want to check out PrinceXML. It is really good.
How are his points regarding computational performance and local handling of large amounts of data misinformed?

There’s a reason why there is Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica.
Then perhaps Transformer is for you: http://www.filetransporter.com/
Your objection is barely coherent. A genetic algorithm is an abstraction of the natural process of evolution, and they are very much comparable. In fact, they are rather analogous. To claim that studying genetic algorithms tells us little to nothing about natural selection in nature is preposterous.
Glad to see Sage commercializing this and happy to see research activities from UC Santa Cruz's (where I went for grad/undergrad) Storage Systems Research Center making it into commercial use.

More SSRC work and some of the original CEPH papers can be found at:

http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/index.html
I really don't get why people who call themselves 'mainstream' economists can't see or choose not to acknowledge the issues the Austrians bring up. It strikes me as quite odd. Not everything the Austrian school preaches is correct, but they do have some valid points that I would expect most smart people to understand.

To bring up just a few big ones:

Printing money and low interest rate policy of the Fed influences many things other than the simplistic lower interest rate=more spending=more growth formula commonly preached.

1) it hurts people with savings. A good example is all the retirees who have saved their whole life and now can't survive on the 1% returns their savings are generating. The Fed is supposedly helping people and business who want to borrow and can do so at low interest rates.. but that does not trickle back to pensioners who should be earning more on their capital if they were not competing with the Fed.

2) monetary expansion stimulates the economy unequally across industries and geographic regions. In the models of the academic economic departments, monetary expansion may apply equally to an economy as a whole.. In the real world short run it is a transfer of wealth from one group (wage earners, people who hold cash or low yield bonds) to another group (banks, government contractors, rich people with lots of land and stocks). Some people benefit from low interest rates and new money, but many people are hurt by those same policies.

There are quite a few other issues that Austrians seems to be correct on, but these seem to be two of the most obvious to me.
Medicaid has some serious problems that are not addressed in the act. One of the main problems is the number of doctors that will no longer take Medicaid (not Medicare) patients. This is generally the result of lots of paperwork and smaller payments to the doctor.

It would have been an amazingly smart start to health care to really focus on the Medicaid patients. Encourage more urgent care centers and fix the payments / paperwork.

Instead, Medicaid is going to get more painful.
>Once people get used to receiving wealth for free, they will look at those who have more and demand that they be brought up to the same level

Or so you assume.

>Everyone should be required to work for what they need,

Why? And how would you enforce that if the production of everyone's needs (at some level => subsistence) was so mechanized that there just wasn't enough actual work to go around?
I dare say that's not really an apt comparison if you're going for sarcasm. If you're being serious, then um... yeah.
Racing cars--and many sports cars--are mid engined. That is, the engine is behind the driver but not behind the rear wheels. The 911, on the other hand, actually has its engine all the way in the back, partially behind the rear axle. It's a very different layout and rather uncommon.
I think (hope) that there is a distinction that can arise between "cloud" applications and services and "offsite" or "online" applications.

If you plug together a handful of off the shelf Amazon components, slap a label on it, and open the doors, perhaps that is rightly called a "cloud" service ... the end provider has no accountability to you (or your users) and you have no idea what's going on behind the curtain. It's all just magic happening many layers of abstraction away.

But if you build systems, own the platform, write the architecture and provide something that you understand and have accountability for, end to end, I think it can satisfy the skeptics (of which I am one).

So in this case, the researcher that can't store the documents on dropbox ... hopefully he could upload them with duplicity to an online storage platform that was built and run like this[1].

And I hope that this would be possible because such a distinction could be made ...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5638295
>>Is collusion more commonly accepted in some Asian cultures?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Generally there exists 0 ways to fight this sort of cheating or corruption or unfair play or whatever you call it. So the net result is people are forced to put up with it. You may ask why it is so difficult to fight it out. Starting at every levels, you just can't as an individual take on a whole a system. You can try, but the end result will be that you will be crushed. You will waste a lot of time, energy and end achieving nothing in the end.

You can't do much against any government employee as they will pretty much have the rights to screw if you want. Grievance redressal is useless and next to non existent. Almost any body here in India can work, especially in Government sectors with total lack of accountability or fear of action regardless of their actions. Same applies to educational institutions and even corporate environments. Corruption and politics is rampant, corporates are only marginally better than government institutes.

You will surprised at toxic high levels of politics and corruption in nearly all corporate sectors which advertise themselves as promised lands of merit based culture. Politics and corruption thereby happens for all sorts of reasons, Language, regional affiliations, caste, culture, color and religion- You name it. Promotions, a work assignment in a foreign country, out of the turn perks, unjustified hikes you name it, and it happens.

I've even lost the count how many times I've seen such things happen in the Indian software companies. Scenes where hardworking people getting screwed, some guy who sleeps on his job getting all the milk and honey just because his manager happens to speak his mother tongue, or belongs to the same state, or his religion, or caste is far too common.

Often there are no ways to fight it. No HR, no body to complain to and pretty much any body you can contact to put you case forward is likely to be your manager's friend.

This is case even in colleges. A lot of hidden gangs exist, teachers generously reward their favorite students.

Almost anybody who cheats almost feels they sort of are entitled to do so.

This case only happens to come out in a place where students found it was unacceptable to cheat.
Wow, I didn't know that. So everything I host on Dropbox (and I host _everything_ on Dropbox) is unavailable in China?! Is this country-wide or ISP-specific?
Ask everyone again. This was true a long time ago (long time being, like, 1.5-2 years), where the Facebook app was so slow and so crashy (and the API down so often) that it was mostly useless.

Facebook is, IMO, one of the gold standards now for large-scale iOS app building. I had the pleasure of hearing one of their people speak about this a few weeks ago and they're very much at the forefront of iOS engineering.
It would have been a good start. Figure out how to get the fraud down and fix the payment / paperwork. Pilot a few different schemes and look at some of the state programs. Cutting the funding was not the most brilliant part of the bill.
Getting E-Mail right with Django and SES
> his own comfort and expertise with it - which is fine, of
> course. With the advancements made in web tech today

Do you have any expertise developing for desktop/native mobile? I have a lot of expertise developing for the web—I've spent 4x as much being the web developer before switching to iOS programming full-time and every time I see someone presenting web tech as a superior way to build apps I have a hard time taking this seriously.
If there is a lack of expertise it must be the other way: web devs don't know what native frameworks offer.
Sure we can push and twist and stretch a systems with foundations met for the marking-up document structure and styling document presentation to fit the needs for the up, but what's really the point?
Yes there is the promise of develop once run on every platform, which in practice is more like develop core once, endlessly tweak for idiosyncrasies later.
And when the web tech really works for mobile app it usually just means that your app had to be a web page anyway.
Their is a well known saying in India, Indians steal in Dhoti (traditional indian pants), while westerners steal in suites. Corruption is prevalent in all parts of the world just the type of corruption changes. Wherever, power and money is involved, there is corruption.
Warning: generalizations and prejudice ahead.

The first sentence because it sounds so simple but is in fact deeply philosophical. Walk around in Germany and talk to people, and keep tabs on how often you hear seemingly simple "by the way" lines that could be considered lovely life wisdoms in their own right.

The second sentence because Germany, for me, is a country of culture, activism and the Piratenpartei (1). Copying something, sec, is basically the definition of not changing it. Saying that it is a change supports the ideas of freedom of culture, sharing, the kopimi movement, and so on. "Hey, it's a copy, so that's kind of like a remix, right?". Other than that, the sentence suggests that a thing isn't really anything at all when seen apart from its context, so copying something indeed very much changes it. That, again, is one such beautifully deep observation said in such a casual way. tab, tab.

Finally, if you read it all aloud it just sounds weird. Until you read it with a German accent. It sounds great with a German accent.

Full disclosure: I'm Dutch. The Dutch were once found, in a survey from the German exterior ministry, to be the people most fond of Germans of all countries neighbouring Germany (lost reference, but not making this up). I'm also very fond of schnitzel and currywurst.

(1) I know the Swedes started it, but that's besides the point. Germany is also the country where 4chan users actually go outside, wearing Guy Fawkes masks, to hand out flyers against Scientology. 4chan users. Outside.

Deeply believing in something and standing for it is very common in Germany.
What Worries Scientists
famously insane according to who? The founding mantra of the editorial board:

"We are united by the mantra 'free markets and free people', the principles, if you will, marked in the watershed year of 1776 by Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. So over the past century and into the next, the Journal stands for free trade and sound money; against confiscatory taxation and the ukases of kings and other collectivists; and for individual autonomy against dictators, bullies and even the tempers of momentary majorities. If these principles sound unexceptionable in theory, applying them to current issues is often unfashionable and controversial."

What is insane about advocating free markets and sound money?
Diamonds in the Rough
You do not want to use that term. Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient#American_English
Unless ‘manual address entry’ implies that the postcode is not a necessary part of an address, then there is the trade-off that postcodes in the UK are (basically) recipient-specific, whereas postcodes in Germany are town-specific. If I know my parents’ postcode, I know the postcode of someone living three streets away from them and hence only have to remember the street name and house number, whereas I need to remember the postcode of that particular recipient to address a letter in the UK.

However, as I said, such data being easily available nowadays renders this point somewhat moot.
Startup Validation Hacks
Interestingly the US has a special treaty with the Netherlands for starting a business called the DAFT (Dutch-American Friendship Treaty)[1] that gives Americans preferential treatment compared to other non-EU nationals. I have no idea about the other legal hurdles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT_(treaty)
> Try running a profiler on a native Mac application that does a fair amount of drawing. You'll see references to function calls like: sse64CGSFill8by1

Try running a disassembler on any compiled graphic applications of the last 10 years on any platform and you'll see SSE instructions.
Exactly! I just started messing around with Clojure after meaning to get into Lisp for ages now. Mind, blown. With hiccup (HTML), cssgen (CSS), ClojureScript (Javascript) and Compojure (server), you can use one language to write the entire web app from front to back. I'm not saying that this is the right way to do it, but it's pretty neat. It is fast to develop in too, basically you get something like Sinatra/Scalatra/Flask, and BYO-everything else (library support is good, but certainly nothing like Rails or Django).

I didn't realize IDEA had Clojure support, I will have to check that out. I mainly use emacs+nrepl and experiment a little with Light Table.
Isn't that just "security by obscurity"? Your home cloud server is probably more accessible to hackers than an amazon server.

If you're ok with relying on obscurity, you already have it - you are one person among billions on this planet. Who else cares about your photos?
>income tax would be ludicrous.

But why? Income tax is supposed to support the infrastructure needed to maintain and protect all of our great stuff. The fact that robots did all the work doesn't negate the need for roads and wars and bank bailouts. I wonder, if we still had slavery, would slave owners be required to pay income tax for the income generated by their slaves?
It's also odd how no one seems to be asking why GCJ doesn't allow teams. On one level this is also participants forcing teams into a system that doesn't support it.
When I think about those kind of things, I see a future à la Star Trek, where there is no need for money, where humanity is only driven by it's curiosity and thirst for knowledge.
Doing a bit more research, it looks like my info is out of date. There used to be a warning about it on the Debian website (I think that's where I originally got the admonition that testing may have security gaps), but the current website actually says that it is security-managed, with security.debian.org uploads done in cases where migration from unstable is held up: http://www.debian.org/security/faq#testing

Sorry for the misinformation!
I don't understand. Why are you mentioning the trade-offs of doing this in Germany when I'm talking about the UK?

Even so, postcodes in the UK aren't town-specific, they're more like street-specific, roughly.
answer: become nobody really wants to do it, and obviously the supply/demand system might be really rewarding.

I recently (today) stopped to try to make some simple ogre3d application because somehow xcode can't manage permissions to create a file somewhere.
How does this compare to Fabric? Fabric offers a load of extra stuff to do with SSH/Deployment, but just looking at the basic features of running Python tasks from the command line, why should I use this over Fabric?

Also, why use `manager.arg` for documenting arguments, why not just use Python docstrings?
The biggest problem is you can't get into any elite institution by doing "Learning the concept thing". There is far too much competition for marks and too many people competing. The only way you can get in, is you have to mug up and memorize everything by heart.

What's worst same thing continues every where.

Do you serious think, companies that come to hire look at how the candidates work, Do they check if the guy is known as somebody who gets the work done? They simply check if the guy knows some algorithms from the books. Or some pointless puzzles, which can be gamed by practicing it for an hour a day.

This sort of thing works at all levels. It even works at some big web giants like Google.

As a society we reward this kind of behavior lot. And then when we get it back, why do we look so surprised?
New Debian project leader wants to turn testing into more consistent distribution targeted for wider range of users:

http://www.debian.org/vote/2013/platforms/lucas

I hope they'll tackle this security issue.
Client Side Cryptography - Should You Hash Passwords on the Client
FWIW, this has been heartily debunked by more modern research by Nick Yee, which is easily summed up as "Just because you like pizza, doesn't mean you don't like ice cream." People move into different modes at different times, and are not mutually exclusive as the Bartle model.

Here's a copy of the paper:
http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/pdf/3-2.pdf
> 53. Too much coupling. –Steven Strogatz, professor of applied mathematics, Cornell

Everybody hates coupling. Also, stupidity.
I moved from Mountain View to Portland for basically the same reason. While Portland isn't anywhere near Dutch levels of biking, the city government takes it seriously enough that I hope it will be nice by the time my daughter is old enough to not drive.

I agree with your assessment that we "need to create more disincentives to driving" and that is the part that is getting the most resistance.

I think the best arguments we can make are selfish ones. Safety, and the damage cars do to communities by taking humans off the streets. Health. Cost.
The question is (a) how much extra are you willing to pay for not having Windows pre-installed. Does $100 - $200 sound reasonable? And (b) how many other people share your view?

You are welcome to make your own personal demands on the market only if you are willing to pay for them, or in this case, if you can find many thousands of other people also willing to pay the price.

It's pointless just claiming a "right". You have no rights. You can't force anybody to supply what you want except by enabling the supplier to make a profit. As it is, you're expecting them to make a significant loss.

It's not just a question of removing Windows (or whatever OS you have installed for burn in and testing). There's the huge cost of qualifying parts for a different operating system, the extra tracking and stock-keeping costs, extra advertising and marketing costs (that will reflect the small number of units shipped), and the high cost of supporting Linux.

Since any 157 Linux buyers typically want at least 57 different versions of Linux, and a fair few want to dual boot because they actually do use Windows (for games, iTunes, whatever), the whole idea is a non-starter....