skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
maybe they always use scoped_ptr / linked_ptr?
If sensors are providing conflicting speed measurements, is there a reason not to believe the fastest reading?
Ahh, from the era when the entire internet filled a phone book. I bought the internet yellow pages in 95, 96 and 97. You could physically see exponential growth as the yellow pages went from the thickness of a small novel to the thickness of the NYC yellow pages.
90% signal is far from "extremely" noisy.
Fair enough, although I was asking a different question (not very clearly, I suppose). Is there a language X and a feature (or set of features) Y for which the following statement holds?

"Language X is more powerful than Lisp because it has feature(s) Y."
I voted you back up, because it's important to bear this in mind. This is not your regular crowd, the vox populi here is not remotely representative.

"the average employed reader probably makes double the median US household income"

I'd clarify this to be relative to local conditions, taking into account the fairly large foreign readership (of which I am a part!) but it's probably about right. Do I smell a salary survey poll coming on ..
I really don't know anything about the economics of the Great Depression, but the opinion of two extremely outspoken economists does not (at all) serve as conclusive evidence of the failure of Roosevelt's policies.

I'll go ahead and link you to the only thing I've ever read on the subject, just to provide another opinion: http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=82c53220-7594-4ec...
It's interesting how Wired has so frequently been obviously aware of the monumental shifts going on around them, but rarely able to effectively capitalize on them. Heck, they owned one of the better search engines at one time, and several of the best web development and technology destinations on the web...and yet, it feels kinda lost now. Smartest thing they've done in the past couple of years was buy reddit, but they need to be making a lot more acquisitions like that, or internalizing that adventurous spirit.
Except they're /right/. The state Democrats are corrupt and ineffectual, but at least they're not insane like our Republicans, who refuse to even consider ideologically impure things like ``compromise to pass a budget''.
You’re right: I exaggerated, and should have looked for data. Still though, if 42% of children in the bottom quintile stay there, and only 16% of them end up in the top 40% (6% in the top 20%), that means that starting place has a pretty giant impact on outcomes, wouldn't you say?

Only 6% of the bottom 20% make it to the top 20%, so I’d guess a very small percentage become “self-made millionaires”.

That report you link is great, thanks.
Two possible explanations:

1) He was clever, had many interesting ideas, but was caught up in a culture that caused him to publish his ideas in essays/aticles that were largely meaningless, causing the ideas to go mostly unnoticed.

2) Even a defective clock tells the correct time twice a day.
For a second I read that as Pop Will Eat Itself. Gimme big mac gimme fries to go!
Google Page Speed open sourced
A few years ago there was the so-called Bogdanov Affair in physics, which some people claimed was a "reverse Sokal hoax" (i.e. publishing bogus physics that was so esoteric that no one could tell whether it was legitimate).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair
The main problem in CA is that the voters can make policy through ballot initiative, and get it into the constitution, where the normal legislative process can’t touch it. That leaves all kinds of inflexibility that ties the legislature down and prevents the give-and-take and adaptation-to-changing-circumstance of good policymaking.
The prisons. Three strikes means we have an awful lot of prisoners.

There's also a lot of dysfunctional allocation- in the school system, for instance, a majority of funds are earmarked for specific purposes, like special ed, regardless of local conditions. Which leads to bizarre things like bankrupt districts embarking on multi-million building projects.
The difference is that the Bogdanov's did their best to seem real, while Sokal et al. did their best to seem fake.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html
Yes, Moritz is suggesting that companies (at least some of them) are more willing to take the risk of buying from a stratup, if it offers them a tremendous advantage.., during a recession.

I am wondering if there are entrepreneurs who can corroborate this theory based on their experience.
So we have the classical PEBCAK here. You got bitten by technology that you don't understand. Don't blame the machine, blame yourself.
I thought I remembered Texas have a budget disaster eight years ago...
Helping “normal people” retire was cited as the reason to pass Proposition 13, but the biggest beneficiaries (and the initiative was designed with this in mind, to be sure) were corporate property owners, who because they never get old and die, can never have their property taxes raised (well, it can increase 2% per year, generally less than inflation).
> In all of these scenes, only a few items we tried to create didn't appear.

That's not "any object you can think of", is it?
TOSBack tracks websites' policies as they change
interesting, that wired threatened the owners of wire.com (a site to encourage women to go on the net) into giving up their domain in the early 90s.

> Trademark infringement cases are usually settled through a process I've come to think of as Big Footing. The big company with the trademark Big Foots the little one, forcing it to give up the name. Usually, this is achieved with a Big Foot letter from the big company's lawyer, threatening legal action.

> McDonald's does it. So does Wired. Last year, WIRE, a computer network encouraging women to get on the Net, registered the domain name wire.com. This magazine's lawyers sent them a Big Foot letter: "That sounds too much like Wired's online service, wired.com. Give up the name, or else." WIRE became Women's Wire, and retreated to the domain name wwire.com.
For a second there I thought that your second link going to say that Richard Dawkins was an intellectual imposter!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTEUbtgpIgo
Typical troll dismissing the original attack as a "joke" to cover himself. Jokes are typically funny or at least attempt to be funny. There's a world of difference between an honest joke and a joke that is basically an attack encapsulated into a wrapper that looks like a joke. He obviously knows what he's doing when he chooses his choice of words. For example look at this joke:

"So there's this guy who is cheating on his wife and he goes into this bar and..."

vs.

"So Leo, you're cheating on your wife, and you go into a bar..."

Both might technically be jokes but one is making a strong suggestion, one is not. A good troll plans these phrases in such a way that they can get the information out but can run and hide behind the technicality when it suits their purposes. Someone accepting or someone giving an apology doesn't change the intent in retrospect it's just a nice happy ending for gawkers to feel good about
It seems like Microsoft has a bad habit of letting lawyers, executives, and accountants sink good products & services with arbitrary and silly restrictions on how you can actually use it.
Moreover, it indicates that getting the stuff you don't like off the front page is not something to strive for. If you don't like it, ignore it. It is a sign that at the moment, the community here has found nothing more interesting to show you.
This article displays a complete misunderstanding of advertising and an intellectual arrogance that I've come to expect from AdBusters. They are disgusted by the "proletariat" and his need to buy the latest bauble even while claiming to be fighting for him. Maybe, just maybe, the average consumer knows what he wants better than a bunch of pseudo-intellectual hipsters.
You have class with Psycho T?!
Most definitely not, I should have worded that better, I've edited it now.
#6 is very relevant to startups. Many startups fail because the founder(s) are too clingy to their initial vision. There needs to be a bit of a 'surfing' mentality -- you are not the wave, you are harnessing the energy of the wave. Try to dictate to the wave, and you get wiped out.
The home value is reset when a house is sold. There has been a lot of buying and selling lately in California.

I have a friend who recently bought a house and his property taxes are like rent, it is just that expensive. He could rent a 1 bedroom apartment with his property taxes.

Money is coming in but as you said, too much money is being spent (through ballot intiatives (high speed rail for example) and the legislature gone-wild. But I believe that the gone-wild days have come to an abrupt end and mostly thanks to Schwarzenegger who has nothing to loose by being rational.
Make a RPN calculator in Perl 6
You just used nearly the exact terminology from the original quote. Sorry, I do not think the concept is clear.

Since the advantage over 'the standard' changes depending on what product and what startup we're talking about, this seems to be more of a comment on the likelihood of the buyer to stick with 'the standard'. (additionally, the wording (and paraphrasing) are not making this clearer...some companies...more likely...tremendous advantage...etc)

I'm attempting to make "his theory" concrete in wording so that it's comprehensible. I think you can boil "his theory" down to:

Buyers' preference for 'the standard' is inversely proportional to the current economic state.

What do you think?
Corporations "die" and then sell the property. K-Mart had more value in property then in it's own business. Granted some corporations are getting a good deal, but in another article here they are getting such a bad deal they are leaving. Corporations benefiting may just be a necessary evil.
The quickest way to fix the education system in this country is to basically pay kids to learn. The promise of future rewards simply isn't tangible enough for a lot of kids today -- especially ones who don't see any future for themselves. What if quarterly report cards were a way for students to earn some money? Not much... maybe only a few hundred dollars at maximum (As in all courses for example) Give the teachers incentives based on the same metrics.

I'm skeptical of the idea that, with enough money,, we can coddle kids into learning by revising how the information is taught or otherwise candy coating the material to be more accessible. It's a bad life lesson. Sometimes learning things is hard. Sometimes you have to work at it. Sometimes you need to learn a subject inside out to understand it and that is difficult. If you manage to find someway to make a particular subject easy to learn it only works to a certain degree because kids may be conditioned to believe that all information they need to learn in life will be presented in such a carefully engineered and optimized way. That is simply not reality. The reality of most people's lives is you work for your own best interest and are rewarded for it in a tangible way. Duplicating that model in public schools in some form would be a step in the right direction.
At a certain point in history, those sentences were capable of initiating a new way of thinking that was impossible before. 30 years later, Mr. Dawkins enjoys himself beating a dead horse.
CS can be pretty postmodern too:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ (An Automatic CS Paper Generator)
People happen to judge you by where you went, where you didn't go, or at pretty much any whimsical idea they happen to come up with. You can't control that and you shouldn't either because if you do then you're just playing somebody else's game and not your own.

You're not here to fish for acceptance by pleasing people in random positions of prestige. If you feel inferior, the quest is to learn to ignore it and find your own worth yourself. Then nothing can make you feel like crap because you know better anyway. Nobody needs to feel like crap because he didn't go to institution X, Y, or Z. (And because of many other things as well.)

You also don't need each and every possible advantage to yourself as if you couldn't make it otherwise. You just need enough and if you know enough to be able to help people, you'll surely get them.
You should catch up and starting watching the Gillmor Gang. Leo has some respectable and well-informed opinions. He actually cares about technology, not plugging himself.
What companies has Sequoia funded that haven't succeeded?
So what's the story of mcdonalds.com after the registration? Court case? Anyone knows? This wild 90s had many success stories when companies were paying to get hold of their trademarked domains since legal system was in doubt, but it does not seem that this case would have been hard to win in court.
That 'negativity' helped twitter. It would have hurt them if TechCrunch had just ignored them and not mentioned twitter. But they kept on and on and on relentlessly about it.
Just to take on [1], the difference between computer science papers and the postmodern papers that involve physics is that while both may seem unintelligible to someone unskilled in the field, real computer science papers actually mean something if you know the terminology. Whenever postmodernists venture into areas where scientists can competently evaluate what they're talking about, the verdict is that they spew absolute rubbish, so it should make us think hard about whether any of the other stuff makes any more sense than it appears to.

It's not proof that the whole field is garbage by any means, but it is at least clear evidence that a lot of respected names in the field are publishing crap that they provably don't understand. That's really not a good sign - there may be crap published in fields like physics, but it's not coming from the Feynmans, it's coming from the relative unknowns.
I'm in England, I can tell you what this is: It's the class system.

Oxbridge > Red brick university (old) > ex-Polytechnic

This could be changed of course, but the things that the Oxbridge and red bricks do so well is the networking. The societies, the sticking together, the essence of "you must be thoroughly decent and clever because I experienced that system and you did too", except the entry requirement was not smarts but whether you could afford to fund yourself through and could get through the entry requirements.

I say it could be changed because I see similar power of networks in smaller social nets. For example I see cyclists online have a great bond with other cyclists and a very strong bias towards other cyclists... to the degree of giving work to cyclists based on no other criteria than those people appearing to be qualified (but many thousands of others are) and exist in the pre-requisite community (belong to a cycling community).

So the class system can be thought of as exclusive social networks. The education itself is not the measure here, it's whether you are in the network or not.

Why this opens it to change is that the network they are in has to be exclusive, and so would a replacement, but it changes by you working with those you went to college with to build your own networks and positively discriminate towards each other. To the degree that if you have 2 candidates in front of you and 1 is MIT and one is <insert your college> you opt for your college or fellow institute over MIT.

Basically... you do have means to weaken the influence class system by discriminating positively towards your social network. Just standing by and bitching that you (not the poster, but general "you") don't belong to the advantaged network isn't going to help you, and you can't become a member of that network... you can just build a new network and make it strong.

I've perhaps over-simplified a hell of a lot of this post... it's early and I'm hungover.
I think they're emphasizing "become more efficient or lower their costs" as opposed to growing the company, or increasing revenue.
If a consumer decides not to spend money on copyrighted material it seems to me they are likely choosing to spend that money elsewhere so it's unlikely piracy causes any real harm to most economies. It may hurt a specific segment but that's just the evolution of supply & demand at work.

I think the best argument against piracy being a major crisis in entertainment is the quality of the products we've seen in the last few years since piracy has really hit the mainstream. Lots of great movies, lots of good TV (so I hear) and when it comes to music I would argue that for most people who previously had a very limited spectrum of musical choices we're now in a renaissance. I don't see any of my favorite bands going out of business, quitting, or putting out subpar products. If anything we're seeing less mainstream acts flourish since, for the first time, they can actually compete with the mainstream.
To Rails Newbies/Rails Coders on Windows: Don't ever code rails on windows! Ruby is dog slow on windows. Use linux or OS X
When I was at university I used to moan that cocacola.com and levi.com were not registered.

I did discuss registering start.com and setting up an index of websites for brands that had bothered to put a site up - but I was too busy helping on a Fortran compiler to get round to it. Happy days.
I did a course on randomized algorithms which referenced the book on the topic he wrote. The man was almost a genius, The book is as ground breaking as the knuth series.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindutva

Hindu fundies make bible thumping republicans look like hippies. They are quite dangerous, but fortunately only inside India.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8814916768652240733
Why Deejay Schools Are Thriving in a Recession
Why do you think there are so few XMPP implementations beyond a few mega-projects? Why should it be a mega-project at all? The XML foundation is a huge barrier to implementation and is the perfect example of counter-productive adoption of buzzword-of-the-day ideologies, handicapping a whole ecosystem for years afterwards.

As someone who has written the odd XMPP client I can only say: Amen, Hallejujah.

The idea and birdview architecture of Jabber is great. The execution is so horrible that most people who had the misfortune to work with it only want it to die ASAP.

Most of the problems stem from unfortunate timing. Jabber was invented in the late 90's when XML and Java engineering practices were hyped as the Next Big Thing™. Had it been invented only a few years earlier or later then we might not have anything to complain about today.

Well, my hopes are on google to end the insanity. They have plenty of skilled engineers working on wave. Once those engineers grow tired of the mess they might just go and replace it with something sane.
HN feature request: hide stories
When reading the HN frontpage several times a day I'm usually only interested in the new submissions floating to the top. Currently it's hard to differentiate those from previously seen submissions that I'm just not interested in (95% of TechCrunch stories, etc) and are therefore not going to vote up.

I propose that a new feature (equal to what's been existing on Reddit for as long as I can remember) be implemented: the ability to hide stories -- personalization.

I realize that this could incur some additional strain on the HN servers. A lightweight cookie solution (with some decaying) could potentially be used.

A quick search shows that this feature have been talked about before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625535
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446171
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=137247
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446080

I could implement a Greasemonkey script using GM_get/setValue for persisting the IDs of hidden stories. The problem is that my cell phone does not run Greasemonkey and there are no good ways to keep such state in sync between my work and home computer.
Michael Mobley Investing
Yes, the problem is exactly analogous. And whenever you manipulate equations of rational expressions, or manipulate any equations by using division, you have to be careful that you don't accidentally invalidate your logic by inadvertently dividing by zero.

A classic example is http://www.math.utoronto.ca/mathnet/falseProofs/first1eq2.ht... — you get from a correct equation to 2 = 1 by simply canceling an innocuous factor (a² - ab) from both sides, the problem being that the innocuous factor happens to be equal to 0.

You can avoid this problem by changing your reasoning procedure. Old incorrect procedure; given:

xy = xz

conclude

y = z

Corrected procedure: given:

xy = xz

conclude:

y = z ∨ x = 0

In many circumstances you can then immediately eliminate the x=0 case, e.g. when x is a numeric constant other than 0, or when x=0 → y=z by some other chain of reasoning. In other circumstances it turns out to complicate your proof enormously, and in cases like the fallacious proof I mentioned above, it actually makes the proof impossible.

So the surprising discovery that this basic set-creation operation — the set of all objects meeting some criterion — contained a pitfall analogous to that of division occasioned some consternation. What was the analogous correction to make to reasoning with set theory? And once that was settled, all of the proofs made under the old system had to be checked wherever they used this fundamental operation.
It's also generally impossible to make a non-trivial game both zero sum in dollars and zero sum in utility, when using a non-trivial dollar->utility conversion.
There's an easy hack around that I just came up with while throwing terms at Bing and switching locales - just add a stop word (a word that search engines often ignore to conserve space) after the topic you're looking for and you can search for it.

In my case, I added "the"

EG, Sexual Healing in germany, search for "sexual healing the", and it comes up with what you're looking for.

I just tried "sex the" with India... searches just fine.

Basically, I'd suggest it's an unintended feature.
downvoteArticle(id) {
for (aid in articles) {
if (aid!=id) upvote(aid);
}
}
eg the blocking is both broken, and easily bypassed.
Maybe Sturgueons Law (90% of everything is crap) also applies to philosophy and postmodernism?
Palm Pre Teardown
On mcdonalds.com, if you click the "Ronald McDonald House Charities" link, you will read this: "McDonald's is not responsible for the opinions, policies, statements or practices of any other companies, such as those that may be expressed in the web site you are entering"!
This article is not either of the things you suggested. It's not jargon and babble, and the argument is pretty clear: cinsumerist society is on the brink of collapse.

The problem is that AdBusters has been saying this over and over in every single issue since I first read it, years ago. They must be pretty happy with the recession, since it somewhat legitimatizes their predictions, for now. Once the economy recovers, though, I'm sure they'll still keep beating the same drum.

AdBusters is kind of like a magazine version of "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", published in 1776. At the time, the Britsh were very concerned by the state of their own empire, and gobbled up this bleak and pessemistic (and highly misleading) version of history.

There's always going to be someone with an apetite for this sort of thing, so that keeps AdBusters in business.
Activities Cornwall
The Adventure Centre is an activity provider based in Newquay Cornwall, offering a wide range of activities and adventure sports to residents and visitors to Cornwall.
I never suggested it wasn't broken, I commented hours ago that some of the settings don't seem to be consistent.

Easily bypassed, well - that's just funny.
Good idea!

fmask's implementation with syntax coloring:

http://paste.lisp.org/display/81488

I also have a more extended example usage in an annotation at the bottom.