skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know the right answer. I do strongly support our President but I do feel a discomfort over owning 75% of GM.

On one hand, we've seen this before with Conrail. Huge success. And even with Chrysler 30 years ago. On the other, if the company can't turn around, when does a politician decide that, despite sunk cost, we need to abandon support and liquidate.

My reason for posting, though, is I think the way you're casting the auto business is way off mark.

A full 10% of our GDP is tied to the auto industry thru the huge amounts of suppliers. If GM and Chrysler were "let go" as you put it, the world wouldn't see anything but a massive depression for a good long period.

Furthermore, nearly every significant supplier (say, over $10MM in annual sales) is supplying at least a couple automakers if not most of them. They've all pushed hard to diversify. And most of them are in peril after 3-5 years of tough times at the "Big 3." If Chrysler and GM are let to fail, huge swaths will go under, and Ford, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, etc, will no longer be able to get the parts they need. That could very well be the economic "stiff breeze" needed to blow over a few of the remaining global automakers that are themselves teetering.

And even after we pull out of that mess, I find it unlikely we'll see any 'startups' in the auto biz. It's just got too many working parts. Product development, manufacturing, marketing, sales and service are all multi-multi-million dollar problems.

Finally, the "last century blue collar jobs" you mention is pretty far off base as well. If you're talking unskilled labor, then you mean simple assembly tasks. But a lot of the simple assembly has been automated. But I'll grant you that by and large, assembly is "last century blue collar." Thing is, most of the workers (by far) aren't doing assembly. And it's not just the "car designers" either, which are really quite a small bunch.

What you're missing is the huge middle. The machinists and fabricators. People programming CNC machines. People fixing those same machines.

And you're missing the huge corporate structures. The AR and AP clerks, the IT staffs, the sales and marketing. The HUGE numbers of engineers designing each hinge, each screw, each spring.

This industry is vital to our nations economy. No question about it. The Midwest would be ground zero, but the depression would spread globally.
I'd like to see this website implement a simple up/down vote feature per setting.
I disagree with your first statement. Non-experts will make more trivial errors. But I think we do agree that being an expert does not change the need for third-party review.
"...or refusing to remove a couch from a lawn"

This is actually making me appreciate the government's existence more.
I've found that code is way more readable, even though I've only been using the language for a short time.

I wonder what a whitespace sensitive ruby would be like :)

%w(a b c d e f g).each do |i|:
puts i

foo = lambda do |x|:
x + 2

foo 3
Yes, of course I've used flick scroll. You don't think a HNer who owns 2 Kindles would own an iPhone? I have 3 iPhones! (Three! Three iPhones! Wah ha ha.)

I am most interested in KM and information science, and a book addict, and a crazy user interface designer. I have paid much attention to these things. :)

Then can you imagine interfaces that do the same exploitation of our brain's affinity to physics to do the same thing, but even better? One that also uses a sense of locality?

It's still not the same.

Heck, little black and white Palms were must-have devices for med students years ago or so because you could have a reference for the entire pharmacopia, and it fit into their pocket. Not the same and not as good doesn't matter if there is a time/place/weight tradeoff. So long as you can have enough interactivity, even a clinku interface with a tiny bit of screen real estate is good enough for reference.
Todays Networks not Ready for Enterprise Cloud - Panel on Video
There are plenty of Indian Jews. You guys need to, like, you know, get out, and stuff.
Maybe put up a video on the front page or screenshots to make it a little clearer what it does or how it works?

In 45 seconds, I couldn't tell if it was a coding framework or a content management system, or what. It sounded interesting, and by skimming documentation I could tell that it was closer to a content management system perhaps, helping people create pages that store info in a database.

An admin demo site somewhere would help a lot, too.
Bought the iphone version a week ago, to kill some time on a long plane trip. I knew the game by reputation but never played it. I wasn't disappointed. The graphics are a bit dated but the game looks fun and challenging (haven't got very far yet)

Myst on the iTunes store:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa...
The important thing that probably isn't obvious is how few samples you actually need. Jitter is essentially random, which means it is decorrelated from the repeated pattern (1 compare takes longer, 255 take the same time)

With the added noise (jitter), all you need to do is distinguish the two normal distributions. This takes less samples than you might guess at first. Think of it as the same problem as distinguishing a biased coin (51% heads) from an indentical-looking unbiased one, merely by flipping each. Given the known bias percent and a desired confidence level (say 95%), calculate how many flips you will need to make a decision.
Don't do this, ok? Honestly, do you think we have no protections against this sort of thing?
Google Timing
Minus the political connotations, I'd agree. Clinton was indeed a lawyer, but then so was Nixon. Carter came from an engineering background; one could argue that Reagan's shift to personality politics was an elevation of style over substance. So my point is not that his politics are wrong, but that they were of the moment and plenty of competing or complementary interpretations exist.

We have painted ourselves into an unproductive corner with too much litigation and an over-emphasis on economic productivity where groundbreaking ideas which don't have meaningful analytics yet are considered too risky due to lack of quantifiability. One man's political effeteness is another's tyranny of the market.
I did ARML, good for him :)
There's a fictional character called Jennifer in the piece, who finds smoking morally wrong. Is this really a common view? Surely few people object to it if it's done in a way which minimises or eliminates passive smoking...
No, this is your misunderstanding. (It comes across as quite insistent, actually. You're opposing views I don't hold, rather you are projecting them onto me.)

I'm advocating a reader-type device for other uses like reference. I'm not talking about a Kindle replacement. I'm not advocating putting a real keyboard on such a device. A very flat pad with no hinges would be the best, actually.

You're only talking about the narrow use-case of the Kindle. There are other use-cases for print media, and these represent additional markets.

Kindle refresh time is good for linear reading of entire books. But this is not the only use case that print media satisfies!

That's about a half-dozen things you misunderstood.

(However, a device with the enhanced interactivity I am talking about would also be just as usable as a plain old eBook reader.)
Seems like a lot of wishful thinking on the part of the author. Sure there are a lot of similarities. But the article seems to be pushing her all-too-apparent agenda of taking down the porn industry the same way the tobacco industry was taken down. But she doesn't make the distinction between thoughts that may be harmful and something that causes actual physical harm.
That was what I used to build my first point and click game in. misty eyes

It was so much like javascript and html are today
This is exactly my point. A different device with a similar form factor, but with different display capabilities can capture an entirely different market!
Here's the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y&feature=chann...
Ah, thank you for the explanation. I digged around a little, and the base acceptance rate of all university applications was 54% för 2008. This is an aggregated number. For Sweden's most prestigeous med school (Karolinska Institutet) the number is 3,6%, so it does vary a lot depending on the education.

There are very few programmes that don't have any requirements. However, if one doesn't have any good high school grade, the "university entrance"-exam is a way in, or else professional experience. Hence, there are (again, depending on the education) a wider range of ages represented. However, 28% of all applicants are 19 years old. No one in my class is older than 25.

About universal and free, I'd say the system here is close to very good. According to me "universal" apply more to the possibility of actually studying, than the numbers of students accepted. And "free" is simply no tuition fees, which Sweden does not have. This is also the main difference, with the US having (large) fees.
Quit.
They don't value you enough to want to pay you. Get the hell out of there.
Games: Another reason why Twitter needs filters
worth paying attention to: *"Windows took off because a small team had the freedom to go of on their own and do something great."
Perhaps, too, there's an awareness that we're running out of land and (most) resources have already been claimed/ allocated, so it's harder and harder to suspend disbelief in muscular external technology, at least for the near future. I noticed the most recent Bond movies focus on villains' ability to manipulate the commercial and legal environment rather than building improbably powerful hardware.
And if "quitting" feels like being a loser... then MOVE ON instead.
haha nice! i think the real question is... would you have bought one? ;)
Wow! That was a fascinating video.
It's awesome how much you understand our situation when this is the first time you've seen what we're working on. This was exactly what we've been struggling with, and having another perspective on it is extremely helpful.

And, you went through the trouble of mocking something up and sharing it with us. We'll definitely take a close look at your ideas. Thanks.
Ah a media kit is a good suggestion, but I feel like it might be yet another page that's full of text... maybe if the product is slightly hard to understand, that would be good.
The one that always bugged me but seems to be true for most dynamic languages is immutable types being passed by value and everything else passed by reference.
"holstered guns on their waists, visible on their waists"

I'm certainly not against people having jobs in this lousy economy, but it kinda bugs me that someone got paid to write this article and someone else got paid to edit it.

"More fundamentally unnerving, some say, is the Free Staters' efforts to secure government positions, with the goal of whittling down or eliminating them."

"Some" say? Who say?
> Unlike tobacco, which was traditionally defended by a coalition of libertarians and politicians from conservative tobacco-growing Southern states, pornography’s most prominent defenders in the public sphere — including its industry spokesmen — associate themselves with the progressive wing of Democratic Party politics. It is hard to imagine Henry Waxman, for example — one of the most voracious elected officials in pursuit of the tobacco companies — adopting any similar animus toward Big Pornography. It is equally hard to imagine the Obama administration taking much of an interest in prosecuting obscenity — if indeed its members even believe that obscenity as such can exist. The recent ascension to the No. 2 slot in the Justice Department of a lawyer who in private practice had numerous times defended Playboy, Penthouse, the largest distributor of pornographic videos, and other pornographers just emphasizes the point.

is the paragraph that I based my innuendo comment on. Fundamentally, most porn is protected as artistic expression, child porn excepted. It's a fools errand to spend resources on prosecution that's going to be overturned. That's probably the position of Waxman and Obama.

I admit that I read the article quickly, but more than skimming. I thought the analogy was stretched, even she seemed to think so at times. But at the end linking liberals, Democrats, feminists, and porn political contributors was just a bit silly. Given that nothing can be done about it legally, the article was just political theater disguised as argument.
woah! cool! It's always amazing when people give feedback using images like this. Really clarifies what you're trying to say.

Thank you for that, and your suggestions.
Is Google Wave Evil? (or the importance of a decentralized Wave ecosystem)
On the importance of expanding the coming Wave ecosystem and how it affects the open source project, ShiftSpace (I'm one of the lead developers)
"More fundamentally unnerving, some say, is the Free Staters' efforts to secure government positions, with the goal of whittling down or eliminating them."

Not even joking, that's my whole plan if I ever get elected President!
Great suggestions, thank you! I'll definitely implement them as soon as I can.
For example, here's one way to generate a random,
fixed-length key in PHP:

md5(uniqid(rand(), true))

Bad example. The obfuscation is weak and easy to guess. Just remember to salt your hashes, gentlemen, and you'll be fine (some conditions apply).

(edit) erm .. sorry, had a brain spasm and didn't notice the rand() .. :)
There is obviously plenty of literature about side channel attacks, particularly timing attacks (which you have contributed to ;-)).

But, among 'lay programmers' I've met, I would say that more than 9/10 have no idea what a 'side channel attack' is. In my experience, its unusual (~ 3/10) for a programmer to know what asymmetric encryption is. I don't expect most programmers to know the particular math behind RSA (let alone ECC/etc), but many don't even the general idea of having a function and its inverse with properties A, B, and C.
Designing a Better Can Opener
> The value of my portfolio rose in six months by 47 percent.

This is poorly explained. How did the market itself, or the selected-from stocks, do over the same time period?

How did it do versus the ten biggest or most active stocks for a lagging period?

I'd be curious to know the sharpe ratio for the various portfolios as well.
> Then when you are told about it, you’d make up excuses trying to explain
> why it is totally normal.

That's a pretty incredible rhetorical device. "If you disagree, you're fundamentally incapable of reasoned thought."
Sorry Paul, I definitely meant the press. I think I'm lumping PR in general with press incorrectly. Thanks for clarifying.

Your points on authentication is very interesting. It seems that the press definitely cares about names.

Our feedback from Hackernews is good, but in terms of getting people psyched about it, not so much, I think it's mainly because the target audience is not exactly the best one. The feedback we ARE getting is awesome, technical feedback, and experience driven feedback... but we haven't touched on the users who actually want to USE it. We will probably attack the other communities that are 1) people who love to shop, 2) people who do a ton of research on products. That probably also includes a ton of women in that as well.

Can't forget to build a good app either, so those improvements will come as well. It's hard to know what direction to go in and what to focus on without ample feedback. We have plenty of ideas of what could work, speculation, but validation of these ideas, or even new ideas is what we're fishing for now.
... oh and when I say attack the communities, I mean go there and talk to the people to see if they are interested in giving us some feedback =)
I think that comes from the ideas behind vector decomposition (remember physics 101? ;-)).

When you decompose a goal into several linearly independent sub-goals - those sub-goals are said to be 'orthogonal' since they don't have any interaction/interdependence with one another.
I apologise if I'm mistaken on this, I've hardly used python at all. (though I keep meaning to learn it so I can finally stop writing bash scripts)

Get crackin'. It's a breeze to learn, and you'll be writing more robust scripts than in bash in no time.
Google's machine translation has really gotten much, much better. This is perfectly fine.
I disagree. I think a programmer would be much worse off facing his first real-world programming problem armed only with an instruction set and a hex editor than if he had a C compiler and knowledge of C. Just knowing how structs and functions work gives you some mental tools for solving the problem. "Any Real Programmer will tell you that all the _____ in the world won't help you solve a problem like that" just doesn't make sense if read literally -- is he claiming that no set of ideas for structuring programs actually enhances your abilities at all? "It takes actual talent" is just an empty truism (like "______ is never a silver bullet.") So the statement falls apart when taken seriously, which calls the attitude it expresses into doubt.

And that's the dual thrust of the article. It doesn't just make fun of Quiche-Eaters. It also makes fun of Real Programmers. The humor is based on the difficulty of drawing a line between progressivism and trendiness. Or, to turn it around, the difficulty of drawing a line between pragmatism and fatalism. The article is written from the point of view of someone who errs on the side of fatalism (believing that no new ideas will ever prove useful) and who makes fun of people who err on the side of trendy prissiness (turning up their noses at anything mature enough to actually work.) The Real Programmer speaking in the article manages, quite ironically, to make just much fun of Real Programmers as Quiche-Eaters. Consider the paragraph you quoted. Of course the most appropriate ideas for finding your way around a legacy system are the ideas that were used to create that system! That illustrates how the (caricature) Real Programmer's perception of technical superiority is skewed by a lack of historical perspective (quite funny given his relish for history.) Quiche-eating, effete values of _____ have a way of turning into Real Programmer stuff when they became widespread and uncool. That means a lot of today's Real Programmer stuff consists of yesterday's quiche. Structured programming? That's C! The present-day Real Programmer sees himself as the inheritor of the guy who scorned present-day tools as effete, not as the inheritor of the Quiche-Eaters who pushed the development of present-day tools. (Likewise, one might parody Quiche-Eaters as not wanting their ideas to suffer the indignity of becoming mature and practical.)
thank you, that is really good advice =) We need to figure out what is that "made to stick" story. Collaborative web surfing in real-time with zero-setup for shopping doesn't seem to cut it =) hehe
The solution proposed by this article (using MD5 hashes instead of numeric identifiers for primary keys) omits the point that strings are way more expensive to look up than integers. You're creating a bunch of extra work for the database on every single lookup.

A better solution is to use a global sequence rather than per-table sequences. That way your primary key is still numeric (and fast). A curious onlooker can guess how fast your database is growing, but they don't know whether that growth is users, orders, log messages, etc. etc.
How is it easy to guess? The number it generates does not at all appear to be a function of the number of keys already assigned.
If they're simply using the md5 of a random number as a unique identifier in order to hide the total number of records in the database I fail to see security implications of not using a salt.
I've gotten in the habit of using:

SHA1(unix_timestamp + "misc salt phrase" + rand )[0, 8]

It gives a nice, simple, 8 character id, pretty much not likely to create a collision in a space of 1M keys, and not guessable. Am i doing it wrong?
His book's fantastic... Thank You For Arguing.

I read it on the Kindle, then I bought a copy so I could refer back to it easily and make notes in the margins.
This is part of what I'm wondering: how much do you have to give? Simply providing for basic needs is clearly unacceptable (in my opinion). Heck, try suggesting that someone go without cable TV to balance their budget and you'll get a bad reaction. Anyway, I think it would be undesirable to have a society in which there were two clear castes of haves and havenots even if the havenots did have all of their needs (medical, shelter, food. . .).

And then the problem becomes: as we move into this new economy, how do we parcel out this socialism? Majority rule would simply be tyranny and we can't have a functional society where there are two groups and one is 100x more wealthy than the other in a caste-like fashion. Still, those who produce need some reward and incentive. So, how would we do it?

The only thing that I can think of is land: land is the one thing that we can't actually produce with labor (despite Boston's Back Bay real estate). If the cost to produce a television is essentially nothing, there's no sense in restricting who gets one even if the design has to be done by an "upper-caste" person. However, land - and land in "cool" areas like Seattle or San Francisco - is in limited supply. Only certain people can live there. So, even if all goods and services can be provided for near $0, land can't.

To be honest, I think that this future will be kinda cool. I mean, if most/all of our material wants and needs are taken care of, we could hack away at projects we thought were interesting/fun. Our jobs could be what we find joy in - whether that be local theater or web apps. And I think that we would create value that way. Potentially not in the focused, reward-driven way that we do today, but lots of people come together around no money to do things even today. I'm not saying that we can replace our current economy like that, but at the point that we have wants and needs met for essentially $0, it seems like it would be fun. Frankly, in that kind of future, there doesn't seem to be a need to force people into things they might not like.

Maybe that's too hippy.
Men do a lot of research before purchasing some expensive gadget, they goto discussions, review sites, and talk about it in forums. The way it's geared now is sort of the way teenagers goto the store to show each other the coolest things they can buy. So I see your point as being very valid here.

Haha @ "Women like elephants, but they don't want to identify with them."
Flash back 150 years or so. Would any of their antics have raised an eyebrow?

EDIT: If you think a long time ago these things would have been okay, is the big deal now because this group is so far behind the times, or are that the laws are out of touch with fundamental principles?
They'll be in Danish, so you probably won't get much out of them. If they were in English I would gladly have done so.
Programmers (and people in quantitative fields in general) are hugely over represented as libertarians.

I would say it's because they are able to objectively evaluate systems and come to better decisions - but that would be revealing my biases ;-)
So would a site get a better chance by doing a private invite beta, only giving TechCrunch exclusive invite codes? It'll probably get all traffic looking for invites to TechCrunch, so I could see that as being extremely appealing.
Even more generally, two vectors are orthogonal if their inner product is zero.

This is why the word "perpenidcular" is not used, as sometimes your vectors don't really have "directions" in the intuitive sense of the word (e.g. the inner product space of functions).
Just to be even more pedantic, "orthogonal" means more than perpendicular.

It means at least:

1. having a zero inner product

2. (a square matrix) that is the inverse of its transpose

3. linear transformation that preserves angles

4. statistically independent