skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> how brutally he is being raped by the alimony system

What I don't understand is how we almost never hear of such people packing up and moving to some country which is hostile to US interests, or simply has weak record-keeping and is thus friendly to those who want to leave their past behind. Are all such countries mournful hellholes to live in? Surely not.

Seriously, if I were ever sentenced to the perpetual confiscation of over half of my income, I would run off - doesn't matter much where to. Perhaps the Somalian pirates - or North Korea - are hiring? I also recall once reading that France will not extradite a French citizen - perhaps you can become one? (They might still allow American debt collectors to find you, however. Does anyone know?) Seriously, just about any life is better than being a part-time slave, which is what such extortion amounts to.
An idea for enforcing the golden rule on the internet via "empathy views".
The golden rule says "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

On the internet, it is harder to follow this rule especially with anonymity and higher occurrences of Asperger syndrome.

So the idea is to put you in other people's shoes.

For example, when replying to someone online, the service would make an "empathy view" in which the names of the people involved have been swapped.

Only you would see the empathy view, but it may be enough to encourage you to follow the golden rule more frequently. This is probably even more likely when an "empathy history" is kept in which you can examine your behavior over a long time.
Every startup should be built around the notion of customer development anyways. I'm glad to see the customer development and lean startup movement gaining traction.
Cliffsnotes: The secret to doing something instantly when you wake up is doing it...instantly...when you wake up. Hardly groundbreaking.
It could be that her ex-husband made so little that the added money wasn't relevant, and the author chose not to bring him into it. That seems reasonable to me.
I looked at it. From the blurb it was not clear to me how it worked. I downloaded and used the tutorial. That made it clear. I would add something like "For you math Wonks!" It isn't the normal iPhone puzzle game. Also you use sort of non obvious gestures maybe find a way to indicate the +- ones on the main screen. I can see the average iPhone puzzle user hitting 1 star when they delete the app.
Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites)
Sorry if this seems dense but I can't reconcile what your saying and I've not read the book. You say:

> It's actually a common misconception that Knuth uses MIX/MMIX to implement his algorithms.

So you state very clearly that he doesn't use MIX to code his algorithms.

But then you say:

> and the MMIX implementation is usually only given when there are relevant implementation details to be discussed

So you say that he does actually use the MIX language.

Do you mean that most algorithms aren't presented in source form at all and only the few that are actually coded are in the MIX language?
If you keep generating random series of tones, eventually you will end up with Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here or any other piece ever recorded.
early stage product development, target customers are startups/SMEs/integrators, the development is financed in bootstrapping mode, goal is to grow organically - sales channel is the web, compensation would be to get him/her as co-founder
What an excellent set of observations! I have been around and witnessed organizations going through the same mindset and pretty much watched the same tragic downfalls happen.

I personally witnessed this professionally in ministry settings as well as tech companies. Very interesting.
Wolfram Alpha API (Google Cache)
If you're in the hole a thousand a month anyway, what's another hundred more or less? It won't solve your actual problem to get rid of it (unless you can get rid of enough of them to actually solve the problem), but getting rid of it may well affect your life enough to depress you such that you find it that much more difficult to think of solutions, etc.

I've been in that situation many times over the past twenty years (though never nearly to that degree!), and I don't regret spending $x when I was going to be short $(x*10) or more.
there's no mid-level yet, only founders...
The general impression I got from this article is "never write software, since the software could have a security problem". Technically true. But sometimes the new functionality is worth the (minimal) security risk. Worry about making something interesting first, and making it secure enough to run on your banking computer later.

Also, if your parsers allow remote code execution, you are doing them wrong. Don't write application code in C! Use a safe language like Haskell or Lisp or Java or ... anything else. Then your bugs are bugs, not major security problems.
FWIW, this is erosion happening. There aren't, fortunately, that many differences between hn/news and hn/classic, but this is one. A lightweight post that has been voted up almost entirely by accounts less than a year old. I'm not sure what to do about these. It's not offtopic enough to kill, but it doesn't deserve to be ranked #2, as it currently is.

The good news is, these are fortunately still quite rare. If they become more common I suppose I'll finally have to implement vote weighting.
Maybe I should make the tutorial mandatory?
What is the rationality of vehemently holding a belief that you cannot prove? He's proving himself on a par with the zealots he likes to criticize. The whole point of religion goes down to faith : either everything is accident and life doesn't matter or there's a larger plan. An individual may feel there is more than this life and have faith in that, but it is inherently something that cannot be proved. This has absolutely nothing to do with modern religion - which is so often little more than the most angry book club ever. Biblical contradictions are simply not relevant to any discussion of atheism - many times in the bible it talks about how Jesus uses parables so people can understand, you should probably take the bible about as literally as any other great novel with a deeper meaning.
So was Pets.com.
Why is "about" on its own line below the "menu bar"?
Month after month, he was more aware than most how many people were gambling and (apparently) winning, and he thought that if they could do it, why not him? Turns out that it caught up with all of them, of course, but that must not have seemed immediately inevitable at the time.
My goal is to wake up, rather than smashing my poor little alarm clock into pieces when it goes off. I achieve that goal most of the time, a fact my employer is quite grateful for.

Agreed about the lack of substance here. This is a fluff piece.
If it was $1 per pair including shipping I could justify it..so like...$30 a month for fresh socks every day.
Top 10 Tech Failures of the Decade. YouTube...Really?
The New York Times recently wrote that "while YouTube, along with other new media properties like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, is seen as leading the challenge against traditional media companies, the company itself is struggling to profit from its digital popularity."
Would that buy you much over installing a JVM + Web Start?
That's probably a very clever way of producing music, but I don't want to wait billions of years until an awesome performance of Mozart's concerto No.17 emerges from your machine. I want it now, please. Thank you.
Evidently the concept of studying theory in school then applying that theory in the practical world of industry is too complicated to fit into 140 chars.
seems like lack of current data is it's current achilles heel
Nobody gets married with that understanding, and nobody wants to.

If she thinks he might be a shitty father who only contributes the minimum, then she shouldn't marry him or have kids with him.
I haven't been in the industry since 2005 or so. Even so:

And how many stock symbols are there? 5500 on NYSE, 4500 on NASDAQ.

Updates per second? CSCO had a few hundred thousand updates per day.

How is the data persisted? It is typically only logged, and not retrieved in realtime.

Unfortunately, Twitter doesn't match this problem particularly well.

Delicious, which I did write, had many similar structural issues. Tags, /network, etc.
Meet India's first porn star
Well his wife and 3 teenage sons have only $4k a month to live on on the east coast ($1k per person).

He has almost 3 times the disposable income as his wife in reality.
Wolfram|Alpha is focused on academic use-cases (for now), not searching for your own name or an online newspaper/blog.

It is purposely NOT Google.
I guess that's allowed so that a certain class of spoiled American female can live the archetypal slut's dream of fucking an alpha male while a beta male provides for her.

I think most states stop alimony when she remarries, though, which is why women who want to play that game will have live-in boyfriends but not remarry.
> People talk about punishing the winners all the time.

This is because the "winners" are overwhelmingly well-connected, often sociopathic financiers and management types rather than technological innovators. Even in the case of the latter, I would argue that no one has ever personally created a billion dollars' worth of value, perhaps with the exception of certain great inventors (many of whom, such as Nikola Tesla and Philo Farnsworth, died penniless.) Thus, just about every great fortune is a result of the workers not owning the means of production. It was the company's employees who generated most of the value, and yet the profit largely ends up in a handful of pockets.

Most wealth is in the hands of MBA/frat boy types, and well deserves to be weighed down with draconian taxes. It is a shame that there is anywhere for these parasites to flee to.

I simply disagree with PG, in that I do not believe that most wealth inequality is explained by differences in actual productivity. In every society I know of, the wealthiest people are largely the least productive in any real sense - they obtain wealth by skimming the output of others.
I'm going to throw out there that Wolfram|Alpha might scrub it's sources' data more thoroughly. How can you trust unemployment data from a month ago? 2006 may have been some major study by INSERT_MAJOR_ORGANIZATION_HERE.
oh god... not you again.
My goal is to wake up, rather than set my alarm clock in snooze mode. I fail that goal most of the time, a fact that my roommate (ie my mother) is not grateful for.
"Problems On Algorithms" (Parberry, Gasarch):
A slim volume containing ~700 exercises on proving various properties of algorithms. And it teaches you most of what is needed. Download it from: http://www.eng.unt.edu/ian/books/free/

"Elements of the Theory of Computation" (Papadimitriou): Classic text. Sure you've heard of Turing machines before, but what do you know about mu-recursive functions? It's very beautiful and if you have a person with whom to read the book and do the exercises, you will gain immensely.
Who cares? There's already a market for expensive socks. The question is - does that market value the convinience of getting them delivered to their door.
And so would you and I. I don't have any kids, but I'd be paying for the health care of everyone that does.
Welcome diminoten. Yea, this kind of thing does go on here, but not much. The whole thing was kinda stupid, but then again, if it got you to stop lurking, then I suppose it served its purpose.

Stick around and speak up from time to time. We can always use another voice. But don't threaten to leave; no one cares.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

That 97% only indicates that most people don't change the defaults; it says nothing about what Twitter users want.

In this case it's particularly misleading, since we're talking about an option to turn off silent data loss. What would make someone track down a setting related to a problem they don't know they have? A more honest representation would be: "A small number of our users were aware that we filter @replies by default, some were happy about it and a few (3% of total users) changed their settings to remove the filtering."
I'm glad too. @ericries is doing a phenomenal job pushing that movement.
Unfortunately, you won't get clojure on the pun issue.
I came to the comments just to see what was the reaction to this article which was up early in the morning and still is on the front page a few hours later, even though there's not much content to it.

I'm glad you keep an eye on these.
A) You're thinking of the Foreign Legion. Go look it up. A few years of military service and you're in.

B) When you get married you're making a very serious promise to share everything and build a life together. The state provided default contract for a marriage is very clear about the separation terms up front. If you don't like them, then negotiate a pre-nup with your spouse.

Good luck.
I agree, trying to out-Google Google is a bad idea.
U.S. Attorney's office tells employees not to log on to Drudge Report
Good question, swolchok - what browser are you using? I've tested in FF, Safari, IE7 / 8, Chrome.
How did google crawl this? Was the pdf link just taken down?
Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds
I think there is already a large body of work on home automation... the media stuff, I think mythtv is a good starting point.
A) The Foreign Legion has much tighter regulations now, and is no longer suitable for its traditional purpose of providing new identities for those with something to run from.

B) US courts routinely and capriciously invalidate pre-nups.
All I'm getting is "service unavailable"
Pretty sad that only half of those are even entrepreneurs. Having a lot of followers on Twitter is not the same as starting a business.
Good article, but all problem description, no solutions.

That's true of this article, and often of Economist articles generally; this isn't necessarily a negative though, because it provided an enlightening insight into circumstances that weren't necessarily obvious beforehand (to me anyway.)

I'd like to understand what drove the Japanese and American industries to turn around, and how much of that is applicable to China.

I get the impression that the business models of America, Japan and China are quite different; I don't think the US or Japan started out like China and then changed, on the contrary I think they set out in different circumstances and therefore with different aims.

I get the impression China is attempting to compete almost solely on cost, which wasn't the case of the US (innovation) or Japan (a combination of cost/quality and innovation.)
_why's classic content_for post, still applies today
You can run MIX programs using the GNU MIX Development Kit:

http://www.gnu.org/software/mdk/
How is it the couple didn't learn anything about finance and financial crisis while studying in Argentina????????

btw: I'm from Argentina.
> Wolfram|Alpha is focused on academic use-cases

I have, so far, found it nearly useless academically. (Computational biology, to be specific.) Perhaps it will improve with time.
Even with academic queries it's very hit or miss. When you get something that returns relevant results it's a Eureka! moment, and you'll be impressed. But then you try a similar query and get zilch.

I suspect academics will try their queries on Wolfram first and turn to Google if that doesn't work. But after seeing too many "no results found" messages, they might just skip the Wolfram step entirely. Google might not have the fancy graphs, but it almost always returns some kind of relevant data.
Actually, child support is also payments made directly to a former spouse. While in principle it said to be for support of the children, there is no requirement that it be used for such purpose (let alone an enforcement mechanism).
> What I don't understand is how we almost never hear of such people packing up and moving to some country which is hostile to US interests

http://roissy.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/hero/
Yes, that is how it is.

For example the first algorithm in the book (found via google):

Algorithm E ( Euclid's algorithm). Given two positive integers m and n,
find their greatest common divisor, that is, the largest positive integer that
evenly divides both m and n.

E1 [Find remainder.] Divide m by n and let r be the remainder.
(We will have 0 ≤ r < n)

E2 [Is it zero?] If r=0, the algorithm terminates: n is the answer.

E3 [Reduce.] Set m← n, n← r, and go back to step E1.
There is a surprisingly even, respectful, and intellectual discussion going on at the original post between Tony Wright and Sean Johnson, respective owners of RescueTime and BubbleTimer. I would urge you to read through it.
incidentally, isn't that Joel Spolsky's Stack Overflow?? Although the emphasis on SO is answering questions, as opposed to instruction material on how to learn a certain technology.
> Well his wife and 3 teenage sons have only $4k a month to live on

... and whatever she earns.

Taking care of teenagers after school is not a full time job.
This article struck me as rather superficial. Though quality fade and IP are big problems, I fail to see how the problems are different from early Japanese or American industry.

Having lived in China for a year (Beijing and elsewhere), I can state two things: They are getting better, very quickly and they are starting to clamp down on environmental, health and compensation issues. It takes time, China started to really develop in the mid 90s, so it has only been 15 years or so. It takes time to develop environmental, health, workers compensation and IP regulations.

Even once you have the regulations in place, it takes years to make the business community aware and respectful of them. Many (if not most) of the factory bosses are former peasants or lower class people who have little to no education. They are just trying to build a small company. That does not excuse the gross abuses of power, but it does explain them.

There needs to be a certain "societal" education on these issues, it took a hundred years in the west, and the environmental (sustainability) mouvement, started in the 1950s is only mainstream since 2006ish. Oh and don't forget, China is 3 times bigger than the US and 10 times bigger than Japan.

See this other NYT article from 2005 on the topic:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E2DD1239F...
To me, even as a joke or means to counter idiotic guard patrols, it is very disturbing to even think about such a concept as "photography license". As if it was an omen of what's there to come in the future.

(And I'm talking Western governments here; undoubtedly there already are some heavily regulated countries somewhere that ban public photography partially or completely.)

The idea of someone having the power to license another party to take photographs (in public) is just PLAIN WRONG. It contradicts free flow of information, artistic freedom, freedom to document evidence, and free speech in general.
Gateway (the Acer of American PC vendors.)

HD DVD (acronym overload, no differentiation from Blu-Ray.)

Vonage (like Skype, but with an AT&T syntax)

Youtube (low definition format, low comment intelligence, low interest cellphone videos.)

Sirius XM (financiers of Howard Stern lost to the Chinese $5 FM transmitter makers.)

Microsoft Zune (the portable version of Windows Media Player but only browner.)

Palm (HTML5 based "OS" might help you now, but I will never forgive you for that Pilot API.)

Iridium (never heard of them before Miami Vice, the movie, and never since. Lost to regional sat services)

Segway (a wheel-chair for the able-bodied; early adopters considerably dorkier than rest of population. Way too much of a "tourism office" gimmick toy than anything nowadays.)
Great :-/ Let's not go there, okay?
We can assume so.
Three ideas - a picture on the splash screen that shows swipes and above and below taps and what they do with a continue button that shows up the first few times it runs, maybe with a button also for the tutorial. Two is to put a picture like this at the start of the tutorial. Third idea is to shade the row and column on the first tap with some + and - indicators overlaid (maybe) or a text box at the bottom that indicates to tap again for +_. This may need to have a way to turn it off if the user doesn't like it.

One other thought is to make the "Solve New Puzzle" more visually distinct. It took me a few taps to figure out the screen.
If my tax dollars are paying their salaries, I don't want US Attorney's office employees logging on to Drudge, or eBay, or ...
I'm curious to see the sort of services that people build with this. This could be a opportunity to get in at the beginning of something huge. Anyone have any cool ideas?
This seems pretty nice, I might start learning this actually.
why throw out the baby with the bathwater?
If you've left a faith (any faith) in a logical fashion, good. If you're leaving a cult to avoid having delusions, it's good too, but consider that many Christians live okay lives not worried about the Antichrist apocalypse.
Agreed. Sexism is bad. Posting "female only lists" probably doesn't help.
Actually, I don't think you can delete / at all on unix. It's its own parent.
Slander aside, this is very much a reality.
When I was a kid, Japanese products were visibly cheap and poorly made. American products were also poorly made, but not quite so bad as the Japanese. The quality gap was relatively easy to overcome. The American electronics manufacturers were not very innovative. When Sony came out with transistor pocket radios, American radios were still table top vacuum tube boxes. When the Japanese captured the TV market with integrated circuits, Zenith was advertising the benefits of hand soldered components. Ampex invented the VCR, but couldnt produce the recording heads needed for the home. The Japanese got their reputation by concentrating in quality on a few key industries. By 1984 HP was refusing American made memory chips, because they were so inferior. That triggered a restructuring of industry that powered the economy for the next 20 years.

Interestingly enough, the Japanese had a similar structure to the Chinese with large companies and lots of subcontractors. However, their motivation was to have the subcontractor absorb employment fluctuations and cost squeezes, not to hide violations of quality standards.
Sam Ruby: Keeping Up With Rails
One other thought is to use some sort of picture (instead of a fill color) for the tile backgrounds like many of the square puzzles do on the app store.
I love Rails, but this is a valid point.
What part of "don't come back and vacation in the country which screwed up your life" didn't this man understand?
That wasn't a bait and switch. He suggested the engineering problem isn't as hard as is being made out, and then when you claimed otherwise, he explained that he was in a strong position to know otherwise. In the real world, this is known as a "good argument".

He didn't claim his experience proved HE could do it. He didn't imply that you NEEDED his experience to do it. He was calling you out on your claim by showing that he had done it, and so knew from experience that it wasn't hard. You're the one moving the goal posts.

Note: I actually don't have an opinion on whether that experience is relevant to twitter's situation, but it certainly wasn't a bait and switch.
Ask HN: What Ad network do you use to buy traffic to your site?
I am new to the world of online advertising. I would like to buy traffic to my site with high conversion ratios. What ad networks would you suggest?
Adsense?
Adbrite?
Adchaps?