skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. There is no monarch or governor general. There are no reserve powers. There is no provision for early general elections. The President is not a Prime Minister, and Congress is not a parliament. Neither is responsible to the other. The House of Representatives and the Senate can each freely block the other indefinitely.

The only Constitutional mechanisms available for breaking a deadlock are Congressional elections every 2 years (entire house and 1/3rd of Senate), Presidential elections every 4 years, and the theoretical ability of 2/3rds of the states to force a Constitutional Convention to propose amendments (this has never actually happened; all Constitutional amendments have been first proposed by Congress; in either case, any amendments must be ratified by 3/4ths of states, which will never happen in the current environment where half the states would be happier destroying the country than seeing the scary black man in office for one more day).
Surface/2 = fail, Windows phone/mobile = fail, Ballmer left, XBox One = NSA big brother/bad timing fail, now known to have been working with NSA first to help access user data of privately bought/installed systems since at least early-mid 90s = fail, Windows 8 = fail.

Yes, they are making lots of money, but the shark was jumped long ago, and we are in Joanie Loves Chachi-land now (2 Happy Days references for you there). I think it is perfectly reasonable to start armchair quarterbacking to try to influence the new CEO.
I've actually had time over the past few weeks to spend time watching the various duscussions in the Senate. In other words, I chose to go to the source and take the time to understand rather than get fed a bunch of ideologically loaded bullshit by various news outfits.

Here's reality:

Obamacare is a complete disaster. Don't take my word for it, go research what unions are saying, what businesses are doing an go figure out what you will have to pay and what you'll get for it.

This horrible law needs to be repealed.

We need a budget. Apparently we have not had one since 2008 or thereabouts. I guess when you have a president who isn't even qualified to run a cookie baking operation this is what we get. It is an absolute disgrace that we are plunging this country deeper and deeper into debt.

Finally, Congress has failed to provide our country with responsible governance for decades. Party affiliation does not matter here. It has devolved it into nothing less than a circus. Given that we are locked into this system of government the only conclusion one can reach is that we are doomed.

This govenrment shutdown isn't a problem, no matter how much of an economic impact it might make. Over the next 25 to 50 years this economic impact will be absolutlely dwarfed by the devastation that will be caused by the layers of irresponsible actions we will have to live with.

I say: Go for it! I hope people understand why it is important to take the pain now in order to right the ship for generations to come.
I tend to hate stuff like this. He closes with suggesting life is fleeting and you should keep up to date with still living friends. There is no indication he is actually doing that. People routinely have wonderful things to say about the dead, often when they said (and did) terrible things to them while alive.

Maybe he isn't a hypocrite but I have seen this too often from people who are.
http://rethinkdb.com/faq/

WHY DOES EVERYONE RECOMMEND MYSQL? Seriously, its 2013, and postgres is right there in the land of amazing databases. Easy to set up. Easy to get started. And works so beautifully. Why do people mention MySQL. There is zero benefit to using it. Less than zero. It's harder to use than pg.
I just reread your comment and now I feel like a dunce. Leaving my original comment, so that I might better revel in my shame.
bill was passed right before to pay them. I don't think they want to risk not to pay the biggest police/military complex ever.
Ask HN: Does the US government shutdown effect your job?
Is anyone here affected by the government shutdown in the US? I imagine some tech people in the government industry might be furloughed?
No worries. It was just a bad day. :) To be honest, I feel sorry for those guys. They're throwing their lives away.
I demand Kenya province borders too, then.
Isn't there a lot of flexibility in Commmonwealth countries with regard to dissolving government and calling for a new election? In Canada you usually just proclaim "this parliament is dysfunctional" and then call a snap election.
Is the government shut down?
Thanks for clarifying for me what opinions I'm allowed to have.
It seems to me that if it was illegal to combine unrelated subject into a single vote/bill government would run much smoother.

No "pork" or pet projects (you'd have to vote separately on each). You could add ACA provisions to this government spending bill since they are unrelated, so there would be no shutdown.

Since it's hard to define "unrelated" make it so that if 1/3 of the members vote that it's unrelated, then it's unrelated and has to voted on separately.
Open Source ORM RedBeanPHP 3.5 released
I'm sure that the 98% of NASA staff that will be furloughed will consider it to be shutdown.
And why we need double retina screen resolutions to tell the difference between vector and bitmap graphics on a 4 inch screen.
WeScheme: An Online Scheme Editor and REPL
Haha, exactly what I was thinking. Like the part where the IRS stops auditing...
Which is also in the article:

>But 1.4 million uniformed members of the military will stay on the job and will be paid, thanks to a last-minute bill unanimously passed by both houses and signed by Obama on Monday night.

Which goes to show that no matter how dysfunctional our government becomes it will go to any length to ensure that it's still capable of killing lots of people.
Your making the broken window fallacy:

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

If we didn't have these unwanted government services (or wanted services provided very poorly or at excessive cost), then the taxpayers would spent their money on something else -- something that is wanted -- and it would generate just as many jobs or economic activity in some other way.
Absolutely agree. My coworker built a business app that sold very well for $120, until the company that provides the API crushed it with their own $10 app (bummer).
Oh yeah, DOS sucked. I remember Xenix and MKS and some other unixy toolkit. Oh yeah also Coherent. I ran a shell called Gulam on an Atari, and it was nice. Fake pipes were better than no pipes :)

Did all the processes run in the same address space on the Amiga??
That we prioritize jobs?

The DOD is a jobs program, with a side benefit of being a military. But mainly it's a jobs program that also does basic research and engineering.
Claiming that taxes are evil or good is hardly HN material. You are entitled to your opinion but please focus on factual matters, not just opinion pieces. I am sure we all have ours.
I'm interested! Sending an email your way!
But the savings is much, much more. And the less federal government, the better (especially in these days).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Note

Fascinating stuff.

Without going into the details... you know that the Federal Reserve doesn't pay the bills, right? The Treasury does. And when the Treasury pays the bills, it doesn't really have much to do with the Fed buying bonds on the open market. The Treasury pays bills based on interest on national debt, stuff like social security and spending approved by congress. For some reason, congress implemented laws which mean that they have to give permission to the Treasury to pay the bills that congress itself voted into the budget.

My point is that this whole debacle doesn't really have to do much with the Fed, and the Treasury is just following the orders of congress.

*Edit:
Ah, I see from stalking your profile that you are not American. Well I can see why you'd be confused - shit's confusing. I don't think even most US citizens understand how it works.
It's infuriating that a faction of Tea Partiers is causing such instability

Why is growth not considered a form of instability? Just curious, last time I looked risk and volatility were agnostic to direction.
You can change who's in office, but it's basically impossible at this point to change the offices themselves. Committees and subcommittees, lobbies, corporations, military interests and other support systems are so entrenched that it literally doesn't matter who you put in power, the same problems will exist.

Anyway, Congress isn't supposed to get along. If everyone agreed all the time we would be able to reduce the system to a single person who made all the decisions. The point to a representative democracy is that the representatives represent different interests. Even the idea of having a vote presupposes conflict.
From SLC? How do I not know you?
I guess I was thinking of the NGen compiler. My (very vague) memory is that NGen is run at installation time. Is this run after NGen, or instead of it?
which will never happen in the current environment where half the states would be happier destroying the country than seeing the scary black man in office for one more day

OK, I'm not thrilled that this article isn't [dead] already, but regardless: This is not reddit and absurdities like that comment do not contribute to the discussion.
Over a sufficiently long term (and assuming that the government is actually less efficient than the market). In the short term, one of the biggest employer and consumer is shutting down for an undefined period of time. That causes real short term economic hardship.
As an outsider, it is definitely seen as "entertaining", while also not really being cared about much. Just another one of those "oh America, you're so silly" moments really.
Yeah I'm sure private policing would work great.
Notably absent from your list is http://grepcode.com -- which IMO has one of the best interfaces around, with compiled code docs and some java-centric implementation and invocation links for java code they index.
They don't hand out money everyday to the same people.

And it is not stupid theater. It is our government NOT at work. We may temporarily recover some of our debt. In fact, if they keep this going for an extended period of time, it might actually help- a lot. Our country has become much too dependent on our government, and now that the two political parties can't get along, there may actually be room for another socially moderate, somewhat fiscally-conservative, deficit hawk, constitutionalist, semi-libertarian party with common sense to come along and bring the country together. Unfortunately, it hasn't organized yet (and no, it isn't the Libertarian party- not with its current leaders- and even with better leadership, Libertarians are incapable of getting the debt under control because they won't allow raising taxes to cover for past debt).
ALittle Chrome extension bookmarks video progress & webpage scroll position
I would welcome elections now. If we had elections now the Democrats would be tarred, feathered and ridden out of Washington on a rail.
1. Government is less efficient than a privately owned, profit-seeking company--at least in most cases. If a business is inefficient, an efficient competitor will wipe them out. The same cause and effect doesn't exist for governments, except in the most extreme cases (revolution).

2. Markets that state and local governments dominate are large. Do you really think Waste Management would hesitate to take new markets that were previously controlled via government contract? Or that private prisons wouldn't purchase and run ones that were previously state-controlled? Or that power and water companies wouldn't realize the incredible opportunity to expand into new areas that were previously monopolized through government interference?
Oregonian here. Although the incidence of meth labs here in Southern Oregon has certainly dropped, which is a good thing, I doubt the number of meth users has changed much if at all. The meth is now coming from Mexico, much higher quality, and a straight shot up I5.
This is retarded. There's just no other word to describe the mental deficiency big enough to render something as large, complex, and valueable as government as uniformly "good" or "bad", or as something that can intelligently be described in terms of "less" and "more" as though it were a basic commodity.

On a more specific note, you have absolutly no idea what's actually happening here. I mean, I don't even know where to begin with how uninformed you are. For what it's worth, this isn't about budgeting for future expenses. This is about whether we honor the bills for expenses that were properly budgeted and legally made. The idea is that defaulting on those expenses will cause the US serious financial pain (which it will). The threat of that pain is being used to extort concessions that failed to win support in the last election. In essence, a distinct minority is using terrorist tactics to accomplish goals both opposed and formally rejected by the majority.

The problem, by the way, isn't that you're totally tuned out. It's that you don't see the problem with being totally tuned out and still having an opinion anyway. There's nothing wrong with saying "I don't know what's going on so I don't know what to think." But knowing not, and knowing not that you know not is the mark of an idiot. Please, spare us.
>How might I pursue a career in embedded software? I think the real-time nature of game programming would be a nice complement to real-time embedded software development. Should I pursue both?

You should contact some of the research professors at your institution and see what's going on at the school in those fields. Look up the robotics/AI professor and go knock on his door. Ask him what he's working on and if he needs any undergrad programming help. Usually these professors will be glad to take on a student to a team if there's room at all.

Of course you'll likely need some decent to good C/C++ skills, and arm/x64/x86 Assembly may help too.
Claiming that taxes are evil or good is hardly HN material.

There was no such claim. Irony is not logic. Have the thought police out-lawed it on HN?
Does taking input from the outside (e.g. internet) change this?
GovOS: a software technology platform for government operations
Imagine a software platform that executes and handles all government operations from policy, roles, voting, records, procedures, etc... and communicates automatically with its citizens. Maybe a way to think about this is facebook for government.

Thoughts?

If you have any insightful points of view please add an answer on quora here: http://www.quora.com/What-would-it-take-to-make-the-running-of-a-government-or-government-operations-mostly-a-software-technology-platform-Think-an-open-source-GovOS
How does that compare to how much it costs per day to be open?
Pretty sure they would consider that an essential service that won't be shut down.
That's very true. The content they're collecting in their databases (e.g., what URLs were accessed by person X) would be the actual data. The metadata is data about that data, e.g., who authorized its collection, or what other agencies it was shared with, or the schema that describes the database fields.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata
Alec Baldwin on Selling
If what the state government is doing is useful and wanted, then the state should tax more and the federal government should tax less. This is yet another inefficiency of federal government to act as a middleman.
Not necessary, but it helps. Being aware of your surroundings does generally help, not obviously burdened by bags, etc.
You do realize that America is a major player in the global economy. If we go down, we are taking everyone with us.
The surprising effects of a government shutdown you may not know about
This needs serious backing as evidence seems to show the opposite. For instance, if we pick firefighting as an example what is there evidence that private firefighting is a good idea? In recent history this kind of thinking have led to disasters like in Tennessee:

- http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/t/no-pay-no-spray-firefighters-let-home-burn/#.UkpUgGSidTp

and during the 1800s private firefighting was a true disaster for homeowners:

- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tina-dupuy/firefighting-in-the-1800s_b_247936.html

Private companies are great for a lot of things, but I am not sure that I would trust someone that might decide to prioritize a quick short-term profit over a long-term maintenance goal to provide all essential city services (fire, police, sewer, roads, etc).
I know, right? Screw those moochers at the Centers for Disease Control. Big gummint out of…uh, influenza!
The broken window fallacy is only applicable in an economic environment where there is sufficient labor demand and insufficient product supply. America produces more than enough goods for everyone, but there aren't enough jobs.

Besides, which services do you believe are "unwanted?" I agree there are many unnecessary "paper pushers" and managers, but the shutdown affects entire departments. One can't simply stop paying the redundant middle managers, and continue paying prison guards and air traffic controllers.
Please don't compare insurance companies to casinos. In casinos the odds are completely computable and known beforehand to everyone. Not so with insurance which deals with real life.
All the other jobs being furloughed are also jobs. Why not prioritize them instead?

It seems crazy to say, "yeah, those people we hired because we actually want them to work should go unpaid first, and the people we hired just as a jobs program should be kept hell or high water."

Edit: s/laid off/go unpaid
Well you get zero value for the $50 Million, so that is kind of irrelevant.

Also, all these short term extensions prevents each part of the government from buying what it needs to operate in bulk, they now have to pay top dollar for small amounts.

So super-dooper expensive. But that might be the plan to jack up the cost and say "look how expensive!"
Can anyone please, explain briefly what are the downsides and practical problems that ACA will cause?
Because you need both raster and vector images. You can't just ignore all pixel based images.
This is basically argumentation by story. You told one of many possible stories as if it was obviously and indisputably true. You provided no support for it. What about all the other plausible stories that you ignored?

What if these "stabilizers" (i.e. money creation) are doing more harm than good, or even causing the business cycle? What if social safety hammocks decrease growth? What if welfare provided by prudent local governments through savings, or even private means, are sufficient? What if there are a ton of differences between the Europe and America other than the Federal Reserve?
Icon fonts are a horrible hack that's only in use because SVG support in browsers has frankly been terrible so far. Plus, you can only use them for single-color shapes.
> Like the part where the IRS stops.

There, fixed that for you.
Glad someone sees and appreciates all the effort we put in :)

It is indeed a bit of an iceberg, in that there's a ton of stuff under the hood that users don't initially see. We've done a couple of talks on the tech - you can check them out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmyDJnEza6A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8KGguflMCc
You are calling the XBox One a failure before it has even launched, which reminds me fondly of everyone who called the 360 a failure before it had even launched.
I have a site that I started about 6 months ago that gets about 30-50 uniques a day, and Im generating about $15 per month.
Attribution modeling is an incredibly difficult problem, yes. Anyone who can come up with a really good way to measure this kind of stuff is going to make bank.

I agree that from a lot of perspectives the way people talk about branding campaigns looks real.... iffy, for lack of a better term. Everyone knows that it somehow works, but nobody's exactly sure how yet. Nobody can really measure the impact yet even.
I think it is the Nokia Lumia 1020/EOS, which I've heard is more of a sham than marketing would lead you to believe. I have to admit when I've seen the commercials, I wanted one also.
Very nice!! I intend to implement this on our Jenkins instance this week.
You definately don't want that all the people with such high access to basically everything digital in the world (including your credit cards and all your banks accounts, to say the least) suddently feel unsafe about getting their salary.
Whoops, that's what I meant to say. Good catch!
How Dave Eggers gets Silicon Valley wrong
Jenkins and many other tools are designed by developers, there needs to be a word for that... we just call it "developer design" - functional but ugly.
1 trillion in red ink
Quite true. I was involved into a project (ASP.NET/64bits) where the JIT compile times on startup seemed like I was compiling C++ code instead. :(
Risk is very explicitly directional. E.g. Wikipedia has it as:

> Risk is the potential of loss (an undesirable outcome, however not necessarily so) resulting from a given action, activity and/or inaction

When was the last time you checked?
"rather than get fed a bunch of ideologically loaded bullshit by various news outfits.

Here's reality:

<a bunch of ideological bullshit>"

Take your astroturf back to Fox News.
I don't know if you're familiar with the "Black Mirror" series. They're very hard hitting commentaries on our modern societies. One of the episodes (the first one of the second season) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes#S... is about such a situation where a person is "brought back to life" using the "image" they've left on social media sites as well as on private digital archives (personal photos etc.). It's not too far from reality which makes it all the more disturbing. I highly recommend it.
"more of a sham than marketing would lead you to believe"

In what sense? Some very reliable reviewers (e.g. Brian Klug) say the camera truly is incredible...
Instability is volatility (sigma). check it out.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100630193942AA...
And Dell, Xbox, Bing, Nasdaq, Chase, and on and on. SO is a great site but it's neither the largest nor the coast complex.
To be an hyperlinked documents, nothing else.
NYC plans free public WiFi expansion in all five boroughs by December 2013
State politicians and voters in state elections, particularly in states that are net beneficiaries of the federal contributions, are sure to like the idea.
>There's something happening in the world and you can't wish it away.

But sometimes, it's not your responsibility to fix. I mean, at some point, you have to let the Bangladeshis fix Bangladesh, the Somalis fix Somalia, the Afghans fix Afghanistan and the Iraqis fix Iraq. I don't think it's up to America to go in and intervene where-ever we see Western values being violated. Not only do we not have the resources to do that, but, in many cases, we don't even have the moral authority to intervene. A lot of the time the reason the country is as screwed up as it is, is because we, the West, screwed it up. I mean, all these countries are the way they are because of Western interventions. It was the West that drew the borders of Pakistan and East Pakistan. It was the West that drew the borders of Afghanistan and tried to impose its vision of civilization on a locale that simply does not want such a thing. It was the West that drew the borders of Iraq, and it was the West who kept Saddam Hussein in power, as a balance against the revolutionaries in Iran (which itself was another creation of the West). And now you're saying that the West has an obligation to go in and fix these places? Please. The world would be grateful if Europe and America intervened less, not more.