skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't see why this crisis is so different from other depressions in last 20 years. It's sad that it happens, but anyway it's better than what other (non capitalistic) systems have to offer.

Also - nobody in his right mind would propose system with no rules at all. It's not what capitalism is about. Capitalism just says - rules should be clear, the same for everybody and the fewer rules we have, the better. But some are neccesary.

I live in Poland, and here this crisis looks much better than last two (I mean - we have now below 13% unemployment, and for most of last 20 years it was sth like 17%).

I think it's because our National Bank was always very strict when it comes to controlling commercial Banks market. I don't see controlling banks as violation of capitalism - it's more like Banks are ugly hack on capitalism to make profits bigger (making money from nothing:). And when you use ugly hacks, sometimes there are bugs.

PS. it's interesting, if banks (I mean modern style banks - lending money they don't have) are good for society in the long term?
"Anyone can do anything without these drugs, and I'm speaking from experience."

No, you're not. You haven't been everyone, you haven't done everything, not everyone has done everything, and even if they had you wouldn't have been able to observe them closely.
wtf why the hell did people vote my shit down. cyberattacks from china is the new threat in future wars and the pentagon needs talented americans to prepare and combat it. Its an inconveinent truth.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/th...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chinas-cybe...
This is a fantastically interesting post. Too bad it will probably be killed because it's about illegal drugs.
My guess is that you've never been in the situation to do this. Coming up with good problems, unambiguously stated, that address the points you wish to address and not the ones you wish to skip, is very difficult. Especially at the undergrad level, where you have to be careful because the base of knowledge is so small (or, at least you have to assume it is).

If the professor has to constantly come up with brand new problems, the students are forever seeing rough drafts of unvetted exams.

Here's a very simple example of a failure I had that illustrates the kinds of things that can unexpectedly go wrong: "what is the angular speed of the second hand of a clock?"

After struggling for a long while with this question, a very bright Asian student finally asked, me: "I see three hands on the clock: obviously they are the first hand, the second hand, and the third hand. Can you please tell me which one you are calling the second hand?"

At the graduate level it may be easier (I've never written a graduate exam) because, fuck 'em, they're grad students, let them deal with it.
... by bundling its browser software in with its operating system.

I still don't understand why this is wrong. It's their os, let them do whatever they want with it. There are other operating systems around. They don't need to use Windows.
Strong Buy on Ian Toll’s Six Frigates
Coffee is still a drug.
The gender differences on Etsy are far too large to explain in terms of some kind of innate psychological difference, such as a difference in expertise at evaluating economic options; the only such large gender differences that have been found are in masturbation and physical strength. You have to go to network effects or explicit messaging about gender.

My hypothesis: women are on Etsy because women go where there are already women. Men mostly aren't because men go where there are already men.
> It makes as feel as though the casual absolute control we have over them is slipping

http://groups.google.com/group/talk.rape/msg/2db5c83cb619b1b...
I use LUKS, and it doesn't appear to affect performance much. During heavy disk activity, the crypto threads do use some CPU, but it is not noticeably slow, even on my eeepc.
> The justification for banning possession of child pornography was that you could draw a straight line from the images to an act of exploitation

This was always transparently moronic. It has never been illegal to possess a picture of a murder, no matter how brutal.
I use a lot of different means for managing my contacts. They range from paper to Google Contacts to Social Networks to my Cellphone. What I would desire is a solution to automatically sync my contacts seamlessly (except for paper probably, but there it would be nice to have an easy way of getting them into all my other means of managing contacts.
You know, if you're in the US and you need medical care, there are other options besides trying to use the US medical system. Some of them are even more reliable than trying to diagnose your own diseases using your own microscope (and safer than trying to treat your own diseases).

Mexico has excellent health care for "rich people", where "rich" has a lower bar to entry than in the US. If you talk to Mexican-Americans, you will hear horror stories about how they had to go on a trip to Juarez or Tijuana to get proper treatment when the US system failed them — sometimes not soon enough. Costa Rica has lots of medical tourism. Argentina is world-famous for its medical care; we recently had a woman from New Zealand who stayed with us (via couchsurfing.com) while she got a bunch of dental work here. Thailand is becoming popular too. I don't know about Canada, but the care we got in the ER there was similar to what we would have gotten in the US (it was just a dislocated shoulder) but cost 10% as much.
My memory is pretty hazy, but wasnt it something to do with the fact they seperately charged for ie (while netscape was also non free).
My IP have been banned from Wikipedia when I made a Tor node to help, seems someone used Tor to vandalize a lot of articles and my IP got used for access. I had to ask my ISP to change my IP, it was easier this way than asking some admins at Wikipedia, they were not very helpful.
Smart-phone wars
I've heard it, and I personally use OpenBSD much more than I use Linux. There's a whole different discussion to be had about the differences between the BSD and Linux models, and why Linux has soared and the BSDs have not. At any rate, I suspect that, despite recent fireworks on the OpenBSD mailing lists, Stallman and Theo de Raadt agree much more fundamentally about the threat posed by patents and licensing than, say, Stallman and Torvalds.
I did not mean to suggest that the only reason for sleep was saving energy. But, the duration of sleep relates to the option to sleep that long while getting enough food, and not being eaten.

The human body saves a lot more energy than one frankfurter bun though sleep by simply not moving all that much. Clearly the brain and body are doing something useful while you sleep, but if it needs to do that stuff and walk around / be awake at the same time it would use even more energy.

Bats, sleep 18-20 hours per day vs. giraffes which sleep 3-4 hours per day etc.

PS: REM sleep is another issue, but the differences in human sleep cycles suggest that sleeping less is not the only goal.
If IE is bundled with the OS, their de facto monopoly in the OS market reduces innovation, competition and customer choice in the _browser_ market.
Using google wave, no less!
I'd be willing to sponsor this.
Netscape's ftp site was always handy, can't seem to find any ftp sites for any browsers now.
There is bound to be some wrangling with the returned value if the case of "something was returned" needs different treatment from "nothing was returned" in the program's design.

However, I agree that

match perform_foo() with
| Some x -> do_something_with x
| None -> do_without

looks a lot less messy than

JOption<Bar> baropt = performFoo();
if(baropt.isNonempty()) {
Bar bar = baropt.getValue();
doSomethingWith(bar);
}
else {
doWithout();
}

There's just something deeply unsatisfying with a statically typed language that requires so much legalese and boilerplate as Java while still permitting surprising runtime errors in virtually every executable line of the program. Abandoning static types is one approach to the dilemma, trying to plug hole by hole is another.
I'm usually anti-Microsoft, but it's ridiculous that Internet Explorer was a problem to the EU to start with.

Why not unbundle Explorer? Why not unbundle the control panel? Isn't it unfair that Notepad is included? What about Calculator.. surely that's hurting Mathematica? (Before you think I'm going over the top here, IE compared to Firefox is like Calculator vs Mathematica IMHO..) These EU commissions are run by dim-witted politicos who fail to understand any of the realities of technology or business.
what's lacking in firebug lite is you cannot live-edit code. That's what I use firebug for primarily.
Does the bundling of Command Prompt reduce innovation and competition in the command line client market? Does Windows Explorer reduce innovation and competition in the file browser market?
Why would anyone want to use this?

FOr me it's 2009 and most the things I want digitally are available online legally to enjoy (music, tv shows, some movies). The only reason you would use this is so you can feel totally safe downloading things you would have otherwise had to pay for. Why do you need to feel safe are you worried about getting caught? Maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place!

I'm reformed as I stole, downloaded and horded everything via edonkey and bit torrent. Reformed after running my own startup and now having access to most things i want to enjoy freely and legally online to stream.
> "Do you really think that the stability, low cost and quality of Open Source software is independent of the Free Software ideology?"

Well, I do. Open Source is basically just Economics.

An initial release of source code happens because there's often no (more) alternative usage for it. From a product point of view, it's often unfinished. Turning it into something that could have an alternative use -- such as being sold as Closed Source Software, for example -- usually requires additional efforts; additional investments of time and money. Another reason for releasing the source code is the "death" of former Closed Source Software: Either it was killed by competition or because people's wants and needs changed. No or little future profit is to be expected.

In both cases holds: The opportunity costs of releasing the source code are low or even zero. One looses nothing by releasing the source code. If you'd loose something, you simply wouldn't release it. And every Open Source advocate is fine with that.

As for contributing to Open Source: It simply pays. If a developer is sufficiently annoyed by a missing feature or a bug to justify make a patch, it will happen. It's pure self-interest. It's economic behaviour.

The next stage is the more important one: Why send the patch upstream? That's simply, again. First, the opportunity costs of sending the patch is zero, again. The developer couldn't use the code of the patch for anything else. Second, sending the patch upstream, will save him effort. If he (or she) wouldn't send the patch, that's basically a fork so he or she would have to waste his time solving conflicts, etc. Sending the patch upstream is, in most cases, pure self-interest. It's economic behaviour.

Accepting a patch is usually also rational, for it improves the source code for the original developer.

In other words: each stage of releasing initial source code, making patches that fixes bugs and improves the functionality, and accepting these, is entirely self-interest and economic behaviour.

No need for any ideology.

Your argument that Open Source wouldn't exists without Richard Stallman, is basically useless: How could we know whether it wouldn't? It's an empirical question that cannot be tested with an experiment.

However, we can make some analogies: Solutions are often invented when problems exists. In nature, the eye was invented several times independently because it helped the creatures to survive more often.

So, it seems save to say: Without Stallman, something like Open Source would have been invented by others. In fact, Project Gutenberg -- free distribution of classic texts -- was invented in 1971, already. The first BSD "distribution" was assembled in 1977. Several others released source code without ever having heard about Stallman and Free Software, before.

Again, no need for any ideology.
> It's stupid to think your brain needs an external stimulus to be creative.

Your brain as well as your entire organism needs external stimulus to function. Food, coffee, oxygen, water. Many of these things affect your brain in obvious and noticable ways: coffee, oxygen. So what's the fundamental difference between substances that are legal and those that governments decided would be too luxury for the people to have freely available?

> I pity those that feel you need drugs to accomplish, because that's just not true.

I pity those who are not questioning the established propagandistic axioms. If you lived in the 15th century you'd never question the theory that the world is flat.

(Minor edits)
There are several roads leading to rome, there is no need to use the highway.
A worrying argument: what happens when her images make their way onto the CP networks and some crazy person decides he is madly in love and tracks her down (yes, this does happen).

If nothing else she is likely yo be inundated with lewd emails/messages/IM.

It wont be pleasant - but, then, in this case perhaps it is a life lesson she needs.....
Are all the histograms based on popularity, diggs, upvotes, etc? The thumbnails are too tiny to make out and they link to the site, not a larger picture.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand what it's a histogram of.
That does require suspicion though. So I guess the less people know of this method, the better.
First look: Microsoft Silverlight 3 challenges Adobe AIR
"your only goal should be" or "I want you to"?

Perhaps they just want to be able to program in a decent statically-typed language with a GC and a JIT compiler and Gtk bindings?
It would be nice if there was a dialog that lists a number of browsers that can be downloaded and installed automatically.
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/
It is a cost. Many IT people/developers like to think otherwise but to do so is truly delusional and can be a roadblock to career advancement.
I think everything we've put out there up till now is too small to survive reentry.
A histogram of votes/diggs/etc where each story title is a bar in the histogram. I didn't get it at first but if you look at the delicious pic you can see clearly how it works with the tags sidebar.
The most noteworthy thing about this (misguided) post is that the blogger's professor responded, thoroughly (http://blog.thetonk.com/archives/dont-be-lazy-dont-use-eval#...) and the blogger gracefully backed down("I was proven wrong. It happens.")
Ezmedicalalert.com - Medical Alert Systems Keeping Seniors Safe.
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That could be argued. It's a shades of grey thing. Some things stand out as bundled more than others - especially those that are obviously not part of an OS, for which a market exists etc.
The Internet is incomplete, says Vinton Cerf (needs more cowbell)
What If Batman's Villains Considered Economic Theory?
Minor thing - it seems to have messed up the comment threading. Check it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hitesh/3618708763/

edit: here it is with 4 comments. check out the whacked-out indentation of the comments -- the nesting is all off:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hitesh/3618714801/
Can't this be handled by the language itself, by default?

Of course; most sane languages require an explicit annotation to say that an object can be null. If it's not that type, there is simply no way to create an object that is null.

(Haskell is an example of a langauge like this; no objects can be null. Maybe and Either build on top of this system to provide a well-defined approximation of null.)
In C#4.0, apparently you can declare JOption as

interface NOption<out T> { ... }

such that NOption<Mysub> is a subtype of NOption<Mysuper>. Still messy to read, though, and C# has ?-types anyway.
The problem steams from the fact that when Microsoft first starting bundling IE with the Windows, they had a monopoly on the OS market. The used their monopoly to dominate the Browser market and this is what got them into trouble. Apple does not have this problem because they only have a small fraction of the overall market.

Although in this point in time, I think the browser market has become competitive enough that people know of other choices and will make the effort to install them. A most people have come to expect that IE will be on the computer, and would be more annoyed if it did not, unless it came preinstalled with their browser of choice.
25 reasons users STOP using your site/product
Spreadshirt CEO Jana Eggers on tech & fashion, and entrepreneurship in Germany
This kits looks biased towards the "selection list" UI metaphor similar to how iTunes works. It doesn't seem useful for any apps that would involve any degree of graphics or visualization. (And of course, games are right out.)

In other words: boring.
What do you suggest as a replacement for nullable fields?
Do you speak from experience? I'd be fairly hesitant dealing with anyone who came from finance who I didn't have a pre-existing relationship with, just because the proportion of sharks is much, much higher there, and their political instincts and grasp of the relevant corporate structures are likely to be so much better than yours. They'll be able to screw you over if they decide to, and they're a lot more likely to.
Is the EC unhappy with the lack of consumer choice, or are they unhappy with the course consumer choice has taken?

Consumers WANT to have applications bundled with their OS. In the minds of the average computer user, there is no difference between operating system and set of pre installed applications.
The Wrong Level of Abstraction
Cute idea - no content.
Ah, sorry! Such an oversight! (You get so involved in a project you think it's all natural...)

The histograms are:

For Reddit, they are of a headline's votes, of a headline's number of comments, and of a comment's votes.

For Delicious, they are of the numbers of users that have bookmarked a link, or applied a tag.

For Digg, of a headline's diggs, of a headline's number of comments, and of a comment's diggs.

For Hacker News, of a headline's upvotes, of a headline's number of comments, and of a comment's upvotes.

For StackOverflow, of a question's views, of an answer's votes, of the number of users that have applied a tag, of a user's reputation score.

It's hopefully all obvious once you install the script.

Adding larger versions of the screenshots in a sec..
I lead a dev team in the real world, using mono for all our work, and I don't need them to do any such thing. Your definition of the "ONLY" goal for them is utter claptrap and certainly not a definition of what the "real world needs".

Stop confusing your desires ("Simply make my C# code work there, and I'll be happy") with the only sane direction for them to go.

I certainly wouldn't thank them for slavishly copying .net 1.1 or any such thing. If you want that so badly, feel free to submit patches, I'm sure they'll gladly accept.
They are somewhat off indeed. This ironically only seems to happen in this particular comment thread. I'll look into it right away, sorry and thanks for the bug report!
While the number does represent "paper" wealth, it is a fair measure of purchasing potential. For example if you have $1m in stocks, at that point in time you can sell the stocks and buy $1m worth of goods. If that number drops to $500k then you only have the ability to purchase that value.
I'm curious if Europe will enforce the same policies on Apple - eg, ensuring that safari does not come pre-installed on snow leopard.

If not, blatant double standards given Apple's market share is increasing.

EDIT - another thought, since access to internet via phones is becoming more widespread, will the EU start imposing the same policies on mobile phone manufacturers...

EDIT #2 - Personally I think if the EU wants to force competition in the browser market, they should ensure that users get a choice of browsers with the pre-installed OS, otherwise with the browser not being included is potentially stumping the growth of internet availability to people who otherwise wouldn't have it.

Just to be clear, I'm not anti-Apple, I just dislike silly rulings that in themselves are anti-competitive, given they only apply to one company.
I was surprised to not see Delicious in the list, since they're part of Yahoo now.
You are ridiculous to think that, if you truly think that from your limited experience you can do anything without the aid of anything, and to think that your life experience is applicable to anyone else, is naive at best.
Presumably they'd use whatever browser was installed by the OEM.
oh not a problem. seems to be ok on digg & reddit so far and now that I get it, its kinda nice to have ..
We agree that the open source ecosystem is incentive-driven - most actual code contributions are made due to simple economic incentives (though not nearly as simple as you make out, but that's a whole different discussion). So, approaching things from this angle, I would say that although most people are simple rational actors who contribute code because they stand to benefit directly, someone has to take a larger view, and try to make sure that impediments that gum up the free operation of this incentive system are removed. The intellectual property trap is just such an impediment, and the people who bother to take the long-term view are the ideologues.

I say again: we need both. I for one hope that the argument between ideologues and pragmatists is never decisively settled in either's favour.
weshould.com is a pretty promising name. I'd squat that for decades, considering but never implementing the many possibilities.
Inside the Python GIL
WizeHive Shaping Up To Become A Powerful Collaboration Tool (ca98am79's startup)
That seems like a reasonable thing to want to do, and a worthy reason to split off a fork. It's certainly not worth hijacking as big or important a project as Mono to do so.

Mono needs to get a direction and follow it. At the moment, they're heading in a bunch of directions at once. If they don't want to be "A .NET Runtime That Works Anywhere", then they should say as much and stand aside so that somebody else can do it.
New iPhone App Lets You Write in Thin Air
They could have already removed it if they saw the need. I hgonestly don't see how this will affect anyone but users of boxed copies of Windows. Not only will they not have IE, but they will also have difficulty in downloading Firefox et al.
it does happen in others too I notice
And for further information: http://jessenoller.com/2009/02/01/python-threads-and-the-glo...

Ultimately, while the implementation of the GIL is inefficient, and does harm you in the case of processor-bound computation, they're still useful in many cases where you're dealing with I/O (file, and socket).

Even as the multiprocessing maintainer, I'd like to see a more robust threading model within python - unladen swallow (http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/) may be able to offer us a world without a GIL soon(ish), but even barring that, getting some work done on improving what we have today would be nice.