skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One day, when I have Karma.
And they can sell what they call the "header" of your credit report without regulation (such as the FCRA). This info includes your name, address, ssn and dob. Or at least it did when I bought it in the 90's to build a service to find dead-beat dads. I've heard they are more restrictive on the SSN, but I also would bet that's the #1 data element for the ID thefters.
Answered my own question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Ma...
The main problem with your system is that you can't produce any pre-tax vs post-tax curve that you like (as you can with progressive income tax). It has to be a straight line. Now I'm not sure if this is really such a bad thing, but it is important to think about what the implications are.
I find the body text color on his site too light for comfort. You don't have to go #000, but #333 would've made it a lot more legible.

Not everybody uses IPS panels with glossy coating.
One motivation for such taxation would be precisely to encourage people to spend money closer to the time it is earned.
Interesting, what sector/job are you in?
Investigate Jimmy Kimmel Kid's Table Government Shutdown Show on ABC Network
I'm surprised that Wikipedia hasn't found a way to integrate and regulate paid PR people. It's naive to think they're going to go away just because it'd be better if they did. Why not work with them instead?

PR people could publicly register themselves as such and, in exchange for extra scrutiny, have a chance to prove themselves as ethical and willing to follow the rules. These people would then build a reputation as very valuable "white hats", willing to help people and companies with their Wikipedia page without compromising the integrity of the encyclopedia.

They wouldn't be able to guarantee "we'll make sure you look good on Wikipedia", but then nobody can really guarantee that anyway. Instead, they could offer to ensure the page is as unbiased as possible, help protect it from vandalism, and generally improve its quality and detail.

This could lead to a large and very motivated base of editors with a significant personal and financial incentive to do the right thing (or lose their white hat status) and sabotage the financial incentives that currently motivate the black hat firms.
Dev Seed did the user-information/knowledge-base component, which has worked fine. They didn't work on the healthcare exchange, which is what has been broken.
Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site
Our MVP was written in Ruby.
I agree, but if you reach that point isn't that one of those good problems to have?
The problem is this. Most bods either hammering out PHP or deploying popular PHP apps such as WordPress, Magento or Drupal are deploying to shared hosters.

Until such time the Rails/DJango/Flask/Sinatra/Node/etc folks come up with a compelling shared hosting story for the likes of 1&1, Fasthosts, GoDaddy etc then PHP will continue to be hugely popular. Like it or not PHP has virtually no friction, technically or cost-wise, when building and deploying your first apps. Add to that we now have some nice dev tools such as PHP Storm and VS.PHP which grease the wheels of PHP somewhat more.

Yes I know there's the Herokus of the world out there, but your average mort agency developer has never heard of these things, or possibly may not have the skills.

Trust me, I work for a webhoster, and despite asking myself the same questions, I do understand firsthand why PHP is hugely popular, despite my own misgivings about the language.
Better design tip: Never use 'never'.
This Dilbert comic is 100% apt today:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-10-14/
So I guess the sign to look out for is Samsung licensing the Amazon APIs?
I didn't even say 'bad,' I said 'more meh.' Furthermore, I didn't say that liking go makes you hate other languages, or that you should hate go if you like other languages...
Samsung devices ship with two versions, remember that while Samsung can't opt out of the Google apps, they're free to remove any AOSP app they'd like.

In fact, I've had AOSP apps disappear from my Cyanogen Mod ROM when I installed gapps, although I don't know if that was due to being overwritten or just part of the install script.
It's entirely within our technological grasp to automatically grade high school English papers, but a big part of paper writing in high school (in theory) is getting feedback and improving as a writer and thinker. Getting accurate, clear and detailed feedback on your writing from an autograder seems like it would be extraordinarily difficult.

Disclaimer: my own high school had a phenomenal English department. Do many teachers simply plop a score at the top?
> It's not evil, it's just incompetent and embarrassing.

And anyone who has worked in the industry over a long period of time will know that for big projects this closer to the norm than the exception.

I've personally worked on one massive banking project in the 90s that turned into a billion (in today’s terms) dollar right-off and in that time I read of many other such disasters.
hello there fellow Indonesian...
I don't doubt that this counts as a plus in some people's books. However in my opinion it is a very bad motivation. Even Keynes never advocated permanently stimulating consumption (vs saving), he only wanted to do this during recessions. I've never heard an economically sound reason for wanting to shift people's preferences from saving to consumption in ordinary times.
Love, love love this post. Your wrap up is the kicker - on the other side of the screen is a human being. Recognize it, respect it and do the kinds of things you'd do for someone you met in person who was giving your business the time of day. This is an inspirational post, thanks so much for sharing it :)
My wife is a high school teacher.

She taught full time for 3 years, and burnt herself out with 70 hour weeks of planning, marking, parental communication, and miscellaneous bureaucracy.

Now she's working as an on-call substitute, working 8:30-3 whichever days she wants, and (get this) making more money than she was teaching full time.
Sure. That makes perfect sense to me - Google apps and services aren't open source in spirit or practice. If I wanted a pure open-source mobile OS of my own, I wouldn't want any of Google's apps or services tainting it; if I did, Google would evaluate that option on their own, as they should.
I didn't say you shouldn't prefer it, just that it's not as big a deal.
Don't be fatuous. If you wrote all of the code, you should be able to tell exactly what it does. If there's some code you're calling that was written by someone else, you have to trust it to do the right thing. Exceptions versus return codes doesn't change that fact.

People usually don't check the return code of fmt.Printf because they simply don't care. Most of the time, you're just logging to a terminal, which basically never fails. And if logging did fail, you wouldn't want to abort the program because of it.

The only time you might want to check the return value of printf is if you're writing a simple utility designed to transform something passed on stdin to something on stdout.
> He's extremely clever, a hacker, and a genius in certain areas (the GPL is such an amazing hack) but at the same time keeps banging his head against the wall using failed strategies instead of trying to hack his way to a solution. When was the last time you heard about something RMS did in the way he presented his ideas to be more receptive to others and thought "hey, that is pretty clever and a nice hack." I certainly can't think of anything, but he's clearly capable of doing it.

I think he chooses not to change his way of presenting it because he's presenting a philosophy, rather than simply trying to convince people to agree with him. I used to think he was a nut, the more time that passes, the more I realize just how perceptive and correct RMS has been about a great many things...
As a theoretical matter, I'm afraid that you are incorrect.

There are essentially zero theoretical arguments that support taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income and many economists have found that a 0% tax on capital gains is the least distortionary. (see the Chamley-Judd Result).
Percentage of market share is not a clear indication of monopoly. From what I could find, 50% is typically the bare minimum to warrant consideration, and 70 - 75% will get more serious scrutiny. Also, it differs from country to country. In the UK, Tesco was investigated even though it had a market share of only 30%.

I also recall reading one of the EU's regulators (was it Joaquin Almunia?) say that (paraphrasing) "we start sniffing around when any one party gets a market share north of 60%." Unfortunately, I cannot find that article.
Announcing Enyo 2.3.0-pre.10
I interviewed for Lab 126 (like everyone else on the internet). I was really excited about the prospect but the guy giving the interview had an attitude problem and was completely uninterested in the process.

He insisted on grilling me on a metaphor in my personal statement as if it were literally true. I honestly don't know if he was trying to piss me off, or was (slightly) autistic and didn't understand metaphors. Once I'd gotten him off that, I mentioned I had a friend who worked at Lab 126, which he was also completely uninterested in. When your interviewer isn't interested in the fact that someone you worked with for 5 years works down the hallway from him? You're not getting that job. It was pretty clear a decision had been made against me before the interview ever took place and Amazon was just wasting my time.

Left a bad taste in my mouth.
I don't understand. How would you characterize these people? You are quick to defend them and criticize my position yet offer nothing in the way of understanding how society should view them. Good folk who should be allowed to play with their toys at the playground where your kids play?
In all honesty, it's probably not a moral thing.

The truth is 'hack' as a phrase is becoming overly used, and taking value away from the actual terminology he is trying to advocate, a terminology that is associated to cleverness.

Not everything can be clever. At some point the usage of the phrase turns into marketing hype as a way for someone to gain the attention of a particuliar group.

"A xxx for hackers'
"how I hacked xxx"

It's really just a way to grab people who self identify with that word, they don't really mean those pitch lines. It's not FOR hackers, it's TARGETTED at "hackers".

Not every single accomplishment of rms' is a hack. That ambiguity is exactly what is killing the value of that word. Not every action of a hacker is a hack, nor are all the solutions they seek 'hacks.'.
Yet he's widely considered an artist.

In an CS proofs class, that would be considered a "proof by contradiction".
Yeah, I felt confused, I live in southern Brazil. Is it south enough for the continent?
Somehow nobody ever says that people who love investment banking or running a multinational corporation should do that for peanuts.
Lennart Poettering weighs in on Shuttleworth's Open Source Tea Party Comment
Are you still doing it
In my opinion, graffiti is a very temporal, fleeting art form. Enjoy it while it lasts, but it's impossible to preserve graffiti, especially from an infamous artist..
한국 anyone?
Map data for mobile isn't free even for Google. Google buys licenses to the data from a few map data providers, and as there was effectively a duopoly in global map data, those licenses have very strict terms of use. To use that data for e.g. real-time navigation assistance in mobile requires a different, much more expensive licenses.
That would be interesting: an Amazon-Samsung software-hardware partnership.
I got yelled at for telling people that :-) Or more seriously when I worked at Google a third party came to me excited about a new Google service that I knew was like the half baked 20% project of a new employee and getting little traction. I suggested they hold off on committing until it was more fully baked. Long story short it got back to the guy and I got scolded for 'sabotaging' a project (which vanished without a trace 9 months later when the person moved on to a project that didn't encourage 20% time).

I completely understood the idea of 'trying' something to see if it would work, but worried about the difference between the project "inside" the plex vs the view of it outside the walls. Personally I think that bringing some more discipline to that was one of the better things Larry has done as CEO so far.

That said, payments systems at Google have always been really really weird. Weird in the sense that they tend to 'force' a user support infrastructure which has historically been anathema to Google product deployment. People will put up with "Go to this forum and ask your question, maybe another user can help you out." for a lot of things, but when it involves actual money, not so much. Not to mention the rules that come along with handling money. It's really too bad since Google could be a force for great good here, instead PayPal continues to own the space. (I'm rooting for Dwolla and Square though, they are showing great strength here).
The effective tax rate is actually a curve rather than a straight line. The basic income causes the effective tax rate to start off negative and then become positive and approach the flat rate as income increases toward infinity. And you can make the curve be as flat or steep as you like by adjusting the flat marginal rate and the size of the basic income.

I suppose it's true that you can't change the slope of the effective rate curve beginning at a particular income level as you can with a progressive income tax, but it seems to me the reason for wanting that in the income tax case is in an attempt to emulate the curve you're already getting with flat tax + basic income without having to complicate things by having a progressive income tax with a continuous marginal rate curve.
Faster than native, introducing FastMail’s new mobile web interface
Markdown isn't difficult for us; it is a very real hurdle for those who are left in charge of content management.
That's a staggering amount of code. Nearly unbelievable. To put that in perspective, Windows XP was 45 million lines of code[0].

[0] https://m.facebook.com/windows/posts/155741344475532
How can anything other that 99% market share even be considered a monopoly? If it's 80% or 90% then there is obviously choice and thus no monopoly.

Anti trust is such bunk...
Interesting that the ratio of Americans to Canadians is less than their respective populations.
From the page:

One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly.

It sounds like they've been doing a little too much coding and not enough designing.
Strangely I am a Neopagan and was introduced to it by a Russian Orthodox priest. It is moving outside the strict domains of Catholicism. Most of those on /r/distributism on Reddit are not Catholics either.
Maintaining an index is a cost of the lookup efficiencies gained.
Use mobile version to get around the pay-wall:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-...
I understand this website is probably more complex than your average website, but I would put money -- a lot of money -- on it being nowhere near 500 million lines.
advertising agency. And you?
No wonder it doesn't work. It's very unlikely that healthcare.gov is more complex than an OS (such as XP noted by conover in this thread).
Yeah, I'd call total BS on that number, unless they did something absolutely insane... I mean, we're talking "instead of saving user information in the database, we codegen'd a set of classes specifically for each regisered user and save them to our repository" level of insanity. Has there ever been software that's even come close to approaching 500 million lines of code?
My reaction as well. Even 500 million bytes would be hard to believe.

While "efficient" is not a word that comes to mind when thinking about the government, 500 lines of code would be 1.6 lines for every man, woman, and child in this country.
In the short term the pay is not so great and getting worse, in the long term they still can't get fired. Your analogy does not work. Unless you are talking about their administrators. In which case yes, quite a bit like Microsoft.
One reason, at least in North Carolina, is the aftermath of the No Child Left Behind Act. There are teachers here who are passionate about education. Many of them feel as though any creativity and skill they have as an educator has been revoked by the state. They no longer have the freedom to create their own lesson plans. Efforts to encourage students to reach beyond the curriculum are stifled. All that matters is what grades they get on some multiple choice test that was mandated by the state.

Even students enrolled in more demanding programs like AP and IB are expected to pass the standardized end-of-grade tests. Now that's two (sometimes three, for students enrolled in both) standardized tests students need to be prepared for.

The people who've dedicated their lives to teaching no longer get to decide what's best for students. Only politicians get to do it now.

To put it in software development terms, imagine a customer giving you requirements that specify not only the desired product, but exactly which programming languages, design patterns, and frameworks you have to use. Now imagine realizing that the tools mandated by the requirements aren't quite a good fit for the solution, and you have 9 months to ship or you fail. How quickly would you drop that client?

The No Child Left Behind Act has led us to a school system where the government -- rather than the students -- is the client of the teachers. More like All Children Left Behind.
Only if you assume that vandalism and art are mutually exclusive.

I must say, I quite love this seeming (or maybe it’s real?) contradiction. There are no absolutes. That’s what makes Banksy’s work so cool.
Also there are a bunch of government people who work on it I think.

I saw a bunch of public linkedIn profiles with NSA analysts and people in the private sector with google maps listed as experience for whatever reason
I wonder what languages it focuses on. I haven't heard.

I find some of it amusing - I've worked on some enterprise-level projects with business systems talking to other business systems, and I can only imagine how much eye-rolling is going on among the programmers that are actually trying to do the work. This is a project where some very visible, loud people have a vested interest in it looking bad even if it were flawless.

I actually think it would be kind of fun to be close enough to the technology to really identify the core constraints and be in a position to help alleviate them.
I tried to say 'no NoSQL alternatives'. And I noticed that while there's node middleware for most libraries, the ease of use is different for each database.
You mistake me, I think, due to imprecision on my part; by 'it' in the second clause, I refer to the rarity of human excellence, not to a theoretical flowering of suppressed potential in the absence of what you regard as oppressive rule.
My first thought was the exact opposite.
I've been migrating my Fvwm2 config (with alterations) for over a decade now. Whenever I see a new feature that's actually useful and not window dressing (ha), I generally spend a few hours to try to implement it, or my take on it. Generally, this works best when you combine it's scripting with external utilities. In this respect, it's the bash of window managers.

Surprisingly, I've actually had people be genuinely surprised as some of the simpler things, such as binding the mail key on the dell keyboard I was using to slide toggle Thunderbird in and out of view (move from off-screen on right to 90% of current screen), regardless of which desktop I'm on.
$400M for 500M lines of code. That's roughly $800/KLoC. I wonder how that compares to any other modern software.
My guess is they're counting code from existing packages used to create the site.

So for example, if they used Java, that line count is including the lines of code found in the JDK.

I see no other way of getting to such a large number.
Level 2 Advanced Replacement Cache for ZFS
they might be exaggerating that by including all of the respective libraries used etc, or just exaggerating in general (like the gvt tends to do)
I'm having a really hard time believing that figure.
It's been hashed out over and over again on the mailing list. Their stance boils down to language design cohesion. In particular, avoiding null in your type system while preserving orthogonality in your language design would require a completely different language than the on that Go embodies. (This is in stark contrast with say, the Haskell community, which will add any new feature produced by original research.)

If you dig through the mailing list posts, avoiding null in the type system can be difficult to reconcile with "zero values", which each type has. More subtlety, avoiding null in your type system might require adding support for sum types, which conflicts in weird ways with Go's interfaces.

I think a lot of people tend to assume that null should always be eliminated from type systems because doing so can be done for free. But I disagree that it can be done for free, and my evidence is in the aforementioned mailing list posts.

The other reason why I suspect we'll never see the elimination of null in Go's type system is that it just isn't that big of a source of bugs. Anecdotally, I very rarely see my program crash because of a nil pointer error, even while doing active development. I could hypothesize as to why this is, but I'll just leave you with this thought: the type system isn't the only thing that can reduce the occurrence of certain classes of bugs.
> On Monday, Mr. Obama will host a Rose Garden event with people who have successfully enrolled in the health care exchanges.

It's great that they can all fit in the Rose Garden!
Was that specialist in the running for being paid to fix it, and thus was overinflating the estimate so he could get paid a few hundred million to fix it up?

I like the idea of a government healthcare program, I really do. But this website... man, someone lined their pockets on this scam, big time.
Cheap WordPress Books (And Others)
Maybe half the developers were coding while the other half were designing ;)
Also I wrote a blog piece(http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-distributist-view...) about Distributism and open source, which comes around to favoring BSD-style licenses on a work-ownership theory. The piece can be an introduction to Distributist theory for open source developers as well as an introduction to open source for Distributists.
One of my least favorite things about markdown:

There are three spaces * for content people – not creators,
because not all content people create loads of content. Some just
manage it – push it from here to there. Those places are:

1. A space for writing. For writing and structuring.
2. A space for management. For adding meta data, workflow,
configuration and managing roles and people.
3. The website space. Basically your website. A place where
you begin the access user journey. Or preview your content.
Generally the starting points for lots of little
administration tasks.

See how the numbers sit outside the left margin? Or worse you've styled paragraphs and MD has chosen that your list elements need to be wrapped in p /p pairs and suddenly your bullets or numbers are sitting all alone while your paragraphs race over to the right margin.

I've beat upon the perl code a bit but tracking down the 'paragraphify' bit is stuck in a regex pulling stuff apart. In my custom version I attach a different style to paragraphs in lists than ones in the document. This helps but there are still edge cases that are very annoying.
This is chump change. No one needing to launder decent amounts would bother with these methods. It takes too much work to launder too little money.