skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Would it be possible for him, or more likely his lawyer, to press a case against the silly estimation done by the district, based on the figures he was able to extract?

Pittsburgh local government? Corrupt, you say? Of course not.

Now get that silly lawsuit out of my courtroom.
Come on people, "Politics" is right in the title!
PostgreSQL, Rails, and why you should care
I'm in Japan at the moment and bikes are already fairly strictly controlled. You have to register it with the authorities when you buy it and there are several places near major train stations where you are specifically not allowed to park your bike.

In addition, while there are often bikes lying around the place, you can get stopped by the police to show that the bike you're riding belongs to you.

With the inner city crowding you get in places such as Tokyo this should come as no surprise. However, there isn't much of a bike infrastructure - you have to share the same narrow roads that cars and pedestrians take.
I totally agree, that is what had led me to this site initially !
the most fearsome self-sustaining entities are also self regulating, they are called governments. legacy interfaces like representative legislatures and voting have limited influence on their path towards omniscience and omnipresence.
Server.com Sold For A Solid $770,000
Hey gang, so has anybody heard about BARNYARD SLUTS? I'm pretty excited about BARNYARD SLUTS these days. Word on the street is that BARNYARD SLUTS is awesome. I just can't say enough good things about BARNYARD SLUTS. Well, see ya later.
That's a terrible idea, for both principled and pragmatic reasons.

Bicycles are the most energy efficient vehicles ever invented, getting approximately 1,400 mpg equivalent in fuel economy. They produce no emissions (other than wear on tires and brake pads) at the tailpipe. They cause minimal wear and tear on roads. They take up much less space than cars, both when traveling and when parked. Regular cycling is associated with several extra years in life expectancy, reducing lifetime medical costs for cyclists.

Also, the cost or providing cycling infrastructure is only a tiny fraction of the cost of providing automobile infrastructure. You can construct a permanent, continuous cycling network in a city for about what the city's road system costs in maintenance for one year.

In short, bicycles produce almost no negative externalities and significant positive externalities, so it makes no sense to punish people for cycling with financial or regulatory barriers.

Further, as the rate of cycling goes up, the rate of cycling casualties goes down, and the overall casualty risk for cyclists is lower than for motorists; so it is in everyone's pragmatic interest to encourage as much cycling as possible.
Screen Scraping with ScrAPI
It is your demographic. You probably don't use payday loan shops in strip malls either.

I used to keep bail money for "youthful indiscretion" grade offenses for certain relatives, but learned how to use an ATM this year and don't have to do that anymore. (yes, it was a stupid hiding place. Under an object a burglar would steal, but it kept it out of sight. )
It's a nice thought, but having a 1/50,000 chance of a user seeing my app when they load the App Store is the same as zero to me. You might make a few bucks here and there, but I doubt it will have any significant impact on your sales. Even if 1/10 users bought your app when they saw it randomly, you'd still need, on average, 500,000 of those random views to make one sale.
I do see the argument, but I often come across things that I may never would have before with such applications described in the article. The internet appeals to my need to learn, and speak to those in interesting fields. I suppose it just a different kind of serendipity. I may be looking at an article or blog and discover something entirely new and unexpected within it that I was not looking for in the first place. Quite serendipitous.
Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0403538/ ) is an excellent look at this and the US in general.
FileMap is a file-based map-reduce system for data-parallel computation
How about a tax on pedestrians?

Shouldn't they be required to buy insurance too?

Anyone want to require registrations of all sneakers?
Writing a kernel is fun... I started writing one a few weeks ago. It's not a real one, just something to play with. But it's very interesting, probably because I'd never worked at such a low level before.

Great resource: http://www.osdev.org/
Don’t Turn a Code Review Into a Code Rant
We believe in the freedom to read
The article is comparing apples to oranges here but I guess if you want to compare mind share then EC2 and Slicehost come out on top.
Interactive graph of how different groups spend their day
Wow, one commenter built a business from the same idea (sorry to repost a comment, but it's pretty great.):

"I have been doing the same thing since 2001. Only I live in Cook County Illinois, the second most populated county behind Orange County, California.

So my database has upwards of 1,000,000+ properties in it (residential, commercial, and industrial).

Funny thing…I took the experiment one step further. I fed every single house in the county through the algorithm, to see who else had a similar appeal case.

Lo and behold, 65% of the county was being overassessed.

So I had two choices:
1) Class action lawsuit on behalf of the county
2) Mass mailing. Gimme $25, I give you the appeal info.

I chose two, and have been mopping up ever since. If you don’t win the appeal (all public record) you get a refund."
I basically don't use bookmarks -- I can either search for it in Google, or it's open in a tab.

What would be especially awesome is live tab backup / sync, so that the tabs in some of my windows are automatically there when I switch computers, including position and form contents.
Brokep Quits Pirate Bay
Grocery deal finder Grocio creeps toward launch
It's better than what happens now. And there is a chance that your app will go viral.
Contrary to what the title may hint at, this book is not about starting a business alone. It does (correctly in my opinion) encourage you to start with a small team.

Thanks for putting extensive content out there for free (it's funny to watch Google AdSense trying to sell me on every possible small business gimmick, page after page)
"Man, I'm guessing that was the nuclear warhead that broke the camel's back."

"And destroyed most of his neighborhood."
I'll just leave these here...

http://www.intel.com/products/processor/manuals/index.htm

[disclaimer: I'm an OS/kernel dev]
I learned ZZ first. That turned out to be a mistake, because thinking of it as :wq crams more knowledge into one mnemonic. Because you can take it apart: you can just do :w, or you can just do :q, or you can do useful variations like :q!

And you can probably do all kinds of other powerful stuff that I don't understand, because I'm an emacs user who only uses vim on occasion. ;)
Finding Family Is Big Business: Ancestry.com Files For $75 Million IPO
I searched for python url encoding and found this amazing page
The record industry's latest attempt at revenue: ads in CD's
Awesome Twitter Visualization with Processing.js
Convert from DRM protected files to MP3 
Get rid of DRM protection and convert from DRM protected files to MP3 is easy for DRMBuster, which is an advanced DRM music video Converter can convert protected DRM files to MP3 such common used format for different devices.
It deals with politicians, but it is all about search engine hacking. They were monitoring searches in real time and modifying the page to try to harvest current hot queries.

The second to the last paragraph is political blather, but get through it to the last one where they name the company that did it. Too often the culprits go unnamed.
Do it! By all means, really, seriously. You'll learn more about coding complex systems than any other project you've ever done.

It's absolutely doable.

If you want to make your life easier go for a micro kernel with message passing. That will partition the tasks to the point where a single determined person can go all the way from MBR to prompt.

Runner up in the experience category: make a game from scratch that has multiple threads of execution, but use a single threaded process. That's almost the same experience but completely in userland, which should make your debugging life a lot easier.

But if you want to learn all there is to know about memory management, interrupts and interfacing with hardware as well as process scheduling build a kernel.

Older dr. Dobbs issues contain tons of useful information.

Here is some food for thought: http://ww.com/task.cc.html and http://ww.com/task.h.html

Other sources of inspiration: the early minix kernels and the early work on what is now known as FreeBSD by Bill and Lynne Jolitz (also described in dr Dobbs iirc)
Why do these call-redirection apps need to be native iphone apps and not webapps? They just look like interfaces to hosted services.
My mother used to run a daycare and she'd do something similar when someone came to inspect the school to make sure it was okay for kids. She'd leave something small (slightly overflowing wastebasket, some loose toys in a hallway) that the inspector would notice in the first few minutes of the inspection. She found that if they got to mark her down for one or two small things quickly they were less likely to go looking for something later and drum up a serious offense from nothing just to have something to write down.
Remember there's been some self-selection here. What other than naive optimism can explain packing up everything you own and jumping across the atlantic or pacific to lead a new life in a new country?

Yet it explains almost all of our parents, grandparents, or great(^n)-grandparents. That's going to bias the culture.

And it's a wonderful thing :-)
A lot of the economy is still cash-dominated, especially among immigrants, the poor, and people with under- or un-reported income sources. That's where a burglar really hopes to score. (See also how part 2 of the article mentions a burglar's hope to find hidden drugs.)
My gut reaction agrees with you Naz, but care to elaborate a little too? You've always got a pretty insightful perspective on things.

Is there any validity to it? Too subjective? Gameable? It seems like junk to me, but there's got to be some value if it's been in use for almost 100 years, no?
From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

Candidates using dirty SEO tricks? Sounds like an interesting new phenomenon to me. There's quite a bit of intersection between politics and technology, especially as technology spread through our society, so I wouldn't be so quick to write off a post just because it involves politics. This story is equally interesting regardless of whether it's about a senator, a big corporation, an athlete, or just about anything/anyone else with some degree of fame.
Cost of Living in America
stunnel is also a nice way to debug ssl connections when you only control one side of the connection:
http://www.stunnel.org/examples/

As a client, you would stunnel local:389 to remote:636.
As a server you would stunnel local:636 to local:389.

Then you can sniff on the unencrypted port with wireshark,etc.

Thanks for the pointer to detours.
Pretty dissapointing. I was hoping for a paranoia-filled full-on psychosis, serialized to HTML, and all I find is a bait-and-switch.

Look, if you want to rant about corporations, make scary movies about them. And no, the corporation from Alien doesn't count, the scary part was the Alien, not the corporation.

In the mean time, I'm going to stay right here, work for a corporation, and keep winding more copper for my EMP.
"Computer use" is that little sliver above "TV and Movies".
Fathers of Technology: 10 Unsung Heroes
I always use this video as an example when I'm trying to make a point about perspective (what you call 'big' and I call 'big' can differ) or obfuscation.

Plus, it's a really well done take on the Starbucks naming regime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFLs9RI8mSA&feature=relat...
UM Offering Students Cash To Delay Matriculation
Code is Not That Important, Marketing Is
Epic geek stereotyping :P
Indeed; outside of emacs, it's my favorite editor.

It is (IMHO) exactly how a GUI-based text editor should act. Simple and unintrusive in normal use, with enough power under the hood (and accessible via UI) to do the tougher stuff. I still miss some of the things I could do easily in it, even with emacs 23.

As for the article's comments on emacs, the mistake is in assuming emacs is an application. It's not. It's a lisp environment that's been shaped for text editing. The configuration interface is terrible because you're not really supposed to use it. Instead, you shove programmatic commands into .emacs to bend it to your will.

Friends and I brag about the length, complexity, and age of our .emacs files... maybe we should get out more... but you get the idea.
Ask HN: Ever "think in Google"?
Do you ever find yourself thinking in keywords when away from the internet, as if Google were an extension of you? I think I did too much research online over the past few days and I noticed Google is reshaping the way I think. Ten years ago if I heard someone interject a few disjoint words, I wouldn't think much of it. Now I wonder if they're "thinking in Google", too.
Or "there's no 'i' in 'team', but there is in 'winner'".
Who said the point of a partner is to help you find an idea? The point of the partner is to force you to explain your idea with enough clarity and detail that you realize how much it sucks. Then you look for a slightly different idea. ;)

No question, you can work on your idea without a partner. That's the problem. You'll risk spending dozens or hundreds of hours on your pet project before showing it to anyone with the incentive and the social position to tell you that it won't work. Your friends won't do that. They like you. They don't want to hurt your feelings.

Worse, when you do find out that your idea doesn't work, you might become despondent. Too despondent to notice that all you need is a few tiny tweaks and suddenly things will be fixed. But there's nobody to help you find those tweaks, because nobody else understands the project. Your friends and loved ones don't get it. It's just you, alone with your problem. By the time you get ahold of yourself and get sober enough to realize that your project is salvageable, days or weeks might have gone by.

You can try to be objective about your own work. But be warned: Not only is it likely to be less effective, but it's torture. It's the source of the emotional roller coaster that entrepreneurs so often complain about -- the one where you're euphoric one minute and despondent the next.
Yeah, except that would span at least two tweets, so it would be even more obnoxious.
Sam Sethi Talks About the TechCrunch Lawsuit
Equity-Linked Certificate of Deposits
No, clearly this crime against logic was committed by a Cocoa programmer.

NSDomainAddress?
Geography of Offshoring is Shifting
Lead Engineer - Mobile
Lead Software Engineer - Mobile

Zoosk is looking to add a Lead Software Engineer who is passionate about building smart and engaging mobile applications to join our crew in San Francisco. We're looking for someone with plenty of experience in mobile web development and familiarity with newer mobile platforms such as iPhone and Android. You will be responsible for leading the mobile development team and will be working with architects, designers, and product managers to define the mobile vision of the fastest growing dating destination.
Responsibilities

* Architect, design, and develop mobile applications on multiple platforms
* Work with Zoosk core team to translate the latest features to mobile apps
* Develop mobile-only features and integrate them into "the Zoosk experience"
* Mentor and manage mobile team developers

Qualifications

* 3+ years of experience in delivering robust large-scale mobile web applications
* Excellent understanding of Object Oriented design, coding and testing patterns
* Knowledge of best practices in delivering workclass mobile applications
* Demonstrated ability to learn new technologies and/or frameworks is a must
* Bachelors degree or higher in Computer Science or another relevant field
* Experience with iPhone and Android platform is very desired
* Experience with Linux, PHP, Apache is preferred
* Previous startup experience and development in an Agile development life cycle is preferred

CONTACT Seth.Dawson@zoosk.com for details
"David Bello Let's...?" Right in the title? Seriously?
Hey, I'm telling you what works for me.

And I don't have to worry about side effects from writing tests.

You're taking me too literally when I say I want to manage anxiety. If medication is a solution, so is not hacking at all, or just remaining inexperienced and non-introspective about my coding. Anxiety usually has good reason, and it requires improving the _codebase_. But my metric for how the codebase is doing is my own perception as I live and breathe it.

I have a love-hate relationship with anxiety. I need to listen to my perceptions, because that's key to where the code comes from. But those perceptions also have the ability to demotivate me away from the code. It seems like an obvious connection to me ever since my experience with burnout. Learning about the non-linearities in my motivational structure makes me a better programmer.

Has Kent Beck influenced me? Definitely. Listening to myself works for me. I don't see how thinking more about how I operate and how I learn my skills can do more harm than good. Paraphrasing Sun Tzu, "Know yourself". http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sun_Tzu
Dmor I recall you work at twilio,

I am impressed by the ease to make VOIP apps with twilio and to actually deploy them. If its not confidential/top secret/etc., what speech engine do you use for your voicemail transcription? Or do you use Indians?
US geological survey earthquake report
very nice- now I can finally write arc's accum macro in clojure without having it feel like an ugly hack.
Speaking from experience, being a sole founder is boring and lonely. It's hard enough getting a company off the ground; why not share some of the load?
If you want to make your life easier go for a micro kernel with message passing. That will partition the tasks to the point where a single determined person can go all the way from MBR to prompt.

I don't know if I'd say that... For one, unless you are actually going to build vdevs and stuff any kernel you build is going to be a microkernel. In my experience, however, I would not say that message passing makes your life that much easier. In addition, it's probably a good idea to write an ELF compatible OS if you want a prompt. Writing a shell isn't that hard, but I wouldn't want to replicate the basic userland tools if I can just statically compile a busybox library. You should also plan to implement some sort of ramdisk if you want a useable environment (or virtual devs with drivers, but that would probably be harder). Actually, I'd recommend just building off QEMU, since that'll give you rudimentary device framework and keep you from having to debug on physical hardware (like I do).
Freakonomics: Q&A With the Author of $20 Per Gallon
Bump Technologies (YC S09) featured in Apple iPhone Ad
Message passing will make the kernel dead simple, after that it is all userland. This makes it much much harder for one device driver you're writing to crash another (or the kernel) by data corruption. A simple post mortem crash inspection will tell you what went wrong. Instead of doing the same on a whole kernel you'll just have that one little process that goes under, and the rest of the machine is still working.

I don't think I could have ever gotten my little OS to the self hosting stage without that.

It still took more time than I care to remember though :)

A virtual machine is a great tool as well, especially if it gives you access to the cpu contents of the running VM.

That will save you days if not weeks trying to find out why your switch from 'real' to 'protected' mode during the boot didn't work...
That's awesome. I wonder what kind of increase they'll see, if any, of download and use of their app. Perhaps someone can chime in?

[Edit]
Forgot my congratulations to Bump.
I remember my college days in the early 1970s at a liberal California university when computers were continually portrayed as soulless monsters having no redeeming value. That was before the personal computer. Same functionality - same destructive potential as before, but now seen as friendly toward human advancement. It is all a matter of perspective - computers themselves are a tool, one that can be used for good or bad.

The corporation is impersonal by design. It is a structure designed to facilitate enterprise.

It does so: 1) by giving an enterprise perpetual existence;
2) by allowing investors to put up risk capital without having to risk their personal assets in the venture; 3) by separating management from ownership such that the operations of an enterprise can be flexibly handled; 4) by creating discrete units of ownership that can be used to create special incentives for founders, investors, employees and others; 5) by creating a vehicle for widespread public ownership of the enterprise.

Is this good or bad? It is all a matter of perspective.

Consider that, without the corporation, we could not have the modern startup. Try to gather a serious team together without being able to promise them limited liability should the venture fail. Try to raise funds for your sole proprietorship from strangers. Try to offer equity incentives to employees when all you have to work with is a family business or a partnering-type vehicle. You will not get far.

Robotic or not, a corporation is a legal tool that serves an important purpose. Yes, it can be used for good or for bad. Just as with the computer, it all depends on the people behind it.
This is almost exactly what I have been working on, and would be a lot of help! Thanks !
"So you've got a million dollar iPhone app idea...?"

Think before implement. Apple might reject you.
Treating this as an either/or discussion overlooks the reality of business, and the world, which demonstrates that to be successful you need to do both.

Great Marketing + Crappy Code / Product = pets.com

Great Code + Crappy Marketing = The-next-big-thing-nobody's-heard-of-or-will-pay-for.

Probably the most telling part of this was talking about the "the world perception didn't seem to value the geek's contribution".

If you can't demonstrate value (which is marketing in a nutshell) then the value (which is business cashflow and profit in a nutshell) won't be there.
Putting the cost of going green in context
Yes.. that is, yes you did too much research online over the past few days!
I think there is a balance between code, marketing, and customer service: if no one knows about your product, you have no customers (marketing); if your product is buggy, you lose customers (code); unless you apply the third and fix bugs for your customers at the drop of a hat (customer service) in which case you'll probably not only retain customers you would have lost, but gain customers from word-of-mouth.
2x-3x increase in sessions within minutes...
-dave, Bump
We don't know when the commercial started airing but it was probably in the last couple hours. So far our usage is up about 100%, but we expect a delay since it normally takes a while after people hear about Bump that they find a friend to try it out.

Unless we find out a reason it will hurt us we plan to eventually release our download data with analysis to the community to help understand the effects of big PR (we were also the Billionth app downloaded).
Billionth app downloaded, and now this?!

When are you guys gonna be invited on stage after Jobs's keynote, Loopt style?
Double thinking in SQL