skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should look up the monocoque F1-cars use. They basically are a carbon case just around the driver which is designed to hodl of ridiculous forces from just about any direction. One can go as far as saying: there is pretty much no chance in hell that a F1-driver is somewhat crushed inside this monocoque.
So, the F1-cars are damn secure, and I do mean damn secure and while it is true that there are some fairly ugly accidents out there in the F1-world, one has to keep in mind: that is a car travelling at 200+kph and hits a wall. In about any other car, the driver would be dead. So, keep in mind: security in F1 is something else (Survive!) as security in regular street cars (get out of there without injuries).

cp eg here: http://www.formula1.com/inside_f1/understanding_the_sport/52...
Perhaps T-Mobile has an infrastructure isn't as insecure and fragile as AT&T's.
If you consider the set of all technology execs, there's probably at least one with an even better records. See James Randi's psychic television special thought experiment.

I came to the conclusion while driving to work today that social investing sites will fuel the next giant financial collapse, because most people are just completely incapable of internalizing "past performance is not a guarantee of future results."
Thanks for the pointer PG. Great essay. There are like a dozen gem quotes in there. I will update my post with a pointer.

To pull directly from the article a technology startup is "measurement and leverage, where measurement comes from working with a small group, and leverage from developing new techniques."

If I pull from chunks I come up with:

A small group of people inventing a new way to solve a difficult problem that is hard for others to duplicate.

Is that far off from how you would sum it up?
Ah, select/middle mouse button click is the one true copy/paste. I would never have occasion to see this happen.
I worked in a boiler-room type place once, while in college. I learned a lot from listening to these slick salesmen (some well past the sleazy stage) working to extricate money from old retired people. Think Glengarry Glen Ross.

I can see a lot of the principles they used listed here. One really obvious one, #12.

They made a game with each other of being able to answer any question with a question.
This is why a methodology, whether it is agile, waterfall, or some bastard spawn of RUP, is not enough to direct a project. What you need is someone who can take on the role of project manager.

A project manager has many roles, but one of the most important is to figure out which bits of the chosen methodology do apply, and which don't. There is no such thing as a "best practice" - only a "good practice within a certain context". The PM's job is to figure out which practices match the current context, and monitor them as the context changes and certain practices drop out (and others drop in).

What you end up with, if you have a good PM, is a unique methodology tailored to your specific project, which is the only sensible thing, since all combinations of project and project team are, in fact, pretty much unique.

It's worth adding that the PM doesn't need to be full-time - but I'd say that even on a 2-3 people start-up dev team you need at least one person who's experienced enough to take on that role.
1: Abusing the police != being rude to the police. You're conflating the two. Saying "Leave me alone, you useless pigs" is not interfering with police business; it's hard to imagine an example use of speech that would be.

2: That's true, but the whole point of the article is that even though it might be inconvenient to you to challenge the police when they abuse their power, it is still an abuse of power. This whole question is specifically addressed in the article.

3: This article is specifically about systematic abuse of police power. That's a real problem. Its truth has no dependence on them complimenting the police who don't abuse their power. This is completely irrelevant to whether the article's argument is true.

In short, your 2/3 of your arguments are irrelevant to the article completely. Your first point, while engaging the article, is essentially contradiction by assertion (you provide no evidence that the kinds of abuses discussed in the article could ever be considered interference with police work). So that's a very very weak point. That's probably why you were voted down.
Nice idea and execution. A few questions/comments.

1. Does the app assume that users want to spend about the same amount every day? I'll sometimes spend $0 one day and $1000+ the next day (e.g. mortgage payment). I'm entirely interested in keeping my monthly spending within a limit, but not my daily or weekly spending.

2. I've never taken to Mint or Quickbooks. My finances are pretty complicated, thanks to several income streams and companies, and tools like Mint/Qb assume that you care about ALL of your income and expenses equally. But all I care about is my overall monthly spending (am I going into debt?), and my spending within categories (how much did I blow on eating out this month?).

Have you thought about adding optional categories/tags? So if you want to keep your "beer" spending to, say, $750/month, you can track how much you have left to spend on beer, alongside your tally of total spending? Email/text in "12.55 +beer" and it gets tagged with beer.

The more I think about this, the more I like it. And I love that it's open-sourced. Watch for a fork. ;)
The people who tried it emphatically haven't liked it. This is just empirical fact based on page hits since launch. Many people have tried it.

The problem isn't that it doesn't do what Google does; it's that it doesn't do what anyone wants.
There were several inconsistencies between the official police report[1], and the original 911 caller, Lucia Whalen's, version of events[2]. Notably:

* The police report states that Whalen said "two black men". In reality, Whalen said "two larger men, one looked kind of Hispanic, but I'm not really sure, and the other one entered, and I didn't see what he looked like at all.". The "black" aspect was entirely invented after-the-fact by the police.

* The police report states the responding officer, Sgt. James Crowley, spoke to the Whalen at the scene. According to Whalen, this conversation did not occur.

* Crowley claims that Gates was belligerent and yelling racial epithets. However, Gates had returned from China with a bronchial infection[3], and was unable to yell or raise his voice. This has been confirmed by his physician.

* Gates showed Crowley two forms of identification, his driver's license and Harvard ID. He did not refuse to show identification.

* Gates was arrested on his front doorstep, after following Crowley out of the house. Gates claims this is because he demanded to see Crowley's identification, which he is allowed by law.

I hope this clears up some of the confusion and misinformation being spread regarding the event.

[1] http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/CANON8AA683_L...

[2] http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/27/gates.arrest/

[3] http://www.theroot.com/print/19236?page=0%2C0
The biblical notion of infinity is represented by "seven". Used in a phrase, it also suggests a definite infinity in the sense of "don't press your luck".

1
He said to his disciples, "Things that cause sin will inevitably occur, but woe to the person through whom they occur.
2
It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.
3
Be on your guard! 1 If your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him.
4
And if he wrongs you seven times in one day and returns to you seven times saying, 'I am sorry,' you should forgive him."
5
I guess most media 'executives' still believe 'any publicity is good publicity'
Android phones work fine on AT&T.
But they would have to be experts in GSM signalling. And those experts tend to have better things to do. Also, a laptop and a antenna would not suffice, software-defined radio would be required and currently there is no SDR design on market with sufficient performance.

If the unwashed masses suddenly gain access to such capabilities effortlessly then it would be a concern. Presently it is not, because smart phones have GSM subsystems carefully separated and ‘dumb’ phones have certain limitations built in. Behaving graciously is assumed a mobile station's role in the GSM system.

Recall the Nokia 1100 rumor eariler this year where underground allegedly gained acces to frimware memory map of certain series of this phone and its price skyrocketed on second hand market.
Millions of people can't be wrong!
iTunes app store needs to extend rating system to cover intelligence.
If your app needs a certain level of intelligence but doesn't have content that would require a higher rating, what do you do?

Introducing violence into a puzzle game just to get a higher rating would be ridiculous in most cases.

Also, what if being an adult is not enough for the minimum intelligence required?
> If it is a great tool for just a minority, then it deserves attention in that minority.

Agreed. What I didn't agree was with the "serious attention" you mentioned earlier.
btw, I didn't downvote you.
Doesn't work in Opera 10 b2 on Windows Server 2008...still, neat feature.
I've been on a little Conway's Game of Life kick for the past couple weeks myself. Such a simple algorithm like this is great for learning a new programming language.

I recently started learning python, so I wrote an implementation using the pygame library. If you're interested, you can see it here: http://readysquid.com/blog/programming/conways-game-of-life/

Feel free to take the source and play with it if you'd like.
I reversed engineered their data files back in grad school while studying statistics. They were coded in base-three. I never figured out why.
The reason the story came up in the first place is because the caller felt the need to distance herself from using the term "black" as if "black" is any better or worse than using hispanic.

The problem is not the caller's racial biases or lack thereof, but that the official police report contains fabrications.

I, for the most part, couldn't find articles that support your other claims.

From <http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/27/gates.arrest/ >, and from your link:

* Attorney Wendy Murphy, who represents Whalen, also categorically rejected part of the police report that said Whalen talked with Sgt. James Crowley, the arresting officer, at the scene.

"Let me be clear: She never had a conversation with Sgt. Crowley at the scene," Murphy told CNN by phone.*

So that's two confirmed fabrications in the police report. Both are rather large, considering they report words which were not said and events which did not occur.
As I mentioned, there are several rice cookers around $25 (my first rice cooker was about $15 at K-Mart). They work very well. I don't know how poor folks the world over cook rice, as I've never had occasion to be really poor (I grew up "poor" by US standards, at least until my teenage years, but not by world standards of poverty). But, I'm not speaking to the world's poor. I strongly suspect that no one reading my post is too poor to afford a $25 rice cooker in order to be able to make cheap meals quickly.
UI needs to be fixed, here are my thoughts:

http://codingthriller.blogspot.com/2009/05/fixing-wolframalp...
Chances are that a lot of the folks around here are both makers and managers. The contextual change between maker mode and manager mode however is enormously expensive. It's not dissimilar to a CPU context switch. However, meetings have the same effect on a maker that busy waiting has on a CPU. You just can't get anything done while you're waiting for the meeting to be over, something that is exacerbated by the knowledge that most meetings are unnecessary and a waste of time because they're poorly run.
Nice share. It probably can't compete with a major Game of Life simulator such as Golly, but I agree that Conway's Game of Life is an excellent little programming project that is entertaining to implement in different languages.
worked here. tiger, ff3.5.
someone should write an iPhone app for this. it would be a big hit
Great idea. I can definitely see that taking off. I even thought it would make a great RTS game.

How fast can you build spaceships and breeders to destroy the enemies spaceship fleet.

Though it is a cellular simulation it is also a game.
Also, I think reserving judgment until most schools in the US start again and people realize that Alpha is awesome with math would be a good idea.
I actually hunted down the report (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0723092gates...) and no where does the officer claim the 911 callers said "two black men" in the call.

Again, as far as the conversation taking place its Whalen (the caller) vs Crowley (the Officer) since they were the only ones there. So the only way you can claim that’s a fabrication is if you just decide to believe her over him (which as I point out above isn’t really the logical conclusion given she’s claiming not to use racial identifiers when she clearly does)

So again, I see no fabrication here. At least no provable one.
Infinity is a number if we want it to be: we can do math in whatever kind of topological space we want, including ones with defined ∞, such as the one point compactifications of ℝ or ℂ, the latter of which has a nice wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sphere

As wikipedia says, “arithmetic with infinity does not obey all of the usual rules of algebra, and so the extended complex numbers do not form a field.” But they’re quite handy for some uses.
The way I think it could work is that a stock exchange is an ebay like environment (sorry for the analogy, but I can't think of a better one) where buyers and seller meet and declare what they have to offer or what they are looking for.

A piece of software in the middle matches buyers and sellers according to some public algorithm and takes care of the escrow so that the buyer gets their stock and the seller his money or nothing at all happens.
Mine is working with the same setup, are you sure you don't have any script blocking activated?
I'm using Seamonkey on Linux, with javascript on, and the page fully loaded. I've tried ctrl-c, right click/copy, and edit/copy from the toolbar. In all cases it copies normally with no link inserted.
The IP assignments I've signed when joining a company (and always gotten modified in my favor to varying degrees) have never said anything about whether or not they have their shit together enough to pay me. In my experience, they tend to boil down to: anything you do on company time, with company equipment, or at the company's request belongs to the company, full stop. You might be able to argue that you weren't on company time if you weren't paid for that time, but the other two clauses should cover that handily.

At my present job, I use my own laptop, and got the agreement winnowed down to just the third of those -- they only own my work if they specifically asked me to do it. (Granted, I'm not writing a lot software here, and what software we do write just exists to facilitate our core business, so I doubt they'd have any qualms about any of the developers modifying their agreements similarly, anyway.)
What Yahoo's Failed Acquisitions Tell Us About The Company
Thank you for the reply, this is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping we might have.

> 1: Abusing the police != being rude to the police. You're conflating the two.

I was trying not to. In the original comment, I wrote, "I don't know at what point yelling at police officers starts getting in the way of that work, but there is that point somewhere." I'm not sure where the line is, and I'm not making a judgment call on Gates' arrest. I did mention the officer wrote in his report (which may be false or falsified - I don't know) that Gates followed him into the streets yelling at him. At some point, a person doing that is crossing a line from protected speech into interfering with police work. Again, I don't know where that line is - it's a particularly sticky subject. Police should probably err on the side of letting people air their thoughts in the form they choose.

> 2. ... This whole question is specifically addressed in the article.

Very briefly - and I get worried that some young person here, who is really idealistic, gets into trouble by asserting their rights to an officer while in college or whatever. For my part, I can't stand customs officials who go over the line and search me repeatedly and generally waste my time, but I'm extremely friendly and respectful and talk about the local sports even though I can't stand that scum. Y'know why? Because they'll mess with you if not. My part of the comment isn't an apology for bad policework, it's a practical note so people whipped into a frenzy don't get into trouble. [Also note - the two times I mouthed off to customs officials, I got an arduous, detailed search afterwards. I learned that real life lesson the hard way]

> 3. This article is specifically about systematic abuse of police power. That's a real problem. Its truth has no dependence on them complimenting the police who don't abuse their power. This is completely irrelevant to whether the article's argument is true.

Right! Systematic - that means happening all over the place. I don't think it is - the article points out a few brutal abuses of police power and doesn't give statistics for how common it is or put it in context of other nations. Our officers in the USA are pretty good. I'm a big rights guy - very big - but implying there's a huge problem when in fact it's a few isolated incidents would be a bad thing. Or who knows - maybe there is a systemic problem, but the article just has a few anecdotes and no statistics. And certainly, all of those anecdotes and no statistics are hostile.

> In short, your 2/3 of your arguments are irrelevant to the article completely. Your first point, while engaging the article, is essentially contradiction by assertion (you provide no evidence that the kinds of abuses discussed in the article could ever be considered interference with police work). So that's a very very weak point. That's probably why you were voted down.

Well, I'm voting you up for taking the time to respond. Thank you for the discussion, and I look forward to more whenever you please.
(Note: The above comment was at '1' when I made this reply. So at least 4 people simply don't care that the info given above is a flat out lie as is shown by the actual report that I link to below)

Just pointing out what I did above.

* The police report never says the officer heard the 911 call (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0723092gates...)

* The conversation is one's word against the other and Whalen is clearly trying to distance herself from the whole incident so she has the more reason to lie

* That's just silly. I had a bronchial infection and I could still yell (albeit with vastly less capacity)

* The report doesn't claim Gates refused to show ID only that he initially did. In fact it says...

. I asked Gates to provide me with photo identification so that I could verify that he resided at Ware Street and so that I could radio my findings to ECC. Gates initially refused, demanding that I show him identification but then did supply me with a Harvard University identification card. Upon learning that Gates was affiliated with Harvard, I radioed and requested the presence of the Harvard University Police.

* Your last claim could be right. No one can tell. But it's at the root of the two claims so the only way you can believe it's a proven fabrication is if you believe Gates without question (since he has as little proof as Crowley does as to what happened)
This article that you linked to from your site:
http://lbrandy.com/blog/2009/07/computational-performanc-a-b...
Is really eye opening.
So rarely are the theoretical aspects written about. At least this one mentions a Turing Machine in passing.

Think about that. We can build a Life pattern that looks for a counter-example to the Goldback Conjecture (GC). We can build a Life pattern such that if the GC is true, the pattern will grow forever, but if it's false, then the pattern self-destructs.

With our current knowledge in mathematics, no one can tell the eventual fate of the pattern. That's a pretty deep result, equivalent (sort-of) to the Halting Problem.

I wish someone had told me that when I was writing my first "Life" simulators in 1979.

Note: The GC says every even number from 4 onwards can be written as the sum of two primes. If you like you could use another unsolved problem, like the Collatz conjecture - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture
SUSE Studio is out - The Linux Appliance Builder
Crappy Common Lisp implementations?... Did you try a few different implementations and found out they're crappy or you're just assuming things?

I never had a problem with SBCL (I didn't try others).

And about the supposed "fracturation" of implementations, first it's not a problem if you use only standardized features, second a lot of features (threads, sockets, etc) that aren't standardized are still well-supported in implementations and there are libraries that hide the minor incompatibilities between implementations.

Want threads? cl-thread. Want sockets? bordeaux-threads. Want access to the Meta-Object Protocol? cl-mop. Want generalized streams? gray-streams.

I believe the perceived problems are really blown out of proportion. Maybe CL implementations were crappy in 1995 but things change and sometimes you have to revise your assumptions.
http://pastebin.com/m3387c4ae

It's part of a game (in the Conway sense) framework I wrote up when I was learning about surreal numbers. Games are an even more general construct, where the left side is not required to be 'less than' the right side. Anyway, to use it, fire up GHCi and `:l game`. I've pre-defined -1, 0, and 1, but you can theoretically create any number with a finite representation (of course, the data structure and algorithms used are deliberately naive and incredibly inefficient and slow, so don't try anything crazy). For example, 5+3 requires 1156 characters to display, 5+4 requires 2556, and 5+5 requires 5118. This is because my code doesn't attempt to "reduce" any of the numbers - numbers can have multiple representations, and with finite representations you can just take the largest element of the left set and the smallest element of the right set and get the same number. My code doesn't do that. Anyway, there's also a fromInteger definition so you can mix Numbers and integers in computations.

Examples:

Prelude> :l game
[1 of 1] Compiling Game ( game.hs, interpreted )
Ok, modules loaded: Game.
*Game> zero
{ | }
*Game> 5 :: Game
{{{{{{ | } | } | } | } | } | }
*Game> let half = Game [zero] [one]
*Game> half
{{ | } | {{ | } | }}
*Game> half < one
True
*Game> half > 1
False
*Game> half + half == 1
True
*Game> half * 1 == half
True
*Game> half * (one + one) > 1
False

The best resources for learning are both by Conway: "Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays" (WW) and "On Numbers and Games" (ONAG). WW is more accessible and introduces you to numbers via games, whereas ONAG is more of a hard-core math book that explains games via numbers. WW is probably better if you don't have a strong math background, ONAG if you do.
You seem to be picking nits. The _only_ time its telling you of an absence of a voicemail is when it's a 1.
High-Frequency Traders Say Speed Works for Everyone
There's a pretty wide gulf between total submission to "authority" and being verbally abusive to a police officer doing his job. As someone who is generally not a fan of cops, but would like them to show up at my door if someone broke in through it (even if its me) it doesn't seem that nuanced really.

Cops have a dangerous job and a lot of bullets are preceded by yelling. They actually should be able to arrest people who totally lose their cool, because who knows where it might go from there.

The iPod dancing wierdos getting arrested is a total ad-hominem too.