skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Are you seriously trying to suggest that understanding the concepts behind C teach you the concepts behind how Ruby works, just because Ruby has a runtime written in C?

That sounds reasonable to me...certainly not ripe for a "seriously?" label. Of course knowing C would help one to understand how Ruby, Python, etc. work, just like knowing assembler helps one to understand what C is doing. Rich languages like these don't just happen out of the blue.
You must not be familiar with this study.

http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf
Can't say there's much I like or agree with in this post. I'll just pick on your 2nd paragraph:

"Now, I’m not one to claim to know what filthy rich is all about, but I do know what it takes to be one; dedication, imagination, faith, and some luck. Do I desire to be filthy rich? Sure I do; who doesn’t?"

I don't. And I'm sure there's plenty of other people on HN who don't. Not all wealthy people got to where they are because it was a desire they actively strove for. Personally, my startup is able to pay me far more than I need or have ever desired earning. Aside from some material comforts/luxuries, my life is no better because of my income (my wife might disagree ;) ).

About your statement that it takes "some luck" to be filthy rich, here's a quote from What Should a Billionaire Give–and What Should You? by Peter Singer:

"The Nobel Prize-winning economist and social scientist Herbert Simon estimated that “social capital” is responsible for at least 90 percent of what people earn in wealthy societies like those of the United States or northwestern Europe. By social capital Simon meant not only natural resources but, more important, the technology and organizational skills in the community, and the presence of good government. These are the foundation on which the rich can begin their work."

In other words, the amount of money you're going to earn in your lifetime will be determined by more than "some" luck. All the dedication, faith, and imagination in the world can't change when, where, and to whom you were born.

I'd suggest you take a step back and ask yourself "why do I desire to be rich?" If you haven't yet, I'd recommend reading Felix Dennis's book ("How to Get Rich"). It's a great read and one of the points he repeats is that money alone will not make you happy.

Cheers.
" That's the analogy that you seem to have completely missed - the government should act like Costco, making their data available in bulk, but instead, they act like bodegas, giving little snippets."

Is that really the problem? If that is the problem, one can easily write an app that gathers a lot of these little snippets and assembles them in any way one wants. In fact that would be easier, than writing a bunch of articles and trying to change how the government does things. Or is the problem that the government wants to provide data to the target user directly and somebody else wants to be the middle man.

"You act as if accessible data standards aren't a part of what the open government movement is lobbying for."

That article did not mention anything about accessible data standards. It also did not mention the "open government movement" at all. Hey if there is something called an "open government movement" and it wants accessible data standards more power to them (especially if "accessible" means open and not "accessible for a fee"). But again, I don't know why this is relevant as neither was mentioned by the article.

"Why, exactly, do you think someone who wants data to be more commonly available would stop and be happy if it were only made available in some obscure proprietary format?"

Well, here is an example, that someone might not want data to be more commonly available to everyone, they might want data to be more commonly available to them and not to everyone else so that they can insert themselves as a middle man between the data provider (government) and the data consumer. This is the only way the Costco analogy of the original article actually makes sense.

"The article specifically says that we're talking about priorities, that the warehouse needs to come first."

Yes of course the warehouse needs to come first. And then, if you are good middleman and know how to deal with government you can ensure that nothing of much importance comes later.

I don't know, maybe I am cynical. Maybe these guys really care for transparency and want government to start releasing data in bulk so that as much data as possible gets released as cheaply as possible. So maybe I am wrong.

Then again maybe not. If you wanted open government above all you would not mind much about exactly what format the data came in.

And the fact that you just flamed me and accused me of trolling out of the blue, makes me even more doubtful the motives of the original article's drafter are honest.
The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. At the same time, I acknowledge that this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering.

Oh, humanities majors -- you guys are so silly.
I held a palm pre and navigated around... it was sluggish and full of UI bells and whistles that seemed to offer little or no usability improvement over any old smart phone.

I declare the Palm Pre the most overhyped gadget of the past 2 years.
google apps / github / slicehost

What more do you need?
I did a sunspider benchmark of safari and firefox (forgot which version, but I did it recently with the latest versions of both) and their speeds were almost identical.
I took classes on C in school. I never really "got it." I then re-learned C after learning Python (and other higher level languages).

I found it much easier to learn on the second try. On the first try I was learning about syntax, functions, loops, variables, and types as well as memory management, header files, and pointers. On the second try I was only learning about memory management, header files, and pointers - I already knew about the other stuff. On top of that, pointers were much easier to grasp because I had experience with 'references' in higher level languages.

It's great to learn C, but I always recommend people learn to program by way of something like Python or Ruby. It's hard to beat print "hello" when you're just starting out.
As I wrote above:

Punishments are generally so harsh because it is considered fraud. The defendants were selling software that didn't work. They either knew it did not work, in which case it is pretty much straightforward fraud, and God help them if someone dies. Alternatively, they did not know that the software did not work. In which case they committed fraud when they represented themselves to the health care organization that purchased the device as being qualified to make a determination as to the efficacy of the software or device. Again, God help them if someone dies.

But all of that is really beside the point.

The fact is that in order to get your software FDA approved you signed off on literally thousands of legally binding sheets of paper. The short version of these sheets of paper is that you guarantee, for instance, that the software ran an 8bit lut through a 10bit colorspace so that the full range of that 10bit colorspace would be visible in the 8bit window at one time or another. That is actually a fairly standard guarantee that medical software makers have to give. If your software does not give the appropriate contrast at a given setting, then the FDA knows that you and whoever else signed that sheet of paper lied. You could not have tested it for all values. This is fraud.

Or let's say your software flips images left for right. You guessed it, there is a slip of paper you and a lot of other people sign indicating that your software will not do that. You also gave that slip of paper to the FDA to get FDA approval. Later some poor nurse somewhere is prepping the left leg for amputation instead of the right one. The doctor cross checks with the FDA approved software, and verifies that the problem is in the left leg. And . . . do you see where this is going? This too is fraud. And it is criminal in the United States. You WILL be prosecuted.
There is no need to speak in general terms, there are very specific things that make economics a bogus science.

The biggest issue is that modern mainstream economics is modelling the world as Gaussian. There is no room for 'fat tails' in econometrics, for example, every time you see 'regression' mentioned somewhere -- this should raise alarm. The world is not-linear.

Same applies to other concepts mentioned above. This one issue of crude inefficient approximation (stochastic world rather than the world as a complex nonlinear system) is enough to undermine most of modern economics. This is because a lot of this so called 'science' consists of many very elaborate and intellectually beautiful rigorous constructs, which are unfortunately built on an obsolete base.

Linear models had their place, maybe, 20 year ago, because there was nothing better. But now we have a very solid body of knowledge on which to build further scientific advances, most of it achieved through experiments (with computers), and not though some cute 'mental experiments'.

So, let's not be too sensitive, there is science that is supported by experiments, and there is a kind of abstract sophism which is modern economics. The sooner the public sees that this emperor has no clothes, the better.
Interesting update: Mackey claims the Wall Street Journal changed his editorial to make seem anti-Obama.

http://www2.wholefoodsmarket.com/blogs/jmackey/2009/08/14/he...

After a quick read, I don't see any significant differences. This sounds like a desperate attempt to stop the boycott.
Safari should just take the V8 engine.
it has become a gaming platform, but its games are nowhere near the quality of DS games.
Wow, I didn't know about the github gem. It looks incredibly useful.

edit: ProjectPlus for TextMate also looks neat. The one thing I missed when switching from SVN to Git was SVNMate (which was apparently the predecessor of ProjectPlus?)
I remember this one. I've never felt more mediocre than I did after reading that write-up. I don't consider myself a hacker or even much of a programmer. I simply make tools to eliminate the boring and monotonous parts of my job. I tinker a bit at home (when I have time), but I have yet to make anything worth showing off.

If I personally had to define what it means to be a hacker this would be on the (very) short list.
A sample composed of volunteers from a particular usenet group doesn't seem like it would have people of equal skill in each of the languages in question, however. I'd expect that you'd get a different language winning in each newsgroup you sampled from.
Is that study a joke? Do you really take it seriously?
SLRs work much differently and the lack of a delay is actually one of their selling points. A bit more on that topic:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/technology/10basics.html
This is not new. Cool, but not new or a sign that Apple is "far ahead". Sony Ericsson was doing this years ago. They would even let you pick from a few frames in case you missed the action.
I'm considering it for a side-project I'm working on now -- but, man, it's so hard for a site to gain traction even with free accounts, I'm not sure I have the stones.
So - All the best parts of the US Media, the UK Media, US Politics and UK Politics - all mixed together.
On YC, Demo Day, Metrics etc : Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose [video]
Yeah, I am not going to boycott Whole Foods over this. This is a store where many of the products sold didn't kill the earth while being produced, and where the employees are treated well enough to legitimately care about helping you out.

Things like that matter more to me than one guy's opinion column. (If he runs for President, though, I probably won't vote for him.)
So how does the machine, in these examples, request the machine understandable representation of the resource?

If the 'concept' is http://www.example.com/book/123, from this explanation, then there should be a way to get different representations of that via different verbs, right?

I guess this is where it always falls down for me, because there isn't a consistent way that all machine readable representations are flagged. Rather, we usually seem to define different URLs via extensions, for example, to define the different representations, which from this explanation seem like they should be reserved for different 'nouns' or 'concepts'.

Am I misunderstanding, or is that just the state of where we are at? And are there any plans to define those new 'verbs' at some point?
It wouldn't be the easiest thing in the world, but like anything, you start with a niche userbase.
Last night my local news had a woman go on and explain why she doesn't like Obama's health plan. Turns out she didn't have health care herself. Next to her was attorney Geoffrey Feiger (millionaire) who explicitly told her that he wouldn't mind paying a little more to cover her health. Take this and Joe Wurzelbacher and it seems like it's actually the poor people against these progressive reforms designed to help them.
So why isn't the millionaire paying anything towards her insurance?
Why would I want slicehost? I don't want a vps - I want someone else's hosted services rather than running them myself. For dev/qa/prod hardware we have 20 dl585s on order plus some nvidia tesla rackmounts. Its the infrastructure I'm looking for.

github gets me a small source repository. Their biggest plan is 60GB. We have more data than that in our initial test cases. I'm sure we could work something out with them but that doesn't help with other things. I guess we could combine with lighthouseapp.com to get issue tracking. Or use unfuddle to get integrated svn and issue tracking. Rally or basecamp for project management. saleforce for crm.

I was hoping someone had nicely integrated everything in a reasonable cost package - by programmers for programmers.
Many (most?) novel innovations seem obvious and self-evident after the fact. Even rocket science (of course make a pointed tube, fins for stability, and _just_ the right fuel- how else would you do it?)
I'm not familiar with anything like that...

I'd suggest just contacting github for a quote... I am guessing that if you're comfortable hosting your code on github's servers that you'll get a way better workflow and lower maintenance overhead than if you went with one of other proprietary companies...

I just mentioned slicehost in case you needed servers... b/c it's really cheap and easy to use.

I think you should make the decision based on scm workflow and code review workflow, not based on one vendor offering the exact set of products you hope to find.
Do you think that HOW the money is spent makes a difference, if the budget is already set for a particular year?
I'm enjoying the constant competition. I'd like to see them continue to push the envelope.
Well she actually said "why should you have to pay more" Which I thought was funny. I mean this just struck so much of a parallel with joe the plumber and warren buffet. On one hand is a guy who's not actually rich yet defending the right of the rich and on the other hand is an already rich guy telling you that you'll feel like it's only fair to give your money away once you're rich. Maybe they're refusing pity money, maybe they're being manipulated by the rich but not generous. Who knows?
Good question. May be they could get sued for gender discrimination? Although I'd like to see two things before making any assumptions:

1. Do men really out number women drastically on dating sites (this is only assumed, but is it really true?)
2. Are there any services that charges differently by gender (I can't think of one on top of my head).
Jump to 8:19 if you are impatient.
I agree, with one correction: you do not have to be a liberal to shop at Whole Foods and to think whether the proposed solutions are worth consideration.

This split into conservatives and liberals, while sometimes meaningful, often hurts the debate. We can take each issue on its merits without referring to talking points, party lines, etc.
similarly most Whole Foods shoppers are fat and unhealthy

I am not sure I agree with this. At my local Whole Foods, the bike rack is usually filled with 30 or more bicycles. (Mostly employees, I assume, but I'm sure I'm not the only person that uses his bicycle for grocery shopping.) Inside, people seem to be thinner than the average shopper at Jewel down the street. (If you want highly-processed foods, that is where to find them -- everything is highly processed. So while Whole Foods may not be perfect, it's orders of magnitude better than "normal" grocery stores.)

I agree that Whole Foods has a lot of "unhealthy" food. If you eat nothing but steak, yeah, that's bad. But if you eat it once a month, it's better to buy a good one from a cow that was not pumped full of antibiotics and that ate what nature intended it to eat.

I am not sure that Whole Foods has a lot of "highly-processed carbs", though, so it would be good if you could clarify that. Sure, you can buy pasta there, but I consider that "minimally processed".

In addition to all that, they do have a lot of healthy food available that you can't find elsewhere. (I was happy to find some locally-grown peaches the other day. Fruit tastes good when it isn't shipped in from South America.)

So Whole Foods is not perfect, but like anything, it's a good tool. You can go there and get some great healthy food. Or you can go there and buy soda and cookies. It is up to you. (I am partial to some of their energy drinks. Not very healthy, but very delicious!)
I’m making an educated guess that their average customer is very politically progressive in nature

You know, I've never even been to a Whole Foods, but I'm going to make a completely uneducated guess that your average Whole Foods shopper is a UMC, 30ish, former-hottie wife of a Lawyer/Doctor/businessman.

Did I guess right?
That statistic can be true without showing that most United States workers work in small businesses.
"being able to keep the majority of their health care dollars" is not grounded in reality. A friend of mine used to be a full-time Whole Foods employee, this is her story: http://www.metafilter.com/84093/This-organic-mustard-makes-m...
There are a number of people who make a living sueing newspapers for running "ladies night" advertisements. So it would not surprise me that there are a similar bunch of people sueing dating sites claiming that any sort of pricing differential would be discriminatory.

>Last September, after losing a Denver County Court case against Westword for a ladies'-night ad (at trial, he compared himself to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.), Horner filed a complaint against this paper with the Colorado Division of Civil Rights - a complaint he offered to settle for either $7,000 (the amount we'd need to pay in order for him to never file against us again) or $20,000 (in which case he'd also promise to not teach anyone else how to file against us). And in February, the Division of Civil Rights found probable cause that a ladies'-night ad in Westword had discriminated against Horner although just a year earlier, the same director at the same division had determined that a ladies'-night ad in the Denver Post had not discriminated against Horner, and in his determination cited the judge's ruling in our Denver County Court case, a ruling that exempted newspapers.

http://www.westword.com/2009-05-21/news/steve-horner-doesn-t...

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/10683429/detail.html
Please tell us in detail what he said that was wrong, and what sources show the correct facts.
More like a childish rant.
Maybe you guys should both get your anecdotes together and have them fight :)
And then there's Taiwan. It has always been a country of small and medium sized businesses

Yes. This was one of the most striking differences between Taiwan and the Republic of Korea during the 1980s, as each country was "graduating" from the Third World into the First World as newly industrialized countries. Taiwan had many small businesses, many of them family businesses employing family members, while Korea had a smallish number of huge conglomerates, employing tens of thousands. There were exceptions to the general pattern in each country, of course, but that was the systematic difference between Taiwan and Korea. Each country thrived with its own economic pattern. Each democratized, even more peacefully in Taiwan than in Korea, over the same period.

In Taiwan, an ancient Chinese proverb is often quoted, sometimes in somewhat modernized form: 寧為雞頭，不為牛後 "better to be the head of a chicken than the rear of a buffalo." A lot of Taiwanese people cherish being business managers rather than employees, and indeed my wife (from Taiwan) has been a small business owner most of her life. She wouldn't want to be someone else's employee just to have more secure employment--she likes making her own business decisions.
I haven't seen a palm pre yet (we don't have them in Canada), but I believe there is more than a bit of marketing hype in this.
Lots of people complain about their iPhones, and i HATE my mac, but get railed for saying so (and I fully expect to get down voted here for saying it).
Part of the Apple marketing magic is droning on about how great they are, and it seems to me most people go along with that.

I'm not saying the iPhone isn't a great device, but I don't think you can rely on these kinds of stats when you are talking about one company with a cult-like following and another that is just trying to get back after years of mis-steps.
The whole benefit of open source is so that stuff can be openly improved. If Chrome has a better javascript engine, then why not firefox and safari adopt it? They could always improve the Chrome version afterwards anyways (I'm assuming the V8 engine is indeed better). There really are only two browsers duking it out, Internet Explorer and the open source browser. Why? Because open source has no barriers to adopting it's own technology and can be considered one entity in theory. If one javascript engine is clearly superior why waste effort developing seperate open source implementations? It's not like the user interface where someone might prefer the style of firefox's javascript rendering over Chrome's. Competition even in open source is natural and should be encouraged, but they don't have to necessarily compete to improve. They can build on top of each other.
Safari's Web Inspector (used verbatim in Chrome) is still missing a few features vs. Firebug (mostly with editing, and integration with webapp frameworks), but it's STABLE, and fully integrated.

Firebug crashes constantly, is unusable with many sites, and is never quite in sync with Mozilla's development plans. Mozilla blew it big time promoting their completely useless "Web Developer" extension for years (even shipping it in the installer), and completely ignoring Firebug.
On this topic: Does anyone have any experience leasing from Regus? We're thinking of using them for (non-virtual) offices and conference rooms in a few areas where we don't have full-time offices (for sales staff, mostly.) Regus/HQ is the biggest company for virtual/executive leased offices, I think, and I've heard some good things about them...and some outright horror stories. I'm not sure what to believe...
I was pretty close to going with them. But they don't tell you their rents up front, and when they do, it's not counting all the random additional fees.

Even when I added them up and found they charged less than the coworking space I was using, I decided not to go with them because it was ambiguous if there were perhaps other fees that I didn't know about.
(Almost) everything is easier to learn on the second try.

Also, keep in mind you learned Python after C, so your experience is not clearcut.