skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The entrepreneurial rate in most countries had nowhere to go _but_ up, so this really tells us nothing more than the fact that a lot of countries have woken up and reduced the structural disincentives to entrepreneurship that had been in place. It is also not possible at this time for a country to be 100% entrepreneurs (or even close to that) and every additional percentage of entrepreneurship takes more and more effort.

Corporate taxes, beyond the obviously bad levels you see at the extremes, are not as directly tied to either entrepreneurship nor unemployment rates as you would suggest (c.f. in the late 90s we had higher taxes and much lower unemployment numbers -- the reason why this was the case is easy to see in retrospect, but it is a simple and direct example of how your arguments are flawed.)
Wow - there are only two Dallas-based folks - me and "sid12112". That is odddddddddddddd. Sure there are a few surrounding-city folks in the area but only two in Dallas.
All services you sign up for nowadays have the magical "binding arbitration" clause which states that all disputes will decided by an arbitrator of the service provider's choosing. And the individual arbitrators know that ruling against the service provider is the fastest way no longer be hired by that service provider.
An Ideal Number of "Idea People", Please
Streamy
-> Southwark
Why have developers been slow developing apps that utilise multicore processors?
How Dropbox saved my command line
> There is a reason that research into functional languages is limited to an old or new functional language. Without syntax and compiler support you don't gain any power to offset the limitations

I don't understand what this means.

> If you start dealing with a Fixed_Point objects, and Mobile_Point object, you now have bloat with little gain

Why would you not have a single point class implementing multiple interfaces? Surely if they do the same thing, you wouldn't bother. Good design would dictate that if they do similar things (but not the same), they should probably share an abstract parent class anyway.

> It's far better to have a "Final" flag on your point, so it will toss an error when you try to change it

And check this at runtime for every access!?! Why on earth would that be more efficient than static checking at compile time?
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=753154 (from just two hours earlier).
Where are you located? I'm looking for a hacker... stevesmith155//nospam//@//nospam//gmail.com
Looking at PEP333, the only reference to ISO-8859-1 is:

Note also that strings passed to start_response() as a status or as response headers must follow RFC 2616 with respect to encoding. That is, they must either be ISO-8859-1 characters, or use RFC 2047 MIME encoding.

start_response is to set the HTTP headers. So I suspect that's a requirement of the HTTP spec for headers (correct me if I'm wrong).

I don't believe WSGI cares about the character set you use for the HTTP message body.
I don't see why people love the JVM if they don't like Java. I agree that it is nice to have lots of libraries for free, but you also have the burden and limitations of living with something that was created specifically for Java. Languages such as Python and Ruby have been much more successful outside the JVM.
Package Manager: The Biggest Achievement of Linux
I agree that it's unlikely to be legally enforceable, I'm also pretty sure some states are moving to make portions of contracts requiring consumers to waive certain rights invalid. (Your example of being required to shoot a neighbor is clearly nonsense however).

Until it's tested in court though we'll likely never know. I assume part of AT&T's rationale is that:

A) They have the time & resources to argue then appeal this point for many years should any significant class action arise.

B) It may be enough to discourage consumers from joining aclass action. In many class actions the only people to see significant money are the lawyers. Consumers usually receive something of nominal value and if AT&T were to highlight this cause it may be enough to persuade most people not to bother.
The very title of this blog post tells me that it is bad advice.

What you should do is disable .htaccess and put all configuration in the VirtualHost configuration file.

Why?

Because when you have AllowOverride ON the webserver has to look for the .htaccess file and parse it if it exists for each and every request.

So if you lard up your .htaccess with 300 lines of rewrite rules and document handlers and so on, that has to be parsed for every page the server hands out. Which is one of the reasons some ignorant people think apache is slow.
I concede the finer point. It's probably true that rent seeking can be accomplished with the intervention of government as such.

I maintain that, because government is so accessible and because they carry such a big stick, the vast, vast portion of rent seeking is accomplished by subverting government regulation.

That said, I'm up-voting your reply because it is a relevant argument. I just watched a TED video with Paul Romer where he talked about the effect of societal rules on development: not just governmental laws, but broader societal norms that might prevent progress.
Huh? Are you suggesting that people use functional programming languages such as Haskell or ML because they are fashionable? Where on earth are you living such that they are fashionable? I wanna live there.
yes, but only for very long definitions of "next"
First Tuesday, Minibar, Drinktank and Bootlaw are often good.
And the comments on the page are really quite comprehensive.
Python is newer than Java? :D
How does TimSort improve (if at all) on what is published on the topic in academia?
I'll just butt in to say Kobe is great. Lots of character and interesting places to hang out in. Has it's own charm, different from Osaka or Nagoya (which I really like too).
Just keep in mind that if your project is under active development, people already have an incentive to contribute their private patches back to the mainline because it makes it easier to take advantage of other people's improvements. Otherwise they have to deal with managing their own fork.
The actual demo of the fork that the article author is discussing seems to be here: http://axemclion.github.com/Chroma-Hash/

(not sure why this is not mentioned in his article)
I lurk at http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
I get a lot of value from bitly's analytics. Also, with their pushing clients like AIR apps, iphone apps, and email readers to include referrers, your site's analytics are going to get a lot better.

URL shortening done wrong sucks. Don't use anything besides those that are really serious. Right now, bitly is the best option.
Please reread what I said. The fashion statement is using a non-functional language and adopting some functional mores.
Live in Tampere, work in Helsinki.
644 Demotivational Posters
Same; I don't know much Java, but I was able to write an Android / Scala app this weekend without any major problems. (OK, my computer won't recognize my phone and I can't install the app. But it works in the emulator.)

(Scala was probably the easiest language I have ever learned. No new concepts or syntax, just Java with some FP stuff and traits. Basically, everything Java was meant to be and should have been.

But it's really an imperative / OO language with the ability to do FP -- the standard library is not set up for pure FP like Haskell's. For that reason, I continue to prefer Haskell... but if Java compat is necessary, it's a great language.)
Under No Circumstances Write A Long Business Plan (my actual angel funded deck)
Girls encouraged to enter technology field
Holy shit, visiting that site is worse than loading a PDF if you're on an old machine.
There's a short story I quite like on the topic, not necessarily on its merits as fiction, but for having interesting ideas: http://everything2.com/title/Think+of+us+as+a+lost
Presentation Patterns
This meme is one that deserves a quick death.

First, how can you talk about tax rates without, er, talking about tax rates? In other words, if your only option is to say "well when I mean tax rates, I mean this other thing that's more statistically significant than what you mean" then that's really redefining terms, isn't it?

And assuming redefining terms is fine (I have no problem with it unless it's simply an excuse to shut down debate), effective tax rate is a statistical artifact, not the law. That means it's an average of all taxes paid -- both by huge megacorporations who have teams of lawyers and can locate partially overseas and by mom and pop internet startups who can't. And who do you think pays what, anyway? Once you get into statistics, methodology matters. If I remember correctly, the effective rate an average computed by total tax dollars, not a mean. That means that one Tycho who pays almost no US Taxes is going to offset about a million entrepreneurs who are having to pony up the full 35% rate.

High corporate rates, just like high income tax rates, will not hurt those already rich or making lots of money. The people it hurts are the folks trying to transition, trying to grow. The ones where five or ten percent make a huge difference.

The frustrating part about this effective tax rate discussion is that it presents a problem from which no further discussion is possible. I.e., suppose the real tax rate is 50% and the effective tax rate is 20%. Does that mean you should increase taxes by another 10%? Would that make the effective rate 30%? Of course not -- that's mushy thinking. But yet what are you supposed to do with this effective rate data? It seems to exist for no other purpose than to end debate on the effects of tax rates on corporations.
Supercomputer Visuals Without Graphics Chips
Taobao is an online marketplace, like Ebay or Amazon. The person making $75k/year is just one seller who uses Taobao's services.

Also, $75k buys a lot more in China ($6k GDP/capita) than in the U.S. ($47k GDP/capita).
Profit from developing something awesome w reddit's API/open-source
Favorite feeds?
The quasi-good news may be that a lot of other countries ... may increase their marginal tax rates

I'm not seeing anything good in that.

The statement seems to make the common assumption that economics is a zero-sum game, that somehow the harm that other nations suffer makes us better off. But this is absolutely not true.

When anyone is better off, it improves the lot of all, at least marginally. For example, a rich USA is able to provide aid to much of the rest of the world; our ailing economy might make some people smile as they think that the richies are losing out, but that just impedes our ability to aid. Even indirectly, riches provide the opportunity to research better agricultural practices, better healthcare, etc., and those things wind up benefitting all. Any country that's richer can afford to be more environmentally conscious, and that's a boon to all earthlings.

So I'm not able to take any pleasure in the idea that other nations might abuse their wealth-makers as badly as we do our own.
Not only does that require reflection, it is very error prone and not refactor-friendly. Just change the type of the list, change the method, and it will blow up on runtime instead of compile time.
In my opinion, that goes against the grain of Java (and c#, in a way) of having the compiler doing a lot of checking for you.

Google's approach, while more verbose, is a bit safer and more idiomatic.
Messaging is already implemented; it's just only enabled for conversations between us and YC founders.

One reason I haven't turned it on is that I don't want all the responsibilities that come with running a message service. But if a lot of people want this, I'd consider turning it on for everyone.
The problem I see is the amount of code that has to be copy-pasted, due to Java's lack of traits. If you want to write code like this, do yourself a favor and write it in Scala instead.
One thing that's weird in the example is that there's a confirm password box. The only utility I can see for Chroma Hash is in removing the need to confirm passwords. You'd need widespread use for people to remember their hashes though.
Croydon
what startup do you work for?
Considering how many links from TinyURL and other sites I've made that still work fine, but point to URIs that 404 without any redirection or sensible handling by the host, I remain unimpressed with this image of zillions of useless, shortened links choking the web.

That said, bits like this suggest that it might be slowly dawning on people that in 2009, we don't need mile-long URIs.
Tell HN:  Why Bing is the future of search.
Google-style search is essentially a solved problem. I wouldn't be surprised if Google's rankings are already close to "optimal" for the top 10 results.

This would mean that it would be impossible to ever beat Google because small ranking improvements would be insufficient to convince users to switch in large numbers.

The only way to improve search is using verticals as Bing is doing.

But you need to take this much further, opening up a vertical search API so that developers can extend the search engine in thousands of verticals competing with each other whereever there is overlap.
My takeaway from the article was that a lot of procedures were unnecessary rather than preventable.
Wherever works for me (im touristing so every place is an opportunity to see something new). <responding on doodle as well>
Boulder CO
It doesn't shorten all links.

Personally, I suspect the real source of the objection to URL shorteners is that they break referrer tracking and other sorts of ad-related analysis.
Concord, NH
Slashdot
Ars Technica

although I don't comment a lot, or at all but do read many articles
Fluent interfaces suck. Mutating objects is not acceptable, especially when you should pass the correct stuff to the constructor.

But this is Java, and it is the only way to cleanly allow inheritable initargs.

(Perl/Moose and CLOS get this very right. I only use setters in those languages in very, very rare occasions, and it is usually because I am hacking around something messy.)
Allston / Brighton
Did anyone else notice that he's started mentioning the CLR a lot more in this article? I know that there has been some recent work on getting Clojure running on the CLR and Clojure-in-Clojure; but I thought it was interesting that it's starting to return to Rich's conversations as well.
WHO UPVOTED THIS!?
That's a really good one (in reference to UI)
Except for that whole 'was a crack dealer' thing...
Tally is entirely written in C/C++/assembly + TDL (which is a DSL).

However, to manage development, we have our own in-house SCM tool (which uses SVN as a backend). This tool is written entirely in python. Additionally, some small build utilities etc are also written in python. That's what I meant by "scripting needs".

Apologies for the slow replies btw - I haven't been checking HN regularly.
indeed there are, and the heat is definitely killing me right now.
Here's another link to the documentation (since svn.python.org is not responding for me): http://bugs.python.org/file4451/timsort.txt

TimSort is essentially merge sort plus optimizations. The major optimization is that it identifies already-sorted subsequences within the input, and sorts these "runs" plus some surrounding elements using a fast binary insertion sort. This means that for input that isn't completely random, it doesn't need to do as many comparisons as a pure mergesort. TimSort has also been tuned based on empirical testing on real-world data/hardware.
Chroma-Hash: A sexy, non-reversible live visualization of password field input
serverfault.com
Ooooj, brate i ja sam iz Sarajeva
Sta se radi?

Also: I am from Sarajevo as well but am currently in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Nairobi, Kenya.
But can you really just use curve-fitting to extrapolate, without any theory of why the data should follow a curve? Would the data follow the same curve if you had 100 years of data? 200?
Is the suburb Richardson or Plano? :)
Of course you don't have to be, but what if you want to be? You don't have to go to Hollywood with the goal of being the next Tom Cruise or Will Smith or Angelina Jolie... you could act in obscurity anywhere, pleasing a core group of fans who are lucky enough to see you in action at your local theater. But if your aspirations are bigger -- if you want to be famous and use your fame to connect with as many people as possible through your chosen medium (like film or social media), what's wrong with that?

Of course you don't have to be social media famous ... but if you want to be, then go for it. I don't see any reason to listen to someone telling you not to pursue your goal just because it's not an imperative for everyone who uses that medium.
Caracas, Venezuela. Is there nobody else from here?
Thanks - good suggestions. The hub has some meetups near Islington, but I don't know if they're any good:
http://www.the-hub.net
Our mental abilities start to dwindle at 27
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7945569.stm
I suspect there are less incremental ways to beat Google. In this field, as in many, the big advances will come from redefining the problem: from saying not "we could make search better if we did x" but "if we did x, people wouldn't need to do search."

Directed Edge is already looking at the world that way. I'm not claiming they're the startup that will make Google irrelevant. Historical precedents suggest it's still early for that. But it seems extremely unlikely that nothing ever will.
Bah, only a few people from KL
By federal law, they cannot prevent consumers from joining class actions. However, they can in some states.

Also, there's a difference between an illegal contract (which is a nullity and for which no remedies are available in case of a breach) and an unenforceable contract (which may still be enforceable under theories of unjust enrichment, promissory estoppel, etc). A contract to do something illegal is an illegal contract. A contract with unconscionable (per se unfair) terms is usually an unenforceable contract.
Well, that and all the places where it goes on about how all "strings" it mentions must be bytestrings (even on platforms which don't have bytestrings), must only contain code points lower than 0xff, must be str, precisely str and neither any other type of string nor any subtype... and all of it to try to pretend that Unicode doesn't exist.

Yeah, HTTP is a byte-based protocol, and yeah, headers have to be ISO-8859-1 or MIME-encoded. But that doesn't mean that the particular bytes HTTP uses have to leak up into what are supposed to be high-level applications. There's no earthly reason why -- with every Python implementation moving to native Unicode strings -- WSGI should still have this attitude.
> To help the city flourish, the Canadians encourage immigration. It is a place with Canadian judges and Mounties that happily accepts millions of immigrants. Some of the new residents could be Cuban émigrés who

So the Canadian government, despite having no authority and no mandate to do so, decides to start administering an overseas possession ... except it's not really a possession.

Canada does this ... why ?

> Initially, the government of Cuba lets some of its citizens participate by migrating to the new city.

The Cuban government, like the East German government, chooses to murder people who try to emigrate. When given a choice, people leave dictatorships, and because dictatorships are slave societies built for the benefit of the rulers on the backs of the citizens, this makes perfect sense. Farmers don't want their livestock wandering free, and neither do dictators.

> With clear rules spelled out in the charter and enforced by the Canadian judicial system, all the infrastructure for the new city is financed by private investment.

Why do private investors want to take a gamble on such a crazy scheme?

Why not just invest their money building infrastructure in places where people already choose to live?

> The structure of the charter could be very different, perhaps with several partner nations in place of just one. The benefits could be just as large.

Huh?

Look, I'm a lunatic libertarian. I'm in favor of oceansteading, L-5 colonies, anarchocapitalism, etc. ... so when I say that something sounds like a really ridiculous dope-smoking idea, that means something...
I contribute actively to BRLCAD. Although I do get paid to do it.
Anyone know of good meetups in the Twin Cities?
Sevnica, Slovenia
Depends on how many people grew up watching Sesame Street and listening to NPR, compared to how many people grew up watching... uh... all those mainstream media sources that take the yes-there-is-human-biodiversity side of the human biodiversity debate.
Sarajevo born and bred here, live in Toronto now (kensington mkt) because it most closely resembles Sarajevo ;)
... this same tripe was submitted to reddit, they haven't actually switched yet, this is just a random paste of the timsort.txt file that exists within the Python SVN repository.
> Pointing this out as unclear for a "Java programmer" is a bit of a red herring I think.

I think it's really not. There's a talk out there, I think by Gosling, about the direction of Java including why lambdas were rejected for Java 7. One reason was actually to prevent the sort of functional code that polarizes people in terms of whether it is seen as beautiful or opaque. (E.g. currying, Y combinators.)

Java provides the flexibility to use functional programming through anonymous inner classes, but at considerable pain to the author. The point people miss is that that pain is actually a conscious part of the language design.

Anyone can learn about map/filter/reduce, and every programmer needs to for the situations when they are crucial. But on the other hand, the problems with explicit looping are much overstated and I'll admit to emotionally siding on the issue with the creators of Java and Python.

I don't think you can ever fully get the "how" out of programming, nor should you try, nor is "what" implicitly superior all the time in all situations.
I share some posts here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/rottled

It's not strictly tech related and I tend to share the non-tech items.

edit: I just dumped the xml file of my feeds and extracted all the titles. Here they all are, in their disorganized glory: "IBM developerWorks", "SlickDeals.net", "developerWorks : Featured content", "Scene 360 Illusion", "we make money not art", "Wooster Collective", "Schneier on Security", "SecGuru -", "Theory to Practice", "Hack a Day", "Cocoa with Love", "Consumerist", "Eli Bendersky's website", "Joel on Software", "Overcoming Bias", "Paul Graham: Essays", "Philip Greenspun's Weblog", "The Frontal Cortex", "The Internet Food Association", "The Simple Dollar", "Unclutterer", "Climbing Narcissist", "NYT > Rock Climbing", "Online Climbing Coach", "RSS - Hot Flashes Climbing News", "Hoefler & Frere-Jones", "Nice Web Type", "SpiekerBlog (en)", "TypeNeu", "Code & form", "Processing Blogs", "Modern Forager", "Falkenblog",
$125,000 in annual revenue is way low.

The Daring Fireball feed sponsorship costs $2,500 for _one week_. That’s $130,000 a year right there.

http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

The Deck pulls in $180,000 a month with 45 affiliated content sources. So if the profits are divided equally, or if Gruber earns the average revenue, then that’s $4000 a month. Some of the affiliate blogs hardly ever produce content and other blogs hide the ad at the bottom of the page, so I doubt that they divide revenue equally between them. I’d be very surprised if Daring Fireball didn’t pull down at least 3 times the Deck average. Call it $150,000.

http://decknetwork.net/

That would put us at $280,000 per year even before T-Shirt sales.
so am i :)
http://typophile.com

http://trendir.com

http://cardobserver.com

http://minimalsites.com

and the usual bunch - slashdot, engadget, ars technica
ABCL: Efforts paying off