skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And now, some alternative perspectives...

'Most Corporations Don't Pay Income Taxes'
http://www.truthout.org/article/most-corporations-dont-pay-i...

'Big business must pay it's fair share'
http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/07/big_busin...

You can slice the numbers and both your point and my point turn out to be true. The questions become: what kind of society do we want? how can we build that society? and who will pay for it? It doesn't seem unreasonable to ask corporations who benefit from the infrastructure of the nation (including transportation, educational systems, public libraries, medical systems) to help pay for those benefits.
If other countries have lower taxes, why don't they have more entrepreneurialism, value creation, innovation, and employment than America?
We're the main contributors to http://dotcloud.org

Open-source system automation for the cloud.
The at&t knowledge base article they are referring to was last updated on June 11; this isn't new.
Are there really this many HN-ers in Boston/NYC, or is this just the bias caused by people outside the valley being interested in location?
How the new U.S. healthcare bill will help small businesses (video)
No, because you're just contributing to Microsoft... ;p
Screen Scraping with Javascript, Firebug, Greasemonkey and Google Spreadsheets
Pretty smooth demo :). I see what you mean now, but i was going on the assumption that in a turn based game he wouldn't need to do much transformation, hence, my suggestion to just use pngs and allow the browser to redraw them.
King of the Apple geeks: Gruber as one-man media company
"Another issue that might change, but probably won’t change enough, is mixing Scala and Java. While it certainly can be done, it’s not easy except in the (admittedly important) case of Scala calling Java."

Has this situation improved at all since the language was written?
Arbitration clauses are getting tossed out left and right... a class action clause would likely be out the window even faster. They might as well put, "you permit us to be evil greedy bastards and screw you" in the contract... it's not going to stop me from suing them when they actually become evil greedy bastards who screw me.
That sounds like really broken compiler or build script behaviour, rather than something intrinsically wrong with the use of final.
Snappy quote, but it does not make much sense out of the context. "they've" must be referring to functions/methods, not programming languages. And in prototype-based languages methods aren't as tightly tied to data as in class-based languages, which is what I'm guessing Joe Armstrong criticizes here.
Which city? Sfantu?
That's a nice straw man you're arguing against.

Lobbying for less regulation, lower taxes and free markets is one position. Lobbying for increased oversight of potentially damaging behavior, increased transparency in industry, reduced rent seeking and universal standards of safety is another. The right mix is somewhere in between the two extremes of course and each side can point to massive failures of the other's philosophy.

Implicitly framing one side as "people who don't like profits or jobs" is distasteful and frankly surprising to see here.
Seattle Ruby Group: http://www.seattlerb.org. Plenty of hackers.
Oakland, California
Sure, but that would be deliberately going against the tips in the article. The idea is to not mutate values, rather, you instantiate new objects to store new values.
Stellenbosch
"The Java concurrency primitives like locks and synchronized have been proven to be too low level and often to hard to use"

synchronized is not hard to use. it's rather not a good practice to use it, since it will slow down code massively.
Most JVM implementations that I am aware of do sane things with respect to optimisation of immutable values.
So you think you found a good reason to show us your cv and your thesis ....
Used to live in the Vinings. ATL, you guys rock.
IIRC, initrd is also compressed.
They forgot the most obvious - "Mo money, mo problems"

"I dumb down for my audience, double my dollars."
-- Jay-Z
That is an extremely broad question, and the answer depends on your application.

I suggest you outline what type of application you're building and related requirements, and post that to http://stackoverflow.com
The problem is probably to find out which files these are. Not that it is hard to measure, but afaik there are no tools in place to do it right now.
No, because the browser initiates each connection.
New social etiquette: Please ask permission to tweet or tag?
Washington Post vs. Gawker -- Round #1: Opinions For Sale
I'm surprised it's higher than in Mexico. I thought our government liked to screw the corporations big time... Or maybe that's one of the reasons the country remains an underdog?
How do you like Kobe? Can you compare it to any other Japanese cities?
I think it is slow because of disk latency. To actually seek to find all these gazillion small configuration files. Just look at how boot up becomes much snappier when an SSD is used.
6-yr old Taobao.com has 120m users, 300m product listings and $15b in sales
Concurrency in general is hard. You'll find that most uses of concurrency in production systems is restricted to very specific patterns. This is probably not a conscious decision, rather it's just very likely that straying too far from very simple models of interaction between concurrent processes is actually just beyond the intellectual scope of most people. I do concurrency theory for a living, and concurrency primitives in Java still give me nightmares.
Tempe here
I'm surprised they haven't done that sooner. IIRC AT&T amended the terms of their "Universal" credit card to include binding arbitration and forbid class actions... right after they lost a class-action suit for having a flexible definition of when a payment would be counted as "late".
I don't understand google's awful implementations. In my code by contrast, a map function looks like this:

public double foo(double x)
{
return x*x;
}

list=Utility.map(this,"foo",list);
Oh, by pre-rendering, I meant using DHTML, not images. Each tile is a div. On the div, you draw a bunch of absolutely-positioned divs (sprites) with transparent PNGs for backgrounds. The sprites themselves are layered, i.e. you'd draw a bunch of divs with background images for terrain, then you'd draw resources at a higher z-index, then you'd draw cities, then you'd draw units, etc.

The reason for pre-rendering DHTML-based tiles is because a.) you have to worry about download times for the sprite images, though hopefully you can pay this once and have them cached forever and b.) it takes a fair bit of CPU to create lots of DOM elements and move them to the correct positions. Less than blitting an image to canvas, but more than just changing the top and left of a container div.
Small horse farm in Minnesota, about 40 miles southwest of Minneapolis/St Paul.
I've often wondered about this line of reasoning - that corporations "benefit" from a given nation and its infrastructure but the problem is that it's a two way street. The others use incentives put in place by government encouraging them to do things like research or investments. Local economies, consumers and nations themselves benefit greatly from corporations - both in the obvious point of jobs but even more so in the products and services they provide.

The report you cite at truthout also fairly points out that 80% of those companies paid no taxes because they didn't make any money. This doesn't take away from your point though that we have to ask what kind of society we want, but we also should be asking what's fair and also how services are provided.
Thanks for the tip. The question is broad because I am looking for guidance how to even get started tackling the problem.

The application will allow buyers to complex RFPs online & sellers to respond to them - a collaboration. I will need access control to allow users within and across companies to collaborate with appropriate restrictions.
These gmaps pushpin mashups have horrible usability. Could you maybe invest some time in producing heat maps?
Jeejee :p
Another thought:

Why doesn't Java make it easier to refer to a method and call it dynamically?

For this example:

List<Person> beerDrinkers = new ArrayList<Person>();
for (Person p: persons) {
if (p.getAge() > 16) {
beerDrinkers.add(p);
}
}

If we had a legalAge method defined on Person returning true for any person over 16, then it would be nice to write the equivalent of

List<Person> beerDrinkers = filter(persons, legalAge);

which would call the legalAge method on each person and keep the ones returning true. Like most things with Java, you can do this, kind of, but it means getting the instance class, looking up the method for the method name and signature, then invoking on the instance, all of which makes it just not worth it. Objective C has the idea of selectors, which is an easy way to specify the message you want to send to an object, which probably comes from some similar concept in SmallTalk.

This is arguably a more object oriented solution to this general problem. For one, it better follows Demeter's Law, as you do not need to expose the getAge property.
You can, but it's quite a bit slower. IIRC I benchmarked drawing a 32x32 image on canvas at about 15ms, while setting the top and left properties of an img tag or div with a background image was under 1 ms. The absolute numbers mean nothing (it was on an old laptop under Linux), but the ratios indicate at least an order of magnitude different in performance.
If you are familiar with rails (although it's worth learning if only for this), then look into http://wiki.github.com/stffn/declarative_authorization

I use it in 99% of all my projects to implement just that...
Taxes are obviously only a part of the equation but if you look at the trend lines, it's definitely not good. Taxes elsewhere have been falling significantly while those in the US have stayed the same. I do think other places in the world are seeing greater levels of entrepreneurialism (at least in the places I travel). The US is now nearing if not exceeding levels of unemployment in places like Canada and Europe.
It would be kinda pretty trivial to do this on any smartphone. Trust me,the iPhone could record before apple gave us Voice Memos.
It is very similar to ajax. The problem I have is when a game gets into the 2KLOC territory and above; when you have multiple files loading at different times in the game engine in order to offer the player a better experience. This leads to many, many handlers and a lot of chaining, and your pretty UML will quickly become incredibly hard to see in the program flow.

For instance to save the user you can't just call User.Save and then go about dependent routines, because there is a possibility that call fails or takes a long time and then the player is out of sync. This is especially important if you want to try to minimize cheating, as the longer the client goes without syncing, the higher the probability for tampering, replays, etc.
that's pretty impressive, even for china, I'll say
like github?
You need to do reflection, which probably has performance implications. You also cannot do closures, which you can simulate with anonymous inner classes.

Might be worth the trade off in your case, but maybe not for the cases Google has in mind.
A polite society is a conforming society. Opinions offend.
$15B in sales and he makes $75k a year? Doesn't sound like a sustainable business model to me.
Because, frankly, what's the alternative?

Lobbying to preserve your government made monopoly, to keep in place subsidies, to restrict competition, etc. It ain't all flowers and sunshine and free markets.

It doesn't matter if it's big labor or big business or big government, they are all bad.
i dont mean IM where things disappear and involve synchronous chat though.
From Jan 2008.
I'm not sure whether this clause would stand up in court, especially if AT&T were discovered to be doing something skeevy that only a class-action lawsuit would provide effective relief for. However, in general, a lot of consumer contracts have mandatory arbitration clauses buried in the fine print and the courts have been happy to delegate their work to the arbitrators.

Also remember that companies are happy to put all sorts of unenforceable terms into their legal boilerplate, to intimidate customers who don't know better.

If I were writing the laws I would enact a very strong presumption against mandatory-arbitration clauses in any contract of adhesion. But I'm not.
Why do we need URL shorteners again?
If txt was _really important_ to Twitter they'd have actually got the length limits right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=660986

Summary: for languages like Arabic, Hindi, etc., you only get 70 characters total.
Thanks. The plug-in description (which includes RBAC) looks like it might be useful.

I did toy with rails while trying to choosing a framework over the past two months - but chose to develop using Django. Is there an equivalent based on Django/Python?
Santiago, Chile

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
HackrTrackr makes FF 3.0 as well 3.5 unbelievably slow. Will have a second look if this is fixed.
I and some friends began a startup to make getting involved easier. We're building an open source involvement engine, helping people showcase their contributions to open source and find new opportunities. One thing I'm particularly happy with is our volunteer opportunity search engine; we index bugs from projects large and small, and we showcase places where projects have said they want help from new contributors. There's no other cross-project opportunity search.

Sign up for our alpha at http://openhatch.org/. Right now, before you forget! We'd love more feedback from people interested in getting involved.

Today is Demo Day run by our funders, Shotput Ventures, in case you follow those things.

Once we hit public beta (just a little while) we'll make a real announcement here. (-:
Bonus: Plenty of other great interviews linked to from the first paragraph of the article. I am reading an interview of Simin Peyton Jones. http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/261007/-z_programmin...

The complete list is at http://www.computerworld.com.au/tag/a-z%20of%20programming%2...

very informative and enjoyable! There goes the day. I'll be reading these all day!
It seems like the "location" field is just getting geocoded. So some people entered an actual address rather than just a city name. That said I bet there are a bunch of people stacked on "San Francisco, CA"
I expect it's for ease of editing when the system is up. Also remember there's a limit to what you can fit into a bootloader; an entire compressed filesystem might be too much.
One of the guys I know wrote this service, which has a firefox extension and a JSON API for un-shortening URL's: http://www.longurlplease.com/
Ditch binary to make quantum computers more powerful
Raleigh here. +1 for scorching heat.
I come from a C# background, learning Java, and I just so happen to be following that process. I don't remember where I picked it up (something in the Spring docs?), but it seemed like a good idea.

Short version: yea, it works pretty well.

Long version is at this shameless blog plug (no ads): http://itgoon.blogspot.com/2009/08/javas-lots-of-little-file...
Lobbying for free markets necessarily implies eliminating rent seeking.

You'll not that the only way that rent seeking is possible is when the government gets its claws into the industry. Government regulation becomes the tool of those it claims to watch. It happens every time: well-meaning regulators get subverted toward the ends of business lobbyists.

Is there any reason to believe that something will suddenly turn this around so that the government is never suberted?
And just a bit further down the road... Syracuse, NY here.
Now, don't scoff :)
"It was all a dream. I used to read Techcrunch & Hacker News.

Dropbox and Posterous up on the Frontpage.

Pushing new features on the server.

Every day Ask HN, ..."

Ok let me work on this. Obviously I suck at rapping.
I'm actually out in Gilbert. There are quite a few East Valley hackers who show up here.

Any of you guys make it out to Gangplank or Refresh?
What's so great about "Fluent" interfaces? If a language supports named parameters, they're inappropriate, no?

(Yes, I know Java doesn't have named parameters, although it and many other languages that don't have it have a work-around with assignment. this is a general question.)
Turku, Finland
yeah, it looks like FestBuzz is doing awesome...so why is the founder panic-ing, The earlier comment seemed to refer to an earlier competitor, so i was just curious what happened.

or is Jennie Lees not the same as hn user jlees?
I can believe there is that many lines of COBOL, after having learned and having to maintain/write COBOL, it's verbosity causes small simple programs to span hundreds of lines.
I've contributed a few patches to unladen-swallow, but most of my time is spent contributing to Django (I'm the multi-db guy :P)
I disagree. The fact that it is slower has no practical impact in the vast majority of cases, and is certainly not nearly as important as readability. So it comes down to which is clearer, and I find the functional style - even with the extra ceremony - more clearly conveys the code's intent. No messing around with the how, just show me the what. It's not about showing off, it's about abstraction of extremely common idioms.

Pointing this out as unclear for a "Java programmer" is a bit of a red herring I think. Anyone can learn what map/filter/reduce/etc mean in no time at all -- it seems a simple task compared to learning the project-specific abstractions of any codebase.
When the compiler sees a final method call it can
(at its discretion) skip the normal approach of inserting code

http://www.codeguru.com/java/tij/tij0071.shtml
There's another site doing exactly the same thing (but in a less cool way, naturally). We were meant to be on TC, but the guy dealing with it went on holiday and we got tech-blog-gazumped :( Fortunately, when your customers are attending an arts festival, that's not the end of the world...
I'm troubled by the suggestion that we can make a conscious decision about what kind of society we want.

First, pragmatically: the work of Friedrich Hayek shows that it's quite impossible for any top-down control mechanism to manage this stuff properly.

Second, philosophically: given the foundation that America is supposed to build on, I don't see how any group of people has the right to actively force a structure of society onto the others.
Animated clip: Boss confronts you for being 3 minutes late
Agreed. Probably his confusion stems from the fact that Java can expose properties directly. Eww.
Pascal Zachary: An Operating System for the Cloud (Author of Showstopper)
I will not get angry at a context-free headline urging me to do so. I may get slightly annoyed that this kind of sensationalism stands here however.
Linux DOES use compressed files - BUT: decompression takes time too, so I'm not sure exactly how valuable this is.
The real slowdown is waiting for hardware to intialise. The super fast linux booting that some people achieve is by clever elimination of services they don't need and by starting as many services as possible concurrently.
The real slowdown is probing which hardware is plugged in.
Yes, I work full time on https://launchpad.net/
The trick with 'no profit' is that it's possible for a company to tweak the numbers such that the books show 'no profit' while great profit was made and distributed in ways to allow that (some legal, some illegal, some gray area depending on interpretation). Big companies can take advantage of these rules much more easily than small ones due to a greater ability to allocate resources a legal dept that can explore these options.
oh, I see. 4iP != TC. maybe you'll be on TC next when the guy gets back...i don't get it. my bad.

as for the tech-- nice work ;-) i've already emailed links to my friends.
Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA
Hello Koobe from Tampere =)
Noida
As much hate as the subway gets when they get shut down from the rain a little context yields a lot more understanding: "We move 13 million gallons of water a day when it’s not raining." Mind boggling that any of it works at all.
I currently live in PHX, AZ but will be moving to Auckland, NZ in the next year. Part of the reason is bootstrapping, but there are others as well: lifestyle, getting a better balance in life, living in a safer, nicer, cleaner part of the world that is very western and modern. Beaches ;) (there are quite a few others as well).

I've done TONS of research on this and for me and my family, NZ makes the most sense. When we get there we'll look around at the various cities and towns, but we'll start in Auckland. The great thing about NZ is English, 4 hr time zone diff to west coast of US (+ 1 day, but really a 4 hour diff) and a great lifestyle balance. Plus, who wouldn't want to go to the place voted to be the most peaceful nation on earth!!
The domain name is a good clue that this is a highly political topic.

Politics is not hacker news.
I wonder if Google Docs will still be around & accessible in 20 years.
I'm just curious, but what did the README files contain? You seem to be really organized!
How did you manage to graduate with a BSEE without learning to program? Not flaming, I just don't get it. Even as an undergraduate EE, I was doing lots of programming projects.

Anyway, you're an engineer; you can learn PHP. Trust me when I say that many people much, much dumber than you already have!
Mars, methane and mysteries
You know you're in Texas when you receive company wide emails asking people to stop spitting in their trashcans, actually, it's published company policy.
Thumb Drive | Modern-Gadgets.Com
I dunno, personal friends of mine have worked on COBOL code and I'm definitely NOT old enough to have been around during COBOL golden age.

Also, regarding Y2K, I imagine if power plants and such were not updated, we'd have been in a bit of trouble.
If you aren't groking what this is about the example given in article is awesome. http://mattt.github.com/Chroma-Hash/

Mattt-triple-t was our intern at the Yahoo! Developer Network last year and sent us this a couple of weeks ago. It's a really solid example implementation. You should play with it.
Ann Arbor, Michigan
If you are intending to keep them for some time, look for pH neutral/buffered paper, and a permanent (and non-toxic) marking device.
Hey, same here! Are you at Cornell?
Some great tips, possibly with the exception of #9 ("Restrict file upload limits for PHP"). I think you'd be better off putting those settings in your php.ini file, just to promote separation of concerns.
I suspect class actions attorneys would get excited by this, because of the extra fees they can charge. I suspect the process would now go something like this:

1. Some people talk to a class action attorney about a class action suit.

2. Attorney finds a class and a cause and moves forward on suit

3. AT&T objects, possibly countersues

4. Attorney now has small-to-medium sized fight over non-enforceability of the clause

5. Class action suit goes ahead as planned

It's steps three and four which are new, and require more lawyering by the class action attorney - who will no-doubt do it, since they wouldn't have started the class action to being with if they hadn't thought they'd win.

As for how this compares to mandatory arbitration clauses, the theory behind them is that people can get similar levels of justice through that process as they can through the courts, with less cost and general overhead required. Preventing class action suits, however, takes away a form of legal remedy - the class action - and doesn't replace it with something similar. There's no legal theory like this behind this clause; it's pretty blatantly about taking away a form of legal recourse without replacing it.

I am pretty sure a clause like this has never been tried before the courts, but if it was, my money would be on it being thrown out rather quickly.
Installing unsigned applications on S60