skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I might imagine good scenario of goverment giving money to some large player in non-innovative industry so they can modernize instead of waiting a decade or so for small more up to date company to grow and eat old behemoth. It's picking winners and it's not fair but it doesn't matter who wins as long as technology advances. It's not like people are in the business only because it's fair.

But generally I agree that examples you provided are bad goverment spending. Subsidizing agriculture is actually subsidizing poor that would not be able to afford food if consumers would need to pay for it 100% out of their pockets. Bank bailouts came out of fear that economy could not take massive bank bankruptcies. I can't even imagine what goes on with starbucks. Those are bad reasons to give money. Money for food should be given to poor in form of basic income and farmers should compete for that money like every other company. And gambling banks should be allowed to fail if they were allowed to gamble. Real economy is much more resiliant and it's pretty distanced from financial markets "economy" to be seriously harmed by collapse of multiple banks.
Do you think so? He's rated very highly in the Anglosphere I would have thought, he won the Nobel prize for lit. and witness the NY Times obit. here.
Huh. I was around the AI Lab in the late 1970s -- as an undergrad -- and I don't recall hearing anyone talk about Chomsky in the way you imagine. DARPA funding was still flowing rather freely, it seemed to me, well into the mid-1980s. I don't recall anyone suggesting that there would have been yet more DoD money if it hadn't been for Chomsky. And the grad student I did some work for, who was working on natural language parsing, was clearly intimately familiar with Chomsky's ideas on transformational grammar and referred to them throughout his dissertation.

So this isn't ringing true for me.

I also recall Gerry Sussman speaking quite highly of Algol 60.

No, I think you're quite wrong: the reasons for the popularity of Lisp at the AI Lab have to do with its actual advantages over other languages for the kinds of problems they were working on.

And there is an example of a language in the MIT tradition with infix syntax: Dylan. Great language, but wasn't in the right place at the right time to catch on.
Ask HN: What happened? HN is slow all day
Every time i visit HN, the load takes about 10-20x the normal time.

How can this be? Is someone else experiencing this? (noticed it on 2 different locations in Belgium)
This is a ridiculously low number. I'd say you really need to double it or so. Good luck! Looks like you've got some pretty cool past projects under your belt.
There actually is a second type of downvote: if you click on the direct comment (e.g. on the 'link'), you can flag that particular comment. You should use that for the "This is actually bad" type of comments (spam, etc.)
Snowden broke his oath and the law. There is no argument about this.

However, the fact that people can't see past the law to the bigger picture is more than a little disheartening.
I largely agree that government influence is a market distorting, but a few points;

* Solyndra received ARRA money which only existed because the economy blew up. The 'crowding out' effect of government money is greatly limited in recessions caused by low aggregate-demand. (The unemployment rate for those over 25 years old with bachelors degrees tripled from spring 2007 to spring 2009 when Solyndra received the loan[1])

* The type of accounting you're describing is nearly impossible for these extreme tech projects. Many of these types of companies are unprofitable until they aren't any more. Solazyme and Tesla are good examples. The 'straight accounting' said they were horrible investments for the government, but both have found success after a decade of struggling and both could be world-changing.[2][3]

* Politicians didn't 'commission' Solyndra, it was founded by ex-Intel employees in 2005, all of the initial R&D and pilot work was paid for by VC/PE and debt, and they only used the DOE loans to scale-up after four years of groundwork.

* It wasn't some ignorant bureaucrat running the DOE program, it was Nobel Prize winning physicist, Steven Chu.[4]

[1] - http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?g=x...

[2] - http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/2014/03/solazyme_lau...

[3] - http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/20...

[4] - http://energy.gov/contributors/dr-steven-chu
Not as good.

Merely goes for the surprise element.

The other quote also:

1) gives more plot information (the hero is an older man, sentenced to death),

2) beautifully evokes his nostalgia before death (remembering an event from his childhood)

3) AND builds suspense: He is at the moment in front of the firing squad. Will he die? Get a pardon? Somehow be resqued?
NASA discovers Earth-sized planet in habitable zone
Well, I was imagining a situation where you had multiple different pieces in a game, relating to each player and distinct to that game. Maybe like an RTS game or something?

So you might want to query how many pieces a certain player has available, or do a check on who this piece belongs to.

Keep in mind I'm still not saying an actual game, but any problem that had similar data storage and access patterns as a game along these lines would have.

I don't know enough about firebase to confirm whether it is suited to this, but if I had any kind of backend at all, and I had requirements for really quick reponses, i wouldn't be comfortable adding the extra hop to a hosted service onto each call.
I edited the title once, and have just gone to do so again, but have found that even though it's inside the 2 hour limit, the "edit" link has gone.
Self reply, I hope that's okay.

I looked into this more (had an urge to learn Spanish today). Frequency dictionaries might be a good place to start. Here's the Spanish one I found [1]. It's a dictionary sorted by frequency of use (in a 20 million word text survey) instead of alphabetically. I imagine you can find a similar dictionary for other languages.

[1] http://speak-spanish.ru/wp-content/uploads/A-FreDictSpan.pdf
How Does Automount Work Anyway?
The question is not only about what could be invented with private funds. No, we also consider if it was actually invented with private funds - or if the government did that first, and now we are not sure when - or if - private capital would actually do that without government.

I'd agree that there are examples of advancements which almost certainly would be delayed without government involvement, and there are examples where it's almost certain that even without government we'd have results in almost the same time. Human genome sequencing comes to mind.
OpenBSD devs comments documenting progress with cleaning of OpenSSL codebase
Very simple UI with a small learning curve.
Bravo, this is fun.
That's subjective, I like the simple look. Also his prospective client want an MVP, a working prototype, they're probably not after the design.
Having a starting price in the $10k range also weeds him out. In my market (Austin), if I have $10k for a prototype (even half that) I can throw a cat and hit a Ruby guy, a Python guy, a PHP guy, etc. The price as he has it is low enough that people with "an idea" might take the plunge to get a prototype going.

If I were to have one suggestion it would be for his site to spell out some parameters about what a prototype is so there are no later arguments.
I don't know how they're doing it, but Fastly is growing like crazy. They're still just a little out of the price range for my personal blog but I do want to use them on a larger app soon. Their benchmarks are great.
it's 3am, here. up from 10am. so i'd request pardon my language, i was being bit lazy, and obviously english is not my first lang.

It's interesting., other guys have agreements and disagreements over it, since science wasn't my major, so until now, i used to believe it's only me. and sometimes too scared to ask it at the risk of for being too stupid.

I can't believe, if we had a physical body like snake, elephants, we could ever had come thus far. at best we hv had an advanced jungle but nothing more than that. perhaps I could be wrong, but this just doesn't settle with me.

As for the 2nd part, why we look anywhere else, Why we don't have life on lets say Mars. If we can understand the 'essence' or whatever, of Evolution theory, then we must have our martians cousins too no?.
And risk alienating an entrenched and fanatical fanbase?

Note the '2014' in the title; this is one of those regular sports games franchises, and it has been around since 1992 (For the first 10 years or so, it had the name 'Championship Manager', but that was changed due to legal hassle). Every year, these guys upgrade their engine, upgrade the player database, pile on some improvements and tweak stuff, and put out a new game. Some fans buy the game every year, some every two, or every three years.

It might be a niche product, but Football Manager owns that niche; it has a recognisable brand name and product (one that is well-recognised in the real-life sport itself to the extent that one Premiership Football Team - Everton - even bought early access to the player database), a large and fanatical fanbase (the company has fans in almost every football team in the world scouting players for it), and constant (if not growing) revenue stream.

Gamers aren't stupid; trying to nickel-and-dime them with those hated microtransactions is the sort of thing that would easily lead Sports Interactive down the road to an EA Dungeon Keeper-style PR nightmare. SI are already onto a very good thing; the sort of quick-buck Zynga/King style cynical disruption you're suggesting would be a total disaster.
nightwatch was a terrific movie, btw.

just curious, but what kind of business model did you end up going with?
Talk to your kids about "Death"
I think a better word than "insane" is "unsustainable." A pet theory of mine is that if the median household salary in a given locality isn't enough to qualify for the median mortgage in the same locality, that locality has a problem. All of San Francisco has that problem and an increasing amount of the area around it does, too. I'm not sure when this will come home to roost, but I'd be surprised if it isn't within the next couple of years. (I also suspect the tolerance for spending three hours a day commuting between SF and the South Bay, even on private buses, will drop as the commuters age, but we'll see.)

There are still places which are considerably cheaper and even still accessible via regional transit like BART, but they're cheaper because they're not considered "interesting" neighborhoods. In another 6-12 months we may see a lot more people deciding the East Bay isn't so bad after all.
My biggest concern with doing something like this would be that you'd burn all your time negotiating - because clients are going to show up with a "3 months to implement" idea, and you're may spend more (unpaid!) time stripping the thing down to a reasonable MVP than actually coding.

"We'll agree beforehand on a list of features" has a lot of complexity hidden inside; if a client shows up with an idea "be the next Google" and hands you a list "1. SEARCH TEH INTERNETZ", what will you do?
I have read that QEMU excels in server virtualization but lags behind VirtualBox in desktop virtualization. Is this still the case?

I am not an expert in this area, but I find it to be the case for me. Running a desktop guest under kvm is a pain - I'm about to move to a new workstation and am considering moving to virtualbox. My desktop guest under kvm doesn't accept the mouse scroll wheel, doesn't support clipboard copying, doesn't support dynamic desktop resizing, and virtualbox does. These things are theoretically fixable with kvm, but there's no clear and easy path to fix them (or wasn't, last I checked. I tried a few things and failed). Virtualbox just has 'install guest additions' and you're done.

I've not tried virtualbox for servers - the perception I had was that the management tools were really focused around desktops.
I'd consider Smartsheet.com to be playing in that space.
Donate pull requests for charity?
Some months ago, I saw an article on HN about an organisation which facilitated coders to contribute to software projects for charitiable organisations. It used some clever play on words, involving some github-related word (e.g. pull, fork), but I can't remember the name, and no amount of playing with HN's seach engine has yielded it for me. I have found a few similar organisations on the googles, but I want to track down this specific one. Can anyone help? Thanks.
Actually, VirtualBox's BIOS code is 100% freely redistributable and modifiable. Unfortunately, the only compiler capable of building it is non-Free (OpenWatcom). It turns out there's not a whole lot of interest in writing compilers targeting 8086 real mode these days. :(
What's incorrect about it? I'm glad to fix any inaccuracies! :)
It runs natively on linux, it's free and bugs, but not source code, are hosted on github.

I really recommend watching this http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZYMI1zB9s just make some popcorn before.
I have yet to hear a good explanation why homoiconicity is a good thing or in any way easier to learn. My main problem is that you have to know all the same things, but they become unknown unknowns. Not being able to tell at a glance that the argument list in a lambda expression, as one of the most common examples, is doing something other than execute code is very confusing if you're expecting everything to follow the (func arg1 arg2) pattern. On the other hand, when you encounter different syntax, it's immediately obvious that you need to know something else - a known unknown, which is easier to correct.
I would love to do an AMA sometime. To be honest, I've just been a long-time lurker on HN (6.7 years a member!), but I sorta wouldn't know the best way/time to go about doing one. Any tips?
I love this one from same author:

"On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit."
Postgres Performance for Humans
Having not found much of anything, we're going to roll our own gateway. It seems to be the only way and extremely cost effective. Probably just using some variation of Android SMS gateway software.
I know one of the main developers on Flask. He's an exceptional fellow and extremely talented. I havent used the framework before but I hear it's highly recommendable in general.
Princess Punt Sweet Surpasses 8 Million Downloads In Japan Alone
I don't see why your (agreeable) sentiment about Digital Ocean affects the fact that Linode is bad at security and customer interaction. We can always avoid both.

I didn't mean to use the word "droplet," so I'm sorry for the confusion.
Astronomers Have Found the First Earth-Sized, Habitable Zone Planet
NASA Signs Agreement with SpaceX for Use of Historic Launch Pad
I loved when /. introduced the vote-categories, if for no other reason than it finally solved the internet humor problem for me. Some people like the joke/comedy comments that occur in discussion threads. Nine out of ten times I find them uninspired and formulaic. /.'s voting system meant that I did not have to see the "funny" comments and all of the "comedy fans" were able to get their laughs in without my downvotes.

slashdot user id = #8912
I've got perception that bureaucrats are reluctant to change things for the very reason the new things can come worse - and those specific bureaucrats will be held accountable, in one way or another. In other words, I doubt there is no reason to try to do better.

May be incentives as a whole are different enough - say, lesser, if we can compare - with government-baked projects rather than with privately backed ones.

Could it be so that government is less efficient, but only on some projects where it can have good competition from private resources? May be government is better - or actually the only option - with some other areas, where you just can't find private backing?
Some of it:

todo: do not leave 15 year old todo lists in the tree.

This code is the reason perl has a name as a write only language.

Remove oh-so-important-from-a-security-pov OpenSSL_rtdsc() function.

Do not feed RSA private key information to the random subsystem as entropy.
It might be fed to a pluggable random subsystem.... What were they thinking?!

<RANT> Whoever thought that RAND_screen(), feeding the PRNG with the contents
of the local workstation's display, under Win32, was a smart idea,
ought to be banned from security programming. </RANT>

Edit: just noticed, there's a BLOG with it.. http://opensslrampage.org/
The effects of meditation
I've been following Servo for a long time and had never begun to consider this. How incredibly exciting it is that they could actually get to the point where the only thing holding back their performance wasn't even in the code.
Montage Studio
Thanks for all the helpful advice! Totally didn't expect so much feedback.

Question for the more experienced people here: if I changed it to "$2,345 per week, and it'll take 1-3 weeks" instead of "$2,345 for up to 3 weeks," would I lose anyone I shouldn't be losing?
posted elsewhere in this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606784

re: deleted comments should still count toward karma

>The other day I saw a user making comments that struck me as factually questionable. I'm not an expert in that field, so I asked for an explanation. The user had an avg over 5, so there was reason to believe the user might have known something I didn't. All of a sudden, the user's comments on that topic started getting downvoted. Despite the initial downvotes one of the comments was still at the top of the thread (my understanding is that a user's avg impacts the comment ordering). The user never responded to requests for more information or reputable sources, and then all of a sudden, all of his/her comments on that thread were deleted.

>Curious, I went and looked up the user's previous comments. In multiple fields this person put on an air of expertise. Maybe he/she is and then again, maybe not. But the comments were almost all disparaging, with this air of expertise. So, the user makes definitive claims that come across like an expert, if their comments start getting downvoted, they delete the comment and don't get penalized. Otherwise, they reap in the upvotes and have an avg that appears to the world to justify their expertise.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6453401

There are more submissions, some may have discussions, but I've not bothered to look them up. Many disagree with me, but I think (a) HN is broken in this regard, and (b) I'm not going to bother any more, except when my Faux-CD[0] kicks in and makes me. I'm trying to control that, but don't always succeed.

[0] I don't really have OCD[1], but I get twinges of what it must be like. Just vague hints at the edge of my experience. So it's not fully fledged OCD, hence the term "Faux-CD"[2]

[1] A friend of mine says he doesn't have OCD, he has CDO, because it has to be in alphabetical order.[3]

[2] Coined by another friend Matt Parker.[3]

[3] Perhaps the most surprising thing about these sentences is that I have more than one friend. Or even a friend at all ...
Yep. This is just going to be an echo chamber, circle-jerk community if 'downvotes' are more powerful.

Not that is isn't already.

braces for downvotes
Indeed, looking at the logo again, it appears to be a pour-over brewer - clever. (I am a coffee neophyte and wasn't aware of this brewing method.)
Portland will flush 38 million gallons of water
Yes, every commenting system which has an 'upvotes' system should learn from reddit's sorting, because it's the only major one I've seen so far which takes care of this 'problem' of early comments get more votes, later ones get buried.
As a simple rule, you can usually break MVP clients into two groups:

1. Cash poor wantrapreneurs who expect the world but can't pay for it.

2. Entrepreneurs with realistic expectations who are able and willing to pay a fair rate for labor. The founder of Groove is a good example[1].

The person interested in a 3 week engagement that costs $2,345 is more likely to fall into the first group.

You want to do everything you can to avoid the first group, even if you're starting out and trying to build a portfolio. These clients are far less likely to collaborate with you effectively and far more likely to be unprofitable to serve. Additionally, because they don't have the capital reasonably required to execute on their ideas, you'll probably never build long-term relationships, which are very desirable for solos.

In terms of targeting the latter group, which would enable you to charge a lot more, you're far more likely to be successful if you can demonstrate that you have some product development chops. A lot of entrepreneurs need help translating their knowledge and ideas into functional requirements; many of them are not going to come to you with ready-to-implement wireframes, user stories, specifications, etc. These entrepreneurs need a partner who is capable of being involved in the tasks that come before implementation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7604055
Last paragraph tl;dr:

"To sum up, for the last several months, while living in Russia, Snowden has been putting forward a justification for his acts (a) that he knows is not true, since it doesn’t explain his actions, (b) that is approved at the highest levels by the Russian government and (c) that gravely harms the US and helps Russia in its confrontations with the US around the world."

Thanks tokenadult, as usual, for the regular updates from an opposing view on Snowden. I'm still undecided whether the man was operating for attention from the start, or got scared and changed his plans after the leak already got under way. In either case, I've come around to accept Snowden as a non-altruistic actor.
It's a good question and something I've thought about.

I have a half-written blog post from a few months ago (proof: http://note.io/1lde2HC ) that tries to address this. My idea was that every SAAS startup should start with an exit plan for its customers that would be legally viable in the case of acquisition, being shut down, or any other scenario. Basically a set of software tools and policies that are clear from the get-go, so you aren't waiting to see what they'd do in that case.

We're working on some pretty major releases here so I haven't gotten a chance to finish the post (and publish a plan ourselves) but it's something I think about a lot.

It's a SAAS problem beyond the photo space.
Wu-Tang Clan Fans Launch Kickstarter to Bid on One-of-a-Kind Album
Nike FuelBand – out of gas already?
Yeah, book is much better though, if you haven't read it, I highly recommend it!

I wasn't able to find a way to present what we were doing as a product, and kept going with a traditional model of getting project specs, doing discovery on requirements and budget and then putting together a quote.
I believe they hit that limit several years ago, hence the 100% annual growth rate in what they are paying to buy distribution traffic. My thesis is that they are now in the $X per organic user + $Y = ($Q - $D), where $Y is the amount of money a nominal 'purchased' user brings in ($Q) minus the cost of getting them ($D).
This is the kind of thing we might do if enough people really want it. On the other hand, HN's minimalism is one of its strengths and we don't want to mess with that. So new features have to sing for their supper.