skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If Tesla finds itself in dire financial straits, they'll be wrapped up and shut down. If GM finds itself in dire financial straits (again), they'll be bailed out (again) or merge, or something. They won't go away.

> Which one is more likely to pay back your bond? The one with a virtual guarantee from the government that they'll stay in business, or the tiny startup with a bright future?

There's something I'm pretty sure you don't know. During the last bankruptcy and government bailout, GM bondholders got decimated to the tune of tens of billions (!) of dollars. If hey, there might be another bailout! is the thinking behind the credit rating, it ought not raise the rating.
Can't wait for Musk's snarky response to this
The propagandists are demonstrably responding to this tragedy with more propaganda. The people of this nation got sufficiently upset with the jackbooted authoritarianism approach in 1994 that they elected a Republican Congress to stop it, among other things. The lesson that gun control equals lots of politicians spending more time with their families sunk in pretty well after Al Gore's loss in 2000 (it was one of many things, that if any one of which had not been an issue he would have won on Clinton's record).

It wasn't till Obama had "more flexibility" after his last election that the gun grabbers made another major push at the national level, and abjectly failed. How much they'll pay for that we'll find out starting in November (various Senators like Manchin won't come up for election for another 2 or in his case 4 years, I guess he supposed we'll have forgotten by then).

(Note this is largely, but by no means entirely a partisan issue; almost no one in the national Republican party cares about the issue, and at the Federal level we've seen very little relief, the real action is state and local, including elections for Federal offices in them. And it's not a litmus issue like e.g. abortion, there are at least a few very anti-gun national level Republicans like Pete King.)

Anyway, the politicians are most certainly acting rationally. Those in completely safe seats like Diane Feinstein are all for gun control, the national security state, etc. Those that aren't have a much stronger tendency to listen to their constituents. Entirely rational responses.

Also, why shouldn't we respond rationally? Besides the total lack of evidence that gun control works, these atrocities mostly happen in gun free zones (all of the really big ones have, except for the Arizona Congresswoman's shooting), e.g. this happened in Santa Barbara County, where the Sheriff issues very few concealed carry licenses, and the state in its infinite wisdom banned (unloaded) open carry. There's one obvious answer there, one that almost all the nation's states have adopted, and with judicial action, we may see 90% of Americans enjoying a right to carry concealed (Illinois now, California and Hawaii someday, maybe).

Another is to get serious again about mental health. It's also no accident that these atrocities are committed by the seriously mentally ill, but for a bunch of reasons we almost always don't do anything about them until they commit crimes.
I think what shocked me the most about that debate was how much the phpng developers tried to undermine Pierre Joye, by even contradicting their own goals.

In particular, their primary advertised concern was on the 4% increase in memory usage - but the whole purpose of phpng seems to be to make PHP more compatible with JIT compilation later on - and that seems to almost universally requires large amounts of memory to work really well.
Does S&P usually wait to be solicited by the company before giving ratings? The headline appears to imply it does.
It's not leaving the US economy but it sure is going into a void. The defense contracting system, especially on large projects like submarines, is very inefficient. A lot of that $18 billion is probably in cost plus contractors where the contractors gorge themselves.
I honestly thought this was going to talk about the incredible misunderstanding a lot of people seemed to have about the story. Most assumed that the Navy was ordering 10 submarines to be delivered at more or less the same time, which is not at all what was happening.

Rather, the Navy is buying the next 10 submarines it would have been buying anyways, but in a single block contract to reduce the per-unit cost. But that wasn't the interpretation that made it to the taxpayer (which makes sense for the taxpayer, but I don't understand why so many media sources left it confusing).
The point I'm making is that you are doing everything but looking at the question from a perspective other than your own, and that's the sine qua non of competence at office politics -- the correct analysis of the social and political pressures currently affecting any given other person, and how a prospective action on your part might influence them.

To refer briefly back to my example: If our lovable rogue doesn't care whether, by attempting to improve the product, he risks both getting himself fired and damaging the political situation around that change to the point where it has no reasonable prospect of being made in the definite future, then he should go right ahead and do what he wants to do.

If either of those concerns matters to him at all, though, he'll be much better served by instead laying off a ways and making sure he's got a solid grasp of the situation, and only then commencing to consider how to make the change he wants to make in a way that'll favor its survival, or whether there is no such way and he'll be better off just adding it to his "when I find a way" list.
It's a myth that NPAPI is browser portable (at least in the sense that portability is not a massive undertaking). NPAPI doesn't work on mobile platforms and it requires a huge effort to add or even maintain support for a multi-process browser and a modern graphics stack. Even then, the support is a hack that is a constant source of bugs, crashes, and security vulnerabilities. The only thing that's kept it working this long is constant vigilance on the part of browser makers.
I gave you an up vote as I suspect you'll need it.
Of Bits and Buffers
Why did this post just disappear from the homepage of HN? Before I clicked the login link it was #2 in the list... 1 min later it's not even on the first page?
The best choice depends on your reasons for learning Lisp. If it's to work through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs or just learning in general, then Racket is the way to go. Teaching Lisp is embedded in its culture.

On the other hand, if you are hard core all day with the JVM, then Clojure. But I would not recommend Clojure as a first Lisp. Its community is very much organized around being a better JVM language, somewhat around teaching people Clojure in that context, and not really around introducing people to Lisp. It's more about providing Lisp to the JVM programmer and JVM to the Common Lisp programmer.

As for learning Common Lisp, if you're plan is to work your way through Graham's On Lisp or Hoyte's Let Over Lambda then it makes sense.

Of course any of them make sense if it's for work.
Actually the submarine program in question (the SSN-774-class procurement program) is one of the most successful defense acquisition programs in U.S. history, as far as cost performance and compliance with contractual deadlines and milestones.
I'm not focusing on his actions here. His actions were the result of pent up, dangerous, toxic emotions. The same emotions that are felt (albeit to a lesser degree) by most men.

Most men just channel that into something else, like entrepreneurship (ie Zuckerberg), or drugs/alcohol/video games.
Wow! This looks exactly like what I'm looking for. Thanks! Will give it a try and see if it fits.
Probably just sold to institutional investors.
They receive the bitcoins immediately* (in 10 minutes, after it's confirmed by the network), which the IRS considers property. If they want money they have to convert the bitcoins to local currency and wait for a payout to their/a bank account.
Sounds like S&P is trying to get Tesla to buy rating services. The unsaid implication from this move is that if Tesla opens their books to S&P (of course, as part of a paid engagement), S&P can come up with a "more accurate" view of Tesla's creditworthiness.
Basic ticket management is easy to get going. Users of the system can also mostly get away dragging tickets between status and logging some work as long as the Greenhopper plugin is turned on.

JIRAs biggest win is integration with so many other tools. Bitbucket is an obvious one, but then 3rd party tools like bugsnag will auto-create tickets for any snags your app issues.
The removal of NPAPI is, ultimately, probably a good thing for users. However, it is frightening to watch a replay of IE4, when a browser developer created a much better product, then proceeded to drive all of innovation in the browser space. At the time, they were probably all good things (at least, in many people's minds; hindsight colors it differently now). At least, until Microsoft decided they won the Internet and stopped doing any innovation (hell, they even stopped trying to keep up with the Jones). Due to the stranglehold they had on market share, it was an intensely painful time for web development.

Google is nearing the point of having won the Internet in the same way. Will we see something similar? Probably not to the same extent: Google's fortunes are too tightly tied to the Internet to drop out like Microsoft did (Microsoft failed to realize everybody's fortunes were tied to the Internet), but I still worry when a single company feels like it can make wide-sweeping, unilateral decisions about the web.
As a one-time newish officer who used to be in charge of things with many zeroes, I'd be inclined to agree.
For the record Ford didn't get a bailout (though at one point they asked for one)

http://www.factcheck.org/2011/09/ford-motor-co-does-u-turn-o...
Ask HN: Design For Content Publishers
Howdy folks. I'm a designer/developer looking to move toward doing more design/illustration work. I've been tossing around the idea of offering content design for online publishers (i.e. bloggers, startups, small/medium businesses, etc...). I feel like a lot of companies are beginning to understand the importance of design when it comes to getting prospects engaged with their content. I feel like content design can add a lot of value to a brand's image. Sites like SumAll and Quicksprout are using content design quite well.

Currently, my service ideas are along the lines of: custom designed blog post images, infographics, social media images, and ebook design/layout.

I'm interested in any feedback you can give me. Do these service offerings interest you? Is there something missing? How much are services like this worth to you? Is content design something you struggle with at all?

Any input would be greatly appreciated.
It's convertable debt which is effectively a bond + stock option so you do share in the upside.
I'm not a computer scientist, but I think that spreadsheets were possibly ahead of their time in a couple ways:

1. They let novices build fairly effective user interfaces, just by entering headers for rows and columns.

2. If I understand what "data flow" programming is (based on using LabVIEW), then the formula cells in spreadsheets are such a thing. Each formula is recomputed whenever its inputs change. That creates an incredibly quick testing cycles. Displaying intermediate results by necessity creates a built in debugger.

In addition, the lack of "complete" programming features, such as loops, may make spreadsheets less forbidding for novices to create and debug.

If these things are, as I suspect, compelling enough on their own, then like you say, the rest of the stuff in the latest Excel would just be icing on the cake -- not that I'd give up any of it.
Compared say to democracies in the US/UK/France etc that are 100 or more years old. Trying to think of totalitarian equivalents that have lasted into a country achieving 1st World status?
At the head of the index it probably won't make much difference, big sites will render the initial page on the server, it's the long tail where it will be client only. It may make scaling a website easier though as frameworks will start making adding or moving rendering from client to server trivial. So the path from the long tail to the head will be easier to navigate. (if you'll excuse me mixing my metaphors)
Very nice article.

You lost me a bit towards the end re event communication but then I haven't played with d3's events. It would be great to see an article just on that.
S&P has two revenue sources: "issuer pay" is when a company requests a credit rating for themselves, and pays for it. The other source is "subscription based" paid for by investors. They could want to "create access to a market" or "complete their coverage"*

So it's possible an investor requested a review of Tesla for their own information and S&P decided to publish the opinion publicly or S&P just wanted to. Blackmail seems unlikely.

* http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=unsolicited-rating
I'm shocked that this hasn't received more upvotes.
So assuming your comment is based on a fact (and I still don't see any citation), do you mean to say the "whatever kind of profile" google uses can still be tied to your google account? If not, then it's _anonymous_ as far as I am concerned.
AFS is quite well suited for this use case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System
I'm not sure I understand - isn't that essentially an A/B test because 25 + 25 = 50?
Hi, my friend @elklein96 and I created GitPapers over the weekend in CodeDay Philly (won Top Overall). It is in a very very early stage but I do want to see how HN thinks about the overall concept and it's current features.

Thanks.
That's interesting! However, is it taken into account in the ratings? Even if there is a potential upside, it looks to me as far as I can tell (and I could be wrong!) that the rating is still just based on the chances of the company paying it back, and not on the risk-adjusted potential gain.
Yeah.

Palm's vs Pocket PC's. Nokia vs the world. Sega vs Nintendo.

Not many wars where decided by technology itself but other things.

Nokia trusted his middle-end low-end market share then android and iPhone came out.

Palm lost it's way when the smartphones came out.

Sega lost because bad decisions. Nintendo also had bad decision but now is staying behind because the ferocity of the fight between Microsoft and Sony.

Kodak had amazing products but it's perfectionist way to do things let them lagging behind.

Kodak and Nokia are really sad stories because both had amazing products but didn't understood the changes around them. (yeah both more recent examples)

Microsoft won their previous wars because understood the previous reality "feature complete but mediocre solutions". I mean, what the people need want but no more just the essential part. So they dethrone Lotus, Wordperfect etc.
I wish AirBnB would make the cost scale logarithmic, to match the fact that this is roughly how the prices will be distributed too. I'm usually only using the left-most 5% of that slider.
Personally, I haven't found Clojure to be an improvement over Common Lisp. Java interop is not important to me, so the only benefit of using Clojure over Common Lisp is better-looking library websites.
Hey can you update your profile with your contact info?
I believe it lets you compensate for the possibility that, say, all of your conversions might be coming from the bottom 1% of your users. Segmenting A into A1/A2 therefore insulates your interpretation of the results for A from being as heavily skewed.
That's true, and AES is a bad example of a QC threat, but if you're talking about packet captures, in practice AES is usually keyed by something that is very vulnerable to QC.
This isn't a condemnation of QuickCoin specifically, but can someone make BitCoin useful for a bigger demographics? That's a much larger problem than simplicity.
Ok, I'll be "that" guy who heckles every AirBnB post, even if this one did have some nice graphs (and ideas).

When is AirBnB going to experiment with helping their hosts follow the law? I bet I can predict that graph. Why, look at all those illegal rentals in SF right there in the sample screenshots--oh the irony.

Remember, DON'T FUCK UP THE CULTURE! But it's OK to fuck up your host city for a buck or 2 billion.
Probably not the best interaction I could have experienced: http://imgur.com/IlZD2sB (using iCabMobile on iOS7/iPad 2).
5W walkie talkies in a big sports complex with the RF getting into the keyboard controllers and acting like a maniac was punching the keyboard - would eventually hang the servers.

Fix: Replace cheapened-keyboards-with-mylar-film-(not)-screening with older models that had a full metal cage around the keyboard assembly.
Doesn't it make sense that S&P would rank Tesla poorly? Yes, they're the first seemingly successful startup in the US auto industry in 70+ years. However, we went an entire lifetime without generating a new car company.

Their roadmap (heh) is get a car down to $40k, then another at $25k, build a couple billion dollar battery factories, sell the early majority on the idea of releasing their gasoline habits amid a "we want you dead" slaughter-fest from every car company, car dealer, and oil man in America. And then it's time to go international. Still worse, they have limited sales in a very narrow segment and have hit opposition in several states.

So while Tesla is an easy company to love, the S&P is taking a very realistic position.
>Otherwise, any loss of monies from your bank account through hacking or identity fraud will be borne by your bank.

Hopefully. Sure in an ideal world, you get your money back. But the real world sucks. And if you do get the money back then you have to get a new CC and go through that whole process.

Bitcoins also means that to spend online you don't have to give someone total control of your funds. My chase checkings account was put on hold and my card cancelled when I bought Bitcoins from a friend using Chase Quickpay. I had to meet with someone, in person, and get an entirely new card. Just because Chase didn't like the way I had spent my money. No one had attempted a refund, or complained. Chase just noticed the email was associated with lots of Bitcoin sales and closed my account without informing me. With Bitcoins you don't need to give a 3rd party that much power just to be able to spend money online.
What a coincidence, I made the FA icons downloadable in 6 colors and 8 sizes just over this weekend as well [1]. One should note, however, that it's 99% odyniec's great script [2] and only 1% some trivial frontend/collection for both projects. [1] https://github.com/delight-im/Font-Awesome-PNG [2] https://github.com/odyniec/font-awesome-to-png
This is better than stopping when you get a statistically significant finding which is nearly always the wrong thing to do. Do you have any math behind this?
XCOM is an excellent game, but I'd argue that it fails as a remake. Despite the superficial similarities, it's a completely different game. It owes quite a lot to modern boardgames of the past 10-15 years, and not so much to the trend of highly detailed, simulationist computer games in the early 90s which had X-COM as one of its crown jewels.

Both the combat and the strategic phases of XCOM are very boardgamey in their own way. And it works, it's great fun. But in terms of game design, it's about as far away from X-COM as you can get while still retaining the same basic components.
I think there's a difference in how you approach this with an internal-facing view and an external one.

Internally, You're right. But externally the company fucked up, not the individual.
100% agree, and it is my oversight to not draw that distinction more clearly. We have the luxury (so far) of only reporting internally.
I see your point, but in this context it's the wrong point (although I firmly agree that taxpayers should demand value for money). As far as economic activity goes, even if cost-plus contractors do gorge themselves, the monies they bill will be spent in turn, resulting in a normal money multiplier effect.

What I was thinking of was the sort of istuationation Russia has to deal with; recently they ordered some new Mistral warships from France because Russia doesn't have the domestic expertise to build that quality of gear at home. So the money Russia spends on those if the deal goes ahead will leave Russia's economy completely rather than circulating within it and generating new activity as it is spent by shipbuilders.
The process NOT the tool.

Yes spreadsheets have errors, but the only method I know of that is able to get error rates down to near zero is due process. There are good processes that reduce error rates to near zero, but there are no tools that reduce error rates to near zero. The problem is the process, not the tool.
There's something really unsettling about those sections but I can't quite put my finger on it
Must be counting the two after the decimal point. =)
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=protonmail#!/story/forever/0/proto...
Firebase (YC S11) is hiring a Developer Advocate for Web in SF
Sad news.. God bless his soul..
I hate the design of disappearing headers.
Develop Native Android Apps on Your Chromebook
Reasons Why a Functional Programmer Might Embrace Go
No: 11 is prime. 13 Is prime. So 9 is just
an exception!
Airbnb could likely get a lot more bang for their buck by letting hosts run experiments on pricing than by testing button colors and whatnot.

I ran an online marketplace at a previous gig. Our service providers always complained that they didn't know what to charge to maximize their business. They couldn't see the forest as a tree. Because we had the data for all providers, we started letting them know if they were under- or over-priced, and we saw more conversions and revenue.

Dynamic pricing (like Uber does on holidays) alone could be hugely valuable.
> Efforts to move them into databases or whatever be damned. A spreadsheet is != to a database table except maybe in the most abstract possible sense in some cases.

The problem is that very often, spreadsheets are used as databases because they are the tool the user is familiar with, not because the application is inherently more suited to a spreadsheet.

> They really are different things and I agree that issues with spreadsheets should be solved by improving the tools not trying to paradigm shift spreadsheet users into an inappropriate environment that also happens to have a very long and highly skilled environment setup requirement.

There is no reason a database using a relational data model (but not the multiuser/concurrency features that are also part of the relational model) needs to have a "long and highly skilled environment setup requirement", or, in fact, be any harder to setup than installing an app just like a spreadsheet app would require.
Greatest respect to the people at CERN, but come on, clientside/js crypto has been pretty thoroughly bunked for many, many good reasons. The only text I could find that touches on this topic is at https://protonmail.ch/blog/protonmail-threat-model/:

> ProtonMail has implemented numerous safeguards against this on the server level. We have routines that constantly scan for code changes and will detect them. The attacker would have to gain control of the server, instantly change the behavior of the code scanners, and then modify the software all without anybody at ProtonMail noticing. The odds of this being successfully executed is indeed quite low.

Really.

Even KimDotCom made a better effort of implementing his browser crypto at Mega. Practically, there is no advantage of choosing this product over FastMail, except maybe the prettier UI.
> The process NOT the tool.

But the tool constrains the process, which is why you should choose tools by appropriateness to the process they are going to be used in.