skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Allow me to reformulate my point for clarity:

1. Politicians don't always mismanage publicly owned resources

2. When they do, it is often on behalf of a private interest, e.g. a real estate developer contributing to their next campaign
Yeah, I know, but you can only attach one per instance, so the effective cost per elastic ip per month is 1 small instance.
"... every paragraph of his blog is worthy of an individual permalink ..."

No but think of it this way. Each idea can be linked. The fine grained linking is possible because Dave uses an outliner for ideas ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner

Dave's obsessed with them ~ http://www.outliners.com/
Microsoft launches Office Web Apps preview
Tiny T. rex fossil discovery startles scientists
It's not really 280 pixels wide: there are 280 addressable pixels but changing one can affect another nearby. Drawing diagonal, intersecting lines can make your blue lines green or whatever. Loosely speaking, there are 280 sub-pixels across, which works fine on monochrome monitors but on color monitors screenwriter's 70 column mode is psychedelic.
I know the developer of Alien Splat, which is also in the same New & Noteworthy section this week. He didn't receive a call, and wasn't otherwise notified by Apple that the app was featured. He was surprised when I brought it to his attention.

So - the call was just to get the change in description, not to notify of the placement. Which makes me all the more grateful Apple was persistent, and that they didn't just write it off even though they wanted the change.

I've also heard other accounts of Apple calling to request "special builds" for TV spots, etc. but don't have any first-hand direct knowledge of that.
Sorry, I'm also coding and terms are bleeding about in my brain.

In the mid-'90s, some friends and I had a small contest on who could write the fastest traceroute. Sending the probes asyncronously gets you most of the way there, but there's a trick that would get you the first N hops for free, too.
I've long maintained that WAP was bitpacked Gopher via Telegram
In a sense, I think that is the life cycle of nearly all software. Eventually it switches back too - stuff becomes big and bloated and suddenly there's a "lite" version.
Right. And when you pitch the vision, "We're going to collect all the data in the world and organize it in a useful way" people will dismiss you as crazy or say, "Ok, come back when you've done it."
A not-terribly-idiomatic Erlang implementation I slapped together to test this theory, and also to practice on silly problem:

-module(test).
-export([run/0]).
-import(timer).

-define(SEATS, 3).
-define(DAY, 8*60*60).
-define(PERIOD, 20*60).
-define(CUTTIME, 15*60).

barber(Shop, Count) ->
receive
{customer, P, N} ->
Shop ! accept,
io:format("(B) Cutting hair of customer ~w~n", [N]),
P ! haircut,
timer:sleep(?CUTTIME),
barber(Shop, Count+1);
endtime ->
io:format("(B) Closing the shop ~n"),
Shop ! close,
barber(Shop, Count);
closed ->
io:format("(B) Closed. ~n"),
io:format("(B) Served ~w customers. ~n", Count)
end.
customer(N) ->
receive
haircut ->
io:format("(B) Customer ~w got haircut ~n", [N]);
leave ->
io:format("(B) Customer ~w leaving ~n", [N])
end.
shop(Seated, Barber) ->
receive
accept when Seated == 0 ->
io:format("Flagrant Error~n");
accept ->
shop(Seated-1,Barber);
close ->
Barber ! closed;
endtime ->
Barber ! endtime,
shop(Seated, Barber);
{customer, P, N} when Seated >= ?SEATS ->
io:format("(S) Incoming customer ~w turned away ~n", [N]),
P ! leave,
shop(Seated,Barber);
{customer, P, N} ->
io:format("(S) Incoming customer ~w seated ~n", [N]),
Barber ! {customer, P, N},
shop(Seated+1,Barber)
end.
shop_helper() ->
receive
P ->
shop(0, P)
end.
run() ->
S = spawn(fun() -> shop_helper() end),
B = spawn(fun() -> barber(S,0) end),
S ! B,
make_customers(S, 0, ?DAY).
make_customers(Shop, _, Time) when Time<0 ->
Shop ! endtime;
make_customers(Shop, Id, Time) ->
Shop ! {customer, spawn(fun() -> customer(Id) end), Id},
timer:sleep(?PERIOD),
make_customers(Shop, Id+1, Time-?PERIOD).

This implementation is 68 lines long: twice the Clojure, but still less than the Scala. A big portion of this difference is because the Clojure version cheats, modeling the system as straight-up producer/consumer with queue size constraints. The other two implementations spend about 20 lines dealing with Customer actors, which the Clojure completely punts. The Clojure still wins, but it's not as big a margin as it looks.
Good on you for posting the apology on your own site.
but there's a trick that would get you the first N hops for free, too.

I smell a blog post/new HN post..! Well, I'm intrigued anyway.
Reminds me of the parochial mindset that caused me to leave Connecticut: residents on tiny twisty roads in wealthy old towns that didn't want a yellow centerline or white edge markers painted on the road because it "would lose its character." Forget all the automotive deaths attributed to people coming around blind corners too close to the middle of the road. Forget drivers in the rain or fog who can't tell where the road ends and the ditch begins. "It spoils the character" of the roadway, and that's more important than safety.

Idiots!
I think his point was that having a simple and clean design would make the software easily adoptable.

What's wrong with that?
Jacques makes a good point that you should be careful with customers seeing started but not completed transactions. Any confusion on the customer's part is bad news.

If you're going to go the route of authorization only then capture, then I'd suggest that you invalidate authorizations yourself after a set period of time (maybe a few minutes?) rather than let the gateway invalidate it based on their criteria. This doesn't, however, solve your problems with the number of requests sent to the gateway.

I don't know much about MercuryPay (and their website is scarce on in-depth developer info), but maybe you could work with them on posting payment information and holding it until the transaction is confirmed?
How do I get a gopher domain-name?
Yes, because had he not been on the plane it wouldn't have flown.
They almost certainly contact the developers of featured apps that are accompanied by custom artwork (artwork that's not the thumbnail, images, etc).
One reason I buy my video "content" from iTunes is because it saves me the time of removing the forced previews and endless publisher logos and FBI warnings.
It's like some sort of pretentious, web 2.0 version of a Japanese game show.
Pity the issue of cutting down the trees wasn't seen before it happened. Browsing through the local news it appears PA doesn't see much value in parks, trees "Guest Opinion: A glimpse back at the history of Palo Alto parks-dedication battles", Enid Pearson ("Initiator of the 1965 citizens' initiative that resulted in the City Charter provision on dedicating city parkland") ~ http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/story.php?story_id=1157...
Added weight doesn't require the consumption of fuel? Using the pointless consumption of resources to garner attention doesn't set a bad example?
Or will it for that matter? It's been incremental so far. mp3s begot mp3 players, eventually the iPod, iTunes. Faster connections allowed Pandora to happen.

Is that the seeds of a revolution, or is it the revolution in progress? Is revolution really just a steady march of incremental improvement?
Plenty of Oak trees still here in Cambridge PG as I'm sure you recall. Just beautiful this time of year. =)

I'd miss them if they were gone too.
Good to hear! Hopefully he can help whatever other platform he chooses become legitimate competition for the iPhone.
Also, if you're trying to start a startup (and aren't living in Silicon Valley) - you should probably answer 408 numbers even if you're not an iPhone developer. Lesson learned.
Years ago, I worked at Starbucks and carried with me a notebook where I wrote fairly sophisticated programs including an Oberon implementation and a core image analyzer for CMUCL.

My hand-written code is in a human intermediate language that's more hand-waving than actual code. I write the difficult parts, but all boiler-plate, syntax and other stuff are not there. I prefer either drawing pads, or ruled notebooks with very thin and very light lines. Get a spiral notebook as well; typically I only write on right hand side pages, to allow me to tear a page if I want, and to put a diagram on the left side if I need to draw something, or I get in the flow and need to spit out a few chunks of code in a spastic moment.
i found this (concluding 4 mins):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRTx1oGG_1Y&feature=chann...

I am thirsty to watch the talk! anyone? torrents?
Basically, legal software can be better then pirated.
Actually 68 is about the same as scala. About 30 of the lines are stylistic: one closing bracket to a line and some blank lines for visual grouping. As well several bits of printed status that the clojure version elides.
You can do that: post@whatever.posterous.com
They do _call_ over any issues with the App Store. For example, I got a friendly call having in my description: "free version will be up as soon as it's approved."
Really? I would certainly say Google and Dell were revolutionary. Now, they may not have been the first to do it, but they were early, and they were the best (at that time). Facebook and twitter, get a little bit of a "meh" from me, they more or less took an existing concept, spun it their way, and got lucky. Microsoft, paypal and Youtube (if the article is correct about the last two, I had never heard that before) apparently significantly altered what they started out doing. While not revolutionary, it certainly is a very impressive thing, to completely shift your focus as a business.

Now, my idea for a startup is really just a twinkle in my eye, and some big talk around the water cooler, but I can tell you this: I don't just want to make it into the next computer security company, I want to change the way computer security is run as a business. I've been working on it in my spare time for almost a year now, and am bordering on having a working model of stage one, which I know will be revolutionary, but won't shock anybody. That's what I look for when I see a new start-up, someone who isn't just trying to start a business, but someone who is trying to change the very rules that type of business runs by.
Wouldn't it be better to invest in vaccines, instead? A laser powerful enough to kill a mosquito seems to be powerful enough to cause retinal damage. Am I missing anything obvious?
These are worth checking out...

http://groups.google.com/group/iphonedevmn

http://iphone.mn/
U.S. Proposes Ban on ‘Flash’ Trading on Wall Street
I'll never tell. ;)

It doesn't work that well anymore anyhow.
wrt to IDE auto-completion: when you write by hand you don't actually write correct programs. You make assumptions about what level of detail you want: the mundane and boiler-plate parts can be ignored, or reduced to a descriptive function name (e.g. GET-INPUT) then the interesting parts can be fleshed out to any sufficient detail. Usually as I progress through a project, my later "models" of it are smaller, as I have understood all the components piecemeal. I tend to draw a few squares when I fully understand a problem, otherwise it's a long rambling into emacs' org-mode.
You certainly look too hard at it then. You apparently missed: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/ftinterface?content=a782431..., the article that I most want to read from it. Sure, it isn't an EEG of the sailors, but it sounds (from what I've heard second hand about it) like it may have some relevancy.
MIT OCW: Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience (Summer 2008)
No one (yes, this includes you) can apprehend what's true and make decisions only by reason and observation. We use heuristics, such as giving extra weight to the opinions of other smart people. In the olden days, they called it respect.

All the people I respect this way can unashamedly and unreservedly admit to respecting other people themselves. When it's mutual, it's called friendship. Sometimes it's called love.

:)
At this point, I don't think there is much in the way of real work behind it. From what I can tell there has been one paper written about it (http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/ftinterface?content=a782431...), which is a "field study", not a laboratory test.

All I seem to find are pseudo-science and anecdotes supporting both sides of the argument, with no actual evidence.
This reminds me of Winer's past griping about the world not adopting his version of RSS (http://backend.userland.com/davesRss2PoliticalFaq). If your standard is open and superior, hackers will use it. If they don't, spend your time innovating on The Next Big Problem instead of insisting that everyone else doesn't get it.
But using Cellular Automata ..
Your tax dollars at work.

It's no wonder that the State of California is bankrupt.

While the state of California is piling on _billions_ of dollars in debt to pay for unionized wellfare programs, raising tax rates across the board on its citizens, cutting essential city and state services, closing state parks, issuing "IOU's" to people in-lieu of tax refunds, and seeing its general obligation bonds downgraded below "junk" status, it apparently is still OK to spend taxpayer money cutting down perfectly healthy trees to make sure that all of the trees on a street are the same height.

This in a state that has more Honda Prius' per-capita than any other state in the union.

Isn't being "green" wonderful?

I'm sure there's an entire office of twinkie-munching government bureaucrats that could be fired to compensate the California tax-payer for this gross misappropriation of his hard-earned tax dollars.
"thedark", is the username of the previous poster. Not an actual reference to anything regarding this post itself. Looks like you got the wrong message.

The reason for low sales outside major labels, is the fact that there are no outlets for unsigned musicians that are worthwhile, and major labels regulate what you hear, and who is heavily promoted. And therefore, the competiton is not level. Unsigned musicians cannot afford expensive studio time to record, have little avenues to promote and sell, and therefore just cant compete. The indie market is a "disaster" as you put it, because major labels, the RIAA and FCC keep it that way on purpose. Who wants an area of business to succeed and compete, if they cannot get a piece of that revenue? No one.

Now how about Digg has done for news, and YouTube has done for music? Leveled the playing field, and taken some of the wind out of the sails of major media. And put more power in the hands of the consumer, and allow then to choose whats best in music. Not tell them what you want them to listen to.
@earthlink.net for the Mayor? Ouch! He probably has a Flowbee and a Zack Morris bag phone to boot.
The Next Generation Bends Over
Domain names are not protocol-specific.
Why capitalism fails - the "Minsky moment"
Amen to that. Yeah put up some monuments!
If governments have so much power that they can demolish well loved landmarks in the center of American entrepreneurship, imagine what they can do to a whole state or even country...wait a minute.

What needs to happen to save the state and country is the exact opposite of this travesty-entrepreneurs should replace the real deadwood, government on every level.

http://lewrockwell.com
"…which will bring a uniform look to the business district…"

Sweet, with a little more effort they can turn all of California avenue into a strip mall. Uniformity is great in pencil leads and spark plugs, but the fractal beauty of nature is not just a sitcom on Fox. If you want uniformity, there's a few towns due south of LA where they shave the rough, non-uniform hill-sides into perfect 45° slopes to ultra-flat plateaus on which to build uniform tract homes.

This just doesn't seem like something Palo Altans would knowingly do. Well, we'll always have Los Altos: http://www.losaltospost.com/PhotoGallery/photo/fullimages/Fu...
People should be pissed about this for a number of reasons. PG--I suggest putting their phone numbers up. Emails are too easy to ignore.
There are lots of themes at http://addons.mozilla.org , they even have a retro category. Foxscape, for example, goes all the way back to Netscape theme. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4083
There are at least five other people as interesting as Mr Q who have made this project completely worth it for me
In my book there's a difference between respect and adulation. Sure, a high-karma member is likely well-known by the community (especially if he has a track record of solid and insightful comments) and will likely get away with a silly comment once in a while. This is natural.

I just wanted to stir things up a bit and stress that dissent can be good. If HN ever becomes a monoculture due to excessive inbreeding and indoctrination, it will become uninteresting because everyone will think the same. There's richness in variety of ideas / opinions.
I've been wondering how long it would take for someone to start doing On Demand Printing of books out of copyright.

I'm really not sure how I feel about Google printing books that are out of print though. On the one hand, I think it would be awesome to be able to get ahold of some of those rare, hard to find books that just sound awesome, but are ridiculously expensive. On the other hand, it seems a little wrong to not compensate the authors, who still own the copyright for the book.

The only other question I have is: price. I think there is at least some market for cheap, on demand printing of just about any book. If I can get (throwing numbers out there) any book printed for 100 page for $0.75 (or something equivalent), with reasonable shipping, I would definitely turn that way for a large portion of my reading (rather than buying used books for essentially the price of shipping).
No. When our app, BillMinder recently featured under "What's Hot", we were not contacted. It just sort of happened (no complaints :D).
That's good news. I hope you're right, because that would be great for all of us.
I think you're mistaking CitySourced for Clixtr (conference/social photo sharing). I don't think City Sourced is in the app store.
We have some on our blog post from being featured (blog.return7.com) but the difference is not nearly 78x.
No gopher names? Oh, well... my GopherDaddy! empire probably wouldn't have been very successful anyway..
Here's what this makes me think about: if Mint had an independent future, then there are employees at Mint for whom this acquisition was not the best move. That's true at $170MM and it's true at $50MM and it's true at $5MM. Founders can get rich on deals that make line employees nothing.

And there's nothing wrong with that --- I mean, I have kids to put through college, and my first loyalty is to them, etc --- but employees should know what they're getting in to.
Your standard Linux distro probably has the gopher command line client installed. I'm slightly disappointed that its not in OSX.
You can basically glean the gist of what the figures mean from the following information. Sorry to be vague, but hopefully this gets to the context you're hoping for.

I had some upfront expenses for a custom icon, the website design, a license for the song for the background music for the demo video (including the questionable MP3 freebie), and to run a one day roadblock on the Fusion ad network. Prior to being featured, I hadn't yet broken even on my costs (let alone my labor). The first day of being featured pushed sales past the breakeven point. If sales were to remain steady at this level, the yearly revenue for the app would be much better than an average engineer's salary. There will, however, likely be a very predictable drop in sales once it's no longer featured.

What that means over the long term, we'll see. If the data's interesting - e.g. significant drop or significant lack of a drop in sales, or more key inflection points, etc. - I'll throw up another post about it and consider including dollar figures at that point.
Funny that. Was thinking smth along those lines the other day, as I was wrestling with my own spreadsheets, I was considering how ML-type languages would be ideal for spreadsheets.

A column could be of type:

type itemCode = string
type itemName = string
type itemMaker = string
type itemPrice = int
type itemPurchase = int
type itemcolumnType = (itemPurchase * (itemCode * itemName * itemMaker) * itemPrice) list

Types can add dimensions to spreadsheets. The path not taken saves you from spreadsheet hell. You can only look at so many little rectangles at a time... Data in a spreadsheet should fit into your visual system. Otherwise, it requires magic. And, if you do magic -> magic -> magic, which is what statisticians and data mining specialist do, you end up with a simple graph.

Thinking about it, you can see that Google Docs kinda sucks...Can I tell my spreadsheet to sort every other row in a column, according to a regex, fuse it with data from another one and make it generate me a report in Teh Eevil .doc format? Oh, the Python API you say? Hmmm. I thought Google was all about clickety click and a "simple interface". Yahoo Pipes fares scores higher here, except for the fact that they like to be stuck in a corner wearing the funny pointy hat.

Where's the innovation? With all the money Google's got, you'd expect a little more.
You're too old
Tips on how to avoid startup disasters
Um, you are not stating anything profound by saying that lots of people here like PG's essays. That's about as obvious as it gets.
Here is what I think he might be getting at:

Advertisement is not a very effective form of marcomm because people tune it out, and if they don't, they don't believe what the ads say anyway.

PR is much more effective. Part of the reason is that if you can make your piece look like a regular article, that in itself makes it more believable. But the other part is that sometimes PR pieces are genuinely useful for the recipient.

If I were in the market for a new x, I think I'd want to read the reviews of xs, even if some of them are paid for by manufacturers of xs.

Fake Steve often makes fun of the Apple "flaks" and the "hacks" that print the "flaks"s output, but I think many people in the market for Apple products actually like reading the gushing stories about Apple.

If PR is the new advertising, then an obvious way to fix the newspapers is to make the relationship with PR companies explicit and charge for it. It's not deceptive if the readers want it and you don't try to hide what you are doing. Charging to make product reviews is one possibility. Offering to write stories about any topic for payment is another, which would make you a direct competitor to PR companies.

There is a balance between making high-quality, independent content and making for-pay content that must be carefully managed, but this is not really all that different from today's print media that range from all-ads newspapers with minimal and very crappy journalistic content, to media with high quality journalistic content and almost no ads.

A company doing this should probably never offer a positive review for cash, and never offer a positive spin on a topic. Only ever offer a review or a story, with payment due regardless of whether the customer likes it or not. In the end, this would be in the interest of the customers anyway, even though they might not believe that at first.
Novell Releases First Solution to Build iPhone Applications Using C# and .NET
This thing can selectively kill them by gender which is pretty cool. Vaccines only help against the individual diseases spread by mosquitos, targeting the mosquitos directly is useful too.
You know, its funny, one of the only reasons I go to movies is because of the "ads" before movies (Not the crap before the previews, but the previews, which I consider ads). Sure, its crappy advertising, but I see a lot of movie ads I wouldn't otherwise, and have ended up seeing several movies I never would have considered had I not.
love to, except I cannot bring up ff ie8 or chrome - they all kak.