skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But we aren't just talking about upgrades that were made in 90's. The network there is currently significantly faster than it is here. Even if it was primarily jump-started by large government funding, something kept it going, and it has kept growing while our infrastructure (at least as far as an end user is seeing) hasn't seen much of an upgrade. From what I can tell, US citizens have seen an upgrade of 10-30x what speeds were at the end of the 90's. Places like Tokyo have seen increases of 40-100x since then.
I like to use separate files for organization during development and then merge and minify for deployment. Just make sure you have an automated process because you don't want to make mistakes doing it by hand.
World of Warcraft's astounding numbers
I don't understand this comment. It's like talking about sharing the pub experience on the Internet whereas the article was more of an affirmation of the AOL style of distribution/publicity from the 90's.

As others have pointed out, Sivers may have over-cooked this example a bit.

Statements such as: The people that took a CD became long-term fans and brought their friends to future shows. may make you feel good but there's no way the evidence suggests that.
i'd say you nailed it here
Vanilla Python has coroutines, as of version 2.5. See here: http://www.python.org/doc/2.5/whatsnew/pep-342.html

Basically it works by letting you send a value into a generator function, which then appears as the return value of the most recent yield statement. I have abused this feature horribly at times to create cooperatively multitasking lightweight pseudo-threads. Good times, that.

What vanilla does not and likely never will have, that Stackless does allow, are full continuations, a.k.a. the Dark Lord of All Flow Control Structures.
Many frameworks have some tools for dealing with multiple javascript files. I use django-compress for example and love it.

It allows you to have many different javascript files to separate your code logically, and it automatically compresses them into one file for you for deployment. In this way you don't have to compromise speed for clarity.

If you're interested in advanced JS I highly recommend this book. http://jspro.org/
> those networks were far more heavily subsidized than our own.

BTW, didn't the US give the telecoms several billion to build infrastructure? Where did that go? And how far did it go? How much does it cost?

Let's say some bankers and lawyers and doctors buy out a 10,000 acre farm in coastal Virginia, 5 miles from the nearest stoplight of a medium-sized city, and they want gigabit ethernet to their McMansions and 3G coverage all the way into work. Essentially, a lollipop-shaped extension of network hardware into previously unpopulated land. What's it going to cost?
It turns out that countries with better crop yields per person, require fewer people, resulting in reduced population.
Why does the going to school bit make it cheaper? Are you eating less? Requiring less shelter?
If she's successful, the success will be self evident.

Please elaborate. My understanding is that the great barrier to disruptive innovation in education, higher or lower is that success is not self evident.
I kind of wonder, though—if there is an impulse built into humans to take out their anger on their children, killing the children in the process, should not we have evolved as a species to either have a stronger maternal instinct to prevent this behavior, tougher children, or children less prone to being annoying?
PostBin - Debug web hooks
Alas, he's also responsible for one of my worst time-wasting habits: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
Thanks for the reply. I've only ever used the method I described above. Seems nice to read the article on its own website (styled the way the author intended).
I think using the Stockholm syndrome is an absurd metaphor in this case. In the Stockholm syndrome, the victim defends the attacker. In this case, the 'attacker' is the regulation, and I'm opposing it.

Seriously though, I think I've addressed some of those questions elsewhere in the thread. Many other countries you would compare against have heavily subsidized consumer internet via government spending. Many countries also have a significantly higher population density than the US, or they had less existing infrastructure (laying fiber is cheaper if you are building all new roads anyway).

As for why Cisco or Juniper equipment is expensive: it is expensive because it is relatively low-volume industrial-strength gear that needs to run far in excess of 99.999% reliability while supporting an absurdly large number of protocols and standards. To put the problem as a bit of a tautology, if you think it is so absurdly overpriced, why aren't you raising a venture round to build cheaper gear?

(Incidentally, I think you probably could, but it is still a hard problem that requires time to solve. Not all things that could theoretically be improved can be improved instantly.)
A big exit gives you freedom from everything. Want to start a new venture? Do it. Want to sail around the world? Go to town. Having to work every year, albeit for 2 million a year, still means having to work.
I have used two varieties of Lisp: Common Lisp and Clojure. Both have dynamic typing with optional "type hints", which allow you to get the performance of a statically typed language. Type hints are typically used only in small doses, for parts of your code that are very performance critical.
It's possible that I'm wrong, but I'd appreciate if you could point to the legal precedent that establishes this. The general rule is that making a copy of any copyright work is forbidden, unless you have a license or it's fair use.

You are right that ripping a CD (that you own?) to MP3 for personal use is covered as fair use. This was established relatively recently in RIAA vs Diamond Multimedia[1], a case that primarily decided that the Rio was legal because it _wasn't_ a digital music recorder. But it also stated "the Rio's operation is entirely consistent with the Act's main purpose -- the facilitation of personal use" and that "Such copying is paradigmatic noncommercial personal use entirely consistent with the purposes of the Act".

But simply transforming a musical recording into a different format isn't quite a parallel example, as the goal is usually to make a complete copy. I think a closer parallel would be recording a television show with the ads clipped out. While 'time-shifting' is held to be legal (under Sony vs Universal), if you save a version with advertisements removed, you may well have created a derivative work.

I think Tivo is probably a pretty close example. While I don't think there has been a precedent setting case yet, it's probably worth noting that Tivo does not allow its users to automatically skip advertisements in the shows it records, despite the fact that this would be a popular feature with users. They no longer even have a button on the remote to allow the ads to be skipped easily.

For example, a law review article[2] titled "The TiVo Question: Does Skipping Commercials Violate Copyright Law?" reaches this simple conclusion: "Using a DVR to skip television advertisements violates copyright law, and DVR manufacturers should be contributorily liable. By providing a means for television viewers to skip advertisements, DVR manufacturers deny television networks the intended incentive for their creative
expression--advertising revenues."

I've only skimmed it, but the article provides a lot of useful background on the relevant arguments and case law.

[1] http://www.virtualrecordings.com/diamond.htm

[2] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=901062
At work, we use pet names (that is, we name machines after employee pets) and the virtual servers all get city names. I tend towards obscure towns in Florida (where we're located) while the other employees tend towards more famous cities.
As someone in a thread below points out, unaccountable commercial carriers were already restricting speech on their networks: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/us/27verizon.html?_r=1
I'm not sure what you mean by "most of the research will fail". In my experience most (proper scientific) research succeeds eventually, both in the sense that it (a) gives the authors something to write a paper about and (b) it adds something, however small, to the total accumulated store of human knowledge.

I will say, though, that while reading a paper, or a book, or even going to a lecture, can be useful from time to time, just about everything I learned in my PhD and postdoc was learned from face-to-face conversation with people who knew more than I did. The internet can't replace that.
Kiwi Camara has a bit of a controversial past himself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Camara#Racial_controversy_...
If you want to see what happens in the absence of regulation, look at the healthcare industry.
I'm somewhat trivializing the selection process, but it's probably more fair to compare the top n startups of YCombinator with the top n startups of TechStars rather than the total program aggregates. One of the things we're evaluating these funds on is their very ability to pick the top n--so a larger fund is at a disadvantage if you compare their median n against a competitor's top n.
"So yeah, $300. Where's the pre-order link?"

http://www.laptop.org plus a $100 mark-up?

It's doable. The CPU doesn't have to be an x86 or have a huge amount of memory. A small amount of flash memory also suffices instead of spinning metal. It could all be mounted directly on the motherboard, reducing manufacture costs and required components (no need for a SATA controller if your flash is not connected through SATA). Linux runs fine on ARM. If we want to get fancy, couple the touchscreen with a PixelQi LCD and you have an LCD that works fine without backlight.

Heck... I would be delighted to help designing such animal. I want one badly.
I think the real point is that, when people don't know their limits, they might think that they're somewhere below where they really are, rather than somewhere above. If the person's output is still great and they aren't making any mistakes, don't let them quit; keep pushing until they actually start to falter. After doing that a few times in relatively safe environments, you can be sure they'll actually know when to say stop, rather than trusting an uncalibrated instrument (their opinion of themselves.)
I'm more interested in facts about successful entrepreneurs.
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I do.

Half my team is stay-at-home moms. The tech industry seems to believe that becoming parents has addled their brains. I'm pretty sure that engineering degrees from top colleges and a PhD in robotics from Oxford can survive formula and spit-up.

The stay-at-home part works even better. I think that most people only have about 4 hours of actual work in them -- the sort of serious analytical thinking required to write code. By working with stay-at-home parents, they happily give me 100% of that time every day, and I only compensate them for that much.

In contrast, most folks (myself included!) get paid 8h/day for only 4h of coding.
Please do us the favor of explaining why you believe his idea is stupid and illogical. If you have just taken that on faith, that's not very helpful.
Code Signing and What It Does To Your Freedom (in OS X)
PlotKit is three years old and doesn't look to have been maintained since then. Why did it show up here?
I have been eyeing books for months now. Pro Javascript Techniques has been one of them. Living in a country where shipping costs as much as a book is hard.
Yahoo seeking up to $500 mn for small business unit
This account is... I forgot my password or my account got deleted from 2007.
I'll assume this is for client side js, since that's what most people use =)

Most of the js I write involves jQuery. As such, I find it's very useful to separate reusable components into jQuery plugins in separate files. If you don't use jQuery or another library which allows plugins, then it's best to create your own namespaced module.

See the "Module pattern" for more info:
http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2007/06/12/module-pattern/

Depending on the complexity of your code, you might want to look into javascript build systems -- there's at least one for every major web framework.

Here's some advantages they offer:
- Allow bunding of many js files into one mega js file. (reduces HTTP requests for faster page loading)
- Specify javascript dependencies using special syntax. (easier maintenance)
- Versioning support (so users don't get an old cached version of your code)

When bundling js files, I try to aim for a maximum of two js files per page. One contains code which is global to the whole site (this is cached on subsequent views), and the second which contains page specific code.
Wow, you're right. Check out, for instance, this so-called doctoral program from the apparently partially-accredited Walden University:

http://www.waldenu.edu/Degree-Programs/Doctorate/18220.htm

130 credit points, of which 30 are a dissertation. This really doesn't deserve to be called a doctorate.
Sorry, andrewljohnson@trailbehind.com
It's possible that 'flat-out illegal' is too strong of a statement, although upon reflection I'll still stand by 'almost certainly illegal'. Here's a law review paper with lots of background and references:

The TiVo Question: Does Skipping Commercials Violate Copyright Law?
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=901062

Please don't mistake my opinion here on what the law is for my feelings on what the law should be. It sounds like a great app. I'd be very happy to proven wrong, and to find that the copyright law regarding such matters is more user friendly than I've been led to believe.
Docs pretty much all have easy access to MRI, at least in the US. I have prescribed MRIs for patients in rural Louisiana. We just tell the patient "go get an MRI". Either the hospital radiology group has a scanner, or there are radiologists with MRI machines out in town. The patient just has to sign a HIPAA release so I can get the images and the radiologist's report.

Fun fact: one of the failed attempts at regulating doctors was to for the government to buy machines for hospitals, thinking somehow the government would maybe somehow have some control over something, maybe who got scanned? Net effect was an explosion in high-end OR and radiology equipment.
My point is that you don't need to live in NYC even if you attend school there, so the comment of "try living off $20,000/yr in NYC" is irrelevant.

He might as well have said "try living off $20,000/yr while living in NJ and spending $1000-1500/month on bling bling." Yes, you'll have a hard time making ends meet. So what?
Cisco gear is expensive because it is expensive to design and expensive to manufacture equipment that can shuttle frames between multiple OC-192 circuits at sub-millisecond speeds across a purpose-built backplane that won't lock up under the load, and because it is even more expensive to design the software that will manage the forwarding databases on that equipment under the strain of multiple global routing table updates every second without ever hiccupping, and because for all that effort, you can count the number of US companies that will buy that kind of a product in any real volume on two hands.

It's a weird argument about the scarcity of bandwidth that suggests that it's all a price fixing scam by Cisco. Cisco, for what it's worth, does not make the majority of its money on big-ass backbone routers.

It is, in fact, rather akin to the idea that Southwest Airlines tickets cost $200 because Boeing has artificially inflated the price of the 737.
And given how few ISPs there are in this country, and how many businesses they're in, that's a pretty big danger already.

The solution to this should not be to limit those companies that do exist, but to foster the establishment of competitors.

(Edit: markup)
I haven't read any of the cited research, but formalization of causality seems like it should be a straightforward endeavour. The notion of a controlled experiment already embodies a fairly rigorous understanding of what it means: if you have two starting conditions which are identical except for one variable 'A', and the outcomes differ in terms of 'B', then you've established a causal link from A to B. I don't envision any particular difficulty in transcribing this notion into the language of formal logic.
Look, I don't support subsidies either. Like with most US subsidies, the money was probably mostly wasted (but I'm sure it created jobs).

In all seriousness, telecom subsidies in the US mostly go to building out old-fashioned POTS lines and slow DSL into corn fields in the middle of nowhere. Don't blame the telecoms (except for the lobbying of the huge ones), that's what the grants specify.

AT&T has been spending big money supporting and astroturfing Internet Neutrality. If you don't understand why that would be, you don't understand the dynamics of the industry enough to know what is really going on. They aren't doing that out of the goodness of their hearts. This is the old struggle between the LECs and the cable franchises.

Internet Neutrality is a win for AT&T and the LECs because they already have a separate network (the time-division network) that doesn't rely on packet prioritization to deliver latency-sensitive media.
Io's coroutine library is separate from the VM and open source:

http://dekorte.com/projects/opensource/libcoroutine/
Simply - race is a bastardization of many historic cultural sentiments; it has almost no use in relation to human-being;

http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/full/ng1455.html
High tens of millions of dollars is my guess, between right-of-ways and spectrum licensing. The routers themselves might not even break a million, though.
Paul, the article has a list of industries they surveyed (page 10). Plumbing and gas stations don't figure. They all seem to be high tech.
Living in a country where shipping costs as much as a book is hard.

Might Safari Books Online work for you?

http://www.safaribooksonline.com/

I prefer the physical book to reading from a browser, but if the price is right...
I mean, hey, it worked for Procket!
I was about to downmod you, but then I noticed your username.
I replied elsewhere also: the list of industries surveyed (page 10) all seem to be high-tech.
Ask HN: Loaning money from the IRS?
Here's a question for freelancers out there. I filed an extension this year on my taxes, and have spent the summer working my ass off to get enough to pay taxes (self employment tax is a bitch). I owe the IRS about $25k which I have finally earned into a savings account.

So noow that I'm about to pay Uncle Sam, I'm thinking... what if I just delay and use the money towards a startup I'm currently working. I've been in this situation a few years ago (owed the IRS about 3k, and they put me on a monthly installment plan). In the current situation, I'd much rather pay 1500-2000 a month than hand over everything in lump sum. Also, it seems like interest on the tax only goes up to a certain point (20% of principal). So there's an upper cap to the penalty I'd be paying.

I know the best response to this "talk to an accountant/attorney", which I have an appointment with a tax accountant in the valley. However I'm curious if anyone's tried this, thought of trying this, or has gotten seriously screwed on something like this.

About my situation, I'm right out of college and have been doing freelance development. I own nothing (rent apartment, my car is on loan). So I can't see a downside of this plan screwing up, aside from maybe going to jail, which I think would be a stretch.

Has anyone been in a scenario like this?
Yes. Building out fiber to a single point would be the easy part (as low as hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps). The continuous 3G coverage would be expensive though.
haha it reminds me of Operation, because if you hit the edges the screen lights up in blue (in Chrome everything becomes selected) ;-)
yes. there will also be a live video stream!
details will soon be posted on the website-
Thanks, I totally forgot about the Resig book since it was announced. Just bought.

I really liked _Javascript: The Good Parts_:

http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Good-Parts-Douglas-Crockfor...

Particularly because it's purely about style and code organization, and not about the best way to get consistent DOM access between Gecko, WebKit, and IE.
It's not just you. Firefox has the Netscape syndrome: it gets crappier with every release. And that's without any damn addons.
His comment about statistics (not formal logic?) is mainly about usefulness.

It's not useful to have a pure causality representation because with the real world and other complex systems, you don't know all the variables. Your variable 'A' in 10 years might be shown to be a combination of variables.

I, for example, only 99.99% believe in gravity. One day we might float off the planet. Lack of 100% proof about observations was one of Hume's basic arguments and I think the point of the "do-calculus" for AI that is discussed in this link. We all have an internal "do-calculus" for operating in the world: work with current held beliefs/rules until they're proven to work differently, etc.
I want a tablet so that I can read a pdf on the metro on my way to work. Often there are enough seats for everyone in the morning so I suppose a netbook would work then but in the evening I'm usually standing so keeping something on my lap wouldn't work. Holding a light tablet and scrolling down by sliding a finger down the screen would be awesome though.
Just remember that sometimes doing things the "right" way can really slow your code down. I started coding believing that text should be added with createTextNode and any HTML element should be created via createElement.

This causes two issues:

1. Memory leaks from deleted or hidden DOM that is still referenced.

2. Performance. innerHTML is still probably the fastest method of adding elements, as dirty as it seems.
Kasparov and Karpov in chess duel; twelve-game rematch in Valencia, Spain
Nice reply: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=12...
The dramatic increases in per acre yields over the past fifty years are closely tied to equally dramatic increases in per acre energy inputs over the same period. The Green Revolution amounts to the replacement of sunlight with hydrocarbons as the main fuel of food production.

Global oil production has now peaked and will slide, sooner or later, into permanent and progressive decline year-over-year. When that happens, all the blue-sky technology in the world won't keep food production rates increasing.
I am not sure of the structure of Mint or much behind it, but it appears he is the only founder from his answer in the article. So chalk another one up for only founders.

"Are you going to tell us how much money you're walking away with?

> No. But as the only founder, I will do very well."
Global oil production has now peaked and will slide, sooner or later, into permanent and progressive decline year-over-year. When that happens, all the blue-sky technology in the world won't keep food production rates increasing.

Hydrocarbons aren't the only source of energy into the future. Your complaint is like noting that a shortage of horses in the 1880s would lead to a lack of future mobility. When resources fail, you change the rules of the game beyond what can be imagined at the time.

Technology has always and will always tackle our scaling problems. At least, if a few thousand years of such is good precedent.