skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So those are Keynes’ prescriptions for a successful economy: low interest rates, government investment, and redistribution to the poor. And, for a time — from around the 1940s to the 1970s — that’s kind of what we did. The results were magical: the economy grew strongly, inequality fell away, everyone had jobs.

Until the 1970s, where inflation climbed up and up and up and finally peaked at over 15%.

According to my amateur understanding, economists disagree about exactly how the US got into that mess (which is why Keynes was regarded with some suspicion), but it's important to note that the Fed got us out of it by raising the crap out of interest rates and triggering a recession (as Keynes would have predicted).
How will they block google? There's already two newer versions of IE and users haven't updated to them, what makes you think the users will install an IE6 update to block chrome if they won't install an update to IE7 or 8?
That's very true, but Internet Explorer has been worked on even longer still. Also, the V8 javascript engine is Google's own.
I'm not the first to say it! But thanks.

You can get a pretty good idea by using Links, w3m, or another text-based browser. You can also use Google Cache's 'text-only version' option in the upper right. Here's a random Scribd page:

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:v4ARQX-cc0AJ:www.scribd....
Seth is wrong; you can control what people say about you.

Would you mind explaining this?
I imaging if you owned noreply.com you'd get a hefty amount of private correspondence in as well. I bet there are plenty of services out there that use noreply@noreply.com thinking it's the email equivalent of /dev/null for some magical reason.
Totally agree. I remember reading this study when I was in school. It is too bad they don't keep updating the survey. This kind of empirical data is really helpful, but hard to make use of now, nearly a decade on with all the innovation that has occurred.
Interesting historical detail.
There are more Python devs in the world than Ruby devs, so my read is that Python was simply artificially supressed for multiple years for lack of a user-friendly webdev toolkit; with Django, Python is both catching up and no longer bleeding Python devs to Rails.

Obviously, Rails and Django are also at different points on the hype cycle.
Doesn't look like the poster works for Mashable. On the other hand, Mash is where he saw the information, so why not post the link there? It's not a bad thing to link to the site that you personally rely on for news.
This holds as long as there's no exploit that affects IE, but doesn't affect google framed IE.
And there would be. I'd say, for IE6, there are probably a few.

And those who care about security don't use IE anyway.
I'd rather say they're lagging regarding Wirth's law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirths_law
Yeah in fact the word "rare" in rare earth is a bit of misnomer. Some rare earth elements are actually quite plentiful but they aren't usually found in concentrations great enough to mine on their own and even when they are found in mineable deposits it's difficult for mining companies to get financing for mines since banks and investors don't have the same knowledge and yardsticks that they have for other minerals like gold, nickel etc.
Two deposits in North America that I know about are the Cordero gallium property (owned by Gold Canyon) and a property in New Brunswick owned by Geodex that might be the largest indium property in the world. The Geodex property will probably get mined because it has other valuable minerals but the Gold Canyon property is still a question mark at this point, even though gallium is in demand.
Moore's law works backwards with software. Google's development is 6 years behind MS.
Just what I'd want at the age when falls create major health problems.
The DNA Mystery: Scientists Stumped By Telepathic Abilities
Anyone have real-life applications of this benchmark? Similar to 3D-gaming and CPU/GPU benchmarking in general the results (and winners) depend highly on the parameters of the test. Although at the end of the day nothing matters except real world performance.

Can someone point to an application where this performance improvement can be demonstrated?
Since they're talking about Atom in the article, at least it runs on the x86 family.
Without knowing what site was used in the testing and in what manner (rendering speed, javascript speed, xml parsing speed ??) is the chrome plugin 8 times faster, I would rather keep my fingers crossed.
I didn't enumerate the reasons that I don't use dynamic languages, because that would have been flame-bait territory.

I see this suggestion as a way in which static languages could be better at prototyping in the same way that dynamic languages sometimes are, so I think you noticed my (implied) assumption that there was something desirable about this idiom that is not as readily achievable using existing methods in languages like ML or Haskell.

That said, I can't see that there is any reason why what I suggest wouldn't be useful in a dynamic language, too. The implementation details just change a bit.

Even bringing dynamic languages into the conversation was an just to counter to people saying "Use ___" where ___ is one of Python, Ruby etc, which is basically a non-solution for my purposes.
Our company has already built this interface on a query response method... www.targusinfo.com
OT:
"...eBay’s shift from a full range auction site to selling used and off-season goods is an example."

What? That happened?
Why is this a competition?
That is true, but it must still mess things up to have robots.txt redirected. It would appear that Google and other bots won't have any way of reaching the real robots.txt.

And what about sitemap.xml, atom.xml, and other typical files that could also be redirected?
WOW I had no idea Ruby was so succinct compared to Perl!

Could you please share a sample of code that takes 20 times more lines in Perl than Ruby.
Intel's Plan to Replace Copper Wires
Is that part of the robots.txt RFC or just a happy security coincidence? The bit.ly issue seems like a pretty bad bug that ought to be fixed.

You also might be able to fool Google Webmaster Tools or other utilities into thinking you own bit.ly. One of the authentication methods I've seen used was the creation of an empty html document in the root directory.
That is bit.ly's problem for not making an exception (assuming they want one in the first place, it's not required), not a general problem.
I didn't think anyone would have the patience to make this comparison.
How fast is your Internet Connection really
Quote (supposedly "explaining" why unemployment happens):

It used to be, Keynes says, that wealthy men just thought investing was the manly thing to do. They weren’t going to sit around and calculate what kind of bonds yielded the greatest expected return. Bonds are for wusses. They were real men. They were going to take their money and build a railroad.

But they don’t make rich people like that anymore. Nowadays, they put their money in the stock market. Instead of boldly picking one great enterprise to invest in, they shift their money around from week to week (or hire someone else to do it for them). So these days, it’s the stock market that stimulates most new investment.

Even accepting this explanation, it is worth asking why they don't make rich people who invest in building real stuff rather than chasing paper anymore. What happened to the innate human drive, curiosity and so on? Why is it that downturns in 19th century corrected themselves, but now we need more and more government intervention, progressively more every cycle?

In Economics cause and effect are often difficult to separate, but one reasonable hypothesis is that the widespread adoption of Keynesian policies themselves caused rich people to chase paper, leaving it to government/Federal Reserve to manipulate the stock market to try to stimulate investment indirectly. In other words, Keynesian policies beget more Keynesian policies, in the process generating a whole bunch of Keynesian economists who can "correctly" claim "We told you"; we reach the point where the government runs most of the economy, robbing people of initiative ("we don't make real men anymore").

If you travel to socialist countries, you will observe this in effect. The population displays a curious passivity ("that is the government's problem"). No one thinks about taking the initiative because the incentives systems are all wrong.
>> I quickly established a reputation as a computer show off

Hmm ... :)
1 Million Spiders Make Golden Silk for Rare Cloth
PSA for Mac Users: Download Quicksilver
Use it or lose it?
He describes the iPhone as "a cool phone to have" but "crippled by the small number of quality third-party applications available". What is he talking about? It has more third party applications than any other phone by far. I have an Android phone and I wish there was half the variety of apps as there are on the iPhone.
Nope, its not a general problem, but I bet the programmers over at bit.ly are still going to catch some flack over this.
What Amazon PR problem?
That's true. I also think that differences are natural and so is the propensity for like-featured (race/religion etc) people to stick together. But again natural is not necessarily good. But as I write that, I wonder how the global culture (universities, workplace etc.) has helped people to intermingle. Now who is to say that creation of this global culture is not natural. I think it is. What's man made is natural too. So I take back what I said about natural not being good - natural today is different and better than natural yesterday.
AAC sounds terrible in iTunes 9
Your comment could be improved by explaining why.
>It's nice to see Spolsky get this enthusiastic about something other than his marketing

Uh... wasn't that his affiliate amazon link? If he gets a cut each time somebody buys the book he keeps telling us to buy, isn't it still his marketing?
Okay, so name a production-ready source of energy or combination of sources that broadly matches oil's density, portability, fungibility and diversity of uses.

I bet people were as cagey as this back when coal ruled supreme and oil was barely used. Solar, nuclear, geo-thermal, tidal, wind - sure, they all have cons compared to oil but they have pros too and technology will advance to a point where these cons are heavily reduced.

We don't have decades to come up with something else: oil is already at its maximum production rate.

That's not true. Just considering OPEC, they keep oil production below maximum to control prices. Further, this past year has been a bumper year for the oil industry with significant new field findings.

Our one-time allotment of cheap, abundant energy is already more than half-consumed

Oil's not a "one time" deal, so I assume you're talking about the Sun. The Sun is half way through its life cycle, granted, but that's a far bigger issue that we can deal with thousands of years down the line.
Keyword search trends: "Ruby on Rails" v. "Django": http://trends.google.com/trends?q=django,+%22ruby+on+rails%2...

Update: Yes, I know it's a rough estimate, and if you can find a way to do a more refined filter on Google Trends, please share it and make us all the wiser. "Python Django" doesn't provide good results for comparison.

Update (2): Filtered out some of the noise: http://trends.google.com/trends?q=django+-restaurant,+%22rub... -- still looking for a way to exclude the musician from results
No, he didn't. "Brandon Frazier, 32, a public relations consultant, was aware of that when he borrowed $18,000 to cover expenses from buying a house in Southeast near RFK Stadium last year." The photo caption is misleading.
If anything, I think the identities of the bank employees should be revealed just so this nightmare gets put on their permanent records (the internet).
I wrote an article a while back on this topic and whether the owners of test.com, check the email account test@test.com.

Didn't get a good answer but I would imagine they could see a lot of very personal information come their way as many geeks I've known use that to test their software.
noreply.com is for sale. Someone ought to try it. ;)
How idiotic can you be? "As a result of the financial crisis many people lost their homes." People lost their homes because they couldn't pay the mortgage. They couldn't pay the mortgage because they didn't have the money to pay the mortgage. The banks went bankrupt because they gave mortgages to too many people that couldn't pay them.
IANAL, but I'd wager that proof of taxes withheld would be the key issues (pay check stubs, etc.)
This is funny... When Microsoft is making the claim, they say they do more to secure their users than the alternatives. However, at least on 3 occasions I've been speaking to a MS employee or MS fan and mentioned that there are significantly fewer security problems with alternative OS's and browsers, and their response is "well no-one uses -insert product here- so nobody wastes their time trying to hack it".
I think you're playing semantic games. Buying stock in a business is investing in it. Either you're buying new issuance, in which case it goes straight into the company's bank account, or you're increasing the stock's price, thereby increasing the price at which new issuance can be expected to be made, not to mention other things like stock options for incentives / hiring, etc.

The other investment is lending, but I don't think you're suggesting that Buffet is primarily making money buying bonds, or getting even more involved with short-term loans.
I like and use Django, but thats a 100% wrong trend as about 50% of Django searches are searching for Django the musician.
True, but the guy who did V8 is the same guy who did Beta, Self, and HotSpot. That's like 20 years of experience in writing high-performance VMs for dynamic languages right there.
But lots of people just refer to it as 'Rails' ...
I agree with you. It is the bank which has done a mistake. Mail user or google has nothing to do with it.
You can't opt out of being talked about on the internet.
But Warren Buffet isn't really a stock investor (he is but thats not where he made his money). So if you're saying he's one of the stock investors playing musical chairs - I don't think you're correct.

---

If you look at Berkshire Hathaway Holdings' balance sheet (1), you'll find their largest asset class is "Equity securities." Equity securities == stock.

Most other assets on the balance sheet are consolidated from subsidiary companies in which Berkshire... holds stock.

What most people don't realize is that buying stock is investing in the business.

1) Berkshire's 10Q: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/qtrly/2ndqtr09.pdf
They used the SunSpider benchmark [1], which only tests javascript: "This benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs."

[1]http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html
First I am not completely buying the "rewritten them in Ruby in something like 1/10th to 1/20th the lines". But I will give you the benefit of doubt since I don't know ruby.

I do know Perl thought, and I also know few other languages, including say Groovy.

And while there certain tasks which can be expressed in Groovy better, there are also others who are better expressed in Perl! And I think it would be the same for Ruby!

Ultimately, Perl, Groovy and Ruby all fall under the same category and are more or less the same type of things!

Perl is still a very good choice for code creation and software developed because: 1) It has very competitive feature set 2) Huge library set 3) The best community 4) It is still evolving

I am sure we can almost do a s/Perl/Ruby on this post and it would still make sense.

People who are defending Perl do so, because they want it to grow, and as Perl grow they grow with it. If you have ever been passionate about anything, you should understand where the people who defend Perl come from!
Spring gaining or Django waning? http://trends.google.com/websites?q=djangoproject.com%2C+spr...

Really, HN should be above this inanity.
If you had read the article, you would know.

They tested using the SunSpider javascript benchmark: http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html
Sure. I simply meant that having a useful product and a good company culture will largely control what people say about you. Google is a great example. I'm not sure what they'll be like going forward, but their record since 2000 is pretty stellar. While not as rare as it once was, Google bashing is still uncommon.

On the other hand, if you engage in underhanded business tactics and don't really care about your customers, you'll have a much harder time controlling the public opinion. Microsoft has been fighting this battle for a long time, and sometimes the results are quite comical. See the Seinfeld/Gates commercial for an example.
Gmail, google docs, pretty much any heavy javascript based site.
Ok, I said the parent comment link was biased in Favor of Django, but your si biased in favor of rails, most ppl looking for Ror search for "Ruby on Rail" (Which is its proper name), but most ppl looking for Django search for Django(proper name), not python Django.
Richard Dawkins's new book about the evidence for Evolution is out
Not to repeat what was said above, but many of us (I suspect) immediately think of THIS when they see someone write "M$" -- http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/215178115_ExTPi-L-2.jpg

That term simply doesn't come across well in a discussion held - ostensibly - by adults. It has the same effect as someone writing 'MAD LULZ G00G PWNED MS' and ultimately conveys nothing aside from prejudice.
Recommend any Authorize.Net reporting tools?
I swear I saw a tool for this recently and now I can't find it through google. Basically, I need an easy-to-use graphing/reporting tool that will let our finance guy run reports on our sales in Authorize.Net. All the data's there, but AuthNet doesn't have very good report tools and I'd prefer not to have to homebrew if someone already invented the wheel there.

Ideas?
Because of the way 80legs handles crawls, users don't need to worry about loop detection. There are really two issues here:

1. For each user crawl, we only allow the same url once, so any simple loops that involve the same urls are eliminated by this process no matter how large the loop

2. For more sophisticated "spider traps" that work with different urls and domains, they can have a limited effect on your crawls. Because of our per-domain rate throttling, the worst these traps can do is add a few cents per day to someone's crawl.
If this was anybody else, I would tell them to explore alternative programming methodologies, styles, and languages. But not you gdp; you know what you're doing, so if you're hitting a dead end with interactive ML, I don't think many people can help you, you might be at a frontier here (at least I can't; I have dropped my last static language 8 years ago when I decided to have my cake and eat it too with the Lisp family.)
Experimental HIV Vaccine Raises Hopes
Complaints against Date.com/ Matchmaker.Com | My Complaint
If you are willing to pay money, tools like AmMaps and Tableau can fill the "pre-assembled" requirement.

For free, you can use the Many Eyes project to do this kind of visualization as long as you can transform your data source into the required format.

There was also a neat proof of concept that someone from the OpenLayers community did a while back:

http://crschmidt.net/mapping/choropleth.html

I've used that code in my Mozilla Metrics to generate some nice choropleth maps.

Finally, there is the code that I worked on as part of the Mozilla downloadstats visualization. It reads a JSON feed of locations and puts markers on a Canvas map.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/stats/

https://svn.mozilla.org/metrics/downloadvis
Do you have any more information on that? I looked around and all I could find were these (fairly racist) asian caricatures in an Atarian Magazine comic strip:

http://www.atariage.com/magazines/magazine_page.html?Magazin...
You Don’t Get to Define ‘Quality’
The 1994 original proposal is silent on what to do with any unexpected response codes/types.

The 1997 internet-draft (never an RFC) suggests the redirect should be followed, but the potential confusion that could cause has meant few, if any, crawlers have followed that guidance. It's more likely to be a webmaster configuration error than real intent.
Maybe it comes with a stun gun on the handlebars?
It's a competition for jobs and influence within the industry. Nothing to sniff at.
Canada has a serious anti-competition problem. It doesn't allow foreign telecommunication providers in, the government allowed the formation of a monopoly book seller (Indigo/Chapters/Coles) and Indigo attempted to prevent Amazon from selling within Canada. The government is pathetic, they claim it helps Canadian industry when really it just gives the companies carte blanche for abuse.

Bell was once government owned and still acts like it, and the government still acts like it. It's pathetic and is hurting consumers, but higher prices means more taxes so of course the government doesn't care.
You don't lose your home if the bank goes out of business. Mortgage holdings are sold off as assets as part of the bankruptcy settlement. The ownership of the underlying mortgage changes, not the ownership of the home.
The same feeling hit me when reading this: the spirit of the oringal "Duct Tape" blog was right, but the specifics kind of overgeneralized. What I took away: most programmers don't have a sense of perspective on the products they're building - to most of us, it's more software then product.

My nutshell analogy in Joel-speak: "software perspective is to architecture astronaut as product perspective is to duct tape programmer".

The dangerous path you get on is "always shipping" without paying attention to what maintenance means. Of course, this only matters to a Real Business - you know, places that make money instead of burning it. But I find that there is a breaking point where all that code rushed out of the door starts to cost ya. And yeah, you might have to consider a revision, perhaps even adding fancy things like unit tests to figure out what the hell is breaking, or a template to reduce the code base size, whatever.

But even in maintenance mode, the perspective still doesn't change. It should be about making a good product (lowering maintenance costs to speed up new development) instead of "the right way to build software".
Whenever a twitter VC story comes up there's not much else to do except debate whether the company will ever be worth that much.
haha, it's not so black and white for me. I can't swear loyalty to any one platform because I'm too curious not to try them all. I LOVE working in .NET, it has taught me a lot, I don't want to switch away from it....on the same note I LOVE working with Rails, it's a pleasure, pretty, 'feels good writing' framework, that has also, taught me a lot.

I'm the same with with operating systems, I like using them all (now that I have Windows 7 that is), so I have a desktop PC for Win7+VS+Gaming, my macbook for LAMP style development and my Linode VPS for handling my own *nix server and bash/shell/testing/personal hosting...I just can't switch to one platform when they all have a different purpose..right tool for the job kind of thing.

Really, I just like to mix it up, I don't want to get locked into any one platform, but if a job pops up that the client wants .NET, why not do it with free professional level software?
That might be relevant if it actually reflected jobs available, but it doesn't, not even remotely (see my comments here for numbers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=805931)

Note also that according to the trends graph, djangoproject's visitors have also been steadily declining over the past year.