skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Fed has made politically difficult decisions in the past. During the 80's, they kept interest rates high, despite the massive unemployment.
If you're not being sarcastic, that's encouraging and makes me want to learn enough Haskell to understand the code.
How ageist.
Why not stick to EAFP and go with something along the lines of:

begin entry.at('description').index_text
rescue NoMethodError; end

?
Agreed. I've been using the site all morning, and it's really growing on me. But I didn't see how to get directly to the comments until you pointed it out.
And that works just dandy, until that one day you're on a Solaris machine...
Silly Russell: didn't anyone tell him about credit cards?

Edit: sarcasm fail?
If you go through a bit of learnyouahaskell.com you'll understand the code in those slides quite quickly.

But ... the problem I have with Haskell is that the other people who use it are smarter than me, so while I can parse their code, sometimes their ideas are so abstract/complex that I still don't get it...
Also consider socat ( http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/ ) aka "netcat++".
Slightly off-topic but I use a couple of things as a consumer to defend myself (or "from myself") from "spur of the moment" purchases.

I never buy anything over $100 the same day I see an item in a store or online; I wait at least one day. (Then I can so some Internet searches etc).

Same thing when some service is offered to me over the phone or at my door. Telemarketers I pretty much hang up on them as soon as I hear the code word "on behalf of". For salespeople I explain that I cannot sign right now, because it's my policy and they don't find arguments against that.

Another rule of thumb is that if I haven't thought or being worried about something before, probably I don't need it.

Also for some services/products I already have an "ideal" on mind that I have already researched, so I don't have to think or make decisions about that any more. For example, for long-distance calling I use the $10/month Skype services which gives me unlimited international time. I don't think this can be beaten, and if so, probably the hassle in changing is worth more than the $10/month.

I also read books like "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert B. Cialdini which I highly recommend, so we are aware of our irrational mind.
Distributing a Windows Mobile application involves putting your CAB file on a webpage somewhere, as opposed to paying for a development license and submitting your software to Apple hoping to be eventually approved for inclusion in the App Store (if you want to be available to the non-jailbroken majority of users.) I don't think that particular comparison is very flattering to Apple.
I agree. However, your leaving out a large part of the debt structure. Well, you point to it a bit "They then made bad economic decisions based on the false idea that it was real". If it were only values of homes that dropped, it wouldn't be so bad as those assets are still valuable in that they are standing homes and can be used without regard to their value. There is a much larger debt bubble of more "perishable" product in wide ranging industries (supply chain, international investment, etc) some of which originated based on real estate value.

The Fed has clearly staked out its path. Nowhere to go now but to continue down it.
pkill and pgrep are useful too!
Ah, thanks. Agreed on the parenthetical link or perhaps just a note at the bottom explaining how to reach comments directly.
Yeh, you make the point. So there are economists who claims that future is unpredictable, like Xiaokai Yang[1].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaokai_Yang
Hadoop is a platform for traversing very large data sets. It is not really for "number crunching." One can use any language for the map/reduce pieces of Hadoop.
GNU Global integrates well with the shell and allows you to do such neat stuff as "less -t func" to see the definition of func.
How I learned to stop programming and love carbon foam
I settled with C-z as it is easy and fast to type with one hand. However I am occasionally too fast and hit C-z z instead of C-z C-z. 'fg' solves this.
Scary ghost videos
It's not just that. One should replace conditionals with polymorphism. It's just that, in this case, not enough thought is given to how. Namely -- how can I accomplish this without possibly breaking lots of other things?
Magnetic monopoles don't seem rational. It would be like asking for something with only a front side, no back side.

Whereas a charge is something completely different. It's basically, a ratio of electrons to protons.
nope, I don't believe them. If the debt bubble were limited to subprime loans, its a big correction to take on, but we could get through it...real estate would be cheap for a couple of decades; cool, there is actually some value in that. If the liabilities truly were limited to house values dropping, it would be almost trivial to calculate the bank's liabilities. Banks have no idea what's on their balance sheets, because houses are the tip of their debt iceberg.
I know some people are on the fence about whether friendfeed subscribers should be counted in feedburner stats, and as a blogger my stance is that I believe they should be included. Many people are using services like FriendFeed as an alternative to whatever aggregator.. so why shouldn't their preferred method of reading feeds be counted?

That being said I went from ~10,400 to ~8,600 subscribers today.
Innovation is one of the disguises evil uses in its larval form.

Let's see what Apple does with its market dominance.
I don't watch Baywatch, I do like McDonalds from time to time however. I am Canadian and while our countries are certainly different my father and his family are Americans and I feel I do have a decent grasp on American culture.

Your President is the highest elected official in your country, the head of your government. While the government functions without the president, the president is certainly its leader(at least of the executive branch and the federal gov). Which makes him the leader of your country.

You may draw the distinction between your president and your country, a completely valid distinction( This is something I certainly understand as a Canadian , our Prime Minster has much less power and influence then your president), that doesn't mean that the President of the United states is not the leader of your country. While he is not your "Master", he is your leader and what you say does not make what he said or the lesson plans inappropriate.

Are you saying that children shouldn't help their president, or consider what he wants them to do based on the content of the speech? Are you saying that the language is inappropriate for young school children?
Good for you! I also prefer typing. As far as handwriting goes, I've unconsciously developed a semi-joined up style rather like that mentioned in the article. No lessons required.

Even though I couldn't be bothered with it, I had always assumed that cursive handwriting must have some advantage. But it has none. It is both slower to write and difficult to read.

Generations of children have been hobbled by a prissy, static tradition, inherited from brass engraving.
Diamonds are for softies -- boron is harder
"Same problems as the segway has" ... let's see:

"too expensive" - check! (Got me there.)

"range is too short" - I'd like more range, but after 20 miles your feet have had enough of the Segway. Miles of sidewalk cracks beat you up and you need a rest. Really, I'd settle for a faster recharge rate.

"doesn't go fast enough" - you want to fall faster than 12 mph?

"regulations" - in 43 of the United States, Segways are allowed on sidewalks, bike paths, and roads. See http://www.segway.com/support/regulatory.php

"batteries" - the biggest problem with the Segway batteries is that they're considered hazmat and are hard to ship. The FAA takes a dim view of "lithium ion" anything, even though Valence's lithium iron magnesium phosphate cathodes make them safe to transport. That's really less a problem with the technology, and more of an opportunity to educate the regulators.
Pen on paper: I'm writing a note to myself, such as a shopping list. Block letters or scribble.

Marker on whiteboard: I'm writing to be read from across the room. Block letters.

Since I don't do art calligraphy and I don't have any relatives so old fashioned they expect handwritten paper-mail, I simply don't find any use for penmanship as a skill.
Another comparison:

My shitty commuting bike: 50€ | Range: unlimited | Top speed: a bit more than 30kph depending on how fast you can spin
Ask HN: Are wives a nuisance or strength?
When you are busy with a long term commitment to you your work. Say a startup or serious research and you wife is hell after you that you give more importance to those things rather than her. (Mnay times I do feel that those things are a lot more important than her, but cant muster courage to tell her that).

On other hand I also feel that being a good husband is far more difficult that being successful at many other things.
That's one of the biggest issues I have with monkey patching of builtin classes in Ruby or Smalltalk: it's not scoped/namespaced.

In Smalltalk, the right thing to do is use a subclass. Have that function return an instance of a subclass of UndefinedObject that's tailored to the context. Instead of returning nil, return a NotApplicable instance. Then you can have it print out a locale appropriate 'n/a' message when you need to display the value.
s/pine/mutt/ && s/lynx/w3m/ : these get old much less quickly, though YMMV.
The math for them work. The English doesn't, because English has already embedded their atomic nature into the language. But the math works just fine; in fact it makes Maxwell's equations even more symmetrical.
Just having an unbounded number of alarms puts it ahead of any other alarm I've had. I have alarms set for 7:01, 7:10, 7:20, and 7:45 (when I finally have to be on my feet to get the kids out the door to school).
I recently re-did my entire rails dev stack when i upgraded to 10.6. and I made the point of avoiding MacPorts this time around. It always ended up being a hassle for me.

these proved handy:

http://hivelogic.com/articles/compiling-mysql-on-snow-leopar...
http://hivelogic.com/articles/compiling-ruby-rubygems-and-ra...
http://hivelogic.com/articles/compiling-git-on-snow-leopard/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobius_strip

There are plenty of problems with magnetic monopoles, but that was a particularly unfortunate choice of analogy.
I take a slight objection to the statement that Android wasn't there until the iPhone came along.

The project was underway long before Google picked them up in 2005, and development on this idea of an open-source phone OS was going on without knowing what Apple was doing. And sure, iPhone is a more robust platform, but there were inklings of a 'free-the-phone-from-the-carrier' movement without Apple's involvement. There were also smaller mobile linux projects underway like Qtopia and Maemo.
Firstly, his first paragraph is an example, whose details don't matter. It's the third paragraph that is most important.

Secondly, if you initially have no need for something and wouldn't have felt any need for it if no one had pestered you about buying it, then 'I did not want it' is an entirely acute way of phrasing the way you felt about it, before you were brainwashed into buying it.

Thirdly, your use of 'want' and his use of 'want' may be different. In 'ye olde English', "having want of something" means: needing it. For Russell, want and need may be more synonymous than for you. You could read "buying what they don't want" as "buying something they don't have want for". I'm not sure this is the case, but having read other writings of Russell, I am sure that his English and our English are different creatures, with some differences that can cause strange misinterpretations.

Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, there is a world of difference between wanting something because you think you need it and wanting something because you have been assaulted with so much glorious reports on the goodness of 'it', that not having 'it' leaves you with a nagging feeling that you should want it.

As an example of the last bit: I consider a car a utility. I have an ugly and scratched car, but it serves me very well and I like it this way. However, that doesn't mean that I can avoid conversations about shiny Ferrari's or someone's brand new SUV and I can't avoid being given the feeling that I should care about my car. I constantly have to stand up to the cultural indoctrination and reconvince myself that what I'm doing is perfectly fine. I don't need a shiny car, but I often feel like I want one. That is what Russell is talking about and that is still something that is very wrong about our society.
Plasmonic Laser Heralds New Generation of Computing
Because they're pseudoscience? No, wait, that's this article.
The quotes from Cheng Siwei come across just fine. I read it as pretty honest with a tinge of political cover. There is nothing in these quotes that is incorrect. They played a game that had this as its only outcome. Both the U.S. and China politicians have yet to answer for why they got in this game in the first place. We all know why this international debt bubble happened, greed. So far, there had been little political fallout from it. Not sure there should be. It happened in the open. Both the U.S. and Chinese populous got behind it and pushed forward. The conservative dissenters were a small minority in both countries.
Switzerland Topples US as Most Competitive Economy
How to track inbound links from your social media profiles
Could someone please explain what's goin' on here? I don't know the difference between feedburner and friendfeed. I don't use either.

Does this mean that some people aren't able to see the content they want? What exactly did Google pull the plug on?

Or is this simply the case where Feedburner isn't telling people that people using Friendfeed are reading their stuff?
Humans have been hardwired by evolution to believe in God
Find Child Custody Agreement Forms And Lawyers 
Where to find Child Custody Agreement Forms online, and how to choose the right custody Lawyers for advice.
Lacking Flash in a browser or on a phone at all could be regarded as a shortcoming as well. A PPC phone could run flash from before the iPhone existed.

> is not 240x320 half the resolution of 480x320? Is not 16bit color space not as deep as 24bit? Did that HTC indeed have multitouch?

So does that mean the HTC touch HD with a 3.8-inch wide, WVGA (480 X 800 pixel) is now clearly superior?

> How did that WiFi work seamlesly?

Search for 'iphone wifi'. Those in glass houses?

What you are doing is defining everything about the iphone as the ultimate. So anything different to it is deficient. You are conveniently forgetting about it's many deficiencies when it launched in 2007 such as - no mobile broadband.
I lost functionality when moving from a 3G Nokia N95 and a webkit browser to an iPhone with 2G only and a much less reliable webkit browser.

I was still happy - the iPhone indeed had sex appeal.
cool, then all these foreign property holders can pay the taxes that support our schools and other social services. Ownership does come at a cost ;).
Sure, I've got a bunch, since I rather infamously screwed around with it after Eric Sink said it was the DVCS he was most interested in. In particular order:

Fossil wants to GPG-sign everything by default, and doesn't get along well with gnupg2. That means no gpg-agent, which means typing your password every time you make a commit.

Until recently, Fossil lacked private branches. Fossil now has private branches, with a twist: merging a private branch into a named branch shows up as a single commit, much as if you had qfold/git rebase -i'd them in Mercurial or Git. Multiple private branch support is still clumsy. Selectively pushing branches, as in Mercurial, is impossible.

Merging support is still very young. Fossil does not handle renaming a file in one branch and making changes in another at all; you'll lose either the changes, the rename, or both. Thankfully, the autosync feature, enabled by default, encourages you to stay rigorously up-to-date, lessening the chance of this occurring.

The SQLite schema still changes fairly often, so you'll need to "fossil rebuild all" fairly often, if you're keeping up-to-date.

Fossil is quite dependent on the integrated web server for using the tool. While most of the functionality is available from the command line, some isn't, and that which is, is frequently undocumented. The web interface, thankfully, is quite easy to use.

Fossil lacks any real patch management, which will be a disappointment for projects used to sending patches by email. It also lacks any support for git-diffs or similar, meaning that some changes stored by Fossil cannot be properly represented to the user.

I find Fossil's separation of repository from working directory highly annoying. Other users love it, and others don't care. Your mileage may vary.

I'm continuing to keep an eye on Fossil, if only because, with Mercurial and Git increasingly well-established, it's the only DVCS that brings anything remotely new to the table. That said, it's got a ways to go before I think it'll be of interest to most projects.
The stark irony of this is, of course, that very few games on the Commodore 64 used or required BASIC, and certainly none of the popular ones. BASIC games where the first generation, before people mastered assembly. Some games may make proficient use of internal BASIC routines, but most will bank the BASIC ROM out of sight and never look back. Without BASIC, you won't get that READY. prompt and you can't enter LOAD "* ", 8, 1, but that hardly seems an obstacle.

The simple fact of the matter is that any emulator, or for that matter any programming environment that can be used to create one will allow users to run "illegal copies of games" (though with slowdown that could be crippling, admitted). They should ban emulators altogether, and anything that even smells like custom code execution (subject to Apple's discretion, of course). I propose "applications may not supply a Turing-complete environment to users", though regrettably this may mean spreadsheets and anything using macros may have to get the axe as well...
That's a potential solution in any language (you don't even have to extend a none/nil/whatever object), but it doesn't help interact with standard or third-party libraries which return `nil` already.
And downloading a windows mobile app involved users putting aside every shred of hard-won suspicion about random binaries from essentially unknown development shops.

Now how about distributing a for-pay app?
How easy was that?
On a related thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810833

BFS had been ported to one of the Custom Roms for Android and has already shown increased speed improvements.
That's what you get for trying to control a platform.

What, a fuckton of money and all the user and developer mindshare you can ask for? Closed platforms are the way of the future, man.
Obviously they din't, if so we would be talking of the pPhone now.
Cappuccino Turns One
What I don't understand is why you need to plug it in to upgrade, I'd rather I could just update over the air like apps from app store do. My Nokia N96 is capable of this in principle (though it never works because my network doesn't approve the updates).
It does have advantages, just not for users. The advantage is providing a way to control pupils: a student's work will not be accepted unless it is written in the correct way.

The implicit message is clear: you must conform to our pointless strictures, or you will not be accepted (human beings experience the rejection of their work as a rejection of their selves, even when this is irrational). The pointlessness of "joined-up" handwriting (as it is referred to in the UK) is part of its utility to the system, as it demonstrates that conformity is the ultimate requirement, not practicality.
Wow, all of my posts now being downmodded excessively. Hacker News is suppose to be one of the few places left for unbias and rational discussion.

I guess that's not the case anymore, especially when it comes to apple products.
Do you mean us?
My guess is it's RunStop/Restore key combination resetting back to the BASIC prompt.
ah, thanks for the info!
My personal favourite such use is here:

"It was so clearly a choice of doing good work xor being an insider that I was forced to see the distinction."

http://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html
LOL :) I wasn't trying to make it science-y, although now that I look at it it sure comes off like pseudoscience. The graphs just struck me as a good way to explain what I had in mind...
> That means no gpg-agent, which means typing your password every time you make a commit.

Yikes. Monotone also made you do crypto auth setup upfront, which meant that starting up a new repository had a couple key/user-related steps that made it seem cumbersome compared to git or hg.
tmux is good as well. Slightly different feature set, and its cleaner codebase means that it's more likely to get features that have been on screen's todo list for ages.

http://tmux.sourceforge.net/
>Socratic dialogue requires you to write dialogue, which only some people have the ear for.

A great negative case study for this is Jane Jacobs' second-last book, The Nature of Economies, which was written as a socratic dialogue among, regrettably, a bunch of insufferable hip urban New Yorkers. The ideas she expresses are first-rate (as usual), but the presentation borders on the unreadable.
If architects had to work like software developers
> Closed platforms are the way of the future, man.

I sincerely hope that you are wrong.

For now Apples app store acceptance policies have given it the biggest PR headache in years.
They certainly did not make politically difficult decisions over the last decade, which would have been to cool off the growth. They generally only make these difficult decisions in hard times, not good times.
Fish Shell: A User-Friendly Shell or Like a Heavily Customized zsh
Users should have kept schtum, shouldn't they?
Well, the Windows Mobile model is exactly identical to the established model of trusting, advertising, and distributing any other computer software. I have yet to be convinced that a different model for handhelds is better.

If I had to choose between making development free and easy and making sales and advertisement easy, I'll take the easy development. There are always a lot of people who will create interesting things for free, but many of those people might not feel like creating interesting things in Objective-C after paying for a development license and then not being able to distribute their things if Apple doesn't approve of the thing they wrote.
How many people here actually use a pen and paper every day?

I probably use a pen once or twice a month :/
A popular electic bicycle would also be cheap and allow pedalling.

Absolutely. If I wanted an electric bike, I'd go with something more sensible, like this:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/10/schwinns_new_line_of...
Very well said. This hits on some points that I have been thinking of recently.
An iPhone update is ~350 Mb or so, which might not be suitable 1) to download over air or 2) store on the device while still running the older software version (350 Mb is a lot of space).
Related:

Mourning the Death of Handwriting (time.com)

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1912419-1,0...
I had no idea that search engines practiced religion.
Agreed, most of these discussions lack rigor.