skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Singapore doesn't nees the same drug laws as California. Mississippi doesn't need the same minimum wage as Massachusetts.

You call that "united"?

We were just talking about why that approach sucks here in Canada for health care. The cost of health care is paid for by the province (state) you live in. Once you're not in that province for 3 months, they won't pay for it, so you have to register in the new province.

That's fine if you've moving province to province, but what happens when you leave the country for > 3 months? You have no health care, and you won't have any till you've been back for more than 3 months.

Compare that to Australia, where Health Care is federal, and you always have it, end of discussion. I haven't been there for 8 years, I could fly back tomorrow and get full coverage.

Apply this to 10 thousand other nuances like education, driving licenses, etc. etc. and even little things become a pain in the ass - i.e. My car has a crack in the windshield which is perfectly legal and insured in state X, but as soon as I drive in to state Y I'm breaking some law... uh. Life is too short for crap like that, make stupid rules and certificates and permits and approvals all transparent so day-to-day I don't have to know or think about them.
Alas, FOIA applies only to federal government agencies that are in the executive branch. It doesn't apply to federal courts or the U.S. Congress.
Is it just me, or is it tragicomical that I can't access firstlook from a government network?
The common counterargument to this is that investors want to buy growth, not profits, and to maximize valuation you should give them what they want.

Profitable SaaS businesses are not rare. Profitable SaaS businesses which do $50 to $100 million recurring within fiveish years of founding? Those are pretty rare. (Most HNers could, if they thought through it carefully, name one example.)
I tried to reproduce this result. After searching "Nexus 7 bluetooth keyboard case", I got a page full of relevant results. I could get to a page full of awful results by first selecting a department, then sorting by average rating.
After learning to program only 4 months ago, this is my latest app. It's built in Ruby on Rails with a little javascript sprinkles. Any advice, feedback or feature requests is definitely appreciated.

Here's GitHub repo for those interested - https://github.com/jasonleibowitz/Follow-the-Tweeter
FYI, Task Manager on Windows now has an "App History" tab which includes both CPU and Network usage. OS X provides similar functionality in Activity Monitor.app.

See: http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2013/06/06/windows-... and http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5890
Dylan started out with a prefix syntax; the infix syntax was added on late in its development at Apple, because it was believed the market wasn't willing to adopt a prefix-syntaxed language. Turns out it didn't matter very much.

Dylan also standardized and simplified a lot of the dark, twisty corners of Common Lisp. Generic functions became a core part of the language, rather than something bolted on by ad-hoc macro packages. The collections API was unified to use generic functions (so no more mapc/mapcar/mapcan/mapl/maplist/mapcon mess), and the language syntax's infix operators were all defined in terms of generic functions as well, so you could eg. define a matrix type and have + and * work on it as expected. The superclass linearization was fixed to be monotonic. Macros are hygienic. It's a Lisp-1, and everything in the language is an object bound to a name.

Honestly, I think its lack of success came down to a Worse-is-Better problem. Dylan is a really nice language, designed by a committee with a combined total of over 2 centuries of Common Lisp experience. But it doesn't excel in any one domain. It's a large language, fairly complicated, which tried to mainstream a number of features with complex interactions and limited applicability. To an outsider, who doesn't understand those features or how they might be useful, it's too hard to pick up in a weekend. And so simpler languages like Scheme, Go, Python, or Erlang steal its thunder - they lack the total power of Dylan, but you can point to Scheme and say "Small composable building blocks", or Go and "Fast concurrency with quick, simple deployment", or Python and "Prototype anything, with batteries included", or Erlang and "Reliable message-passing concurrency." If you point to Dylan and try to describe it in one sentence, you get "Generic functions all the way down", which means nothing to the average programmer.

It's much the same problem that Scala faces, except that Scala features JVM interop and so Scala advocates can say "Tomorrow's language features with yesterday's Java code."
Skepticism is mandatory on HN, except when it's forbidden.
Excellent article! The utter thoughtlessness verges on malice (given the tech world's supposed ability to find knowledge on the net). I've often had to intervene whenever some manager microaggressed people into his infantilizing vision of "team building", with the tacit approval of devs who lap it up.

Same goes with those who refuse endorsing the product/company. Because there's usually no way they want an employee actually giving a self-critical appraisal of the product/company.
>Inbound.org, for instance is the HN for inbound marketing and has attracted a huge user base in their short existence.

I agree, the userbase is high, but relative to their current revenues, even a well monetized Inbound isn't going to make a dent in their rev.

Also, the quality of the site is fairly low in my opinion.

Currently on the trending is a 2013 AMA from Rand. Over a year ago, the content is still on the homepage.

Dharmesh also recently posted a discussion about the ranking power of subdomains vs. subfolders. The CTO and founder of a company losing tons of money every quarter that doesn't have enough to last if they DON'T IPO is talking about a somewhat trivial (in the grand scheme of things) ranking factor [1].

[1] http://inbound.org/question/view/it-s-2014-what-s-the-latest...
I worked on a similar project a decade ago written mostly in Perl with the frontend in PHP (hey, it was 2004, folks!). Just checked and I still even have the old courtbot.com domain I registered for the project.

I suspect you'll find pretty quickly that there's a limit to how far regular expressions or similar techniques can take you if you want to normalize and reference precedents and make sense of cases. That's why Lexis and Westlaw pay actual attorneys considerable sums to summarize cases, and why they can still command such princely subscription fees even in 2014. But analytics might be interesting. A family member is a judge, and her judicial office keeps track of how many cases she decides per month, how many reversals she receives, etc. I don't know if those are made public -- certainly I'm not aware of any project to do it across a large data set, and I wish you luck with it.
Dylan is compiled. It was done by the same folks who did CMUCL, which was the original optimizing compiler for dynamic languages, built in the 80s, well-before Strongtalk begat Self begat Hotspot begat V8.
Thanks for the link! There's a ton of relevant information there I hadn't seen.
I thought it was worth letting you know that I upvoted this comment for conceding the debate when presented with evidence. This is a commendable skill, one which many of us lack, and which all of us occasionally forget to exercise.
The Hubble also cost thousands of times more than many private aircraft.
The judiciary sees it as a profit center.
Folks have offered to essentially buy the data and make it entirely public.
But they see too much profit from it
What I wish they’d do in the Bay Area & San Francisco is figure out how improve transit and increase the density of single-story residential areas like the Sunset or the Richmond (I think these are zoned to require no more than 2 units per building or something?), or turn some of the areas toward the southern end of the city from low-density warehouses &c. into 3-5 story mixed-use with lots of housing, and then build some more reasonable urban (again 3–5 story) centers in the towns in the peninsula (Mountain View &c.) so there would be better/more interesting places for all the young tech workers who work there to live and they wouldn’t get forced to all move to SF to avoid surburban sprawl.

I’m curious what would happen if many zoning restrictions were loosened (for instance allowing lots of units with no dedicated parking spaces, and encouraging mixed use residential/commercial) and replaced with a 5 or 6 story maximum height, something like central Paris density, and if property taxes were allowed to go up commensurate with property value (damn Prop 13). If combined with transit infrastructure improvements, I suspect it would be possible to keep a very nice walkable livable city with dramatically increased housing stock. [Which is I guess some of what you’re talking about.]
Browsing the various discussions on Reddit, the most plausible explanation is (IMO) fleets of squid fishing boats.

http://www.reddit.com/r/EverythingScience/comments/2eiv1g/pi...
If the photo didn't resemble the eyewitness's experience, the eyewitness would have mentioned it.
How do you judge whether or not what's holding you back is your inability to move on to a different, less fantastically tedious, idea?
False. A female will prefer female candidates. This is discrimination. Males do this too.
Ask HN: With rise of Tesla motors, is traditional automobile engineering dying?
But why did they support it? Because they wanted to make a deal with the tribes so they could bring more pork into the district? Or because they genuinely respect the tribe's beliefs and thought the skeleton was related to them?

One of my biggest pet-peeves is when someone uses a process-based argument to conceal their true motives, and the article sure does a good job of painting it that way. I'd love to hear the other side of the story, whether from the relevant Congresspeople or the Corps.
I love Dylan. We should all be using it instead of C++ and Java. Particularly C++. Each time I type "friend" in C++ or have to use the STL, I miss Dylan.
Show HN: Phoenix
Great job on taking the time to do a writeup! Last year, I designed a similar algorithm from scratch one weekend to implement some complex spatio-temporal visualizations. I was ecstatic because it was faster than Quadtrees. I thought that I had invented something new. Later, I read somewhere that a mathematician had invented that algorithm close to 200 years ago! Not only did that burst my bubble, but it also made me feel stupid for not having found it. Anyway, using this approach I was able to implement a Linear Quadtree in Javascript using Typed arrays that could accommodate 1 Arc Second resolution all the way up to 60 Arc Minutes if you wanted to. It is extremely performant and I ended up using it to do some really neat animated heatmaps. I went through the invention process myself only to realize someone had thought of that problem ~200 years ago. No idea why that person did it though. I suppose mathematicians did that back in the days....wonder what the application was!

This process is known as Z-Order Curve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_(curve)). You can quickly get to an index in memory or a cell/location on the map using Morton-Encoding. It is also known as a Linear Quadtree.

Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures is a great resource! Check it out at http://gisandscience.com/2009/08/21/award-winning-book-by-ha....
The future of Ethereum: “DΞV and Beyond”
You don't take public transportation in a big city, do you?

Cell phone theft is a HUGE problem. Huge.

People don't like carrying things of large, uncontrolled value on their person when they don't have to. The status quo is the equivalent of forcing people to carry a small brick of gold on them everywhere they go, just so they can hail an Uber or play Candy Crush.

People will literally feel safer for this every day - I know I
do already.
I think I'm more surprised that this was a surprise to people.

Of course they built a search engine. Wouldn't you? Don't you have similar at your workplace? We use them all the time. Think about web interfaces built on top of ElasticSearch, for example. Is that not a 'search engine'?
Show HN: Awesome-python
Elegantly accessible state in Angular services using promises
This looks like Netscape 7 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_(version_7)#mediaviewe...), which had its final release in August 2004, not the original Netscape.

Would it have been more secure if they used IE 6?
What's to say they wouldn't if they were more uncommon?
What happens if you are the only ones in the world that can do this? What if it is never built? What if the problems you are trying to solve get worse? How will that affect society in the future? What if you try working on it your whole life and your work inspires someone who changes the world after you are gone?

That is why you go on. Stopping would be ...unbearable.
This can be done using an Array, so yes you can.
Tail: Tinder like swipes for your Inbox
Human workers report feeling most productive when led by artificial intelligence
I was in the same boat. Then I recallibrated myself a bit and everything changed. The tweak was what I thought "work" was. If you think going to this place called office and doing what you think you love to do (code, design, water plants etc.) is what it is about, then you will mostly find yourself in your current situation.

Now think of office as this place which is a set of problems. Mediocre talent, useless meeting, aimless projects, difficult managers etc. and you are captain-problem-crusher. You have one goal: make this place efficient and super productive. Impossible? Not for captain-problem-crusher. Track your progress. Keep score. 2 months, in were you able to eliminate 40% of meetings? Were you able to make middle managers play nice? Great.

People will start calling you leader, visionary and stupid stuff like that. Ignore them. You are captain-problem-crusher.
Actually, California has precisely that. Shortly after driving across the California border, you'll usually find an agricultural checkpoint or "Border Protection Station".

Their focus is mainly on agricultural products, but they're there to get you to dispose of (plant/animal-based) materials that violate CA law.

http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/plant/pe/ExteriorExclusion/borders.ht...
To me, this explains why the five eyes nations are pushing for (meta)data retention legislation. It's a condition of participating in the scheme.
Mieh, network, freelance and learn to love Montreal :-)
URI Parsing with JavaScript (2012)
Show HN: Goagent
Agree completely! This is the best thing I've read on Hacker News in some time. Even if you've never been involved in security research you'll learn and be entertained at the same time.
You live in the EU, but legal activity in one place is a felony worthy of decades in prison a few miles away - in the same political union. It's mind numbing that a citizen of the EU would have to know 26 sets of laws just to travel around the Schengen Area.

"States" in the American sense have nearly all of the powers and differences that "Countries" have in europe. Each one is as large as a european country, and nearly as socially diverse. The only difference is that we've long since figured out the whole Unified Currency and Freedom of Travel thing, while it's still a morass of bickering in Europe.
Also pyvmomi (python), rbvmomi (ruby), vijava (might be what you were looking at), and the perl kit (also probably what you were looking at).

I did a project in pyvmomi and I was very impressed with its flexibility.
I'm only saying to completely remove security altogether with respect to how we treat the PASSENGERS. That is, when people walk into a plane let them be "protected" to much the same degree as when they walk down the street or get on a bus or a train. Protected by a little sensible thought put into how the environment is designed and a little faith in human nature, not at all protected by strip searches and behavior rules written out in minute detail and a legion of guards with uzis wearing camo on every corner.

In response to prior experience with hijackers, pre-9/11 "security" primarily involved disarming the passengers and training passengers and crew alike that they should act like sheep, exercise no judgment of their own and obey any commands given by hijackers. 9/11 should have sufficiently demonstrated the fundamental flaw with that approach - that it is brittle. It was perhaps worth trying back then, but it didn't work and we should try something else instead.

There are many busses in NYC where the bus driver is in a bulletproof compartment; he doesn't have to come out until/unless it's safe. One cannot reasonably expect to hijack such a bus. Planes can be similarly safe against hijacking so long as airlines take cockpit security seriously. Make sure the door is strong and secure, make sure the pilots can see OUT of it well when they need to - this might involve a bulletproof glass window - and make sure there are clear protocols such that nothing going on in the main cabin can force the pilots to come out. Let the pilots be armed as well if they so desire. Beyond that, we might want to encourage passengers NOT to be sheep, but it would probably suffice to merely let them exercise common sense. (The would-be shoe bomber and underwear bomber were ignominiously foiled by fellow passengers.) "Taking control" of a huge room full of hundreds of people is not an inherently easy thing to do and it's not clear it could ever happen again in a similar situation now that the risk is known. Given that ordinary technology and protocols and social institutions make controlling the cabin unlikely and controlling the cockpit nearly impossible even WITH the use of weapons, why bother searching for them?

There is a weird feedback loop in operation: we are unusually afraid of plane hijackings, so plane hijackings are an unusually good way to make people afraid. But hijacking is already nearly impossible, so we just need to stop being afraid of it. The solution to terrorism is to stop being terrorized. Modern security leaves people defenseless as it sends the message that they SHOULD be afraid; getting rid of security would send the message that the threat isn't so bad that we need to be paranoid about it. Paradoxically, this would actually make planes a less attractive target for terrorists.

There is no baby in there; it's ALL bathwater. It's dirty and gross and needs to be tossed out.
Value is only what someone is willing to pay for an asset. Shorting the stock allows you to profit off of your knowledge that the stock is overvalued compared to what the market thinks.

But remember, the market can stay irrational far longer than you can stay solvent.
There was a quake right nearby where the pilot saw this phenomena. Relation?

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/usb000s5wm#...

I wish the pilot had indicated exact UTC time the phenom happened. Hard to pinpoint but nevertheless, his position and the quake's position are quite close, even if the two events were hours apart.
When the earthquake hit California there was also people reporting seeing a blue light.

Some examples here: http://abcnews.go.com/US/northern-california-struck-60-magni...
Nice work, looks great:)

On thing i noted as beeing polisheble was how the conflicting was done and renames of files.

When a file was renamed the other browsers acted as if the file had been deleted then recreated.
I am vaguely aware of how CL came to be, but was unaware of this report. I'll give it a read, thanks.
Show HN: Streisand
With this being written in 2006, I'm really impressed with how on track Tesla has stayed. It gives me hope for the future of the company, and the results it will hopefully deliver.

I can't wait to see what Musk and Tesla do next.
Yeah, that's inevitable. From the same source I cited above, average densities (people/hectare) for European cities range 50-130, American cities have 5-40, and the far East has 160 - 275.

When I say historic European cities are a sweet spot, I mean, they're the most reasonable density you build up to, without getting into the congestion, traffic and transportation energy problems of Eastern cities.

With regards to the midrise model I'm promoting above, I should add it's usually best practise to 'anchor' public transportation nodes like subway stops, with high-rises, so as to compact more density around these areas. Also, while I have yet to see a convincing scheme to successfully integrate affordable housing into downtown, high-demand areas, one of the least-bad incentive schemes is to make them a condition of allowing developers to build tall.

Essentially, high-rise has it's place in the city as a useful strategy to increase efficiency of high-demand areas or help create mixed-income areas.
Why is it a problem to have 300 million people follow the same set of laws, but it's okay to have 38 million people with the same laws? Or maybe California is too big to be a viable state too? Maybe 6 million is the right magic number, and that's why Singapore is still okay? Or maybe 3 million would be better (like Mississippi.)? Then again, the founding fathers knew best (right?) and the largest colony/state at that time was well under a million, so maybe that's the right size?
The best one since Win2k.
Show HN: Cayley
I haven't uninstalled it yet but I've hated swarm and the new foursquare since it re-launched. I'm user #85,437 and have been using to check into absolutely everything since I got my first android phone, the Nexus One in March 2010. I've given them 4 1/2 years of data that I don't want to lose, but I don't want to keep using it anymore unless they put back the old features. For example someone asked me how many times I checked my local Dunkin Donuts the other day, a question foursquare used to easily answer, and after 10 mins of checking everywhere I couldn't find the answer!

I challenge someone to make a clone of core original foursquare features and allow us to import our foursquare data. I'll use your app and help promote it. :)
Hackers Target Video Games for Fun, Profit and Better Scores
Show HN: Cockroach
This time is different. It's like comparing apples to lemons (pun intended).

IBM is now a professional services company. They have almost half a million employees worldwide, not considering the many thousands of contractors. That's 5x more people than Apple.

IBM is in the business of 1) selling people's time, and 2) selling some software, to justify selling even more of people's time. Hardware is not a priority anymore.

Those who have worked in professional services industry know there's a cap on how much you can charge for each employee. Maybe 2-3x the salary, which will get you to the $200-250K range. Maybe a bit more if you have teams with unique skills (e.g., lawyers, scientists, creative talents), but nothing even close to the revenue per capita that a product-based company commands.

Case in point: IBM just got to #1 position on AdAge's ranking of digital marketing agencies [1]. Yes, digital marketing agency. A few years ago they weren't even showing up in the rankings.

Apple, on the other hand, is in the business of creating products out of hardware + software. That requires a much smaller scale, given that 80% of the manufacturing is outsourced. So when you look at the revenue per employee, you'll end up with much bigger numbers.

But a better comparison would be to add all the employees of Apple's direct suppliers. Just Foxconn, for example, has 1.29M employees and 40% of its revenue coming from Apple. Add it all up, and things start to look a lot more similar to IBM.

[1] http://adage.com/article/agency-news/2014-agency-report-reve...