skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to think that too, but the data seems to show that more economic freedom (unregulated capitalism) the better off the people are (per capita GDP, etc)

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GM_-_Countries_by_Eco...

http://images.absoluteastronomy.com/images/encyclopediaimage...

If unregulated capitalism was just as bad as communism you'd expect this chart to have a bell curve type shape, rather than it's upward curve: http://www.investmentu.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/200601...

You can explore the relative economic freedoms of each country here: notice that the US is only the #6 free-est economy in the world): http://www.heritage.org/Index/Ranking.aspx
Crap, I might have to finally give in and sign up.
As Geoff Boldglum might say: "There's no step 39!"
Anywhere's probably better than Detroit. Having never visited California in my life (closest I've come was living in Texas), I really want to see how great it is. So please, Paul Graham, if you are reading this, please at least give me an interview so I can fly there for free.
What part of exponential don't you understand? At the current growth rate of the internet since 2000 you'd expect the entire population of the world to be using the internet by 2020. That may not occur, but you'd have to assume an end to the current growth rate of the internet.
Heh, where's Nokia on that list?

They're on a downward spiral and they had better swallow their pride, ditch Symbian, lose the Not Invented Here mentality, and have that Android phone in the works already.
They don't charge for minor point (that would be y part in 10.x.y) releases. More than that, upgrade from 10.0 "Cheetah" to 10.1 "Puma" was free, and upgrade from 10.5 "Leopard" to 10.6 "Snow Leopard" is only $29.
It seems that Android is heading that way.

I think the developer complaints about Android are a signal that developers are sticking with the platform. Much like Windows programmers complain loudly about Windows and still write code, or have to write code, for Windows.

One might say: If you can't hear their complaints, they have left already.
I don't get the point. Right now this site is basically stamp collecting. You need to bring some quality writing or analysis to the table to make this worthwhile. You need a purpose. Some example things you could do:

- A humor site. Unoriginal and a little mean, but it could work. You'd need good writing and consistently interesting/funny failure screenshots.

- A design critique of failure pages.

- Failure pages on well-known properties with descriptions of how they're triggered, each followed by a dash of well-founded speculation about the causes of the error as an intro to a technical discussion. Would require you to select interesting failure cases.
Again changing names... Was previous http://getvolery.com

It would be good if somebody replied to my suggestion comments on site.
Q: What is exciting about a copycat store 'concept (unless you are a mall-geek, off course) plus an OS release that does not advance the state of the art in no way whatsoever?
A: 0.
This would make my proofs so much easier.
I'd also heartily recommend learning to read other peoples code from the assembly - softice/dissassembly listing.
What about the days when we let monopolies roam free??? Perhaps the data only indicates that the equilibrium is shifted a little more towards the capitalism side?

I don't understand how your second link argues that less gov control means higher standards.

I think what we see in the world right now is that there are many more 3rd world countries with ineffective governments and less economic freedom than there are countries who are doing well enough to have an economy to not regulate. So in other words it's much harder for a country to go from poor, low economic freedom to prosperous than it is for a country that already has a strong unregulated economy to adopt some regulation and go to prosperous.

http://www.investmentu.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/200601...
The graph there probably doesn't exhibit a bell curve because as soon as a country leads too far right towards pure economic freedom, it jumps back really fast. And I think enough time has passed that all the most developed countries have hit that mark and popped back left a little.

Also I think you should consider the size of countries like Hong Kong and Singapore, since different principles probably govern economies of different sizes.

Can you name me one 1st world country without economic regulations? I think this is evidence enough that there must be some slope leading down to the state of America in the early 90s, even if that slope is almost vertical.
Flagged for the surprise soundtrack.

Thanks for that.
When I was studying CS, one of the things I was told was that if you grep and get only the comments out of a particular file/class, you should effectively see the pseudo-code of the program. In reality, I comment very little, just pointing things out that can’t be quickly deduced from casually reading the code.
Now that you know how comments can fail, you should use that knowledge to write good comments rather than not writing any. There are plenty of very good reasons to write comments.

The most common reason I write comments is to explain the purpose of something that is unintuitive from the pure code. Examples are comments in CSS about a particular browser quirk, or hacking around an edge case in an efficient but opaque way.
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There is a final truth, I believe. Doesn't mean the truth won't change. There's nothing in science that says something can't come from nothing, so something could just ... come to exist that would change everything.

I'm agnostic about human knowledge of truth.
Soupy was live and virtually unscripted in a media just reaching puberty.
True, and we do see this happen. Look at RAMBUS and SDRAM though it was a standards working group not a collusive group of price fixers.

There is something to be said for the consequences of breaking the agreement in the real world. In the classroom, she gets boo'd, but if she had been colluding with say 'the Mob' she might have to worry about something else after breaking the agreement.

This also doesn't take into account:

* Industries where the people at the top are part of an 'old boys club'

* An Industry were the conservative move is to collude and let the marketplace stagnate.

* In the classroom example, she had nothing to lose. She probably didn't even really care about the $20 or not. Whereas in the real world, people like guarantees. If a collusion agreement with players that you feel you can trust gets you a better guarantee than striking out on your own it's an attractive prospect.

* It could put a 'black mark' on you with other key players in your industry to play on their trust like that. Which could be a bad thing.

* This excludes collusion to to exclude a player. (e.g. the rumor that companies were going to break the FCC spectrum auction rules in an attempt to make sure that Google didn't get anything because it seemed that their plans were commoditize the industry.)
Maybe it's just me. But sometimes I draw diagrams describing how the code will work and how the methods interact with each other. A quick drawing with a pencil and paper or on a whiteboard will do. It helps me understand how the over-all system works...
I don't see how the example applies to all cases of price fixing.
If two gas stations next to each other decided to fix their price, and one all of a sudden decided to lower their price, then that would only give a temporary gain. If they stick to fixing the price however, they both will gain until a journalist muckrakes them.
Would someone please save shareholders from government pay czar?
As long as they build the hardware well, the Android version running can be modified and/or replaced.
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Looking at the deluge of success related postings on HN, I wonder if the dirtiest secret of them all may be that success is 95% chance and 5% things that are too heterogenous to classify, even for those who experienced them.
I hope you don't still believe that's a good idea! That's a recipe for out-of-date documentation. Even if the comments are up-to-date they'll only be saying things that can be inferred from the code itself, less precisely.
I don't want to start a whole argument, but is it just me that hates threads/concurrency, and doesn't use them unless absolutely forced?
This would be more educational as a collection of pages that each get one or two things wrong.
> I don't understand how your second link argues that less gov control means higher standards.

It's missing it's legend unfortunately. Red means economically unfree and green means economically free.

> as soon as a country leads too far right towards pure economic freedom, it jumps back really fast.

I'm not aware of Hong Kong or Singapore (as the 2 leaders of economic freedom) historically jumping sharply away from economic freedom. The UK and the US slowly moved away from it in the early to mid 20th century, then moved back towards it since the 1980s.

Also don't confuse "the right" with economic freedom. Some of the right tends to support economic freedom to a degree these days, but that hasn't always been the case.

> Can you name me one 1st world country without economic regulations?

There's no countries anywhere without economic regulations, but with the data available it appears that the less economic regulations the better the outcome for people in that society.
Your parenthesis don't even match in the second example, which could easily be re-written not to require a comment by renaming the variables.
Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code is the authority on this, I think.
I see they still haven't addressed the issue of providing their readers with real news: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=888251
Indeed, but you should understand it before even trying to rewrite it, then folding can help a lot on poorly divided code.
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I thought the iPhone was already supposed to be purchased by people of means.
The thing I found most interesting, is the use of couchdb and python for Raindrop instead of XUL.

My hypothesis:
Due to CouchDB being used by both Canonical (UbuntuOne) and now Mozilla in new interesting 'products I'm more and less convinced that CouchDB will be become a the choice for data storage. It seems like a good replacement (although comparing the two isn't really fair) for sqlite.

Why? Because it supposedly (I haven't tested this myself yet) makes it very easy to sync between different couchdb instances (making it easier to have on- offline applications) and because you can 'run' a complete application from it using only html and javascript.

I've been reading Chris Anderson's (http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_list/index/recent-posts...) about how couchdb would transform both desktop and webapplications and nowadays I tend to agree more and more.

Curious as what other people think of this..
It will be worth it if they make it as good as cable tv with out ads. Unfortunately they will properly just double the amount of ads.
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Scala is the clear king of speed. Actors are more lightweight than threads, and a shared nothing approach means no locking, so concurrency can be maximized.

Ah, another person who's never come close to examining Scala's actor implementation. Check out scala.actors.FJTaskScheduler2. It uses threads. That's, uh, kind of the only way to get a JVM process to do things concurrently.
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I don't know about the rest of you but I got into software development to create software (ideally from scratch) and to learn clever new stuff, not to tinker with someone else's code. Of course, just like every other software developer, I have on occasions ended up working in someone else's codebase. But I have done this not out of choice - and except in a handful of cases, I have not gained any knowledge or mental satisfaction from doing so. I have done it because I have been told to by my boss.

Let's not con ourselves. Becoming a dab hand at maintaining other people's software does not make you a good software developer (writing your own software does that). It makes you a good employee who is willing to do the boring shit. The two are not the same. I for one hate maintaining other people's code, and if I ended up doing that the majority of the time, I would either get a new job, switch careers or kill myself. Probably one of the first two.
Ok I don't see how Twitter is more cutting edge than television, but even if you don't watch TV, it will undeniably affect you more than Twitter once it's hype dies down, if Twitter even affects you more than TV right now.
Realtime sensor data to browsers via Orbited and Twisted, an example.
Thank you for correcting my mistaken impression that there was a silver lining to any Californian tax policy.

http://www.boe.ca.gov/pdf/reg1603.pdf

“Hot prepared
food products” means those products, items, or components which have been prepared for sale in a heated condition
and which are sold at any temperature which is higher than the air temperature of the room or place where they are
sold. The mere heating of a food product constitutes preparation of a hot prepared food product, e.g., grilling a
sandwich, dipping a sandwich bun in hot gravy, using infra-red lights, steam tables, etc. If the sale is intended to be of
a hot food product, such sale is of a hot food product regardless of cooling which incidentally occurs. For example,
the sale of a toasted sandwich intended to be in a heated condition when sold, such as a fried ham sandwich on
toast, is a sale of a hot prepared food product even though it may have cooled due to delay. On the other hand, the
sale of a toasted sandwich which is not intended to be in a heated condition when sold, such as a cold tuna sandwich
on toast, is not a sale of a hot prepared food product. When a single price has been established for a combination of
hot and cold food items, such as a meal or dinner which includes cold components or side items, tax applies to the
entire established price regardless of itemization on the sales check. The inclusion of any hot food product in an
otherwise cold combination of food products sold for a single established price, results in the tax applying to the entire
established price, e.g., hot coffee served with a meal consisting of cold food products, when the coffee is included in
the established price of the meal.

Good golly, I am so glad I don't have to program anything like that in my shopping cart...
You're comparing TV, the technology, to companies. I think the internet is much more revolutionary than TV. I mean a country like China goes as far as censoring the internet (and it takes much more effort to do this than to control the TV stations) because it knows it is not only revolutionary, but capable of inciting revolutions.

Perhaps TV, when it was first invented, was comparably revolutionary, but in terms of today, the internet is the big, new thing.
I think you're missing the point. The idea isn't to have to maintain someone elses rubbish code.

The idea is that reading good code makes you a better coder. Which it certainly does. Having said that, bad code can sometimes teach you lessons in how not to do things.

Good authors probably read other books as well.
Dynamic linking works just fine.
You don't want your every app to carry its bits of glibc inside, same for libx11, same for openssl.
And it's definitely more polished than gems or jars or whatever other languages have; maybe only perl/cpan comes close.

On other hand, C++, with its writhing ABIs and changing mangling rules is definitely not suited for dynamic linking.

They could make their Class.forName() one day, but they were too arrogant and now it would never work okay.
The solution is to restrict C++ usage.
Using small numbers to understand big numbers: clearer explanations.
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Also the WW2 one: http://angusmcleod.deviantart.com/art/World-War-Two-Simple-V...
I agree totally. That's why I don't do it.
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Fyi, as is this one:

http://github.com/jmathai/gittwitit
Yup, repeat games are a different situation that may lead to different outcomes. If you can enforce the agreement, it's a different kind of game.

But then consider situations where information is unreliable:

- Cheating because you can't trust others not to cheat, i.e. to protect yourself, and everyone ends up cheating, as in Prisoner's Dilemma.

- In a lot of situations, you may not even know who is cheating and by how much, but you might be sure someone is cheating. This will feed back into your own incentives to cheat. I believe OPEC suffers from this a lot.
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Sounds as if the problem is different taxes for physical devices and for mobile operator subscriptions (or whatever the categories are). If one is 25% and the other is 10%, of course the iPhone will eventually cost nothing.
Different types of content with different types and size of audience will demand different types of revenue models. So a free model will not work for everything, an ad model will not work for everything, and a pay model will not work with everything (at least on the internet).

I'd say freemium is the most promising approach so far where those who are willing to pay more pay a lot more to cover the costs incurred by those who aren't willing to pay anything at all, so that those aren't willing to pay anything at all make the service/product more valuable to those who pay more. Whew... Anyways airlines operate sort of like this where First class pays a shitload more than coach. The graduated tax system is another example.
One productive technique to read other people's code is to step into the code using a debugger (e.g. gdb)
Your Thunderbird experience is almost completely opposite of mine. Gnus is my main e-mail client but there are a couple of Windows machines I run Thunderbird on.

All of your points can be solved by going through the configuration options. Maybe that shouldn't be necessary, but not everyone's the same.
Well, Silicon Valley is in good shape anyway. It still produces things, unlike most of the rest of the country. Hollywood is likely to keep ticking, too, and I don't see the wine country having much trouble either. Meanwhile, the state is a pretty damn good place to grow tasty, nutritious fruits and vegetables.

As a California resident, all this doom and gloom has struck me as utter nonsense. California has especially noticeable problems because it is such a huge and dynamic economy. So perhaps it reacts to U.S./World economic conditions in an especially intense manner. But this is something like a healthy immune reaction in my opinion. California will get over it, and it will be stronger in the end.

Perhaps I sound too infatuated with California. Well, come here and see for yourself. It almost makes me feel patriotic---for California, that is.
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Google apparently violating copyright of chinese authors
Logo in the center? Hm, I seem to know that from somewhere ... ah, yeah: http://www.zdf.de/ (German public service broadcaster, redesign from May)
Do not watch the movie version of this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_from_the_Sky:_Flight_17...). It's inaccurate and overly dramatic.
Modern man a wimp
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Well, it is better late than never.

I do not know if they are going to do it, but it would be nice that you can customize it with your preferences about type of news (sports, politics, etc.), location, etc. For what I have read it includes many "social media" sources but it lacks in personalization.

Some months ago the BBC also changed its web site to make it more "Web 2.0". You can personalize it at some level. For example local weather forecast, type of news, type of tv shows in the iPlayer, financial data, etc.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/
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What did you expect when clicking a link to the "world's worst website"?
Yes, but he means "Apple never considered those patents at the the time of developing the iPhone" therefore meeting his definition of "un-wilfull".

This is also possibly a reason why Nokia have waited to sue - they have been spending the time trying to get Apple to license them out of court.
It would be interesting to find a film version of a real event of which the same cannot be said. The film "U-571" springs to mind, although is most likely an extreme case.
Steve Derkote and I have just related a new graph database with a filesystem like REST API:

VertexDB: http://github.com/stevedekorte/vertexdb
Nokia has already Maemo which is far older and more linuxy. Its actually based on debian and afaik it's userspace is largely based on typical GNU userland.

I for one would prefer Maemo to take over world instead of Android.
Which medieval philosophers are you referring to?
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Seven patties in a bun. Would have killed Elvis...
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> Its actually based on debian and afaik it's userspace is largely based on typical GNU userland.

I'm a "dyed in the wool" Linux user, but I just don't see the value of bringing along all that user space stuff. Android is slimmer, which hopefully means it will be in more phones sooner, as it requires less in the way of resources.
If the code is really intricate, I refactor it to understand how it works (and how it ought to work, which can be an important way of spotting bugs).

But even though refactoring is supposed to be perfectly mechanical and "harmless" (especially when supported with unit tests) I'll usually throw away my refactoring, because the risk of breaking the existing code is just too high. It depends on how invasive the new feature is -- if I'm going to have to change a lot to get it done anyway, I might as well incorporate the refactorings. But if the change literally is finding the right position to add a single line of code, no way I'm going to change things once I find it.

When it's clear that adding even simple features takes an extraordinary amount of time because the code is that hard to understand and maintain, getting/making time for proper refactoring is easier, but it's worthwhile even as a way of creating a mental model.

I've never tried unit tests to figure out the semantics of existing code, though, even if it seems obvious in retrospect. I think the code base would have to become very complicated indeed before I go into full scientist mode and construct hypotheses on the semantics and verify them with unit tests. If the code is a tangled mess, it could also be tough to extract the proper bits to test on and/or set up a test environment complete enough for that.
came here to post dabbledb -- seems exactly the sort of thing described in the OP
http://dabbledb.com/