skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ever heard of regulatory capture? That's where a regulated group attempts to get control over the regulators, so they can then regulate their own industry for their own benefit. It is universal that regulated organizations will attempt this, and usually they succeed.

After a regulated industry undergoes regulatory capture you will see is a steady growth in the amount of regulation, and a simultaneous decrease in how much the regulation prevents that industry from doing what it wants. The regulations are added because they benefit the industry in some way, for instance by creating barriers to entry for potential competitors.

That is what happened in finance. Glass-Steagall really kept companies from doing what they wanted to do, and got dropped. But we got new "regulations" like the optional alternative way of calculating net capital ratios introduced in 2004 that allowed the 5 major broker dealers to double their leverage. The result? More lines of "regulation" that reduced how much actual regulating there was. Oh right, and a few years later a bunch of failed broker dealers. See http://www.nysun.com/business/ex-sec-official-blames-agency-... for verification of that.

Therefore a steadily increasing number of lines of regulation is not evidence that there wasn't major deregulation in the same time period.
How does one get in touch with documentary filmmakers and photographers to get them a scoop?
When testing helps, test.
When testing hinders, stop testing.

This business of "must" and "always" anything ?

Not so much.

Unless your business is a lucrative hourly rate telling those who believe in "must" and "always" what they should be doing instead of thinking for themselves.
I agree - the question always IS when and not whether:) slowdown has a non-zero probability and will happen - the nontrivial part is predicting whether in a decade or five?
Virtualization and Security
The internet has a neat ability to remember things.
You're lying to them about the value of their property?
Thanks for the response. I wonder what percentage of users will have the JVM installed in the future; maybe it depends on Oracle's plans.
Those subtle differences are execution. The idea is to build a better car.
Microsoft’s Project Pink to be canceled?
5 Google Wave robots you might like
You Were My Life
It is a songs about a guy who want his girl back in his life… no it don’t resembles my life…. and he is singing this song for her… Girl do tell me what would have been your reaction if some guy wanted you back in his life …. in this way…
I guess you mean NPAPI.
I agree, I'm glad to get the chance to read about this stuff, but I think the PP's point was that if you're going to present a bunch of data in that manner, it's best to say, up front, something like, "our sample, while extensive within our service, is not necessarily representative of particular ethnic groups," and point out something akin to what slashdot says about their polls: you're insane if you intend to do anything serious with this data.
the General theory rests on a faulty premise: that the failure of the markets are to provide full employment and income inequality.

both of these are features NOT bugs.

income inequality is covered by the Graham essay mind the Gap, the lack of full employment has to do with the marginal utility of labor, suffice to say full employment would represent a labor market in disequilibrium (even by Keynes' definitions).

The General Theory is crap.
The Story of Jeff Bezos’ $250,000 Investment into Google in 1998
Use "mysqladmin"

run: mysqladmin ping

output: mysqld is alive
He didnt need a legal fund; a polite letter or simply ignoring them would have sufficed.

There were no lawyers involved. They had no case :)
> Once you start using a bug-tracker the bug database grows and grows, and that data is not easy to migrate to something else.

If it's a new project, why would you need the old bugs?

Rereading that, I realize it sounds flip, but realistically the way things work here is that we get the critical bugs fixed, we launch, we get the annoying bugs fixed, and then we promptly forget about everything that's left and go start a new project. There's nothing wrong with reverting to e-mail, or index cards, or permanent marker on the back of your hand for the next project. The bug database is huge - literally millions of bugs - but realistically they're all either fixed or won't be fixed. People only care at the margins, the projects that are actively being worked upon.

> But in practice a scrum meeting turns out to be just your average status report you give your manager

I don't give status reports to my manager. The important part is that my peers know what I'm doing, and it's much easier to tell them all at once than individually. That is, if they care - which is why we don't do them if people don't find them helpful.

We're also allowed to say "I did nothing today" at the stand-ups, with no questions asked (though I suppose if that became "I did nothing this week", some questions might be asked). It's actually the managers that say this most often, because they waste the most time in meetings.

> For an epic example of such a train-wreck, go read "Dreaming in Code".

Read it. IMHO their problem was that they never pinned down the goals for the project in a way that was concrete enough that you could say, "This is what Chandler is, and this is why it's important." If you can't do that, you've lost regardless of your process and how many superstars you have on the team.

The reason they kept running around in circles concerning coding conventions is that they had nothing else to concern themselves with. If you know why you're doing something, you're much more inclined to say "Let's move on and not argue over bikesheds, because we want to get some real work done."

> Teams aren't going to decide anything right by consensus.

Every team I've been on here has done just that. Consensus doesn't mean that there's no decider, or even that everybody agrees. It means that everybody's been asked, and a solution has been proposed, and everyone is content enough with that solution to move forward. Oftentimes, that's because they find it more work to argue than to just hold their tongue and do it, but the net effect is that they can do something and at least see whether they were right or wrong.
oh puh-leez... srsly?

i don't need to apologize for swearing... and similarly, you don't have to perform semantic acrobatics to find a different definition for "bending over".

jason certainly meant the headline in a "don't drop the soap" fashion, just like i meant to use the word "fuck" for emphasis.

get over yourself and get off your victorian soapbox. people swear. they've been doing it for hundreds of years.

if you can't get past the use of either as a literary form of emphasis, then you're the one being juvenile.
thank god i got my invite from http://getgooglewaveinvites.blogspot.com/
they got like 3k invites. I feel lucky :)
It isn't video decoding per se: the .flv videos are merely containers for real video encoding formats, and playback alone shouldn't eat considerably more cpu than with other players. Of course, if you have video decoding hardware you can even offload the heavy number crunching to that unit which kind of gives you "free" video except for any memory I/O overhead for video stream and buffering decoded frames.

Flash runtime seems to be pretty slow, as for animating and as for executing ActionScript itself. I don't know how much AS3 helps in that, though. Compositing in Flash can be pretty heavy: SWF videoplayers often have a mix of layers for controls, progress bars, advertisements etc. that all have to be composited on top of each other. Even worse, the SWF videoplayer might be set to run at 40 FPS or 60 FPS eventhough the video itself runs only at 25 fps, for example. This means that Flash tries to render much more and more often than is needed for the video alone. This all happily cumulates: even if we can decode video frames fast enough, the frames still have to be synchronized through the choking Flash core and compositing which may be running late, causing delayed or dropped frames, jittering, unresponsiveness etc.

If we played H.264 videos via HTML5 and JavaScript/CSS, I suspect that websites could (and would!) still program their videplayers to do too much and eventually choke on scripting and rendering. Similarly, I guess it's possible to create a lean&mean Flash videoplayer that just basically shows the video layer at the video FPS and nothing else.

Disclaimer: I work on next-gen smartphones in a closely related field. YouTube chokes my EeePC 901 on Ubuntu; it runs much better on these little next-gen devices where practically anything graphics related is being accelerated.
thanks, I'll look into that.
You've got me backwards. I agree with you. I understand why you need a mac. I don't understand why it is such a big deal to have to buy a one. Just buy one. If you are doing this for a living, this seems like a reasonable expense. If you are doing this semi-pro, well then get your hands on a used machine cheaply.

If you are neither, Apple's not really catering to you. That's true. Jailbreak or do something improvised. Even someone doing it for non monetary reasons.

By hurdle I meant buying one.

By puzzle I meant people hearing about something like this and thinking "now I can develop without a mac" rather then "now I can develop in flash."
the automated object recognition and extraction is what impresses me. everything else is a killer usage example of that core technology.
Well, I would too if a rubber band survived even when the whole house was burnt down.
thanks for the extra effort... hope it's worthwhile

(btw, it's been my experience that when people find something fun, they are more likely to spend time educating themselves on what they're having fun about ;)
Even considering how lucrative HFT can be, I'm not sure it's quite gone to the point that we should be expecting to hear about the Goldman-Sachs Particle Accelerator anytime soon.
Exploiting asymmetric information to intentionally screw low-information consumers on the value of their property makes you an asshole in my book.

Cue the glibertarians to spew their idiocy about blah blah blah, consenting adults, blah blah blah. That's fine, and believe me, I'll be pointing and laughing when it happens to their grandparents.

And yes, I can't give you a technical definition of screw. Much like Justice Potter, I know it when I see it. And paying out 20% of value or less is screwing people.
It's worth reading up on the author. Normally, the messenger is less important than the message, but check this out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner#Legal_positions

If you read his positions, he seems to me to take the worst elements of both political parties. He's like everything that's wrong with both views of government wrapped into one person.

He's described as generally right wing, but a moral relativist and moral skeptic. That means he believes right and wrong are relative to a situation (which invalidates the rule of law and turns it into rule of man) and moral skepticism (which means perhaps there are no moral truths or natural rights - which is frequently used as an apology for power and control). Helped set Bush Sr's antitrust policy. Opposes the right to privacy. Writes favorably of "efficient breach of contract" - that means breaking a contract if the damages are less than the losses of honoring it.

He argues that the ends justify the means vis-a-vis torture: "If torture is the only means of obtaining the information necessary to prevent the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Times Square, torture should be used—and will be used—to obtain the information. ... no one who doubts that this is the case should be in a position of responsibility." (note: I'm a firm believer that "ends justify the means" is always the route to totalitarianism and fascism, similar to how "we need to suppress free speech to protect the country" does too)

Finally, he both doesn't understand technology, and is proud to take a crazy stance on it: "Posner supported the creation of a law barring hyperlinks or paraphrasing of copyrighted material as a means to prevent what he views as free riding on newspaper journalism"

I'm generally somewhat liberal and modern - but the thing I respect most about American conservatives is that they draw strong moral stances and encourage them to be followed uniformly. Hell, they get a lot of their moral stances quite wrong in my opinion, but uniform enforcement leads to rule of law instead of rule of man. A stable, predictable, uniformly and equally enforced legal code is crucial to a healthy society. Moral relativism and moral skepticism are valuable in universities, but disastrous in courtrooms.

The author, Richard Posner, seems like an apologist for central power for any reason, and like a reasonably dangerous and bad person. So, the message deserves to be judged in its own right, but a quick understanding of the messenger might shed light on his motives.
Right -- and next you're going to tell us that each and every website that uses flash - you're going to install an application for on your mac.
Exploiting asymmetric information to intentionally screw low-information consumers

But all negotiations are based on asymmetric information, right?

This is like the cigarettes discussion. Cigarettes kill people. So just tell them so and let's move on.

These guys screw people over. So just tell people and lets move on. There are lots of ways for people to lose money.

I think there is a line where a company would be evil, but I draw that line where high-pressure sales tactics are used for large sums of money, such as time-share sales. These guys are no different than the neighborhood pawn shop.
I'm personally of the opinion that this comprises a large portion (>60%) of the value of unit tests. Unit testable code tends to not have many of the side effects / global variables / nasty state that make nasty bugs, so this alone tends to drive down the number and severity of bugs. The testing itself is icing on the cake.
Mistakes are human's little addition to the galaxy. Kanamit turns out to be a joke. Nitrogen will be added today as well as some others pointed out by our users.
How does this find and load shared objects?
Dude, a sudoku solver is really directly solved via brute force search. If a coder can't come up with the brute force algorithm for a 9x9 sudoku board, there's something wrong with that person.
iPhone apps probably won't go down that much. You'll still have to pay at least $0.99 for those apps you'd get on the internet for free, and this is because you're getting the app on a closed, mobile platform that runs in the palm of your hands. Then there's the $99 fee to get it into the app store, which is part of the closed platform problem.
Please Download Our Toolbar to get your invite?

and a link to snugcash . com hidden in the text?

Flagged.
I strongly agree with this. The sad reality is that some of us have deadlines to meet. I think this is an option that makes sense. Writing testable code to get the job done and meet the deadline and the unit tests come in later when needed. EG: new features, bugs, etc.

Not a good practice and ideal but it is practical. IMHO
MMA Supplements
The popularity of mixed martial arts is on the rise, some of the major supplement companies have already started to market their products to the MMA community
Don't bother clicking; this is linkbait spam compared to what usually makes its way up here. Summary: Jeff Bezos invested 250k in Larry and Sergey and got a 5000x return, platitudes, sign up to hear my seminar so I can sell you my ebooks prominently listed on the sidebar. Flagged.
These days, no business model but advertising would work since the market is so competitive.(free service is everywhere) I would focus on building more effective advertising method than ever rather than creating new business models...
JQuery Lesson Series: Introduction to Selectors
This article is an introduction to jQuery Selectors and illustrates how to start using them with simple practical examples.
Summary: have lots of money and get lucky
What sorts of things, out of curiosity?
Interesting excerpt on their view of advertising back then:

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Looks like they solved the problem by turning it on its head.
Well be good at it. Then you will have a higher probability of getting lucky.
"fuck you TimBL"

This site was, at least once, where that sort of person might happen to turn up. It'd be nice to keep the personal assaults to a minimum (and the comparison to Ted Nelson is cleverer anyway).
'Porn sites work because you get the point.' -this is mentioned in regards to asking for subscription.

Maybe putting up a paywal on a porn site would have worked well in the late 1990s or even early 2000s, but there are so many you tube like porn sites for completely free which makes me wonder whether anyone pays for porn anymore.
List of FIFA 2010 World Cup Qualifiers fixtures for Saturday
The qualifying for the 2010 FIFA World Cup Finals in South Africa are wrapping up as most regions have only two more match days left. There are still many spots up for grabs in every region. In South America (CONMEBOL), Argentina is struggling and in danger of not qualifying.
Trapster Speed Trap App Dowloads Hit 50,000/Day
The Future of the Internet - Vinton G. Cerf
I've repeatedly cited gigantic peer-reviewed studies including the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (1999) one in which participants were split into many groups based upon differing levels of activity from sedentary to daily runners. Each one has shown dose-dependent gains from cardio-vascular exercise. And in each case, you've shrugged off the research and then come back with something like this.

From your links:
"Heidbüchel's study included only a small, highly selective population of endurance athletes, predominantly cyclists, who engage in a particular type of strain, with preexisting arrhythmias."

So even when you specifically searched for "runners die young", it came back with a paper that states that marathon running is part of a healthy lifestyle and then goes on to talk about possible risks for those who race without sufficient training or who are trying to undo decades of unhealthy living. Over half of the participants were former smokers. The paper does not in any way claim that "endurance sports can mess up your heart rhythm" nor is the quotation you took out of context representative. In fact, it said:

"Marathon running is part of a healthy lifestyle. There is overwhelming evidence for the cardiovascular protective effects of physical activity."

What is it with this? What ax to grind is so important that it's worth posting misleading, disingenuous summaries of research you find by googling for your already chosen conclusion? As I asked last time, Can you refer me to any peer-reviewed research linking sprint training or weight training with equal or greater benefit in any of the health indicators that Paul Williams's 100,000 person study found distance running improved?
Don't confuse the movement with the control of the movement. We can build machines that move much better than any animal, especially at certain scales and by certain measures.

A clockwork automaton really does move, it makes no sense to say it's not true motion because it is dead. If you need something moved, you move it yourself, you use an animal, or you use a machine. Machines generally move more.

Someday machines will be generally more intelligent.

I'm not sure what you are talking about when you say intelligence.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/tx/optimization/

>Only GOD can create people.

Many theists would say only god can create life, which is what you propose, yes? They are wrong for much the same reasons you are.

Evolution has little to no 'intelligence' depending on how you measure it, and yet it produced life and intelligence. We should be able to create much more powerful intelligent machine, just as we have created much stronger machines.
This is going to make the copyright brigade go into apoplexy if it starts to become popular!
The Problem With Planning
Fossil: Simple, distributed software configuration management
He also invested in 37S, seems he likes to spread his money to interesting people in the community at least.
DDoS attack rains down on Amazon cloud
Yes it is a big hurdle for me.

I own a Dell laptop running Ubuntu and a desktop I've built myself running both Ubuntu and Windows.

Because I live in Europe, the cheapest MacBook Pro is 2233 USD. And the cheapest Mac Mini is 1000 USD.

A Mac Mini doesn't cut it for me because I travel a lot (not long distances, but enough to keep me from having a stable office). I won't consider the simpler MacBook because I had one that I've taken to the repair shop 4 times in one year. The MacBook is simply not made for high-workloads.

And MacBook Pro is just expensive. I've payed 800 USD for my Dell Inspiron and it's been running for two years with no problems. The MacBook Pro is just overpriced. I don't care that they are bundling the latest Intel processor in it. I don't want the latest hardware available. I'm happy with just 2 GB of RAM and a big-enough hard-disk. A colleague of mine had a MacBook Pro and the motherboard fried when he spilled some coffee on the keyboard. I've spilled coffee (with lots of sugar) on mine and besides the keyboard getting sticky, nothing happened.

Besides, I always hated Windows because it is too locked down. I also stay away from proprietary technologies because the skills aren't transferable. But having to go all-Apple to develop for the iPhone is just ludicrous.
Database vs. Search Engines: The Space Locality Bottleneck
How a Microsoft veteran learned to love Linux, and why it matters
I have heard Chopra speak on a few occasions. He's bright but not the brightest apple in the bunch. He appeared to me to be green (for someone with his level of responsibility) and not the most polished of speakers, IMHO. I would certainly not characterize him as being "brilliant." He must have been at the right spot at the right time to have been nominated for that post. I could think of some more well qualified and seasoned alternatives.
Chicago Boss - the no-nonsense MVC framework for Erlang