skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I've said before, and will repeat one final time, I DO NOT agree with these firm's practices, but I will defend their right to apply whatever bidding/pitch process they'd like, under the law, within their respective organizations.

Aside from the usual litany of trade-secret/defamation issues (largely paper tigers here) and clearly vested bias by the publisher, the release itself isn't the issue.

What IS wrong is the instant garnering of credibility of this single-sourced material without any fact-checking of these accounts nor dialog with/about the respective parties. Whistle-blowing is fine IF released through 3rd parties who apply independent due diligence.

To use an analogy, it's as if the coach of a college football team calls a press conference to expose the corrupt high school recruiting practices of a rival university.

If true, and the coach genuinely places the best interests of those high school students foremost, he insures its release through ESPN, the college athletics association, or any 3rd party perceived to be reasonably neutral.

If, on the other hand, he personally brings forth these allegations in his own forum, it only serves to degrade their credibility, do a disservice to those whom ostensibly he is attempting to serve, and cast a great deal of umbrage on his true motivations.

One final addendum, if that $18k story is true, then it sure looks like an open and shut case for a breach of contract suit, but more likely, an easy opportunity to reach a pre-trial settlement for the majority of the proceeds.

If the founders blindly paid these fees w/o any sort of written agreements of performance on the part of the Angel firm, nor applied any inverse due-diligence to their potential investors, then I seriously question if they have necessary modicum of business acumen to run a company.
> The distinction between so-called "positive" and "negative" rights is wholly artificial.

Not at all. It may not apply to this situation (that Finland politically decides to provide a service doesn't mean it makes sense to call it a right), but there's a very clear distinction between positive and negative rights.

Positive right: The right to a free education. In order to provide that for a certain person, certain other persons have to pay for that. If they don't, they'll have to be forced to, otherwise it couldn't really be called a right.

Negative right: Freedom of expression. No-one is allowed to keep you away from expressing yourself. On the other hand, no-one is required to help you express yourself -- that would be a positive right.

> Now, none of this stops us from debating the merits of this particular infrastructure project. In this case, we should probably compare it to a library system or post office, as it serves similar functions.

Agreed. I think it's a bad idea to spend other peoples money on providing 100 mbit internet connections to someone who's very voluntarily chosen to live as far away from human civilization as possible. Just like a bigger library in a bigger town is better than a weekly visit by the bookmobile, there's a difference between living in the city and in a rural area -- one that's also included in the cost of living.
Here's what I took from that: Don't use Java. ;)
I would say putting ads and turning a profit by advertising competitors of the brand your domain is mimicking would be considered squatting a domain.
This is why everyone should be forced to take common curriculum classes regardless what their major is. I went to a school that required two history, two english, three philosophy and three religion classes (among other things) as common curriculum. They were all awesome classes that I'm glad I took. More notable, I probably wouldn't have taken any of them if I hadn't been forced to.
Anyone want to compare and contrast the two? Is one better overall? Do the books have different strengths and weaknesses?
Please, dylans@gmail.com. Thanks!
Perhaps "news" is the wrong term to use then?

In my mind, news if referring to an event that has occurred (even if that event is the stating of someone's opinion)

Maybe "article" is a better term, or even "essay".

Someone chooses a topic, people discuss it, and then someone works that discussion into an essay about that topic.
Yes, your body has X resources available for maintenance activities at any one time. If you need to recover from exercise AND fight off infection AND keep yourself warm and you exceed X then at least one thing is going to operate at a reduced capacity until another has caught up sufficiently to free up some capacity.

What would be nice is if you could tune it e.g. "I don't mind my muscles being sore for an extra day but I really don't want to get ill".
> The easy way is to refuse to directly answer this question. In this dialog, it comes down to, "Are you willing to imprison or harm someone who refuses to subsidize a rural area's broadband internet?"

> You're conflating refusal to pay taxes with not supporting how those taxes are spent. Those are two very different ways of interacting with the law.

It's not conflating - if you pass a law to further an agenda (say, broadband internet in rural areas) you need a penalty or it's just a request.

The reason I'm not talking about all taxes is because I can answer this question: "Are you willing to imprison or harm someone who refuses to subsidize a rural area's broadband internet?"

My answer to that is no. No, I am not willing to imprison or harm someone who refuses to do that. Therefore, I believe the law has a problem with it.

However, if my country was invaded by malicious hostile forces and I was asked, "Are you willing to imprison or harm someone who refuses to defend the country against the malicious hostile invading force?" - Then I would say yes, in that particular emergency, I would imprison or shoot someone who refused to defend against the invaders. I would not enjoy doing it, but I would do it if I could not find another way to keep our people from getting killed and pillaged.

When you pass a tax on something, you need to back it credibly. Now, it's easy to wash your hands of it by saying, "It's the law, and if you break the law, there are penalties." Yes, but this a generic non-statement. So far, no one is willing to say whether they are willing to imprison or harm someone for refusing to subsidize a rural area's broadband internet. Are you?

"The easy way is to refuse to directly answer this question. Are you willing to imprison or harm someone who refuses to subsidize a rural area's broadband internet?"
> I chose "gouging" and "non-gouging".

Why the nice name for a supplier who doesn't, you know, supply?

Discount camera stores are infamous for advertising things at great prices to get you in the store but being out of stock. It's a crappy way to do biz and should have a crappy name; "non-gouging" doesn't qualify.
violet hour afterwards?
The author seems to be strongly biased against python.

I'm no great fan of some of pythons choices but I think if you find x things wrong with python and 0 wrong with clojure that that is fairly indicative that this is not a balanced review.

Which is a pity.
As I understand it, and I am not a kernel expert, the existing real time patches reduced latency to improve the soft real time responsiveness of the system, but were still priority based. The Ericsson patch appears to be closer to the idea of hard real time, i.e. that scheduled events have a fixed deadline that must be met.
The preconditions for world peace with humans are pretty much a horror show.
When it comes to rendering (layout on the page), IE7 is a lot like IE6.
It's a sense that I, and other people, strictly avoid. Why use "literally" to mean "very" but "not literally"? It adds nothing but confusion. I would say it's an error, but if you want to be pedantic the rules describe usage, not prescribe it.
Fan death is a widely believed superstition in Korea. The idea is that"an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can cause the death of those inside (by suffocation, poisoning, or hypothermia)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

Something like this could be very successful there, even if there are actually fans in it. Superstition is about appearance and intuition, not reality.
So you prefer 1970s unix schtick to 1990s object oriented schtick?
I like Clojure, but this whole article strikes me as thinly veiled language trolling. It's not a comparison, it's a long blog posting talking about how Lau thinks Clojure is better than Python.
Extreme Programming, 10 Years Later
Perhaps my information is simply out of date.

Given that Mr. Calacanis is active on this thread, he clearly would be the best source to clarify things.

FWIW, (see below) I also disagree with these practices, but have serious reservations on the methods and motivations employed to expose them.
I believe Steve McConnell calls this long-term technical debt because it kind of tends to creep up on you.
Not to get into a prescriptivism debate but "Price gouging" has a specific meaning, not just "charging a lot of money":

> Price gouging is a term for a seller pricing much higher than is considered reasonable or fair.

or

> pricing above the market price when no alternative retailer is available
Hybrid Cars May Include Fake Vroom for Safety
The McKay textbook is more about Bayesian inference and a few neural network chapters.

Hastie is more of a statistical approach with statistical rigor.
Man, being a student out in the middle of nowhere sucks, I miss all the cool events in the city.
need fewer entrepreneurs and more inventors

You are making a similar mistake. How do you know how many inventors there are? How do you know there aren't people writing stuff like BASIC? I am guessing it is because you don't see their faces splashed or hear much about them. But just visit most COMP SCI programs and you'll find very technically brights folks working on new things.

This ends up with the boring conclusion that may be we need both inventors + entrepreneurs. But just because it's boring doesn't mean it isn't accurate.
I think the whole debate needs to be reframed in terms of a new perspective of self-interest. A healthy population will contribute more to society and make for a healthier, more robust society. A more interesting and enjoyable place in which to live.

Personally, I also find a moral component. An obligation to "help my neighbor".

As for the judgment that gets thrown around as to good vs bad behavior and what we should "reward" and what we should "punish", I would suggest that we simply don't know enough yet to accurately make such determinations. In the last couple of years, it's been demonstrated that nicotine may be as effective as stimulant drugs in treating symptoms of AD(H)D. Are all of those smokers simply making a bad choice, or are some of them self-medicating? Were people self-medicating in such a fashion a couple of decades ago when AD(H)D was not well known, recognized, nor treated by the medical establishment?

Stop arguing about who's to blame, and start fixing the problems. It's a lot more efficient. That's what the rest of the developed world has been showing us (the U.S.).
Sell 15" notebooks for $300 and you'll see netbook sales dry up. I don't think 10" notebooks are going to be a mainstream product in the long term.
Not only that, he's wrong - Python is sensitive to indentation, not whitespace. As long as your block is at the right depth, you can have as much whitespace as you want. I regularly format code so similar things line up. This is perfectly valid Python:

def foo():
longvariable = 1
x = 2

Also on the subject of lambdas, this is also valid:

def foo():
def bar(x):
return x + 5

print bar(5)

With a nice clean syntax for nested functions, lack of multi line lambdas is much less of an issue.
Have you managed or employed people? I ask because paying people well is a bit counterintuitive , but most owners and managers figure it out pretty quickly. Paying more than minimally typically increases morale, loyalty, and retention.

Sometimes you wind up working for an oblivious or sociopathic boss - but then you need to go apply for another job elsewhere. It's like if the closest restaurant to your house is no good: You ought to take the effort to get out of there, and that is your responsibility.

But generally speaking, even halfway decent managers and owners go out of their way to compensate their best people. Now, low-middle managers are not always halfway decent, but then, they're probably not getting directly compensated on production either. Once you get to "head of division", "head of region", and any ownership role or incentive based on real production from a manager's unit, you're going to get managers that want to pay their people well. It makes a bigger pie, so to speak.
Yeah, I did some back of the envelope calculations on this yesterday - approximately 4 million edits to Wikipedia a month, 4% of which end up being vandalism of some sort.

That ends up being approximately 160,000 instances of vandalism a month if you don't mind my hand-wavey oversimplification.

The median time to revert a vandalized article is 14 minutes.

I guess the question is "how many vandalized articles are in an average snapshot?" instead of "are there any vandalized articles?".

Sources:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesDatabaseEdits.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Vandalism...
It is not the fans that cause such a supperstition it is suffocation/hypothermia caused by continuous air flow that the superstitious think is the problem.
The only difference between this and a strawman argument is that Business Week provided the strawman.
We just covered Neural Nets in my machine learning class, and the professor made some comments about how far a good name can take you. Neural Nets are better than other learning algorithms in some ways and worse than others, but the name gives you the sense that you are learning the secrets of how the brain works. That may or may not be true, but it sure has served as good branding for the Neural Networks algorithm.
Off topic, but anyone have any idea what that color scheme is?
He clearly shows that breaking into computer systems is called hacking in the media, and explains why the term hacking is in technical terms correct in this situation.
OpenStreetMap is my favorite community project in the world. Truly open map data is a huge deal, given how many companies are making money from the stuff. Long ago when I started OpenPhotoVR I'd dreamt of eventually integrating it with OSM, too bad it never gained enough momentum.
As with most language comparisons, the author is clearly established on one side of the fence and unwilling to investigate in any meaningful sense.

He begins with a somewhat spurious statement on how code must be arranged, continues with a complete misunderstanding of what most people mean by scope, and then accuses Python of innumerable memory leaks and associated bugs before he even gets through his first set of comparisons. He claims Python dictionaries abuse the term 'immutable', but they most decidedly never make any such claim. You might learn something about Clojure, but take everything he says about Python with a grain of salt.

(Anyone who is interested in concurrent Python should check out multiprocessing, not threading.)
I opened a normal Word document, created a screenshot and tried to OCR it. The quality was terrible and the result was completely unusable. Only a rare word was recognized correctly. The document was in Latvian, but the site claims it does support Latvian and I did check the correct language before recognition.
Yeah, that's a huge deal.

I'm moving to a workflow where I import to the SSD, do my work, then immediately move the raws to an external drive to save space.
I am starting to learn statistics. But I have zero knowledge in the subject. I have picked up a copy of Headfirst Statistics. Is that a good one? Any recommendations?
Focusing just on collaboration would limit its market.

They should add reddit-like features for public waves.
Every install of Ubuntu 9.10 (going final in two weeks) will come with CouchDB, managed with Desktop Couch:

http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2009/07/09/desktop-couch-initi...
Managing the Long Tail of Digital Storage
Clojure seems super cool. But, 99% of my tasks
- are simple & easily accomplished in Python; and
- do not require any concurrency.

It seems like Clojure would be super useful in number crunching like scientific computing, etc.
Not in my opinion. You do have the right to not be harmed by others, but when it comes to shared resources like that, you're going to have to agree as a society on what is acceptable and what isn't.
So Monday 10/18, 8pm, at Hophaus http://www.thehophaus.com/ at 646 N. Franklin?
Except you have to login.
I've used the web for too long to hate IE. Not after all it did.

IE4 introduced the UI control that allowed you to build full-blown applications in your browser using server-side processing. IE5 introduced the scripting that allowed you to build full-blown applications in your browser using client-side processing. They introduced browser plug-ins before anyone thought they would ever need them and could do AJAX years before that term that was invented. Since then, the other browsers have improved upon the things IE introduced, but haven't taken any considerable single steps forward.

For reasons beyond my understanding I still can't embed MathML and SVG in my HTML and there has been very little development towards more sophisticated browser-applications, despite a huge demand (Microsoft gave it a try with XAML, but by then it had lost its culture of innovative engineering).

Instead, browser developers spent 10 years coming up with the Canvas element. The state of browsers is so bad that if a serious developer wants to do anything slightly off-track today he has to resort to a proprietary plug-in called Flash.

Lets hope Chrome stirs things up a bit.
Or you could just actually pay attention while driving, and, if walking, look both ways before crossing the street.

When will people realize that responsibility is more important than safety features? There's a great quote from House: "If you want people to drive safer, take out the airbag and attach a machete pointed at their neck." No sane person would ever drive such a vehicle in any way that even resembled dangerous. No one would likely exceed 5 mph, and no one would be killed in car accidents (except accidents involving the machetes of course). Almost all car accidents are preventable. The only ones that aren't are probably those that involve mechanical failure. If your brakes go out, you're pretty much screwed, but almost everything else is in your control. You can't control what other drivers do, but they should be taking responsibility too.

Just the other day, there was a 5 car pileup on the interstate near where I live. The only way that can possibly happen on a 3 lane interstate is if someone was following too closely to the person in front of them. Simple rule: If you aren't at least three seconds behind the person in front of you on the interstate, you are endangering their life and your own. If everyone was obeying that simple rule, there is no way the accident would have happened. Almost all accidents at intersections are either the result of someone not knowing the rules of right of way or not caring / paying attention. These accidents are also completely preventable.
Agreed. It's great both as a reference and as a teaching/learning tool.
I agree. "Leave no trace behind" is like the one and only commandment people reiterate out here(in California). But he's from Arizona, so might not fully understand what it means.
This reminds me of my high school algebra teacher. He would automatically fail you in tests if your equals did not line up.

Very neat syntax!
Chapter 13 is the best!
My take on the issue: picking a lock is hacking, breaking down a door is not. Apply the metaphor as you will.
I don't see how it's really hack-a-day material. It's more of a rant, and someone using the wrong site for which to air one's grievances... but it's their site, not mine. And I'm known to rant off-topic a bit in my own little corners of the web, as puny and insignificant as they are.

Still, Dyson is a bit of a snake-oil salesman. He makes sleek, designer houseware and peddles it via the outlets frequented by those with disposable income whom are always looking out for sleek, designer houseware.

An impeller that leverages the venturi effect does not a visionary make. It just means the new, inefficiently-placed blades are going to be almost impossible to clean off once they become gunked up with allergens.

Dyson didn't pioneer vortex separation technology, either. That shit's been around for many decades, and is likely older than I am.
There are some really handy things that IE7 lacks and IE8 now supports. For example: pseudo-classes before/after/focus, inherit keyword support, and alternative display values.

The other things IE7 doesn't support are trivial in some respects (but not exactly trivial).
It's "charcoal black" from the emacs color theme package.

http://gnuemacscolorthemetest.googlecode.com/svn/html/charco...
Likely yes. Neat video with 24 SSDs in a raid configuration: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/09/24-samsung-ssds-get-strun...
In large organizations, the managers themselves don't decide on their employees' compensation-- HR or executive committees do. Their mandate is to compensate minimally, and they are disconnected from the actual performance of the employee and thus has only their self-interest and political considerations (whose department got the last raise and for how much?) to take into account.
site:port/file could be considered illegal. A well-formed URL would be: protocol:site(:port)?(/path)?

where (...)? denotes optional parts.
Funnily, people in Austria seem to also believe that fans on at night make people sick. Not dangerously sick. They think it will give them colds.

I believe it about closed air conditioning systems, but not fans.
Wages are a hygiene issue: people will quit over low wages, but high wages rarely encourages morale, loyalty, or retention. (Herzberg)

Instead, autonomy, complexity, and achievement, and recognition are related to motivation. I'd rather make $80k a year doing something I love than $95k a year doing something I hate (assuming that $80k is enough to meet my living expenses and other hygiene needs).

http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/herzberg/ for a brief overview.
This is a bit harsh. Anyone who has a Dyson Vacuum cleaner understands the amazing attention to detail and build quality, efficiency, etc. Even if it's not a miracle fan (who said it was going to be), having a 'dyson' designed fan will be enough to make it a success. They consistently make fantastic products.
Violet Hour would be awesome but I don't think they'd be thrilled to have a bunch of guys in ironic t-shirts ruining their ambiance. :)