skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, there's a lot of history here, so I can see why it's mysterious to outsiders. But as somebody who has been following this since a teen, I believe a proposal of "let's increase competition" will go absolutely nowhere in the US. A very quick summary:

In the 80s a judge broke up our national communications monopoly [1]. That came as the result of action starting in the 70s, when business regulation had some teeth. To aid that, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 created the notion of the Competitive Local Exchange Carrier [2], allowing local competition for phone service by forcing the local-monopoly phone companies to share their wires. But that came just as telephone service was starting to become irrelevant, and didn't touch the local monopolies of the cable companies.

Eventually, AT&T basically put itself back together [3]. And that happened because the climate for business regulation had shifted; anti-trust enforcement has now withered away to the point that it's ok with oligopoly and near-monopoly. Why? Well, I think that's partly a US shift to managerialist thinking, aided by billionaires funding plenty of think tanks and professorships that just happen to promote then notion that billionaires and their companies should be able to do as they please.

This is all compounded by the insane US campaign finance system, where we end up with legislators that are very strongly pro-money. There is a lot of talk about supporting "free markets", but very little interest in healthy markets, ones where competition is a meaningful check on the action of dominant players. We had a very competitive ISP market, but it's basically gone now, and surprisingly few mourn it.

So basically, the whole political tide of the last 30 years in the US has been away from the kinds of governmental interventions that would restore real competition in the broadband market. It's so bad that 20 states have laws against municipalities providing broadband to their own citizens. [4]

So yeah, I'm just not expecting meaningful pro-competition action in the next 10 years. Net neutrality, though, is an achievable short term goal, because that's basically defending the status quo.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_carr...

[3] Stephen Colbert sums it up here starting at 2:23: http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/eamlaf/bears---balls--...

[4] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-alr...
About £2.8k - £3.2k/month - it has admittedly increased over the last six months, as we've had a few expensive hires, and have taken on more space in preparation for more growth.

As per elsewhere, we admittedly have abnormally low rent costs, and virtually no other costs outside of rent, people, power, and hardware.
BMW M2 will be the Beemer you’ll need to have
This also means that 30% of bitcoins have turned over in the past 6 months. Which is huge compared to almost any other commodity that can be hoarded. (Although the 30% includes change addresses, which means the real amount that changed hands might be less.
Looking at those screenshots made me a bit nostalgic for the old windows 2000 UI. It wasn't exactly showy, but from a UX experience it was great (clean lines, nice spacing, easy to find things, responsive, consistent). Every UI Microsoft has done since then has sort of been a regression, even if not a terrible one. Windows XP looked like a cheap toy, Aero was pretty but their insistence on killing menus and blending UI elements with the title bar was weird, and metro is awkward on a desktop. I know you can still go back to "classic" mode, but it's definitely a second class citizen at this point.
The other thing to note is that people are suggesting here to use Google analytic to see where people are bouncing, I'd suggest that its much more fundamental than that.

read this:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ogilvy-Advertising-David/dp/18537561...

then find what you are trying to sell, and sell it in plain terms. You are offering webdesign to businesses? they are coming to you because they don't understand web technologies. If your unable to communicate the essence of what you provide to the normal man, you are sunk at the landing page.
Fantastic, I'll keep an eye on it. This is a definite contender as a Trello replacement for me once the apps are ready :)

I feel a little dumb missing the checklist now - there's a big button right in front of me! Nice!

One last thing that would prevent me from switching: I don't see any terms of service or privacy policy on your site.
Gigya – Regarding Today’s Service Attack
Dilbert comic strip for 2014-11-27
Crashed chrome on my mac! Also how are you suppose to scroll without a touchpad?!
Having expressive code makes it so much easier to hold a complex problem in your head, when you can see all the related code on one page.

This.
> If i were Google i would give the EU a day without Google.

I'm not sure how that would help refute an accusation that they're abusing their monopoly. It would seem to play right into the accusers' hands.
Surely you can't be this blind to the power imbalance.

A Googler defending Google on HN has the backing of one of the most powerful corporations in the industry, and no risk to his future career.

Calling out this bias or even being critical of the Google carries potentially huge career risk.

Anonymity is a necessity if unpopular opinions are to be heard.

And by all means assume I work for a competitor (which I do not) - that doesn't change the fact that DannyBee is incentivized to support Google and yet tries to distinct himself from this truth.
Data Science Weekly Newsletter – Issue 53
Sounds like it's time for one of us to make an AWS status page. I wonder if it'd be possible?
Flow Is the Mouse of the Future with Gesture Recognition
Multiples are done on annual revenue.

70k/month * 12 months = 840K.
840K * 14 =~ 11.8M
I really like Cmd+[ and Cmd+] for back/forward. Also because Cmd+Shift+[ and Cmd+Shift+] are tab prev/tab next.
San Francisco has homeless shelters and a program to get transients into permanent housing. The homeless who need showers are the ones who refuse the program.
Eg: By referencing an encoder function using the standard on* attribute. Could be called onbeforesubmit=encodeMsgpack. This function would take a JS object, generated according to the W3C's JSON form spec, and return a pair of [string, arraybuffer]. String being the MIME content type, and arraybuffer containing the request body.
I think this is one of the many cases where you emerge out the top of an ideath to come right back to where you started at the bottom, but for different reasons.

I grade school many are taught that math === arithmetic. Then they get to interesting stuff in high school and college and realize arithmetic was just a tiny part of the story. So many at that phase are emphatic about refuting what they were told early on about arithmetic being math. Then when you calm down from that notion, you can get back to realizing that while arithmetic is only a small part of math, it is still very much a part.
I think much of modern PL research (and with a little poetic license, all of the original PL research) is actually dedicated to developing PLs as human languages for expressing pure, true thoughts.

What is "pure and true" in this context? That was the question which originally drove the invention of PLs or logical languages and answers were attempted near the beginning of the 20th century by Russell, Whitehead, Frege, and many others. Church, Curry, and Turing, notable names in early CS, were actually largely driven by Hilbert's mathematical program of formalizing mathematical logic.

So what does this effort look like today? PLs of this pedigree are barely at all interested in how binary codes work (unless they are the object of study, of course). Instead, they endeavor to provide valid logical frameworks of massive expressive power. Modern PLs in this vein can formalize mathematical logic through intuitionistic logic which is something like the logic most people learned in school but augmented with a notion of the limits of the Halting Problem. This means that it lives nicely between logic and computer science.

So why do we think that PLs are an object of computer commands? Because the popular ones which were both widely implemented and fast had that property. It's essentially a walk in the park to convert Assembly to machine instructions compared to an intuitionistic logic calculus. We then proceeded not by seeking to make Assembly more like its forebearing languages but instead to layer abstraction after abstraction atop it to make the fundamentally alien task at hand more manageable.

This is ultimately a flawed program judged that way. Furthermore, it's also less than half as old as the original PL research efforts, but it already had us develop many techniques for efficiently executing complex tasks on a computer. This is an important part of "computer algorithm design" but essentially a side-topic to the larger field of PL research.
care to explain this ? whats wrong with 1&1 ?
Anonymity is vitally important to civic discourse, which is why it's so galling when it's recklessly abused for cowardly and pointless drive-by character assassination.

But that's what I'd expect to see from a secret shill for Yahoo.
I agree it was bad phrasing, that was not my point. I was simply pointing out that even though his wording was bad what he was trying to get across (Proof that is's still a viable hypothesis) was technically correct. Here i'll fix it for you "This is proof that that DNA can survive re-entry from space, due to this finding there is still a possibility that life came from somewhere else"
Dr. Bussard gave a very interesting talk on his design for "inertial electrostatic confinement" fusion reactor: http://youtu.be/rk6z1vP4Eo8
EU to Google: expand 'right to be forgotten’ to Google.com
Taking in large contributions that violate style(9) is a really bad idea, though.
Until they disclose the details, it's not even much of a feel-good story. How is the full-time attendant going to clean dirty needles out of the toilet? Maybe that's where the "policing" aspect comes into play? But how many transients are okay with being watched in a bathroom? The SF public library was forced to install sewage grinders to handle the "dirty details." - http://sfist.com/2013/08/27/were_doomed_sf_main_library_bath...
Hundreds of BTC gone from blockchain.info accts, Tor-based MITM attack suspected
from __future__ import print_function
import textwrap

t = """
Hello there
This is aligned
"""

# Need strip to get rid of extra NLs

print(textwrap.dedent(t).strip())
From the article: "As for what governments should do to prevent social unrest in the wake of mass unemployment, the Microsoft cofounder said that they should basically get on their knees and beg businesses to keep employing humans over algorithms. This means eliminating payroll and corporate income taxes while also scrapping the minimum wage so that businesses will feel comfortable employing people at dirt-cheap wages instead of outsourcing their jobs to an iPad."

I'm sorry, WHAT?
Is this some kind of a joke?

I would love to see iPads create enough demand, when one can argue that NOW we have to supplement our buying power by taking on unsustainable debt, both private and public
Scientists digitise the brain of a worm and place it inside a robot
> Porsche, BMW, and Daimler - claiming that they possess abusive and unfair positions in the luxury car market

Can you explain how any of those examples are abusing their market dominance?

For example, if Porsche engines only ran on Porsche oil and petrol, available only from Porsche fuel stations which required an annual membership subscription, then that might be a problem.
I know all that history, though. But around here we went over a similar transition (single public carrier got broken up not that long ago), and it's hard to argue we're any less pro-money. I just don't find the argument that it's impossible that convincing.
Well, the safe way would be to mirror the current form spec and treat everything as arrays of strings by default.

<form enctype='application/json'>
<input type='text' name='fruit' value='apple'>
<input type='number' name='bottle-on-wall' value='1'>
<input type='number' name='bottle-on-wall' value='2'>
<input type='number' name='bottle-on-wall' value='3'>
</form>

{
"fruit": ["apple"],
"bottle-on-wall": ["1", "2", "3"]
}

Then add attributes to explicitly give the structure. Since this is a browser spec we can add attributes. Here's the same form but with some attributes giving the explicit encoding.

<form enctype='application/json'>
<input type='text' name='fruit' value='apple' enc='string'>
<input type='number' name='bottle-on-wall' value='1' enc='array/number'>
<input type='number' name='bottle-on-wall' value='2' enc='array/number'>
<input type='number' name='bottle-on-wall' value='3' enc='array/number'>
</form>

{
"fruit": "apple",
"bottle-on-wall": [1, 2, 3]
}

Dynamically varying JSON structures by form names and number of form elements is definitely going to be a source of bugs and security problems.
I learned today what a jellybean part was:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%E2%80%93Machine

"cheap and multitudinous commodity parts, each with a processor, memory, and a fast communication interface"

This reminds me of when I first went into business and bought some machinery. It actually surprised me (at that young age) to learn that the production machine I bought used standard parts that I could buy anywhere (bolts, screws and the like) and that if I needed one I didn't have to order it from the company that I bought the machine from. That seems obvious to me today but it wasn't obvious back then ("back then" was way before the web of course where info was not readily available)
It's funny that my iPad 4 handled the animations without a problem.
No matter what they say, it's obviously an anti-american action, plain and simple.

If the EU wants a trade war, then they'll have it.
Uber app not 'literally malware'
Xodus – Java Transactional Schemaless Embedded Database
It looks like the link for "Download Adblock Edge for Mozilla Firefox" points to IE.
Python noob here. What does the _ mean in "...for _ in range(100))"?
Grammatical aside: I've noticed more usage of "company x are…" I never really went for "the data are/show/etc.", despite the learned Latin explanation. To me, "the data" indicates the same group as "the information" and is still singular. A company acting as an entity is singular. I hope the "company are" trend in writing doesn't catch on. (I never much liked "graphical" either) Flame away. :)
Sort of off topic, but how does Spoon relate too services like TestingBot for Selenium testing in the cloud?
reminds me of netvibes. I used it as an online notepad before dropbox became a thing.

http://www.netvibes.com/
If done right, even unsubsidized, this could have the same expected return as a standard interest bearing savings account, but with with increased volitility.

Instead of giving a tiny amount of interest to everyone (proportional to their balance), you lump it together and select a few people to give it to (in either quantity or probability proportional to their balance). Right?
Stupid Patent of the Month: Who Wants to Buy Teamwork from Penn State?
I would say that by and large it's actually the social people who get lonely. They need the acceptance of others in order to feel good about themselves. Newton had his God and his work. Sure, there's 'more to life' but bear in mind that by any reasonable measure his work was full of life and, logically, every choice he made precluded other choices. We're all the beneficiaries of those choices and I expect they were intensely meaningful to him.
"it is what it is"

This is where my mind usually lands when the symbol meets the semantics and the hardware. But there's usually another world in what 'is' is.

I look up to people like you, and aspire to compose a similar list. It looks like you always chased your interest, no matter where it took you. Luck can be a huge part of it, and it can make you feel spoiled. But on the other hand, I always looked at it as being a bit optimistic and maybe a having a mind that is both opportunistic and capable of winging it on a connection. When it seems like there's nothing there to learn about, there's usually something there. That's a bit of luck though. Some people think having the opportunity to be in the right place to be educated is the gift; I tend to think the stable, persistent interest deserves more credit than it's been given. It's hard venturing into unknown territory. Sometimes it can make me feel like I can only look back at a distant point where everything seemed to make sense and I had it all understood, and the adventure itself has gotten me so lost, that I'm not sure I know less or more than I did before.

I have been playing the piano as a hobbyist for at least a decade (some lessons as a kid), and have an m-audio midi controller 88 key in storage that should get some use. If you are looking for a tester, that's one of my leading interests. Email at petitecomputer[AT]gmail.com if you would like to get in touch. You'd also probably do well looking/posting here: http://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/
More modern languages have overcome the most glaring
inconveniences of early languages, but the core
assumption -that a PL's purpose is ultimately and
exclusively as a tool to convey instructions to the
machine- remains unchallenged.

I really feel like you're selling an awful lot of the programming language design world short here. An awful lot of what programming language design is about is making it easy to precisely express what you mean, in a way that will make sense to future programmers, be robust in the face of changes, and so on. It has been a long time since it has merely been a way to convey instructions to the machine.

Configuration files and XML domain-specific languages
may work this way, and it's a very natural way to reason
for the human mind

Your mind must work fairly differently from mine if you find XML a natural way to reason.

You seem to be ignoring all of the tools for building embedded domain specific languages in Lisp, Scheme, Ruby, Haskell and various other language, logic programming languages which are much more declarative, and so on.

Literate programming has existed for years, but never really caught on because it turns out that one of the best ways to express the meaning of a lot of code (especially code for a large project that changes fairly often) is via the code itself, not a bunch of natural language prose associated with it.
I did some scientific computing for OL3 in 2009-10 and the issue you're referring to is a different one. Back in the 80's, there was around 5 new nuclear plants built in France, each year. It powers 75% of our electric grid and most of these plants are still going to be here till 2020-2040. Now most people who conceived and designed those plants are retired or almost retired. The new EPR plants (OL3, FA3) suffered consequently, the project management and the engineering is pretty much fucked up (personal point of view, I didn't had much insight). Also Areva consciously sold the plant for a low price in order to win the auction, they knew from day 1 that it would be delayed but probably not that much.

Now I was referring to the inherent difficulty to scale fusion up due to the underlying physics. So when the article says:

> The next steps for the dynomak are straightforward. The experimental device [...] is about one-tenth the size that a commercial dynomak fusion reactor would be. [...] the group hopes to construct HIT-SIX [...] that will be twice as large as HIT-SI3.
>At that size, things start to get interesting, says Sutherland. If imposed-dynamo current drive works well in HIT-SIX, he’ll be “much more confident going forward that our development path will be successful,” he says.

I don't know if it will be that straightforward because they're building a 1/10 prototype to build a 1/5 proto and then if all goes well they could be more confident about building a full scale plant. Does someone know how scaling up 1/10 → 1/5 → 1/1 is or isn't such a big issue ?
vim-instant-markdown [0] has been around for quite some time and if the gif on livedowns github page is representative provides much faster preview.

Another great editor-independent alternative is livereload + a markdown rendering plugin for your browser.

[0] https://github.com/suan/vim-instant-markdown
Very authentic that said pastry shop hired the boss' son who "knows photoshop" to craft their new logo!
Clojure Does Objects Better
Reminiscent of Weinberg's 1971 "Psychology of Computer Programming", which discusses programming as a human activity. This is from chapter 1:

"Programming is, among other things, a kind of writing. One way to learn writing is to write, but in all other forms of
writing, one also reads. We read examples—both good and bad—to facilitate learning. But how many programmers learn to
write programs by reading programs?"

He goes on to discuss programming as an individual and social activity, with the principle that it's a human activity at root.
Avoid Influenza (and build muscle/brain) with these 5 (10) Swedish Holiday Foods
I often find myself genuinely disinterested in other people where I live. I live in Somaliland and people love to talk local politics here. I don't get involved in it anymore because it's not really about politics but tribalism. It's not about right or wrong but just blindly defending whoever you're tangentially related to. I'm actually quite worried how children I have will end up if raised here.

I'm genuinely interested in people here on HN. In people I see presenting conferences I watch. In people who share my interests. I don't believe I can manufacture genuine interest. It's supposed to come naturally. However, if I don't even try to at least pretend to care then I will literally not talk to anyone for large portions of time.

Thanks for the advice though.
And the site is borderline-unusable with a mouse... :|
Paypal got repeatedly slapped on their wrist for similar behavior until they somewhat understood. Why don't you gather people to start a class action suit ?
There are cases of true abuses but because it is "only" some few hundred dollars, people let go ... And Google keep the money. Reminds me a lot of a certain Paypal area.
It exists here is a charity specific for women with a location in San Francisco http://www.dressforsuccess.org/affiliate.aspx?sisid=114&page...
It's just a name of a variable. There's nothing special about it (in this context), but it's conventionally used when you don't care about the value assigned to it.
This happens at run time whereas IIRC the string literal is crammed pre-joined into the ,pyc / .pyo file.

The performance hit of doing this kind of thing really adds up in a larger app.
Van der Pol phase portrait
I'm curious to what would be the Windows 8.1 scores to in this test.
> On the other hand, I wonder whether the German Pirate Party is able to look beyond what may be construed as an interest of German publishing industry.

It's not actually in that industry's interest and even if in were, no, the Piratenpartei is completely opposed.

Noone is seeing any problem with defending google in one instance, and bashing them in another.
In Emacs you could achieve the same thing without node dependency, the markdown mode already supports previewing in browser so you could add two hooks (on 'markdown-mode-hook and 'after-save-hook) and call 'markdown-preview on the latter.

What does livedown add?
And Hinkley C in Somerset, UK http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/20/hinkley-poin... (again, delays etc - currently only earthworks are going on)
A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.
Normally you would place a variable there, such as x or y. But in this case, the variable doesn't matter. You aren't using it in the function call. You're telling the programming the variable for the for loop that it doesn't matter.