skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice use of Thomas. I had forgotten about this bill, most likely due to the news media showing me some shiny new thing in a different direction while they hid this one under the rug. But if I'm not mistaken (which I'm more than happy to admit I may be in this case), many of the ideas in this bill were eventually moved into the current Senate bill and the just passed House bill.

But to be honest, the legal documentation is so voluminous and it's a moving target such that I can't keep track of all this. So I may be mis-remembering. The size is certainly a bug.

I would say that it's also bad thinking to think that none of the Republican proposals didn't find their way into the present legislation. I think that there were some good ideas put up by the Party that the Democrats also latched onto pretty fiercely. They claimed it was for bi-partisanship, but I think it's more to appear that they owned all the ideas in this debate.

>(Further, I'd point out that as a minority, "obstructionism" is pretty much their job. The idea that this is evil rather suspiciously dates to January of this year, for mysterious reasons.)

I pretty much agree with you on everything you wrote here except for this and that the obstructionist agenda was purely of the media's making.

I think it's a matter of semantics. "Obstructionism" can be one of a number of things. It can be pure stonewalling and obfuscation, or it can be a presentation of alternatives.

The Republicans in this case were relatively transparent, on my plane trip today I saw no less than 20 Republican backed advertisements against "Health Care Reform" -- unqualified. Some of the advertisements asked questions that made absolutely no sense "will it guarantee I can keep my provider?". Well, lady-acting-like-a-concerned-citizen, I've got news for you, you have no guarantee of that now! And several other examples.

Now the GOP may have been taking a two pronged approach, addressing both senses of "obstructionism", but considering that the agenda I heard came from the GOP itself via paid advertisements and spokespeople/heads of the party like Steele, there really wasn't much made of the alternatives. I would say it was an 80/20 effort.
(ABCL) - Common Lisp on the JVM
It's not as simple as he makes out. I had a look at the + operator and compiler optimizations back in 2005. Basically, depending on exactly how you setup your strings javac is able to do some optimization. Note that this is a compile time optimization, so compiling with Eclipse (for example) will probably give different result.

Anyway, some details are at http://nicklothian.com/blog/2005/06/09/on-java-string-concat...
DCR SR300 40GB Handycam Camcorder 
Take the next step in home video recording with the DCR-SR300 Handycam camcorder. The internal 40GB hard disk drive stores up to 28 hours of video (LP) and easily transfers it to your PC, giving you the freedom to capture more video, easier than ever before. And, you can take amazing 6.1 megapixel still images when you're not shooting video. The 3 megapixel ClearVid CMOS Sensor and Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T Lens with 10x optical/20x digital zoom provide outstanding image quality. And Super SteadySho optical stabilization reduces blur, giving you crisper pictures. Connect the camcorder to a Handycam Station and you'll be impressed by a new level of multimedia sharing that allows you to download and share video with a TV or PC via a number of interface ports.
Those words aren't true. These games exploit a psychological quirk that most humans have.
Bulletproof Business Blueprint
Bulletproof Business Blueprint is a new product developed by Todd Perkins set to launch Nov 11, 2009. There is all ready buzz and hype creating some excitement around this product! Its only natural considering the uniqueness of this product.
First, I'd wonder if it would be possible to have an "index fund" of sorts, say 0.001 of 1,000 startups. :D

I'd say the same criteria to invest apply to where you'd want to work. I seriously considered the following three companies, and got to the interview stage with one of them:

I think AirBnB are on the launchpad great idea, great team, making the cash. Dropbox had rabidly happy users and are able to attract top talent (eg, Zed). Dolores Labs are quite successful, though they have a tendency to drop watermelons from great heights.

None of that matters, of course. They don't need my dumb $5K or even $50K. To make an investment that's worthwhile to both ends of the transaction it'd have to be much earlier than where they are now. An investor also needs to be more than just a fanboi with money -- I'd need contacts, expertise, time to advise, etc.
how about retain cycles?
I'm unwilling to pay for other people's medicine under threat of force. I will actually pay for someone's medicine in some circumstances - I'll run a charity event, donate money, help out a friend or relative. But I do not accept being mandated to buy insurance, pay a tax, or be arrested. I think it's bad for me as an individual and bad for society

That's the main disagreement right there: in what is the role of a government and what is a function of any modern society. If you don't believe that an automatic medical treatment is a basic right of any citizen then there won't ever be an intelligent discussion. It's like with evolution vs intelligent design: you quickly hit a wall which can't be cracked by any arguments from any side due to the fundamental difference in beliefs.

Even under the pressure from overwhelming evidence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_reform#United_States) you keep believing that a social medicine is "bad for society".

And just to answer your question, yes - I would have you arrested. Refusing to "play along" and letting your fellow citizens die is a borderline murder.
Jailbroken iPhones fall victim to Australian virus
> and if you've been using Linux since 1996

Not exclusively.
No, but it does promote Socialism. Right now, we're trawling the last fish out of the ocean. That helps a few people (the fishermen) at the expense of the rest of the world. It's not a Nash Equalibrium, but it's very much Capitalism. Without government intervention (Socialism) you would get no fish, inflammable kids' pajamas and toxins in your food.
To me, that would be a problem with your code, not Objective C or anything within the Cocoa frameworks.

I would personally say that if an object is retaining its parent (or parent's parent, etc), there's something wrong with your design and you should step back to reconsider things.

Matt Gallagher put it much better than I can and I would recommend reading his post on it: http://cocoawithlove.com/2009/07/rules-to-avoid-retain-cycle...
The direct quote from Mihai from my e-mail reads: "The benefits of the compiler system are tremendous. The most obvious are the size ones, without it Reader's JavaScript would be 2 megaytes, with it it goes down to 513K, and 184K with gzip (the compiler's output is actually optimized for gzip, since nearly all browsers support it)."

(I left in the typo for this excerpt)
-- I'm the author of the piece. I can't say why Reader's JS would be so high. I assume RSS can be heavy, and many feeds at once can be browser intensive.
At Google scale is a major point. Exabytes of bandwidth. Amazing to think about.
This is a good point that I don't see repeated often enough. To expand, and rant a little (okay, really just rant...):

People whine about Google or Facebook's apparent inability to permanently delete data, yet simultaneously expect their data never to be lost due to bad disks, datacenter fires, or whatnot. It's all very silly. Of course FB or Google can't delete all your data, and it's that way because that's how everyone wants it.
Ask HN: Screencast software for demos?
Looking for screencast software for PC. What do people recommend?
Don't care. There are multiple phones running Android, unlike the Palm Pre and iPhone.
But doesn't it also mean that if we were "smart" enough to think of the collective interest while pursuing our own interests we can theoretically maximize everyone's profits. So for example instead of having a bunch of companies trying to screw each other over, we have one national company without competition so it can focus on the product.

It seems capitalism is what works simply because we can't be satisfied if we are all equally well off.
You're talking about shaving several seconds off your user-visible load times.

This is the sort of statement that SHOULD set off a veritable explosion in your head of "If what he is saying is true, that is awesome. Seventeen exclamation points elided here!", because shaving seconds off user-perceptible load times results in huge, automatic, reproducible impacts to the bottom line, across a wide range of different web sites. You can reproduce it for yourself by A/B testing adding unnecessary delay into your pages versus not adding unnecessary delay, and watching what it does to conversions. Google has done this: they've found that less load time means more searches, which means more money. Amazon has done this: they found that 1 second more means 1% less -- revenue, that is.

Although I don't routinely A/B test bad practices against the default to make a point, I did get a handful of percentage points worth of free conversion back when I first saw one of the YSlow presentations and got religion on this. Seriously -- if you don't already pay attention to page load speed, you have a money tree in your back yard. Go put a basket under it and shake a bit.
its good for attracting over 100mm in investments so far, I personally expect more utility to be realized soon..
He's wrong about the lack of HD Youtube videos. It's not on by default; you have to enable it in the menu, but the functionality is there.
You make a good point, but it really depends on the content of the email. For stuff that's mostly text, without much in the way of interesting links, "open" rates can be deceptively low and you could potentially be losing active readers if you remove them.

On the other hand, your email could be being spamboxed (or worse, blackholed) because half of your list has marked you as spam, and you're continuing to send to them once a week.

There isn't really an easy one-size-fits-all solution to that. Using a decent email service provider is a good idea, if you have the budget for it. They'll be able to give you a lot more information about your email's performance, likely have better delivery rates than your current mailserver (assuming you pick a provider that doesn't suck) and, importantly, will be able to identify and remove recipients who have marked your email as spam.

Edit: Deleting bounces, on the other hand, is extremely important, particularly if you have lots of webmail addresses. Possibly the most important thing you can do to maintain or improve delivery rates. That really should have been higher up on the list!
One could start with a few well known food items and move from there I suppose.

I.e. milk goes from 4% fat --> 0% fat (skim).

For meat, there are well known measures of how lean the meat is.

For bread, the more grains it has makes it more healthy (I think).

You would only be able to tax the extremes though. For different people, different amount fat, etc... are correct depending on their body types, exercise habits, family history, etc...
Currently using a provider, and you're right - a lot more information and better deliverability.
I disagree with the above description of a Nash equilibrium. My understanding of such a thing is: When a Nash equilibrium exists each player's best strategy to the others create a "equilibrium" point, or a point from which you don't deviate. In a sense a change in government creates a change in game, not necessarily a Nash EQ. A Nash EQ in a society with a generally "Capitalist" economic, with supporting legal statutes, potentially result in players robbing, stealing, or cheating. However, in a game in which "Communism" is the economic standard, a Nash EQ may be universal altruism or chaos (my hypothesis to two possible Nash EQ's --not based in observation).Thus it is incorrect to blanketly label "Communism" or "Socialism" as a Nash EQ. In a sense a Nash EQ doesn't care about the morality of its players behaviors only that it is a relative equilibrium which results in best strategies that do not deviate in play.

See this Yale open course: http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/game-theory/.
To this day I don't know if it was Skype of my old T43. Most likely the latter.
See also: createDocumentFragment()

http://ejohn.org/blog/dom-documentfragments/
What if you consider anarchist society as the game, would then communism be the best strategy?
Skytrain, in Vancouver, has sensors to determine if someone is stuck in between doors, or, alternatively, has hopped onto the tracks. The trains at Peak time are leaving every 45 seconds, so the system has been fairly well tested over the last 23 years.
The main idea I was trying to make behind those 2 points (as PG mentions below/above) is research your investor, not change your idea. Reading a few essays in between coding sessions doesn't take too long and it definitely doesn't hurt to know more about who you're going to talk to.
If Facebook and Myspace Merged ?
Facebook and Myspace are good,Nice Way to Merge is'nt it?.
Being a physicist and being a surfer are not particularly correlated. As it turns out, being a physicist is rare, as is being a surfer, so finding a physicist surfer is unlikely, but that alone doesn't speak to the correlation of those skills.

Having a debilitating disease such as ALS is almost certainly much more strongly negatively correlated with being a physicist than is surfing, yet nobody would be silly enough (given the notable counter example) to say "people with ALS can't be physicists" as a blanket statement.
I agree with your point, but think someone should mention a point I believe I saw on HN the other day.

Basically, trial -> purchase conversion for freemium seems to max out at around 1%, so your efforts are usually better focused on improving retention rather than initial conversion.

If anyone remembers what presentation this was from please post the link, I can't seem so find it.
This is a really good set of guidelines. Here are the three most effective things you need to do (in my experience) to get and maintain decent delivery rates:

Remove your bounces. I cannot stress this enough. If you're sending using a homebrew system or a script on a webserver or what have you, make sure it can process bounces. Excessive attempts to deliver to dead addresses is the number one metric used by large email receivers to assess your mailserver IP's reputation.

Keep your list clean. Don't be tempted to add those 150 random names and addresses you found from last year's marketing push. It's not worth it. One or two bad records on your list is enough to completely decimate your delivery rates. Stick to double opt-in and don't be tempted.

Make your unsubscribe link obvious. Really obvious. Like, at the top of your email, or in big black text. Too many people feel the need to hide their unsubscribe link away in tiny text at the very bottom. If someone doesn't want your email, they have two choices - spambox it, or unsubscribe. If many people spambox your email - your delivery rates will suffer. Make unsubscribing easy and obvious.
The barriers are low as long as the brainpower is high. It isn’t just any person off the street who can flesh out and grow a startup company from scratch. It takes a certain type of person with a certain amount of horsepower under the hood to achieve that objective.
I'm not sure what he means by "AS A PRODUCT." If it had failed in the areas he praised but succeeded in the areas he slams would it still have failed? Is this just a list of cons?
+1 for woopra. It really is additive to see people using your site in real time.
Take a look at http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
In my first job I discovered my passion for consumer facing internet products and services. While job was good, you have to work within a certain framework. And I was always impatient. So started my own thing and took the plunge. Its been a great learning experience and we are still learning.
And you call that kind of memory management "easy"? Looks quite contrived to me.
Navigation does not require a radio system. Terrain Contour Matching aided by by Inertial Navigation Systems allows for fully autonomous navigation - They had this working with 1970s era Technology (Try and recall what a computer was like in the Mid 1970s and continue to be amazed at what engineers could get to work in a missile)

It was a big deal in Canada in the Late 80s/Early 90s - the United States used to test their (hopefully unarmed) cruise missiles over Canada - presumably we had a terrain profile that was useful to them. Or maybe it was the long stretches of unpopulated environment.

Now consider what your typical iPhone would be capable of doing. (Compass, GPS, Terrain Maps, Camera, Radio Signal...)
And just when you thought it doesn't get any worse, it does. Hurray, Apple, I guess.
Software Pricing
Peer review. Since the files are public people will spot your abuse and report it. I reported various obvious copyright infringements over time and they were quickly removed.
They're all common forms of nonsense. That sounds similar!
Not to mention the amazing atmosphere all done with a simple soundtrack and extremely simple visual style.

Here's the intro, still feels awesome on viewing it just now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j4gO9sR7zs

Reading the original game author's page about the creation of Another World, I was surprised to see he worked on the graphic design for Future Wars, a game I remember enjoying immensely at the time.
thank you, I'd been looking for that one :)
I think his problem with websites was a simple matter of screen size. On my Android phone, the right navigation wraps, because there's no room for it otherwise. On the much bigger screen of my Archos 5 media player (Android also), it displays fine -- it looks like it does on my desktop.

Turn the text size down, and things are fine on both.

Also, what does Twidroid Pro not do that anything on the iPhone does? I can post photoblog entries to Twitter and Posterous right from the home screen and I can go into the app to see messages from people I follow. I get a background notification when someone direct messages me or says my name. It also supports multiple accounts and multiple providers.

I am not sure what more anyone could want.

I think he just like to whine.
Startup Advice: Find Underserved Markets
There is no necessary relationship between the size of code (the JS) and the size of data ("many feeds at once"), and since data is almost always much larger than the code, there is proportionally very little benefit from reducing code size to fit more data.
You may be thinking of the discussion here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926506

The presentation it references for support of the "1% is the limit" myth is here: http://particletree.com/features/web-app-autopsy/ "Myth" is strong language for me, but I believe it is justified in this case. If you play "Hey I got a BA degree for a reason, let's play secondary researcher", it is based off of a misstatement of a repetition of a claim that doesn't even appear in the primary research. All the primary research says is "Three particular firms we have convenient access to say they have about 1% visitor -> purchase conversions. That's probably typical, then." (Even the primary source skips over the fact that one of the three actually reported 1.14%, which is a 14% difference that falls straight to the bottom line, and the other two reported to exactly one significant digit.)

You'll note that visitor -> purchase is very different than trial -> purchase, but don't beat yourself up, different folks routinely quote both numbers at 1%. It should be self evidently obvious that both groups cannot possibly be equally right, but as it turns out they're probably both just equally wrong.

In addition to being incorrectly repeated from a misreported summary of anecdotal data, the claim is empirically false. I can't tell you other people's numbers, but I can tell you mine: 2.45% trial to purchase conversion. Feel free to do much better than that -- it is certainly possible. (Important possible apples-to-oranges alert: my freemium app is not sold on a subscription basis.)

This post is not meant as a personal attack: I have heard this statistic, and its older brother ("1% of shareware downloads convert") for years. Vaporizing it in the harsh light of actual evidence is one of my numerous personal crusades, because it leads to poor decisions that actually cost people money, like "Well, conversion is a fixed number so I totally can't add 5% to my bottom line by working on buttons or something absolutely stupid with a shopping cart redesign."
I find this whole Closure story amusing, because what it amounts to is applying static typing techniques to a dynamic language - and guess what, static typing makes "it easier to catch errors much earlier". Where are the dynamic typing extremists when you need them?
Last.fm is sometimes helpful: http://www.last.fm/music/Alcest/+similar
Dishwasher vs Hand washing
drat! I didn't have an OS X box to test it on. I'll ask one of my friends to fix it for me or let me log in to do so. thx for the heads-up.
Capinski and Kopp's Measure, Integral and Probability is a good brisk introduction to the theory as well, albeit a bit hand-wavy at times.

If you're feeling brave, have a shot at Wheeden and Zygmund's "Measure and Integral" :-)

Zygmund does not do prerequisites, he assumes you know as much as he, so you will need to do a lot of heavy lifting on your own and augment his works with other resources. I accidentally bought "Trignometric Series" from Amazon for $100 once, and when it arrived, I couldn't read anything past the preface. It sat there on my desk for months; I was messing with signal processing at the time, so I was reading a lot of materials and going back to it every once in a while. I kept opening it up and forcing myself, out of guilt. Over time, this much loathed text became my best friend; whenever "intro" texts became too chatty, I turned to Zygmund to get the gist of a theorem or a technique. I started comparing proofs and eventually came to prefer it. Still, was overkill for someone who isn't an specialist.

[Edit:

I really don't recommend the book in the parent post. It feels a bit antique; I have had by first brush against analysis via Knopp's cheap Dover books. Excellent mathematics, yes, but the excessive syntax, weird conventions and unpronounceable German alphabet made it harder than it needs to be. I recommend people get set-theoretic intros to analysis; mathematics teaching has become far more accessible in the last few decades, and nowadays the yellow Springer-Verlag texts, specially for undergraduates, is doing a fine job combining rigor with readability. Serge Lang pretty much made mathematics playful.

After that, move to the hard-cover Princeton Series on Applied Mathematics, and reach to the blue Cambridge books for absolute rigor, and the company of masters.]
> safeRead s = catch (readFile s) $ \_ -> return ""

> Contrasting this with Java is left as an exercise for the reader.

String safeRead(String fName) {

try { return readFile(fName); }

catch (Exception e) { return ""; }

}

Just the same thing, except replace ASCII garbage with words? (It assumes I have a readFile function, but that's not such a terrible thing to have around...)
Wash your hands
I'm writing my own for iPhone apps.
Brand New Liverpool Hero: Alberto Aquilani’s Time Has Come
Liverpools fans will finally get the chance tomorrow to welcome the 20m summer signing Alberto Aquilani to Anfield. The Italy international, signed in August, has been recovering from a knee operation since.