skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Coming Collapse of the Municipal Bond Market
I really, really hate the fact that you upvoted him too.
Found on Philipp Lenssen's Google Blogoscoped blog http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-11-03-n53.html
No matter what you think of the content, "Joel on Software" is barely even a blog. There's a post every three weeks, if that.
Assume trains are more fuel efficient, but less convenient because of fixed routes and the cost of loading and unloading the cargo onto trucks at the endpoints. As fuel savings increase, trains become more attractive.
Personal services get business flavor: Xobni and SugarSync
The author seems sensitive to the argument that Arc is "just" a bunch of macros. To me saying that Arc is "just" macros is like saying that Haskell is "just" a translator that rewrites functional programs into Von Neumann instructions.

No, I am wrong. Saying that Arc is just a bunch of macros is saying that the difficulty of the implementation is more important than the value provided by the resulting product. It seems very close to arguing that OS X is equivalent to Windows because they both run on PCs. There may be an argument that Arc doesn't break new ground or introduce new semantics or that it doesn't make it easy to solve a problem that other PLs have a difficult time solving. But "just a bunch of macros" is not that argument.

I wouldn't bother with an entire blog post just to refute it.
Having read Ran for many years, I can tell you that he is definitely "giving back" by sharing with his readers and the world his thoughts and himself in a most honest and kind way while living according to his principles.

Yes his ideas are provocative, and I wish more of us were able to critique our own thinking, our own group-think, and our own society as he does. He reminds us constantly how our willingness and need to identify--our allegances--become an easy way for us to stop thinking for ourselves. It takes real work to maintain a remove from the propoganda around us, to be able to see it for what it is, and act against it by helping others to open their minds a little (or a lot).

A couple of you have noticed his "Land Blog." See how he uses his land project as a laboratory for his own thinking, and to test the concepts that so many people are only talking about yet seem to have such strong opinions on while never having actually DONE anything like that.

It might also interest some of you to know that he used to accept donations, but lately due to having come into a small amount of money, discourages them. Though he has manners and will accept a gift graciously.

It is clear that so many of the commenters here work quite dilligently to defend their own closely held beliefs and ways of living, while trying to find faults with alternative ideas that are not THAT far removed from your own. What is the threat you perceive? That maybe some of the life choices you have made and the belief systems you have invested in may have been a wrong turn, a dead-end, or at least not the ones that create joy and happiness? Rigidity of thinking is widespread, and some of the most rigid minds I've encountered are those that consider themselves far-left new-agers! (though I don't mean to suggest that describes the posters here).
I can't stress enough how important it is to get dates, times and timezones correct in your code to avoid embarrassment or worse. Just yesterday, just when we thought we'd ironed out all the timezone issues in our production code, our system rejected a bunch of customer data thinking the current time was actually an hour ahead of what it was. It turns out to be a bug in the Oracle JDBC driver that happens when connections are kept open while DST flips the clocks back but it goes to show that you can never be too careful when dealing with times and timezones.
How to select your angel investors
Katrina Kaif Hot Sexy Photos
The Double Opt-In Introduction by Fred Wilson
Sitting, Standing, and Bouncing (Standup Desks and Balance Balls)
Standup desks, balance balls, and how to make the transition.
the costs b/w trucks and freights differ after a certain price point and it becomes cheaper to have goods travel by freight than by truck. So, if you go back and look at when oil was at its high, railroads were performing better than trucks
As part of the deal, Berkshire will split its class B shares 50-to-1 to help pay for the acquisition.

Wow Buffett splitting stock?!
Possibly, if price of the fuel is, say (it's just a random number, really), 1/3 of all expenses for the railroads, and 1/2 for trucks, then rising cost of oil will hurt trucks more (even if also those 2/3 of other expenses sees some increase).

(Electric engines are out of the question for BNSF. Insanely high cost to electrify the network.)
The links I got from the second stage(Which I had to agree to via a checkbox) are these:
https://a.thymer.com/accounts/tos
https://a.thymer.com/accounts/privacy
Games Top the Charts in the iPhone and Android App Markets
It was a bit of a dilemma for us. On the one hand, we realize the importance of the TOS and Privacy policy, on the other hand, we don't like the "Hi there, thanks for visiting. Please sign our TOS" kind of welcome; it's so cold.

EDIT: added links to the TOS and Privacy policy to the footer on thymer.com
> If you're looking at this end of the spectrum, just go with a VPS/Cloud system. You'll be paying about the same amount, maybe less. And you get drastically improved reliability if your provider is using failover and isn't using crap hardware.

Of course you roll your own, e.g with Linux VServer and HA (heartbeat/drbd). If Atoms were really low-power (they aren't, 8 W is noise in comparison to the chipset), offerend ECC support and decent mothboards with Intel NICs and IPMI onboard then they would be interesting hosts for virtual server guests.

As is, they're reasonable as firewalls (which are typically redundant) and SOHO servers. I hope ARM will deliver something competitive here.
Is that an African or European swallow?

Seriously, guys. How much further can we get with products with cultural allusions? Aside from Java guys in the trenches, can anybody track all the world-of-coffee spinoff names? At some point instead of being a mnemonic it becomes just so much garbled noise...
Want some emotion with that website?
I know. I'm hoping the interest will spill over to passenger traffic, like we are starting to see now with the European high speed train network.
The ultimatum game played by children
It absolutely is germane to this site. Many of us are entrepreneurs, hacking capitalism. I think that "capitalist masters" is actually a succinct treatment of the state of things in the US, and challenge you to better articulate the nature of things so concisely.
Research Paper: Sleep Deprivation Can Negatively Affect Information Processing
Storing as localtime+timezone is asking for bugs since most people shift timezone twice a year. That makes testing a real problem.

Store times internally as UTC (time_t epoch is a good representation, or the DateTime object of your preference), convert as needed at the boundaries of your app for display/persistent storage purposes.
>a language approaching Haskell's pedantic-ness

I believe the word you're looking for is "pedantry".

/pedant
Doesn't Spolsky write a column for Inc. on a monthly basis or so? Maybe they skipped him to avoid it looking too self-congratulatory or like a conflict of interest or whatever.
I don't think post frequency is a criteria. pg is on the list and he posts less frequently than JoS.
I tried to make up for it by giving him a stern lecture.

Think it helped?

Looking at the topic currently, out of 10 root replies, 2 are jokes, 1 is a basically a one-liner, 1 is trash, 5 are on-topic, and 1 is a complaint that this isn't HN.

(sigh)
I solved this problem on my box by installing the proprietary 64-bit alpha Adobe Flash plugin which is linked in the article; buttons worked and I haven't encountered problems yet.
While it sounds like he's trying to make a point, it's practically impossible to have a meaningful discussion about language expressiveness when a major party in the discussion is essentially arguing that anybody who doesn't use their pet languages is thinking in baby talk. It's incredibly condescending, and drags the entire discussion down into name calling.

(For a previous thread criticizing "The Blub Paradox": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630094)
From the article's "criticism and response" page :

Q:What you're suggesting is parasitism.

A:Industrial civilization is parasitic, because it takes more from its environment than it gives back, and if we remove ourselves from roles that feed that behavior, we are anti-parasites.

That does not make sense. If he is parasiting a parasite, he is still a parasite. He's not causing sufficient harm to destroy society, but still he profits from it, by diving into dumpsters.
Why did I not get this second stage???
Why would the frequency of blog posts determine whether a blog is a blog or not? What is the threshold, and where is it defined?
Deriving the Arrow of Time
Slamp New Collection Of Lamps
Right but it's silly to say, "Make sure you - and, when using Thymer in a team, all other team members - ("you") read these Terms carefully before subscribing to Thymer. By using Thymer you agree to become bound by these Terms. If you do not agree to all Terms, you may not subscribe to Thymer," and then not put a link to these terms anywhere in the signup process.
Very true of course, but then you can't really argue that the Scandinavians are worse off because they can buy less retail goods because they put more money into their government to get healthcare and education.

Actually you can. That's part of the deadweight loss of taxation: you are forced to spend money on stuff you don't want and are unable to spend on stuff you do want.

If person X would choose to spend $100 on an ipod, but is instead forced to spend $100 on education which they only value at $80, they have lost $20 of value.

Now, in a democracy, people in the situation of person X may only make up 50% - 1 of the population, but that doesn't change the fact that they lose.
BNSF has the best end-to-end rail network in the country. They spent big $$ improving infrastructure when others like the CSX were dawdling with their logistical systems (does anyone remember the backlogs and delays in TX and AL during the early 2000's that required federal intervention?)

The hidden gem in this deal is the investment BNSF made in laying 24cnt fiber next to their track in continuous 4" pvc. I've always felt the decision to do that was a reflection on just how well-run the BN was as a company.

Large-scale packets on the rails, small-scale packets in the pipe.

Berkshire Hathaway doesn't just invest in well-run companies. It invests heavily in the management of well-run companies.
It seems that there is a “Dummy 1325” and “Dummy 1456

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=Dummy1456,+Burton+up...

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
My sister in law's family (parents and siblings) are all on welfare and receive food stamps. They find clever ways of using their food stamps to get cigarettes, drugs and alcohol (such as "selling" them to family and friends for cash), and more often then not they run out of food by the end of the month. Her teenage sister just had a baby and they were asking around for money for formula, even though they get hundreds of dollars a month in food stamps (more money per family member then my own family spends each month on food). I wouldn't be surprised if at least a few of her family members are malnourished, but you can't force feed people.
Van Persie desperate to face 'stamping rival' Adebayor
Thank god trains don't run on oil.
For researchers who can go into industry, the supply-and-demand dynamics are different.
Read about Google Eliezer Yudkowsky

Thanks for making me hunt, asshole. Anyway, he didn't go to high school and is an "autodidact."
I almost welcome the bimonthly screen article. I adore that program.
Other than the new menu strip, not much else has changed ;-)
pizza isn't an issue of starvation, it's a luxury good

norweigian pizza is expensive but everyone can afford it once in awhile

american pizza is cheap but many cannot afford it at all
Looking at the topic currently, out of 10 root replies, 2 are jokes, 1 is a basically a one-liner, 1 is trash, 5 are on-topic, and 1 is a complaint that this isn't HN. (sigh)

Yep, it's kind of a bummer. Be interesting to see how it unfolds over the next hour or so (and we are polluting this unfolding with our meta-discussion) -- maybe it will even out. (Aha! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=919318)
All this is, is handwaving and opinions, though, because we can't very well agree to or define what this "capitalist masters" business is, can we? Is PG one of the capitalist masters? People are bound to have different opinions, and it really comes down to politics, which is poisonous for sites like this.

Also, entrepreneurship isn't really "hacking capitalism" - it's part and parcel of it, and it seems to me that if you don't believe in capitalism in some form (be it the Norwegian, American or some other variety), this site doesn't seem to be appropriate.
Android is Sprint-ing ahead
All scrupulously clean, except of course the tires which are exactly as clean as the gutter you have been riding in.
Every part of a bike is a pointy bit, made abundantly clear when you go down and tangle with it.
Transportation devices belong in the garage, not in the living room.
This isn't "breaking PGP", it's guessing PGP passphrases. If they had guesses a PGP key using a cluster of virtual machines, that would be news.
Thanks for pointing that out. We meant to give people the chance to first try it without having to bother through all kinds of forms, so our initial idea was to reflect these terms onto the (free) subscription period after the testing. But I agree the way it's presented now is a bit confusing. So we're going to change that, thanks!
"Yes, yest... they have great education and great healthcare for everybody BUT ..BUT.. they have to use old furniture and prepare their own meals!!!!!! THE US IS STILL THE BEST"
Can you share what they are please?
Is there any surprising recent development concerning European HSRs? There are new lines opening in Spain, France, Germany, lots of ideas in many other countries (UK), but it isn't much faster or bigger than last few decades. There are still more new highways, and even though railroad passengers numbers (HSR) are rising, still only quite slowly.
This is a persistent, incorrect interpretation of what people mean when they say that lojban is intended to be unambiguous.

Parsing lojban is unambiguous. Interpreting lojban quite specifically is not unambiguous.

Given a grammatically correct construction there is a unique parse. That is what is meant by "unambiguous". There's no problems akin to "Machines need to wreck a nice beach."

There are manifold ambiguities, however, in the semantics. When one talks of "lo sutra tavla" there is no indication as to the sense in which the speaker is fast. Perhaps the speaker produces many words per minute, or perhaps the speaker runs past while talking. These ambiguities can be reduced by using more precise expressions. Metaphorical use is frowned upon, so what it does not mean is one who persuades in a fraudulent manner.

For example, we can say "lo gerku" which refers to a dog, or some dogs, but gives no idea of how many. We could say "re le ci gerku", which means "two of the three dogs." More precise.

I can say "mi tavla", which means "I speak" or "I will speak" or "I have spoken" and even leaves the audience, topic and language unspecified. I can say "mi ba tavla" or "mi pu tavla" which are future and past respectively. I can be even more precise if necessary or desirable.

You said in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=918042 :

... my understanding based solely on reading ABOUT
Lojban, I don't know a single Lojban word... aside
from Lojban

I think you have fallen into the trap of not reading enough, and mis-interpreting some of what you have read.

I'm not surprised, I think much of the early material written about lojban was written without regard for how it might be mis-interpreted. Politicians today generally say nothing, because everything they do say runs the risk of being taken other than intended. The early lojban writers (writing about lojban, not necessarily in lojban) needed "spin doctors" to ensure that what they said could not be mis-interpreted.

All that aside, lojban is intended to be an expressive language, suitable for communication. Therefore it will be complex, although the complexities are not necessarily those of natlangs. I suspect that we are not that far apart. We agree that:

- lojban is complex

- lojban is not currently suited for general use

- lojban is cool

I further believe that:

- learning lojban (at least beyond "mi tavla") is mind-expanding

- learning the structures of lojban teach more than just lojban, they teach about structure, syntax, and monolinguistic assumptions.

- it's not for everyone.
I think the question is biased by the wording - people will be more likely to view the poll if they satisfy the condition "have a blog that you closed". You should instead ask something like "have you ever blogged?". FWIW.

Edit: that's going to cut out people who haven't blogged a little too, perhaps "have you ever considered blogging?". Of course then there's "what's a blog". But I'm trying to be simple.
One train can pull 20-30 cars. How many trailers can your Peterbilt pull?
Read my other post Dan.

I had an office two blocks away from the BNSF line in Chicago when they were laying the fiber from downtown to the central office in Hinsdale. I went out and talked to the guys boring underground (TX fiber-slingers wearing metal-tipped boots and hats -- I'm sure people here have met them).

Berkshire made a good purchase.
Well, seems they are dropping that as a package anyway, and it is just easier to download the source and clbuild and go for it.
Here is a good article on the fuel efficiency of trains:

http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/can_a_freight_train_re...
Awesome. I realize I'm probably in the minority on reading TOS, but when I'm paying for something (or trying something which I might pay for), I like to know all the details, especially when I'm likely to be submitting personal data to the site.
The first pie chart is an abomination. Firstly, it's about time series data so that chart itself is not appropriate and secondly it's next to impossible to spot the difference between 10/20 and 10/21 without the figures.

See http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/08/please-dont-use-pie-charts.h...
Full virtualization, though, in it's current state, is inferior to paravirtualization

Do you have benchmarks to back it up ? Is performance the reason to choose Xen over KVM and other virtualization technologies for your hosting company ?

Some benchmarks after quick google:

http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/XenVsKVM
As far as TONS moved a MILE per GALLON trains beat trucks by a pretty large factor.
Its not about open source vs closed source, its about corporate development in which you are a developer with non-developers deciding what is important VS the developer has the last say.

So, to sum it up, developers are claiming developing software is better when developers are in charge ? I'm shocked.
Toronto Open Data
That's not the point. In order to maintain weight-loss, it's important to think of how and what you eat as a permanent lifestyle change. A temporary "diet" of any kind will never work for losing and then keeping the weight off.
If it's a one-pop shop 'Owner' is perfectly ok, too.
Damn. I just locked up 2 of 'em.
Well, they do. Railways in almost every country relies on diesel engines. Even if most of their lines are electrified, there are diesel shunters and engines for branch lines and factory sidings. And these are vital for freight transport. (Even in Switzerland with almost 100% electrification of railways.)
Great post!

[next time] Could you just combine the two please so that I can enjoy voting up both the great one-liner and the pithy insight. I love humor, and I have a soft spot for great one-liners. My point is that others are the same way, and sometimes the jokes get more karma than the meaty content. That's not good for the board over the long term.

Whenever I find myself wanting to throw out a one-liner, I make myself stop and find something useful for others (or usually I don't post at all)

Lame attempt at this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=919298

Apologies for the meta-discussion. This is yet another of my bad habits...
The really interesting thing here is that Buffett is set to use Berkshire shares for the acquisition. I can’t remember the last time that he did this, I know he really regretted it with Dexter Shoe Co.:

In 1993, Berkshire paid $433 million for the Maine-based company. Rather than use cash, Buffett used Berkshire Class A stock to fund the purchase. That Berkshire stock is worth eight times more now, giving the Omaha, Nebraska-based insurance and investment company a $216 billion market value.

Dexter didn’t make it that long. It ended shoe production in the United States and Puerto Rico in 2001, and Berkshire folded what was left into its H.H. Brown Shoe Group unit.

“What I had assessed as durable competitive advantage vanished within a few years,” Buffett wrote on Friday. “By using Berkshire stock, I compounded this error hugely. That move made the cost to Berkshire shareholders not $400 million, but rather $3.5 billion. In essence, I gave away 1.6 percent of a wonderful business — one now valued at $220 billion — to buy a worthless business.”

“To date, Dexter is the worst deal that I’ve made,” Buffett went on. “But I’ll make more mistakes in the future – you can bet on that. A line from Bobby Bare’s country song explains what too often happens with acquisitions: ‘I’ve never gone to bed with an ugly woman, but I’ve sure woke up with a few.’”
I'm actually in a similar position, finished a project and mulling over some new ideas. My email's in my profile if you want to discuss ideas.
Haha. The use of 3d pie charts was deliberate, and I know they convey almost no information (and often give a skewed impression). We would never use a pie chart for real decisions, but in this case we only cover 7 days worth of sales, which is way too little for any meaningful analysis.

In this case, the 3d pie charts just look shiny :)
Droid: iDon't Understand Search Engine Optimization
Ask HN:  How can you encourage users to generate content?
I've been working on a new site for several months now (http://www.shouldigetthebook.com), and I'm to the point where I need user input. The goal of this site is to allow college students to comment on specific courses that they took, and tell other students if they needed the text book. Aside from a few usability concerns that I'm ironing out, I think it is time to get some content. But that's the problem.<p>To get users to come to the site, I need content. To get content, I need users to come to the site and contribute. I'm running on a severely limited budget (I'm a grad student, saving for a wedding, etc), but I'm still trying to offer incentives for entering reviews. I've also tried limited advertising on Facebook, Google, and print papers. People come to the site, but only long enough to see that their classes for next semester don't have any reviews.<p>How would you encourage people to enter reviews?
That's actually pretty amazing; maybe now they'll be affordable by ordinary folk. (Some of their shares were $60K at some point.)
USC: We’ve Helped 15 Promising Startups Raise Over $115 Million In Capital
Monty Python references are standard within the community. There are projects named Eric, IDLE, Bicycle Repairman, Parrot, etc.
Well, there are submarines running on nukes instead of diesel, but doing that on land might raise a few eyebrows ...

The real point is that cost of fuel is a lower percentage of total costs for railroads (a casual search hit on a 1997 guidebook said 7.1% vs. 13.5% for trucking).