skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Elected legislators have simple incentives. Loudly claim responsibility for anything good that happens to their constituents. Deny responsibility for anything bad. If at all possible, deny the existence of anything really bad.

Avoiding blame is the primary reason law codes are so complex and hard to read. The average spending increase is passed to great fanfare and acclaim. The average tax increase is mentioned briefly in an amendment to an amendment to a sub-section of a codicil to a rider on resolution to honor the US Winter Olympics team for their fine performance in... wherever.

Ultimately, this works because of attention shortage. There are people (with various political agendas) who read the text of every bill, cross-reference things, and try to connect the dots. They probably issue press releases every day. They only get the public's attention a few times a year, usually when they discover flagrant abuse of an elected office, a sex scandal, or similar.

In other words, we could already have this, but we don't. Knowing something is very important -- that you should want it -- is completely different from actually wanting it.
Are you Russian Orthodox Christian?
It might also that it takes time for algorithms to find uses and to really make an impact.
WeightComment.com
Due to the vast amount of diet pills in the market, we here at WeightComment pledge to only review the top selling diet pills for sale today. We have chosen the top 3 diet pills from the best sellers and top customer reviews.
Why do people believe conspiracy theories? Because they are presented with some data, they analyze said data, or they trust some expert who analyzes some data for them, and they draw their own conclusions. It's pretty freaking simple.

One of my bigger hangups is that some people will say "there's no evidence for ufos". Well, there's plenty of people who say they've seen a ufo, so there's some data for you, if you reject that data, fine with me - you should probably analyze it first before you jump to conclusions, but don't say there's no evidence.

This is a fact, that's a myth, this is reality that's just a theory. Nonsense! There's just data and data analysis. Draw your own conclusions.
For people that don't know what a vertical search engine is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_search

Usually Google using the "site:" command for stackoverflow etc, since I'm satisfied with the way Google orders the results.
Maybe this is just semantics, but the others browsers wouldn't be evaluating them either, since they're comments and only IE looks for the conditionals, neh?
I haven't noticed a dramatic difference with omega 3's. I am rather sensitive to noise; I find it quite difficult to tune out particularly human background noise when I am trying to concentrate on something else and am not participating in that noise.

Thunderstorms, etc., are fine. Neighboring conversations, music, TV, etc., not so much (not at all).
New Airline Restrictions: No Moving During Final Hour
The possibility of an always-on-the-record government lies not in chasing around members of congress with flip cameras but capturing their inputs, outputs and making that data accessible to ordinary citizens.

You're not going to create any good by looking over someone's shoulder and watching them constantly. You don't do it at work, neither does your boss and neither should your congressman. But what should be happening is we should be measuring their data, their outputs and coming up with systemic, non-politically-charged ways to measure performance and tracking them.

Synopsis: I'm far more interested in supplying the Nate Silver's of the world with more concrete data about Congress than I am having 24 hour video surveillance on Harry Reid.
And having articles split in multiple pages with just a little text on each is more and more common (because ad revenue depends on CPM, of course). Someone should augment Readability to combine multiple pages into one.
It's a funny metric. If things are going well, you tend to forget to think about it. If things aren't going well, you never really have a chance to. I agree with the author that it's something to seriously consider, but it's always difficult to calculate until you've got a lot of data.
Thanks.

I do hope to revive cspace sometime in 2010.
I'm not sure what the point of this would be. In the United States, the accountability that is important during elections has very little relation to the results of the legislation that a congressmen voted on. In other countries, like the UK for example, the only accountability that most MPs need is that they voted consistently with the party line.

It's sort of a flaw in democracy that voters will be fully informed about their elected leaders and within one election cycle will be able to judge how effective a leader or congressman turned out to be. An always on-the-record congressman wouldn't make any of that better.
crunchbase, glassdoor, imdb, (clerkdogs), twitter, backtype.
Warning: this site has some really aggressive 3rd party tracking cookies. It pops-up dialogues on Safari if you have 3rd party cookies disabled.
Ah,

2.6 "Best to median" sounds like a much more plausible figure. The x10 figure is usually quoted in such a way that it seems like it is "best to median".
Octopart
Yes,

I'm actually a skeptic on the generic x10 programmer-productive claim but the claim "Markets tend to clear" when applied anything and everything is more of a justifying fiction than a useful measure. Alan Greenspan and friends used it repeated to justify the housing bubble. And yet this kind of reasoning is still here.

Sigh...
Stop trying to impress people with your intelligence, just try to connect with them.
What I imagine this would do is create yet more information that we have to sift through. I'm not convinced that the solution to any problem in our age is more data. I'm very interested in finding information that is relevant to me and ubiquitous recording seems to be increasing the level of noise.

I appreciate that news outlets filter through the noise, but sometimes very interesting information gets reported in a dull manner, causing few people to pick it up or get excited about it and share it, or very banal information (say a sex scandal) gets sensationalist reporting, causing it to drown out other important points.
Some of the information is this article is new for me. I know it's i wikipedia, but the following facts in the Degenerate Era:

* Formation or new stars ceases. Stars cease to fuse.

* Solar systems no longer exists. Planets flung out of orbit or consumed by larger bodies.

* Galaxies no longer exist. Stars flung out of orbit or consumed bty black holes.

Have they been established as real facts? As far as I know dying stars go Supernova and allow new stars to be born, thus repeating the full cycle.
"If I can cure even one such sufferer, the hot air will not be for naught."

You won't cure anyone by "hot air". At least you won't "cure" anyone half way intelligent. Talk is cheap.

"[programmers] refuse to believe that there has been any kind of systemic decline. Mankind is effectively stupider for the lack of the intelligence-amplifiers which could have been - could still be."

So, code up these "intelligence amplifiers" and show us. Talk is cheap. Code is more convincing. It also gets over the problem of all these deluded programmers (on HN and elsewhere) who "refuse to believe" something just because you said so. ;-)
I am really glad to have read this.
Learn Objective-C Tutorial
I love this topic because it gets directly to the weird way people's brains work. But I would be VERY careful about feeling like you are above the fray and others are all so logic-challenged. If anything, I've found that we're all in the same boat here.

Interestingly out-of-power Democrats are far more likely to believe the theories about in-power Republicans, and powerless Republicans far more likely to believe them about powerful Democrats. One aspect of conspiracy theories is that they are history for losers.

I remember when Clinton was in office. Good friends of mine who were Republican were convinced the man was the devil -- or something close to it. There were the cocaine rumors, the smuggling rumors, the political killings, etc. Along those same lines, some of the smartest people I know, who are also Democrats, were seriously telling me that George Bush was building detention camps to hold dissenters and that he would make himself dictator for life by preying off 9-11 fears.

These were serious, well-thought, respected, intellectuals. (Some of them might be reading this.) I imagine I'll start hearing from my Republican friends soon the same outlandish rumors about Obama. I frankly don't know what to do when this happens but to smile feebly and agree with them. Some cognitive blind spots resist all attempts at illumination.

On the other hand, this is one of those areas where you can paint with too broad a brush on either side. This is really what makes this topic so interesting. Let's take, say, UFOs. To some uber-defenders of logic like Mike Shermer, UFOs are nothing new and probably just artifacts of that fact that human observers are flawed. People want to sell books and there's a "conspiracy" among UFO'ers to gloss over inconvenient truth in order to generate wild rumors.

Assuming for a second that there exists some sort of atmospheric phenomenon that is real and unable to be replicated? To Shermer it's going to look like swamp gas and to the actual observers like nothing they have ever seen before. You can't make a case one way or the other (although plenty try)

On the other side, to the UFO-buffs, there's a government plot to cover up the "real" truth. More likely it's just a general quality of bureaucrats not to stick their necks out for stuff that makes them look like they are crazy. No conspiracy needed, just human nature. But to each side the other is acting irrationally and as the result of some sort of conspiracy or the other.

Fun stuff.
If once every month or so counts.

Google to search wikipedia, stackoverflow, imdb
Introduction to lock-free/wait-free and the ABA problem
Simple service. If your goal is to make money of the AdSense ads, you might want to think about what kind of actions you want to encourage users to take after they've checked a domain's server, in order to increase their time on your site.

One of the things I'd add is a "How do you know?" link that talks about how you can tell what kind of server the site's using.

Also, why have social bookmarking links? Why would anyone put the results on reddit? Why would anyone expect enough others would upvote it to be worth posting?

It's also not clear that the Facebook, twitter, and digg icons are links to more sharing actions; many other sites use those size of icons to link to their own profiles on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?
You are a nice guy.
But nanoc does not just output the static html, it gives just the files, with no side bars and all. I think the layout part is not there.
Minds for Sale
Not to mention the amount of momentum in these systems.

The x86 architecture is hideous. But Intel and AMD have pumped billions of dollars of research into it that is difficult to overcome.

Look at Apple's transition from the PPC to x86. The reason given was performance/watt. Do you think Jobs spent more than a minute worrying about how annoying x86s are to work with?
I suppose get excited about something you can do with computers. As a kid, it excited me that I could influence what appears on the TV screen with my ZX Spectrum. I programmed lots of stupid drawings and animations (animation as in a character moving across the screen).

While it might seem as if my generation was privileged to grow up at the same time that computers grew up, actually there have been several similar situations since then.

A couple of years ago, there was a chance to influence what happens on your mobile phone (with J2ME programming, or earlier more hardcore methods). Recently, there is the mobile internet, or Twitter apps and social networking.
Breakfast Ideas
Remarkable. Here's what seems to be the key point (reordered a bit for clarity):

The study supported our hypothesis [...] that the premotor cortex represents intended speech as an 'auditory trajectory,' that is, as a set of key frequencies (formant frequencies) that vary with time in the acoustic signal we hear as speech. [...] In an intact brain, these frequency trajectories are sent to the primary motor cortex where they are transformed into motor commands to the speech articulators. [...We] had to interpret these frequency trajectories in order to translate them into speech. [...] In other words, we could predict the intended sound directly from neural activity in the premotor cortex, rather than try to predict the positions of all the speech articulators individually and then try to reconstruct the intended sound [...]

Also remarkable (but maybe this is old hat to people who know about this stuff?) is that the signals they're interpreting come from neurites that started actually growing into the electrode months after it had been implanted.

I suppose there is a big difference between being able to interpret pre-speech frequencies in a normal brain (i.e. of a person who hasn't used this device before), versus someone being able to train themselves to communicate using this device over time. Given how adaptable the brain is, it's the latter that would seem to be the big win (and the article does vaguely imply this). Of course the device presumably wouldn't work at all if it weren't rooted in normal speech function.
Does Twitter disprove that? A lot of people with many followers on Twitter have mostly fake followers. I think people with a lot of real followers do have influence on Twitter.

For example a friend of mine bought a band's new album just because @veronica mentioned that she liked them. @veronica has 1500000 followers on Twitter. I think for a band it can make a real difference if she mentions them.
Tell HN: Our launch press email and press page
hey guys, here is the press email and the press page from Style Guidance launch. I know a few of you were asking me to post this, so here it is
Thank you for saying so.

I have a tendency to keep up with all the men in my career who helped me with my career, directly or indirectly:

Mark Ruzicka: Navy petty officer who turned me on to DOS 6 and hacking in general

John Grosshandler: my first software sales job

Leo Linder: helped me with MCSE certs and got me into network admin and support via his consulting firm

Larry Spear: CEO of a voice over ip company who supporting me being hired and doing Java dev

Brett Slaski: Network and DBA manager who let me talk the company into revamping their software and use C#

My current boss: unbelievable support and encouragement from him allows me to make mistakes and recover.

I could not be programmer, my life love, without these guys.

:)

edit: To answer the OP's question, I would start with a specific goal/project in mind and find out what steps are required to get it done. The best way to learn programming is to do it. If one book doesn't click, try another on the same subject. And another. Until you get it.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) versus long-term value (LTV) is one of the concepts at the core of any SAAS (software as a service) or subscription business. Companies like Salesforce.com have made it their mantra to constantly drive CAC down and LTV up.

The factor that this site doesn't mention is the speed of acceleration. If you can extract $200 of value from every $100 spent in acquiring customers, it sounds like you're in good shape. But if it takes you 5 years to make that $200, then you won't be able to reinvest your revenue in getting new customers. On the other hand, if it only takes two months to $200 back from $100 in customer acquisition cost, you can very quickly spin up a massive business from a small initial investment. The difference between 5 years and 2 months is massive in terms of valuation and ability to self-fund.

He also fails to mention scalability of your marketing, but that could be a whole different post.
Ask HN: What are incentives for scientists to perform replication studies?
We often see headlines in print/online articles proclaiming "numerous scientific studies have shown that X causes Y". My naive question is: What are incentives for researchers to perform replication studies? It seems like the first published study gets a lot of acclaim and prestige within the research community, but it's much less prestigious to be like "oh, I saw that UC Berkeley economists did a study on dataset A, so I just used dataset B from a different country and replicated their study. I achieved similar findings"

It seems like it might be difficult for up-and-coming assistant professors to make a convincing tenure case if they simply performed replication studies (seems like originality and 'being first' are more valued for tenure), and veteran researchers probably also want to venture out to perform new breakthrough studies rather than doing replications. I'd like to learn more about the incentives that scientists have for performing replication studies; it seems like they're very important for making sure that results are robust, but I don't see any reason why an ambitious scientist would spend time doing them rather than doing his/her own original experiments. thanks!
The Creation of the Tortoise Tracker
My father taught me when I was young. Learned a few languages by myself. Tried making websites. Too easy. Tried making games. Too hard.

I stopped programming. Because I tried making games, programming is not for me. Maybe if I was not so ambitious, it would've been.

I'll never know: I'm trying things other than programming.
Numbers I cannot disclose to you from a major Japanese multinational which actually tracks programmer productivity (grumble grumble why is this rare grumble grumble) cause me to not have major plausibility problems with the x10 best to median.
The foodstuffs I received this year. Didn't get much outside of foodstuffs.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brutimus/4216683268/
I hope there's someone out there who remembers this, but I started out on mIRC, first on a few IRC servers, but then got into the MSNChat rave.

Writing scripts, prots, take-overes, and connections were just so fun. I loved the competitive nature, having races to see who had the better protection scripts. It was interesting to see how the community really grew, as it turned really sour in the next few years and then MSN finally shut it down.

But thats what got me going. The feeling of writing code for something you understand, being able to think it out in your head and then just write it without having to check the docs. What a rush. I miss it, so now I learn python. :-)
there seems to be an opportunity for designing a new kind of forum to facilitate this sort of collaborative work. perhaps the traditional threaded model of forums like HN, phpbb, and others isn't optimal for this sort of collaboration.
About the gain: from the comments on other sites (I believe ars technica) I seem to remember this was indeed the case, but I can't be sure.. (I don't have access either from my holiday destination).

As for real circuit fabrication, you are absolutely right; I would even go so far as to say that placing these individual molecules in some kind of circuit topology is an order of magnitude harder than doing the same with CNTs. I don't think they've even started working seriously on that problem yet, and I wouldn't, either; you have to be able to make reasonable amounts of working devices first...
it seems like there must exist some sort of 'benign spyware' you can install on your computer, which monitors what programs you have running (and when each one is the active window). it could automatically generate reports of your top 10 most frequently-used programs, most used in the recent day, week, month, etc. this is sort of like the "top visited websites" feature in Google Chrome and other browsers, except extended to all programs on your desktop. think of it as a layer on top of 'ps' or 'top'.
Ketchup Week
Utterly frivolous, but the Ruby port of Linda (given the language's Japanese origins) seems to me to have the funniest project name ever. I couldn't stop laughing when I ran across it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinda_(Ruby_programming_languag...

Perhaps this wasn't intentional, but I sure hope it was.
A key insight here is that in many fields you can implicitly confirm results from a study by basing your own research on them. If the foundation is rotten, you should be able to figure that out sooner or later, which will lead you to trying to replicate the original results---initially, to see what you're missing---and from there you are in a position to falsify them.
I was about to post a similar comment.

In 7th grade the first programming I did was mIRC scripting. I then did a little tcl/tk to try and get a bot running on a unix box.

I quickly moved to web dev from there though.
I'm curious about this: Don't expect tons of code that you can actually merge. Is this a general open source phenomenon? Are there good ways of managing a project to encourage more high quality code submissions from users?
this shouldn't happen but it would be an interresting comparison nevertheless
I am not an astrophysicist or even a physicist, so bear with me. What happens in the far future really depends on what theory you look at. Is dark energy accelerating the expansion of the universe? If so, there will be a point where all we can see is our own galaxy. Proton decay? Experimental evidence says that protons are stable, or the half-life is much longer than 10^38 years.

Shock waves from supernovae trigger star formation by compressing the intragalactic hydrogen, but they dont provide the material for fusion. (Lots of other effects though.) So when the hydrogen is too dilute, star formation stops. There are old galaxies wher star formation has essentially stopped.

Edit: I meant this as a reply to gpmedia, but pushed the wrong link, giving a real astrophysicist the chance to reply.
How would you go about protecting the search results, say I plan to write an App Engine clone which actually url fetches results from your service and provide an ads free interface with some more features?

Is verifying the Referrer header enough for this kind of protection?
not all stars end in supernovae, and even supernovae may leave a core. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution

that means that matter is gradually "trapped" in brown dwarves, neutron stars and black holes. so recycling by supernovae isn't sufficient to avoid heat death (if only half of all stars give supernovae then in in just seven "lifetimes" you've lost 99% of matter to those "sinks")

(maybe it's not clear, but that diagram is focusing on a very long time period, much longer than the lifetime of any star that would go supernova).

but what happens in the very long term is, i think, something of an open question (i am not an expert - i used to be an astronomer, but i've never really thought about this before).

that diagram is based on work in a book that assumes two things: (1) that protons decay and (2) the universe continues to expand. i haven't read the book, but the conclusions seem reasonable given that assumption (afaik the current consensus is that (2) is correct).

but they are just assumptions - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe for alternative possibilities.
I feel the the issue with cspace is that at first glance people at first glance, usually percieve it as some sort of a secure IM, and the mainstream user base for IMs doesn't really care about security. For those of us who use it, it works well. I guess its primary user base is mostly made up of people (like me) who aren't too good with evangelizing for things they use.

That being said, I'm just as guilty as you for letting it bitrot. I always wanted to do something about cspace, but never got around doing anything :(

disclaimer: I used to work (a long time ago) for sreeram, on cspace.
Those are some seriously funky scales. I could have sworn things go on top of scales.