skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow... never looked into MixPanel -- you know, it may be just what I need! Thanks for pointing it out adatta02
Driving a car is like force feeding me toxic exhaust when all I want to do is walk down the sidewalk. It's disgusting. Please stop driving everyone. I don't need to drive, why do you? I am within walking distance of everything I need; you should be too. This is my city and I want to walk in it without your dirty car offending my delicate nasal passages.
Try a city that has tougher anti-smoking laws. All of our bars/clubs (except the casino high-roller room) are non-smoking. It is much nicer for those of us who don't smoke. (Most have some form of al-fresco area / patio / etc where smoking is allowed. While it once felt part of the experience - I've grown to love it's absence. //Melbourne Australia
How to use twitter to control your pc remotely
Surely, law enforcement would find an excuse (quite possibly even a legitimate one) to put said store front under surveillance.
It uses the GNU GPL version 3, which is incompatible with the use cases of many of BSD's "customers". Notably, Apple has refused to use the GPLv3 versions of GCC in Mac OS X, and FreeBSD has followed suit by staying with GCC 4.2 until clang is considered finished. It also tends to have problems on less popular architectures that Net/OpenBSD still consider important.
The stats the government already provides are baked to hell, and manipulated to suit the political cycle. It's a stupid idea.

The government shouldn't even be in the measurement and statistics business. We need a census and that's about it. Why should the government calculate GDP and so on? Competing private estimations provide greater depth already.
Most of the videos I watch online are related to events such as TED, conferences, talks,etc. There's a lot of opportunity to organize around events. Not sure what the end result looks like, but it could be damn useful.
Here goes another wave of plastic & silicon hitting the world's dumpgrounds.

If we made less hardware and more software, the world would thank us for it.
Do you find that the two-fingered side swipe thing is a disaster to? I couldn't pull it off without simultaneously moving the mouse.
I was looking at that and thinking Haskell-biased.
Presumably you already know how Netflix does that and you're asking this rhetorically. If you are actually interested in how Netflix evaluated submissions, you can read all about it on their contest page.

I thought about the Netflix example, which is obviously related, while writing my post. Ultimately the Netflix competition isn't for a recommendation engine, it's a prediction engine. They use that prediction engine to produce recommendations, but that's a separate phase. The top N predicted ratings != the best N things to recommend at this moment, though obviously it's useful to know predicted ratings for movies if you're writing a recommender.

A recommendation engine should not just recommend the highest predicted rated apps given that the user downloads the app. As an extremely simple example, even if you habitually rate games much higher than other apps, it shouldn't recommend you 100% games. You probably want to see other things sometimes too. The perfect set of apps on your phone would not be entirely games; you do like to twitter after all, even if you're not entirely fond of any of the twitter apps out right now.

The perfect recommendation engine would be psychic; it would know the set of apps on your phone that would make you maximally happy. That's obviously not the same as predicting exactly what you'd rate each app (though presumably you could do that easily).
> Read more carefully. I did not forget the money being paid to the government. Instead I was describing a net effect

and ignoring the H1B holder, which is why I provided an example.

Very few H1B holders who have skills that a US company values at $120k will take a job for $20k without some angle.

You suggest one such angle, namely that such employees go to another employer who doesn't pay the fee to govt, and suggest that original employers will therefore pay more to avoid losing the benefit from paying the fee.

Let's extend that example. Suppose that it takes $100k/year to keep an H1B holder from jumping ship. Add that to the $100k fee and that employee costs the original employer $200k. Since the agreed-on market rate for that job was $120k, the original employer isn't going to pay $100k year. Instead, they'll avoid the risk of losing the $100k fee and hire locally.

That's why the fee will discourage H1Bs for low-wage jobs.

If the fee is paid by all employers (and presumably refunded when an H1B jumps ship), there's no poaching bonus so every employer is essentially the first employer.
A downvote without a comment is just as rude online as a terse "no" is in real life.

It's you who are choosing to interpret it that way.
The simple solution to that would be to require a comment if you are going to down vote. If you down vote you have to comment and say why.

Maybe that should be added as a feature for up vote to. To up vote or down vote you would have to comment. This would ensure that only people who were really serious about their opinion would vote at all.
In other news: Carpal tunnel syndrome cases doubled in Apple users.
I tend to agree. One of my first thoughts when I looked at it was "You seriously want me to read all this?" If the focus is supposed to be "here are the reasons why I'm a good candidate for your company", make sure that it's as easy as possible for a potential employer to pick out the important points.
> A much better way are the points based systems found in Australia, Canada, and the UK.

The US has a points-based immigration classification. It's pretty much a disaster.

I have no idea how well UK et all run their points based schemes, but it doesn't actually matter. The relevant question when proposing one for the US is how well the US would run one. Maybe this time would be different but....
United States individual state and also federal securities laws make a determination as to who is considered an accredited investor and who is not. (Federal Securities Laws and state Blue Sky Laws.)

Accredited investors are deemed to need less protection under the law than un-accredited investors. Basically accredited investors are deemed more able to take losses and/or more able to analyze which investments are better for their money. In certain instances un-accredited investors may have rights to a return of their invested money in the event of a financial loss, where an accredited investor must take the loss.

In the United States, investment is heavily regulated on both the state and the federal level.
> An ad hominem attack is a way of saving resources

That they are both ways of saving resources does not mean they are the same in any other way (e.g. both "wrong"). Choosing not to read your proof is not the same as declaring that the proof must be flawed because you wrote it.

You seem to have a particular instance of this behavior in mind. Not being familiar with it, I can only argue the general case. I'm sure your proof is actually quite good!
Yes, people should drive cars that don't produce such a large amount of noxious fumes, they should drive less -- cars are the number one accidental killer at 40k deaths/year in the US.

Both of these things would naturally occur if drivers were not free externalize the significant costs of their personal choices.
One reason to share: all that juicy knowledge in your brain will otherwise be gone when you die.
App Store Cranking
iTunes connect was down for a week (vacation). but on the first day they came back up, they seem to be re-energized. We submitted BA.net Live Webcams on dec 28. It was approved an live on the app store on dec 29!

That was fast
check it out atitms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ba-net-live-webcams/id348529659?mt=8

or
http://m.ba.net
The unlikely origin of fish and chips
Yes. With the UK's "no smoking indoors in public" laws, you get a ton of smokers emitting a choking cloud under the awning outside train stations, etc. I hold my breath to walk through it.

Plus just plain walking closely downwind of a smoker on the street is nasty. I have to pay visual attention to avoid getting a lungful of breathed-out smoke. Not fun.
Yeah this is what I thought when reading this. He does, however, preface his statement that "nothing good happened" with "economically speaking", and he makes a good case from that perspective.
>>take a couple of hours online to investigate the scientific evidence for the dangers of second-hand smoke [fell into statistical noise when I investigated]

I spent twenty seconds to help you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_ban#Effects_on_health

"Several studies have documented health and economic benefits related to smoking bans. In the first 18 months after Pueblo, Colorado enacted a 2003 smoking ban, hospital admissions for heart attacks dropped by 27% while admissions in neighboring towns without smoking bans showed no change."

(I saw larger claims in a BBC article sometime for the smoking bans in British pubs, but was too lazy to go find it.)

Edit: 20 more seconds.

>>What is the measured, documented percentage of smokers who contract lung-cancer?

Here are some values for second hand smokers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_ban#Medical_and_scienti...

"Specifically, meta-analyses show that lifelong non-smokers with partners who smoke in the home have a 20–30% greater risk of lung cancer than non-smokers who live with non-smokers. Non-smokers exposed to cigarette smoke in the workplace have an increased lung cancer risk of 16–19%."

Edit 2: I went and found the BBC article (or another with the same content :-).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8267523.stm

"Smoking bans cut the number of heart attacks in Europe and North America by up to a third, two studies report.

This "heart gain" is far greater than both originally anticipated and the 10% figure recently quoted by England's Department of Health.

[...]

The studies appear in two leading journals - Circulation and the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

[...]

But the latest work, based on the results of numerous different studies collectively involving millions of people, indicated that smoking bans have reduced heart attack rates by as much as 26% per year."

Edit 3: Who votes up the parent comment?! :-) Less than a minute with Google shows his claims to be totally wrong.
Stack Overflow Has Open Sourced Markdown/C#
It has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic of this thread and, if it isn't flatly inappropriate for HN, creeps right up to the border.
Suppose you are forced by circumstance to play Russian roulette.

Do you or do you not load extra bullets?
Really? Full body scans, basically a technological stripsearch, wherein you and your children are examined in detail by some guy in some room somewhere, does not hold potential for offence?
I would pay for a printed + bound copy of this.
I treat the voting arrows as if they meant (1) as well, and in addition to that, if something is at 0 or worse and isn't in fact a waste of time, I'll vote it back up.

Downvoting something you disagree with kills a discussion, IMHO.
I particularly like the distinction between Java and Ruby as seen by Lisp fans. Just as overhyped, just as vaporous... but (trying to be) sexier.
I really like that by default OS X has basic emacs navigation and kill/yank keybindings in all text fields. (Ctl-A, -E, -P, -N, -K, -Y)
Hi Index in Eyeglasses
Cute: very elegant.

Vicious: I have to model all my program's data structures within Haskell's type paradigm, or I get ripped to shreds by the strict type checker.

Alternative explanation: the photo shows what I looked like after I programmed in Haskell for a while :-)

Bias: I'm a lisp programmer xD
Strongly reminiscent of this really fantastic talk from Eric Mazur, a Harvard physics professor (and a charismatic speaker!) who was shocked when he discovered the pervasive misconceptions held by his undergraduate students.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI

Mazur describes how he discovered and carefully measured the lack of fundamental understanding among the majority of his students, and how after attempting to address the problem in various ways, he found that a discussion-based, peer-assisted method of working through material was much more effective than more a lecture-oriented approach.
To heck with driving less. Drive electric.
I hope that wasn't directed at me. I 100% agree that we don't have a free-market healthcare system (ie totally unfair playing field, bureaucratic wastefulness and on and on). but, Mackey, Ron Paul, and myself see that kind of system is possible and would be best.
Yeah, maybe... It sure seems like there are a lot more medical lawsuits than traffic death lawsuits though.
For this I find tools like lloogg.com invaluable (disclaimer: I'm the author of LLOOGG, but I'm currently not really running it as a business, at least for now, so I mean, LLOOGG or any other good real-time stat stuff).

There is nothing as good as identifying patterns as the human brain, and a few minutes every day of actually seeing what users are doing on your site is very good.
PE Fund for Litigation
Re: Color/Styling - Tell me about it, I just came back to the HN screen, and after staring at black for so long, everything looks _very_ washed out. Here's hoping my eyeballs recover...

[Edit: No, seriously - My MacBook Pro's screen (10 minutes later) _still_ looks all washed out. Adjusting the brightness doesn't seem to work. This is after taking a two minute break. Something about reading long fiction for 30 minutes on that black screen really caused an impact]
Flag it. I did. See? The system works!
We could also outlaw corporate personhood.
- Do you think people should receive necessary medical treatment based on ability to pay? That's the alternative universe where health insurance companies charge based on cost.

- Should the government should try to hire younger, less educated, part-time employees to bring pay down? Your chart links to an actual explanation:

"In 2008, only 14 percent of federal workers were on part-time schedules, compared to 26 percent in the private sector. Federal workers were far older on average: 55 percent were between the ages of 45 and 64, compared to 36 percent of private-sector workers. Furthermore, 45 percent of federal workers held a college degree or higher educational credential, compared to 29 percent of private-sector workers.

Federal workers are more likely to receive employer-paid health benefits than private sector workers — 77 percent compared to 56 percent."

...

"The biggest difference between private and federal employment, illustrated in the graph above, lies in the proportion of jobs paying less than $25,000 a year. In 2008 more than 43 percent of private-sector workers earned less than $25,000 a year. Most federal employees fell squarely in the middle earnings brackets, making $25,000 to $75,000 a year."
Also we should add a section to cover things like

Stanford's iPhone App Class:
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/

Stanford's WebApp Class:
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs142/cgi-bin/projects.php

Harvard has several good classes, but I cannot seem to find them online.
That's fine, but doesn't solve point 2, and doesn't take into account the "social" costs of car-dedicated community infrastructure.

Of course, these costs are really not "social" at all, as easily observed by reviewing the impact on surrounding neighborhood small businesses and property values in areas where inner-city freeways were erected in the 50s-70s, and then torn down again in the 90s or 00s. If you're interested in the pure social costs, there's always the increase of crime, in-cohesive communities, etc.

Cars aren't going anywhere, but that doesn't mean we should always optimize for them above all other concerns, though I agree that we should use more efficient (and less polluting) vehicles.

This is a bit off-topic on a discussion regarding second hand smoke -- my apologies.
Rands in Repose seems like it should be on this list.
I'm curious about the points about inhaling---not being a smoker, I just always assumed that (nearly) all smokers inhaled the smoke. That's why Bill Clinton's pot claim ("but I never inhaled") was such a joke, right? Or is there something more going on there?
U.S. Ranks 20th in Tax Support for R&D
It must be an odd feeling for writers like Cory Doctorow to watch their fictional worlds become true right before their eyes.
2010 Predictions on Linux, Friendfeed, Mike Arrington and Pete Cashmore
Shameless plug, but I'm part of a Nexus One forum here:

http://www.nexusoneforum.net
"IOUs from the treasury", otherwise known as T-notes, are, according to everybody, including "everybody in the private sector", the safest interest-bearing investment on the planet.

Where do you think they should put their short term surplusses to offset the long term obligations? Cash under the mattress? Honest question -- where else should they keep that money?
Professor describing the revolutionary turbo-encabulator
Simply amazing. Must Watch!
Tips on Finding the Best Portable Massage Tables
I have a Mac so I just hit Control + Option + Command + 8 to invert screen colors. It makes reading light text on a dark background bearable.
Http://www.americanjobs.com/my.job/searchJobs
You mean simple things. The preamble to the GPL is longer than the entire ISC license... by like 5 times. GCC is like 100 times more complex than PCC. BSD folks like simple, secure things.
It will only work if the employee is desirable for other companies. It would not prevent H1B from being used as a cost-cutting measure - it would only prevent it from being very effective at that.

If the person signing the check can't (or doesn't have to) tell the difference between a good and a bad professional, 5K saved are 5K saved.
> No, it's not the same. One is plausible, the other is not.

Yes. Now let's not give the propaganda machine any ideas ;-)

Of course, one is plausable and the other is not. One is also a hyperbole to illustrate the point. Basically, in the last 10 years we had about 400 people/year die of terrorism on average (took 9/11 number and spread them over 9 years). There is a higher chance of being shot by your neighborhood cop than dying from terrorism. Now that's plausable. So lock up all the policemen in jail, that's more effective at preventing American death than what the TSA has been doing.

The point was that TSA in all these years has nothing to show for. There have been bombing attempts but they have been stopped by near by passengers and/or air marshals.

By now, instead of millions of harassed citizens TSA should have had a glass display case of at least a couple dozen explosive devices + some terrorists behind bars.
The good news is that there is only one way to go once you hit rock bottom. The bad news may be that I don't think that we've hit bottom. And, we don't necessarily know what the bottom is. The Big Zero is a nice round number, but I think we've been borrowing towards an unpayable debt for longer than ten years, and we are only falling further. Planes, both figuratively and literally, continue to keep dropping out of the sky. If it was left up to me, I would get right to the bottom of it.
Why should I care what Bruce Schneier, an expert on computer security, thinks about airline security?

Should I care what the head of the TSA has to say about RockYou's password data theft, too?
The point of the article is not about smoking at all, it's about bad science. The last paragraph:

"It may be argued that this is news about an old and settled subject. And who cares about smoking anyway. But smoking is really a secondary issue. The primary issue is the integrity of science. This has no use-by date. When the processes of science are misused, even if for what seems a good reason, science and its practitioners are alike degraded."
Please, for the love of God, could somebody point out some good US potato varieties for chip-making? I'm lost without my Maris Pipers, my attempts over here with Russets have been horrible.
Why America and France have very different experiences with immigration
I downvoted your post because I viewed it as insubstantial and somewhat bitter. The two reasons you provide are obviously (?) not serious reasons; they're just caricatures, so it provides a pretty poor platform for a sincere discussion about why people downvote things.

I don't really see how you can characterize it as "discussing the problems with the downvote." I would characterize it instead as "taunting people who downvote things."
Exactly, there was no app to do it so I built one. I also did it to get the experience of taking an app from conception to the store.

The next 5 people who follow http://twitter.com/nezumiapp and reply to this thread with their Twitter handle get a Promo code for a FREE copy of the app via Direct Message.

Note: The promo code is only valid in the US App Store.
Google doesn't frame content with it's own label, you don't go to Google New York Times edition, you go to New York Times.com
If it's not illegal yet I hope it is soon.
Nice reference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_the_Iconoclast#Embiggen_an...
it would make me more willing to expend the effort and time to investigate his theories on programming methodology.
Zed playing/singing:

http://fretwar.com/static/data/player/1/round/40/submission/
Smoking isn't antisocial at all. Smokers are usually the most friendly people I know. Some of the best social things I have done is smoking a cigarette on a train station in a 3rd world country - it brings people together. If someone offers you a cigarette you would be an uppity idiot to decline.

You can walk up to a strange smoker and ask him for a light. Taking a smokebreak outside while there is a complete smoker outside turns strangers into friends.

Not anti-social at all - having a stick up your ass because you dislike smoking is.
If you're ideologically opposed to the existence of any social welfare systems, then that's a philosophically consistent position -- one that about 80% of americans disagree with, but it's consist and you're entitled to your own opinions.

You are not, however, entitled to your own facts.

FACT: Medicare's payout rates have nothing to do with their administrative costs. You're thinking balance sheet. Administrative costs for Medicare and the VA are far, far lower than any insurance company. It's a fact. And that's before you consider that the insurance companies are taking out profits on top of that. This isn't an indictment of the ideas of markets in general -- this is more a statement that insurance companies aren't in anything resembling 'markets' and have no accountability to anyone. Who else gets away with 15-20% yearly rate hikes for a decade? They're getting less efficient.

Similar story for SS. Per dollar managed, they're orders of magnitude lower in fees than any organization on the planet, because they process a ton of money through a dead-simple operation. Any inherent differences between "public and private" are noise compared to those fundamentals. It's not about public and private. If you want, you can argue that they should be doing more complicated things instead.. but then I think about my parents' impending retirement, their 401k recently, and am pretty glad that they kept it simple.

So anyways -- you're entitled to your own philosophical opinions about whether things like medicare and SS should exist -- but factually, they're much more efficient at what they do than any private sector equivalent. Also, what they do would most likely never be done by the private sector on it's own. If you think it just shouldn't be done, that's a coherent position of course.
See Peter Norvig's article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

for Warning Sign I9: Being Too Clever, which relates directly to the point of this thread.
Netflix Envoy Pitches Online Films to Wary Studios
How do you legally punish half a conjoined twin?