skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm familiar with the broken window fallacy, I just question its applicability here.

The broken window fallacy is usually used to highlight the importance of opportunity cost and unintended consequences. In the parable, the broken window results in some very visible benefits - the glazier has money, his wife has a new dress. But it's a fallacy because we don't know what the glazier would be doing otherwise. Perhaps he would've created a beautiful stain glass window, which causes his business to spike up afterwards as his skills increase, which means his wife can afford a series of socialite parties, which bring together people who would never have met, etc.

As Retric points out, I think the fallacy is more likely to work in the other direction here. The benefits of working are very obvious - you get more income, you can afford to buy more things, you live more comfortably. The opportunity costs are more subtle - perhaps your kid grows up hating you, perhaps they fall in with a bad crowd and start doing drugs, perhaps they never make it over the mathematical hump that prevents them from being a famous physicist. It's different for every kid, and you won't know for years.

Good economists admit that there are things that count that can't be counted, and recognize the limits of their models.
This is true in the general sense, you cannot remove all outside agents and still say anything meaningful.

But it is not true when dealing with any one particular agent. You can often say what would have happened but for one particular agent.
be upfront and honest. if you have to, be ready to explain why, and make sure that your explanation will make sense. and do it ASAP. the longer you wait, the tougher it'll be for both of you. its just that simple.

i'm sure it'll also help if you can promise do try to continue working part-time as best as you can.
If you are not too familiar with functional paradigms, many of the code examples seems obscurely clever. The nice thing about Scala is there is always a procedural way of doing the same operation that is more digestible for most people. I find the trend in developers coming to Scala from languages like Java/Ruby/Python/etc is to begin with the latter and gradually improve technique toward the former.
the article he links to on "horizontal organization": http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/light/organization....

this is absurd. "horizontal" should be replaced with "no".
Yes, I knew what you meant ;) I think an open source exchange killer was far more up the list of priorities when Yahoo bought it, than it would be today. (Exchange is still everywhere, but people don't seem to mind nor talk about it - with Lotus, and Google "gone google" in the market - maybe people view it as acceptable competition now?)
Authors, Impostors and Other Pretenders
Google could make themselves look better right now by quickly granting a free perpetual nonexclusive patent license to the Apache Hadoop project.
For the curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molon_labe
I've been using Lock Laces on all my athletic shoes for over 5 years now. Ridiculously convenient.
http://locklaces.com/
Ah, right.

There are also a number of problems where it is possible to narrow down the answer fairly easily, then submit a limited number of guesses until you get the right answer without having really shown that it is right.

But they try to limit how easy that is to do.
The most depressing part of this whole affair is the masses of 'relationship advice' that was foist upon her. It's amazing how much bad relationship advice you can get out of a bunch of people that are otherwise normally complaining about how they can't get a relationship.

Personally, I suspect giving into peer pressure to go visit him right now is likely to have been a bad move, but we'll see.
Using scala almost daily, I don't think I have ever done that, with floating point anyway - looks like one line slideware code for demos.
I share many of the author's feelings with one notable exception. He praises testing libraries in his pros section. While they show promise, I find these libraries to be in need of maturing. This is obviously true for much of the Scala ecosystem, but in my opinion, the have progressed a bit more slowly than other components I have used.
Agreed. I think Tufte would be proud of that diagram.
One point that you are missing here is that some people have stockpiled wealth and power, and have no intentions of using it to stimulate liquidity in the markets.

How much money does a billionaire need to live from day to day? The same as any other normal person. Yes, they are likely to consume more luxury goods, but in the end, it does not cover the fact that the more money you have, the easier it is to get even more.

For examples of this you need to look no further than your local bank and see what premium rates they offer for people with high balances. Index funds offer ultra low expense rates for people with a lot of money. With a large proportion of money, it becomes possible for you to manipulate the markets by buying out competition, and becoming a monopoly: which is arguably the equilibrium state for any free-market. The monopoly is the most profitable situation for any business, and this is at odds with society.

So the more money you acrue, the higher your money/work rate becomes. This is a perverse incentive for the large corporation owners to not work as hard; and also to lay off workers during recessions. What sane company would be hiring when workers/consumers have less money to spend?

And the less work that is put into the economy, the worse off the economy is. This cruel cycle is why the economy was in a deflationary spiral and why "Helicopter" Ben is printing money as fast as he can.

This has a communist vibe, but in the end there is simply no argument that it is much better for the country to utilize the resources and wealth to stimulate the economy as a whole than letting a few people sit on it so they can get richer by doing nothing with it.

The poor and middle class can't just create their own wealth because they don't own "the means of production" or the intellectual property horded by megacorps and protected by megacorp lawyers and lobbyists.

It is analogous to not letting DeBeers sit on a stockpile of diamonds, except instead of diamonds, it is money, food, gas, homes, etc...
Apple iPhone OS 4.0 and the iTablet
But he's trying to show that any company that's concerned about its IP should worry about sending jobs to China, even if it's just for self-interest.
I've just tried it: it's much safer than the standard one, check it yourself, that's definitely a winner for sports and everyday usage
I don't think you should take the internship, you should do the startup.
Probably doesn't help.

But I'd be far more interested in hiring someone that spent 3 months busting it on a startup than working elsewhere.
Do you realize what you're saying? Starting at birth, the entire learning process is trying to achieve things that one isn't currently capable of. Taking what you wrote at face value, children should never even go to school if they haven't already learned everything they intend to learn.
Letters.app vision document
Ah, I should have used omega there instead of omicron. I'm sure I got dinged for the defiant sentiment though.
Apple tablet called iPad ?
What we are doing git-wise is the reverse of what the article shows: Bug-fixes are (usually) done on the release-branches, while all feature development (except of these customizations) is done on the main branch (we just use the git default name "master").

I would just like to point out to git newbies that there is nothing special about the master branch in git except that it is a reasonable default. In terms of working on the release branch or working on master, there are no extra features or support from git, so the trade-off is only in what is easier for you and your team to remember.
one of the sacrifices they've made in their quest for aesthetic minimalism

I don't imagine it was solely aesthetic. The articulating arm required a huge amount of dead weight in the base to support ever-larger screens. The 20" iMac G4 weighed about the same as the current 27" iMac.
No, that is not Yelp. Imagine if Apple rang you up, and offered to remove the reviews for $300 a month. That is Yelp.
Btilly is entirely correct of course, but there is a huge caveat to what he says.

That being that people who want to cheat have any number of ways of doing it from finding someone else who posted it publicly, to asking privately, to (in the extreme case) actually paying someone to figure out the answer and give it to them.

And, as I mentioned in a previous post, the people who do not want to cheat, won't. They won't do those searches. If they stumble over it and know what it is they won't read it. If they stumble over it and read it before they know what it is, they will almost certainly forget the details quickly.

So by posting your Arc code publicly, you would neither (significantly) help someone wanting to cheat nor hurt someone not wanting to cheat. But you will help people who want to learn Arc.
Wow. You are "quite sure" and feel that crumbling roads is a leading indicator of inflation? I generally make a point not to be snippy on Hacker News, so I'll just post some links and a suggestion to not say you're "quite sure" when you aren't (or really shouldn't be).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation

Kudos on the success, though.
Without much content I'm not sure how it's going to work. And you plan on manually adding in all of the content? Is that really feasible? Are you updating the movies everyday by hand?

Voting should be ajaxified.

I know you are trying to be the informal, formative resource, but, for me at least, it is a major turn off when I detect someones bias in what is supposed to be just that, a resource. It's obvious we have different tastes, why would I return to your site?
Maybe the solution is to make comments work more like submissions, e.g. new top-level comments start out dead and need two upvotes before they go live.

Is that also related to the way comments are now weighted against time, as well as value? Every new comment is momentarily - or longer - placed at the top of the comments page, so something trite will live above a 32 point well-reasoned post for a period of time, depending on how old the 32 pointer happens to be.

When the new comments went straight to the pile of 1 point comments at the bottom, there was less incentive to contribute late in a discussion as your input could be overlooked; in fixing that problem, there's now an increased noise-to-signal ratio as low-value comments filter their way down, rather than build their way up.
Interesting for two reasons:

First, the Times reporter wrote "intentional discrimination, one of the most frequent and volatile charges made by conservatives, turned out not to play a significant role." While the actual paper mentioned this as a potential cause, and cited conservative commentators like D'Souza and Horowitz, it wasn't one of the six hypotheses actually tested by the sociologists - I assume because it's hard to test this in a quantitative manner. In other words, the Times reporter is editorializing.

Second, the ending quote from Neil Gross: "The irony is that the more conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism, the more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism." If political typecasting is an issue for academia, then gender-based typecasting is almost certainly an issue for certain male-dominated professions. Yet a sociologist who said "The irony is that the more women complain about [profession's] preponderance of males, the more likely it's going to remain a bastion of males" would be widely criticized. There's a double-standard at work here.
I'm going to stick you in the Facebook recruiting system.

Edit: done. You should hear from someone.
I think it was controversial on the comp.lang.lisp newsgroup, with threads saying "It may be Reddit-ish but it lacks most of the features like a proper data store".

[Edit] Of course, I was reading that newsgroup at the time, so this isn't a 'I think' but a 'I know'.
My mother taught me to tie my shoes just like her mother had taught her once upon a time, and they both tied granny knots, so I learned no other way to tie my shoes.

A friend of mine found this webpage a few years ago, and was very excited to tell me and all of our friends about it, and I finally learned how to tie my shoes properly.

30 years of tying my shoes the bad way. 30 years of sometimes slipping laces and shoes come undone. Goddamnit mom.
Interesting that you brought it up, I actaully thought about this for quite a while before I wrote the original comment. I agree the forms and targets of oppression between ROC then and PRC today are quite similar in urban areas. However, the main difference being that for most of the time Chiang Kaishek ruled China under martial law, and due to the amount of opposition Chiang faced back then, and the civil wars happening in the rurals, I would say the level of violence was much more severe.

In the end though, China probably would have been better off if ROC stayed, but the fact of the matter is different. Note that by China I am referring to the mainland. Taiwan is hands down better off today.
Yep, here you go:

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2010/01/13/chinas-sophistcated-ha...

The FBI report estimates that since 2003, the Chinese Army
has specifically developed a network of over 30,000 Chinese
military cyberspies, plus more than 150,000 private-sector
computer experts, whose mission is to steal American
military and technological secrets and cause mischief in
government and financial services.
Eric Raymond finds gun control to be a very hacker-worthy issue, and firmly believes that true hackers are all libertarians. Many people clearly believe that atheism is a hacker-worthy issue, because creationists are disrupting science classes. Where does it end? Nowhere. It never ends. You let one of these stories through, you let them all through, and bang, we're Reddit.
Is there a lot of that kind of crime near the campus?
I don't disagree with your views, as such. I feel comfortable judging countries on the merits of their policies and track records, etc.

However, the real question is, what do you think we should do about it?

Consider our range of options:

- learning Mandarin and translating controversial English language documents, then distributing them into China.

- Traveling to China carrying a hard drive full of uncensored wikipedia pages.

- boycotting Chinese products

- finding an activist (terrorist according to the Chinese government) charity and donating a few dollars.

- Lobbying your local officials to support trade/economic sanctions on China (sanctions create intentional non-death suffering intended to inspire political uprisings).

- Lobbying your local officials to advocate for a zero tolerance policy on human rights violations from US trading partners, etc.

All of these specify a clear course of action and have a fairly expectable outcome.

But suppose your goal is one of the following:

- To have the US send war ships into the oceans near China.

- To have the US impose sanctions on other nations that trade with China (sanctions create intentional non-death suffering intended to inspire political uprisings).

- To have the US demand the release of all Chinese political prisoners with a threat of selling arms to China's enemies if it fails to comply.

As you can see, we start from basic moral outrage and find ourselves very quickly sounding like raging neoconservatives.

My view is that we should REMOVE all trade barriers with China and increase immigration from China by 10000% over 5 years. I elaborated in the previous thread about the causes of China's behavior (and the existence of much similar behavior on the part of a slightly younger USA)...

Also, if you're concerned about censorship, consider the JFK assassination and how a major event (seemingly a very significant conspiracy of some kind to overthrow the US government) has been kept top secret, etc. Is it really that much of a stretch that China wishes to suppress knowledge of its own governmental overthrow attempt?

If, at the time of the JFK assassination, there had been dozens of Chinese journalists covering the event and getting camera footage, firsthand accounts, etc., then perhaps the US would have tried some fairly disreputable ways of censoring the info after the fact. I am no expert on this, but it seems to me that if it was just one crazy guy with a gun, then all of the information should have been declassified long ago.

Americans tend to put things like protests on a pedestal... but what about KKK protests in the US? Many Americans pat themselves on the back and support the banning of the expression of such views. I find the views of the KKK appalling, but we either have free speech or we don't... we either have full transparency or we have censorship. China is no different.
Some hopefully constructive criticism: you absolutely need to enable login using openID/FB connect. I'm not going to create an account on a site where I've not yet decided if I'm going to spend more than 5 minutes. You're going to fail to convert a huge percent of potential users at that step.

On the positive side, your design/stylesheet is much better than HN, IMO. (For example, on HN I keep voting up/down when I mean the opposite because the damn arrows are too close to each other.) Having 1-2 line summaries of articles is also very useful.
Fastest turnaround ever :)
I wish I could decipher my mental blockage with understanding git's model of development.
Also, if any of y'all have any company suggestions, I would love to hear them.
HNers Build iPhone App for Haiti
Counter-point

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-b...
I think Xtenex are even a bit more convenient. Elastic, and they turn any shoes into slip-ons. I bought them first for my running shoes, but now I have them on all my work shoes too.

http://www.xtenex.com/
Thanks for sticking me in there, I'd love to work over at Facebook.
exactly. I used the term master because that's what we are using internally. We could have called it foobar of course :-)

For the poster of the article, a stable (i.e slow moving) master was important, for us stable release branches.

The head of their master only uses as new releases are made. Our master moves constantly and releases are tagged on the release-branches.

It's really just a matter of terminology though.

Another point I wanted to make with my post was that you don't need as many branches as the original article for quite the same advantages.
How is not implying guilt nice? I've seen the same concept in calling criminals 'suspects', but when you've just seen someone shoot someone else (for example), not implying guilt shouldn't be taken into consideration.
Overall, I thought it was an excellent article. It had a good "hook" up front with the slightly crazed store owner, and then led into a pretty good description of Yelp's impact on businesses. As a frequent Yelp contributor, and reader, I'd say that 95-99% of reviews are honest, forthright, and make an attempt at some kind of balance. I'm actually quite impressed at how effective Yelp is at keeping both the trolls and shill reviews off their site.

The downside of the Yelp "Anti-Shill" algorithm is that it does to tend to have a lot more false positives than false negatives. As a result, infrequent, or new Yelp reviewers will typically have their reviews dropped off the site, or not appear to accounts other than theirs - New Yelp reviewers may not be aware that their Yelp reviews may appear to their logins, but not to others.

The foundation of Yelp, of course, are the "Elite" reviewers - They are the equivalent of the "Wikipedia Admins" - by themselves, they are obviously fallable. As a group, you can trust them - particularly the best of the best - someone like http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=P5bUL3Engv-2z6kKohB6... is more trustworthy than any restaurant critic you've ever read in the NYT. I can attest his credibility is untouchable, and, with Yelp, you can get a _dozen_ reviews by people like him of high-profile places.

Is Yelp Perfect - No. Have they had salespeople (typically teenagers or people in their early twenties) say things on the phone during cold calling that they shouldn't have? Absolutely. Do they maintain a pretty damn good wall between Sales and Advertising/Services - Nowadays, yes. I don't know if that was _always_ the case, but I don't have any strong evidence to the contrary. Just rumor and innuendo. Regardless, they are a pretty upstanding act these days.

I'd be interested if anyone has any real evidence of poor behavior lately? I think this is more like Mark Pincus's speech that "when you are small, and struggling, you do all sorts of things that you'd rather not do - Just so you can get to a stage _where you don't have to do those things_ anymore."

I think Yelp is now at that stage.
Really? So tell us, how often do you check your old reviews? I this process actually easy to do?
My bad, I didn't know that Lock Laces were elastic as well. I've seen those at stores and always just thought they were normal string laces with a sliding clasp.
I can testify that his book is pretty nice ( http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/iansbook.htm ). I bought it from Amazon UK, for a youngster's gift, with my occasional box of inked paper.
temporary

Practically speaking, copyrights are perpetual in the US. If something is copyrighted for life plus 90 years, I'm not going to see anything made during my lifetime enter the public domain naturally.
You can generate some nice cashflow working on niche local sites like this.

General process:

1. Scrape listings off yellowpages/yelp

2. Start ranking for local keywords

3. Call restaurants/bars/auto dealerships to confirm info and generate lead

4. Offer ad sales on site, as well as design/SEO -- can outsource the latter

There's a great discussion on wickedfire with respect to this field, if you can tolerate the profanity: http://bit.ly/4L1Rya
The Twitter Streaming API and why you should use it
Campbell Hausfeld Air Compressors Features and Uses Information
I introduced Django to a company fitting "they're big (Fortune 100)"

I can tell you the single biggest win for the framework. Clear separation of the presentation layer from the rest of development. Designers were able to work within Django templates with no problem and very minimal training.
wow.douche.
If every CEO was a devote human, environment, and IP rights advocate and they all agreed to protecting these rights in the same manner, we wouldn't have a problem on this side of the equation.

Government and their proxy organizations, such as the WTO, are the ones that are supposed to level the playing field to ensure the CEOs have their hands bound on rules for engaging with developing countries. I do not believe we are close to handling this well.

[EDIT] It is fair to say that some foreign entities do a better job at respecting "global" thinking in regards to human, environment, and IP rights for their China engagements. As an example of worker "preference", several years ago, a poll was published (I think it was the China Daily, but I could be wrong) asking workers what boss would they rather have. The results, in order of preference: U.S., European (seen as more strict than the Americans), local Chinese, non-mainland Chinese (Taiwan, HK). These poll results seem in line with my experience.
>> "Again, though, you should probably be modifying your busted server-side code to stop sending malformed JSON!"

I still think it was a silly mistake to impose a 'must be enclosed in quotes' rule for JSON parsing in js.

Those quotes are just wasted extra bytes. Needless.

Yeah sure, you can argue that someone silly will use a reserved word, like {new:"hello"}.
But I don't think that's a good enough reason to waste more bandwidth+time for those that know what they're doing.
Yes, I'd get rid of the Federal Reserve.
[Jan 21st] CEOs Panel on the Future of Tech [Collegiate Edition], at Drop.io HQ